Image: Winslow Homer’s The Fox Hunt at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
I rarely revisit books. This might reflect my principal failing as a reader: often I feel compelled more by a need to know what happens than to answer any of the more erudite questions I was taught by teachers and scholars of literature to ask. However much I appreciate the practice of close reading, I resist reading with analysis in mind. I suspect my skepticism stems from lingering resentment at having been made to painstakingly label literary devices in high school — the whole business made me feel like (simile) a vulture picking at the carcass of the book (imagery), a process that may give the vulture something to chew on (inaccurate metaphor — vultures have gizzards, not teeth) but that is essentially reductive of the volume of the carcass.
On the other hand, my general disinterest in revisiting books might be a function of my age, given which I am presently occupied by reading rather than re-reading. Vivian Gornick has taken up re-reading as a serious business only now, in her eighties — in her most recent memoir, Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader, she is reading D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers for the fourth time [1, 2]. If that’s the pace set by one of the premier figures in American letters, I figure I have plenty of time to catch up.
For Gornick, re-reading seems to be a blended exercise in literary criticism and self-examination. Of re-reading Natalia Ginzburg, she writes
First time around, my eyes were opened to something important about who I was at the moment of reading; later, to who or what I was becoming. But then I lived long enough to feel a stranger to myself—no one more surprised than me that I turned out to be who I am.
I am neither a literary critic nor a person done with the business of becoming, so my motives for re-reading necessarily differ. Among the few texts I find perennially absorbing: Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Madeline Miller’s Circe, Tim Kreider’s two essay collections, and E.B. White’s Essays. I re-read and recommend them all, for different reasons. Bluets because Nelson investigates every corner of a broken heart, including that small corner in which humor has hunkered down to weather the storm of sorrow and self-pity [3]. I haven’t yet and expect never to find a better description of a particular kind of romantic heartbreak than her nineteenth proposition. When I first read it, prone on my own blue slate floor, I lol-ed.
19. Months before this afternoon I had a dream, and in this dream an angel came and said: You must spend more time thinking about the divine, and less time imagining unbuttoning the prince of blue’s pants at the Chelsea Hotel. But what if the prince of blue’s unbuttoned pants are the divine, I pleaded. So be it, she said, and left me to sob with my face against the blue slate floor.
Circe because of how Miller fleshes out her mythic subject in a realistic way while preserving the power of both registers — Circe can turn men into pigs, but she will first have to get dirt under her immortal fingernails [4]. White and Kreider because I admire the seamless way in which they join reportage on the events of their lives to evergreen themes — love, death, loss, renewal [5, 6, 7]. They make timeless writing look easy.
More recently I have been absorbed by all of Garth Greenwell’s prose and especially Gospodar, the second chapter of Cleanness [8, 9]. I’ve read Gospodar three or four times since I first spied the opening paragraphs peeking over the The Paris Review’s paywall. (I so wanted to read the rest that I abandoned my work, bought a copy of Cleanness, and spent the evening spellbound on the sofa — a fresh lesson in novel desire.) I re-read Gospodar because I would like to learn how to write about the physicality of sex so forthrightly and without diminishing the peculiar ways in which it can illuminate and obfuscate, make evident the boundaries between the self and the other, between the composed self and the self that has fragmented with want, even as it dissolves them.
And then there’s Aminatta Forna’s Happiness, which I’ve read in its entirety three times since its publication in 2018 [10]. I am looking forward to the next re-reading in the same way I anticipate spending quality time with old friends, which the characters in Happiness have begun to resemble.
Forna makes most of the introductions within the first few pages. Late one February afternoon in London, a fox crosses Waterloo Bridge, on which Jean Turane (wildlife biologist and garden designer) collides with Dr. Attila Asare (expert on PTSD in civilian populations). The fox has just escaped from the National Theatre, where Dr. Asare is headed, having out-maneuvered Olu and Ayo (security guards at the theatre) thanks in part to Osman (silver-painted living statue), who had just finished his day’s work and come to change into regular clothes at the back of the theatre, the doors of which he opens, freeing the fox.
None of our protagonists — every character we spend time with in Happiness becomes a protagonist — knows each other yet. We tag along with Dr. Asare first, accompanying him to dinner, and learn that this is a man who knows how to be present. He pays attention to his own pleasure:
Attila was shown to a corner booth, the maître d’ pulled the table out a good way to allow him to slide onto the banquette. He said good evening to the people at the next table and picked up the menu to remind himself of the good things on offer. He ordered calves’ liver and bacon because both of these were hard to come by where he lived, and the potted brown shrimps because these too were a rare treat. A carafe of Rioja completed his choices, and as he waited for his meal to arrive he sipped wine and looked around at the other clientele.
Later we watch as he tangos alone in his hotel room before dressing for a reception. There, an elderly man working the event greets him by name at the coat check though he has not seen Dr. Asare since a similar reception six years ago, when Attila had been accompanied by his wife, Maryse. While Attila is chatting with old colleagues, Jean has gone for her daily run. She has come to London from Massachusetts with a grant from the Southwark Council to study urban foxes.
She paid a number of volunteers a small amount of money to collect data for her. All they had to do was use their eyes. Abdul, the street-sweeper, was one of them. Jean had recruited him on a whim, she’s seen him sweeping the early morning streets alone and so she’d approached him and asked if he’d care to help out with her study. In turn he’d recruited a number of his colleagues who seemed to enjoy the joint endeavour more than they cared about the money. So, in an outcome as accidental as it was effective, Jean had her research team in place within weeks of arriving in the city.
When Attila’s grand-nephew, Tano, goes missing, our not-so-far-flung protagonists are brought together. After a day of fruitless searching with Jean, Attila returns to his hotel where James, the doorman, greets him. Attila shares with James his predicament, and the doorman offers to share a picture of Tano with his network of doormen and security people throughout London.
[Attila] found the picture of the boy on his phone and the doorman did the rest. Attila thanked him. The doorman nodded by tilting his head to one side as if to say think nothing of it. What he actually said was: ‘He could be my son.’
Whenever I reach this line, I inevitably think of my own family history and how indelibly it was shaped by a couple whom I suspect once thought about my dad the same way James thinks about Tano. The story goes like this: the grocer whose shop my takurmah (grandmother) patronized in Kuala Lumpur heard that my dad was leaving Malaysia after high school to make his way in India, with the goal of attending medical school there. The grocer told Takurmah that his brother and sister-in-law in Chandigarh might be able to help — they had had no children of their own and sometimes took in young people with no family nearby. The grocer wrote to them and they agreed to take my dad in. After a year of studying for the entrance exams, my dad was accepted to two medical schools — one in Ludhiana, just 60 miles west of Chandigarh, and one in Goa, more than a thousand miles south. Having adopted my dad, the grocer’s brother acted as parents sometimes do — he decided that my dad would do much better if he stayed closer to his home-away-from-home and, having so decided, neglected to inform him of his acceptance to the school in Goa. It was at the medical school in Ludhiana that my mum and dad first met (over a cadaver, which deserves a vignette of its own).
I love my dad’s story for its old-fashioned improbability, though I have no evidence that such chain reactions occur with a lesser frequency now than they did a few decades ago. In the world of Happiness, set in 2014, they occur with a pleasing regularity. Attila speaks to James who texts his network to keep a look-out for Tano — Jean once talked to Abdul who then recruited his colleagues to her research project and now recruits them to search for her new friend’s young relative.
Jean’s cellphone rang in her back pocket. She was tempted to ignore it, but then took it out and saw on the screen it was Abdul, the street-sweeper.
‘Good morning, Jean.’
‘Good morning, Abdul.’
‘How are you, Jean?’
‘I am fine, thank you, Abdul. How are you?’
‘I’m doing fine too.’ Conversations with Abdul began this way, Abdul was a man who liked to observe formalities.
‘What can I do for you?’ Jean had learned this gentle way of moving him on before he could begin to ask after her family.
‘I’m calling about the boy.’
Jean and Attila keep searching for Tano on foot. Abdul and James join them, as do Komba (a traffic warden), Osman, Olu and Ayo, more traffic wardens, more street-sweepers. I appreciate the care and dignity with which Forna treats each of her characters, even more so the care and dignity with which they treat one another.
Attila walked across Waterloo Bridge… On the far side of the bridge, out of nowhere, he tripped and fell. One moment he was upright, the next he was on his hands and knees. A bolt of pain shot through his body as his knee hit the pavement. He remained on all fours in the moments it took his brain to reconfigure what had happened to his body, aware of the grit of the pavement beneath the palms of his hands, the feet of passers-by, entering the grip of the heat and nausea caused by shock.
‘D-D-D-D-D-Doctor!’ It was Komba, the traffic warden who had helped in the search for Tano. Within a moment Attila felt hands gripping his upper arms, the rustle of waterproof jackets as he was raised to his feet, people were patting him down. Komba insisted on calling a cab. ‘Let me call my cousin, he drives for a minicab firm right here.’ A few minutes later Attila was in a cab headed south, at quarter past five he range Jean’s doorbell and soon afterwards was sitting on the sofa with his trouser leg pulled up over his knee while Jean dabbed at the bruise with a cotton-wool ball soaked in witch hazel and Tano looked on with the kind of awed concern children demonstrate when an adult is hurt.
That I have returned to Happiness after spending the first part of this year immersed in Garth Greenwell’s prose is not a coincidence. Forna’s London and Greenwell’s Sofia are separated by more than the plain facts of geography and fractured alliances. Her characters have full lives that intersect occasionally in a community so lovely it sometimes strains credulity; Greenwell’s nameless narrator exists most fully in the company of his friend and sometimes-lover Mitko. In each setting, the authors interrogate the nature of care — Forna in the setting of foreignness and friendship, Greenwell in the context of desire. In both cases, bearing witness to the care with which characters treat each other leaves above all an impression of exquisiteness, an intense blend of beauty and agony. Neither Forna nor Greenwell stoops to tugging at their readers’ heartstrings — having given your heart into their hands and your full attention to the plot, you simply fail to notice they are steadily tournée-ing the outermost layer of said organ until it is returned to you neatly flayed, as familiar and foreign as a peeled tomato.
Care in Greenwell’s Sofia is deeply felt and complicated by widespread homophobia and uncertainty and asymmetric desire and money changing hands within an airless community of two. In Mitko [11], he writes:
Perhaps I felt dismay at any reminder of the material basis of our friendship, which was so easy for me otherwise to forget, imagining that we seemed innocuous as any two men headed somewhere, friends or colleagues or even lovers; I wanted to pretend that nothing in our bearing toward each other revealed either his financial motivations or my risible desires. And perhaps I felt, even then, that these mercantile desires on Mitko’s part were as bottomless as my own longings, that certainly I couldn’t satisfy them, though I might be tempted to try.
In Happiness, generosity is more straightforward:
Twenty minutes later, Attila stepped out of the hotel into the freezing day… He was twenty yards away when the doorman called out his name and hastened after him, pulling off his gloves. He thrust them at Attila, who would have refused.
‘They won’t fit me,’ he said.
‘They will fit you,’ said the doorman.
And they did. Just. Attila looked at the doorman and saw that most of his clothes seemed outsize: his greatcoat drifted past the back of his knees, his shoes were huge, his feet could not possibly have filled them. He looked like a child whose mother had been persuaded by an outfitter to buy his school uniform ‘with room to grow’.
‘What will you do?’ asked Attila.
‘I will stand inside,’ replied the man, as if this were obvious.
Attila thanked the doorman but the man shook his head. ‘After all,’ he said. ‘What is a pair of gloves between countrymen?’
Despite my re-reading, I can’t decide whether Happiness offers us a vision of ordinary people at their most decent or a vision of extraordinary people on a regular day. Even if there is a touch of idealization in Forna’s rendering of her characters, she hasn’t let any of our protagonists go through life unscathed. Attila might argue that the apparent idealization of our protagonists is in fact a real (that is, believable) product of their scars. His thesis, arrived at after a career spent in war zones and refugee camps, crystallizes around a story Komba, now a traffic warden but once a small boy with a big gun in a company of rebel fighters in Sierra Leone, tells him. After Komba has shared this story, Attila asks:
You think about those times?
Komba tapped his heart. ‘My grandfather was once a signalman on the railway. That was the reason I asked the commander to give me the job at the checkpoint, I wanted to be like my grandfather. Sometimes in the days when he lived with us he would show me the grey uniform he used to wear. He could recite the train timetables. My grandfather would be pleased to see me in this uniform, I believe so, yes. And I have a wife now, I have children, two daughters, I have this job. So I am hopeful.
Later, mulling the keynote address which he is scheduled to give at the conference for which he ostensibly came to London, Attila thinks:
I am hopeful, Komba had said. I am hopeful. He did not say, I am happy. That was his outlook on life. Another person might have talked about happiness, but Komba did not. Hope was of a different order from happiness. People owned the narrative of their own lives, it did not belong to the professionals. Komba was not a fighter, he was a signalman’s grandson.
Attila scraps his original speech and in a matter of hours composes another, which he titles The Paradox. He says to his colleagues in psychiatry:
What if we were to have revealed to us that misfortune can lend life quality? Whatever does not kill me makes me stronger, yes. What if I told you that there are times when whatever does not kill me can make me more, not less, than the person I was before?
Many novels are called meditations — some book reviewers seem to default to this term the way Niles defaults to “incandescent” as a descriptor during his episode-long career as an arts critic on Frasier. Maybe they all are. Maybe the likelihood of this quality emerging for the reader grows with re-reading — the quality of meditation naturally emerges as the reader meditates. That would explain why Happiness is the first novel for which I’ve thought that particular designation apt. Or perhaps the meditative quality of Happiness simply can’t be missed. Among other things, I’ve come to consider it a meditation on friendship and community, a guide for moving on your own through the world while creating opportunities for connection. Many writers have addressed the relationship between solitude and companionship and how the two interact, or should, in friendships and partnerships and marriages [e.g., 12] — in Happiness, Forna gives us an exemplar. In one of the final scenes of the book, our protagonists come together again for a memorial:
There had been a memorial for Rosie, not at forty days, which had been Attila’s first instinct. The centre director, whose name he had discovered to be Mrs White, had told him that none of them could rely on the residents’ ability to remember Rosie, or even to still be alive. He laughed at himself, the absurdity of imagining otherwise. Attila had started the dancing. At first alone in the middle of the dining room, then with Emmanuel and then with Jean, who was shy of dancing, but did so feeling few in this room would judge her, not the residents for being incapable, nor the staff because they had seen more and worse, nor the other visitors whose attention had shifted to the plates of rice and lamb being served in generous portions by the woman in charge of the dining room. They had come: Maurice and Vivien Quell, James and Komba, Abdul, Osman, Ayo, Olu, the traffic warden with the bright weave and her companion, Tano and Ama, everyone who knew Attila and Emmanuel, even if they had never known Rosie, they came as much for the living as the dead.
The feeling I get while reading Happiness echoes what I felt when a post office worker I had never before met called me beta (Hindi, meaning child) — when one of the elderly passengers on the bus from Lisbon to medieval villages in eastern Portugal offered me homemade food and made sure I disembarked at the correct stop — when a rescued dog I had spent months convincing to trust me one day rolled onto her back for a belly rub as soon as I walked through the front door — when a security guard at the museum looked over my shoulder to see the copy I was making of a painting, grinned, and gave me a thumbs-up — when American tourists in Aix-en-Provence asked me for directions in halting French and were thrilled to find I could instruct them in their own language — when a friend on the opposite coast of the country texted me the day before an important exam to wish me both luck and skill — when, after a hundred miles of flat and incredibly monotonous riding on a perfect bike trail (no potholes, no debris, no cars, no dogs, no other cyclists), my team-mate without warning and with a perfectly deadpan expression threw his water bottle in our path just to make me laugh — when a man who started out as a last-minute date and ended up as something considerably more looked into my eyes and earnestly instructed me to be gentle with myself — when the woman who vacuums the carpets at the library where I work in the wintertime greeted me like a long-lost friend after I had spent a season elsewhere.
All of which is to say: in the opening scenes of Happiness, Attila picks up a menu to “remind himself of the good things on offer.” I return to Happiness season after season to do the same.
the main post
Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader by Vivian Gornick
Vivian Gornick is Rereading Everyone, Including Herself by Alexandra Schwartz
Rainer Maria Rilke on love and solitude in marriage, via Brainpickings
from pillar to post
the best of my bookmarks
The UK cover of Happiness struck me as one of the most beautiful book covers I’ve ever seen. The author herself (!) let me know that it’s a huge painting but couldn’t recall the artist’s name. Thanks to the superior sleuthing of Shome Dasgupta, who found out that Kelly Winton designed the cover (along with many other stunning covers), I eventually tracked down the artist — Emma Haworth. See more of her work here — much of it evokes the same feeling I get when looking at the work of Pieter Brueghel (the elder).
Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist introduced me to Richard Hawley, whose 2005 album Coles Corner I have been listening to on a loop for the past week. Hawley’s voice is the sonic version of the best hot chocolate — rich, warming, luxurious, worth savoring.
Last Sunday, I found Ellen Meloy’s Seasons: Desert Sketches in the back corner of Folio Books. It is a slim, beautifully printed volume of two-page descriptions of life in the Utah desert (you can purchase a copy from Torrey House Press). Meloy’s prose is unlike that of any other nature writer I’ve read — terse and at times polemic, but never short on good humor and imagination. In Bighorn Sheep, Meloy writes
If you look for bighorn sheep, you won’t find them. Even hard-rock patience usually ends in disappointment. Bighorns are so elusive in this canyon, so invisible, it’s as if they live inside seams of time. Yet in the coming weeks, I will see this same band often. Our paths will cross without my seeking them. I simply fall into their seam of remoteness and serenity.
In Toads, she offers the following advice:
You can, but shouldn’t, carry them around in your hands like a pork chop. When you think about licking them, change your mind.
I get the feeling that she knew exactly of what she wrote.
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