It’s the ache of being reminded of what I’ve lost, sure, but it’s also the anxiety of not knowing what to do — how to comfort those dealing with what I’m dealing with, what to tell those who have no idea what it’s like but want to help, whether it’s ridiculous of me to think I’m qualified for any of this in the first place.
The cynicism and the concern work together in weird ways. On a day like Friday, I end up feeling watched.
Any ideology operating under the seismic pressures of the actual world will reveal a seam of inconsistency, a line of vulnerability running through it like a stress fracture. Free-market conservatives, for instance, have tried to square their support for big business with their professed fondness for little communities, sometimes by suggesting that the interests of both are one and the same.
Eliza Griswold will tell you what happens when they’re not. Scratch that: Eliza Griswold will show you what happens when they’re not. Her sensitive and judicious new book, “Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America,” is neither an outraged sermon delivered from a populist soapbox nor a pinched, professorial lecture. Griswold, a journalist and a poet, paid close attention to a community in southwestern Pennsylvania over the course of seven years to convey its confounding experience with hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a process that injects water and chemicals deep into the ground in order to shake loose deposits of natural gas.
In the end, it all comes down to the mysterious matter of inborn sensibility. The question of why a writer can make the words on the page come to felt life in one genre but not another — why the gift of expressiveness is extended here while that of appreciation goes there — this question remains unanswerable. For the reader, it is only necessary that gift there be — the one that makes us feel alive to literature and ourselves when subject, writer and form are brilliantly matched.
Browne’s four Paul Pine novels — now gathered together in “Halo for Hire” — are quite consciously written in the wise-cracking, tough-guy mode of Chandler’s fiction and 1940s Humphrey Bogart films. Yet even with their faint tongue-in-cheek air (and an astonishing amount of cigarette smoking), they make for heavenly reading: Who doesn’t sometimes long to wander down mean streets while listening to the world-weary voice of a down-at-heels private eye? Browne’s alliterative shamus even quips like Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, regularly encounters gorgeous dames with bedroom eyes, swallows a lot of scotch, and frequently stares out through the half-open Venetian blinds of his dingy office while rain falls steadily on all the living and the dead.