In the winter of 2004, Sarah Stewart Johnson, then a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was on a field trip in the desert east of California’s Sierra Nevada. While learning to map geological terrains, she fell prey to an adolescent thrill. Boulders were perched on ledges; when nobody was watching, she would strain and push one over the edge just to watch it roll hundreds of feet, crash and break apart.
“It was just the power of it,” she said recently in an interview. “It would just echo up through that emptiness. The dust would come up and the boulder would clang into the rocks as it barreled down.”
It’s a strange thing, to find yourself in a place you call home and feel so apart from it. I’ve lived in New York for more than a decade, but I’ve been going to the Northwoods since I was a kid. My parents have a cabin there, in the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest, in a wilderness preserve on a chain of three lakes. I’d been fishing those lakes since I was small, my father and I in a row-boat at dusk, baiting hooks with nightcrawlers. I’d been hiking those trails, jumping off docks into those waters since before I can remember. Still, I was nervous. I would be a woman alone in the woods. I would be unarmed. (I’m pretty firmly anti-gun, but in a place where most men have a gun strapped to their hip, I was keenly aware of my lack of one.) Even though I knew those woods by heart, I was an outsider.
I know that much of my lament for reading in public spaces is tied to the recent narrow routes of our lives—narrow for good reason—but I have always associated places with books. I love to read at the train station, on the train, at a park, or even in my car, waiting to pick up my wife and daughters. The mind and heart are paused by that action of waiting, and reading fills that space well.
In his latest book, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist, Adrian Tomine turns himself into the everyman of writerly mortification, cataloguing all of the above indignities and many more besides in such brilliant and toe-curling detail that, post-pandemic, you can imagine publicists quietly placing it in the hotel bedrooms of touring authors, the better that they might find succour among its pages late at night.
But once I started bingeing old episodes of “The Tonight Show,” I found something oddly calming about his topical jokes about Watergate, Iran-contra and other grave events that no longer seem urgent. Comedy plus time equals a certain indifference. But it wasn’t only that: Carson hosted with an unusually light touch and an equanimity that stands out in today’s hyperventilating culture.
Chambers deftly conjures how much these small pleasures mean to people living pinched lives of making do and mending (the novel is dotted with Jean’s Household Hints, taken from real magazines of the 50s and all concerned with saving money). But she also writes with compassion of the bigger passions and unspoken sorrows that lie buried under the respectable surface, and how these can threaten to derail a life, especially in a society that expects women to behave a certain way.
Let’s start with the horse: sometimes,
especially when working, I’m the horse,
as well as the ploughman whipping the horse