Uncertainty is invaluable in fiction. It is often what makes reading a novel so pleasurable: the instability of the world that we enter; the sense that something is going to happen, though we do not know what; the promise that what we imagine might, in fact, unfold. The mechanics of this uncertainty have often required certain objects: the broken-down car, the doorbell, the unopened package. The landline telephone is perhaps the greatest of these objects. In the twilight of its life, we might, like Nabokov, remember it as an open line of possibility, just waiting to ring.
I thought about all this in my rental car, at the cruising speed of mourning through Eastern Washington, where the reception is so bad I’d have lost Dad even if I’d had him on the line. I thought of my wife waiting at home for me; of the upcoming, soon-to-be-canceled trip to Florida for my grandfather’s 95th birthday; of the hundreds of Jews, strangers to me and me to them, who had welcomed me into their presence, into their community, so that I could have a place to lay my sorrow down, forge a peace with my past and mourn a man who none of them ever knew.
Above all, Van den Berg is a writer of wonderous understatement. Her stories end with readers feeling they have Wile E Coyote’d their way off a cliff and are only now realizing there is no ground left beneath them. Van den Berg’s introspective narration assures she is falling with us and is just as scared to find out where we are going to land—if we are going to survive.
But where those books were also propelled by motion, to change, “The Butterfly Lampshade” by contrast stakes its ground early, and remains there. It resists becoming something other than what its opening pages suggest it’s going to be. Yet its particular quality of stillness hums with so much mystery and intensity that the book never feels static. It is a measure of the book’s success that as I reached the conclusion, I felt considerably more altered by the experience than I often am by novels that travel much further from their beginnings.
Meditations on what the pandemic has done for creativity or political commentary on how the US could look to postwar Britain under Clement Attlee feel less essential than more rhetorically adventurous items; there’s a strangely moving list of personal influences (family, Muhammad Ali, “contingency”) that= constitutes a kind of kaleidoscopic selfie and an essay that riffs on coronavirus as a metaphor for racism, comparing – in passing – Dominic Cummings’s eyes to those of Derek Chauvin as he knelt on George Floyd.
If I were to meet the ghost
of my childhood running
with slipping shoulder-straps
Oh my, oh my, I lose myself
I study atlases and cirrus paths
in search of traces of it, of you