The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit

Every book is a kind of encounter, an encounter with the mind of the writer and whatever it is about themself that they choose to reveal. Some reveal more than others. Some reveal themselves by accident, or unintentionally, trying to disguise themselves in the intricacies of their stories. Yet the writer is always there, waiting to be revealed in the rhythm of their words, in the parts of the story they feel to be important. In the case of Rebecca Solnit there is no thin disguise of fiction; if anything in her personal essays she is quite palpably present, as though you are watching her through the false privacy of a webcam she doesn’t know is operating. Except she does. It is a brave way of writing rarely seen, brave and honest and vividly intelligent. I always feel my mind has been expanded when reading Solnit, like the world I have been watching so jadedly has suddenly revealed an scene of such impeccable beauty that I revel in it like a child. It is rare to encounter writing which affects me so forcefully.

In The Faraway Nearby, Solnit explores a duo of personal dramas which shaped a period of her life: her mother’s descent into Alzheimers and her own, almost simultaneous, encounter with cancer. Both events had a profound effect on Solnit’s experience, both events serve now as fodder for her relentless exploration of the world, of herself, of human experience. There is, always, so much packed into these short essays by Solnit that it is breathtaking, impossible to condense into a pithy (or not) little review. The tracks her mind follows are extraordinary: the delivery of an abundance of apricots stripped from her mother’s tree lead her to Alzheimers, to her difficult relationship with her mother, the way it had shaped her, her disappearance into books which leads to books which include doorways as means of escape or deliverance or discovery, to the merits of reading, to what it means to read and to write, to Frankenstein, to ice and glass, to Iceland, to darkness and light, to isolation, to leprosy. To each subject Solnit brings a sharp eye and an intelligence which, frankly, dwarfs the capacity of most.

What strikes me most about Solnit’s writing, aside from her crippling intelligence and precision skill, is how so often she puts into succinct words the things I find most difficult to express. Like here, when she talks of writing:  

“Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone. Or rather writing is saying to the no one who may eventually be the reader those things one has no someone to whom to say them. Matter that are so subtle, so personal, so obscure, that I ordinarily can’t imagine saying them to the people to whom I’m closest. Everyone once in a while I try to say them aloud and find that what turns to must in my mouth or falls short of their ears can be written down for total strangers.”

This feels so true, and it is so true of my own experience. I have always, I think, found it most powerful to express myself in writing. Verbal communication, to me, seems so awkward, so fraught with the unsaid with the said so filled with alternate and unstated meaning, that words turn to ash in my mouth and it is easier, or more true, to say nothing. And there is always that feeling that if you said what you really mean, if you talked about the things that really mattered, that either you would be most likely greeted with silence or incomprehension and having taken the trouble to speak either of those responses would simply confirm to you that verbal conversation was empty pushing you further down the route of silence. Well, perhaps that’s why I’m here writing about it to strangers rather than discussing it with the people close to me.

Solnit sees, she sees and expresses so skilfully that my burgeoning desire to write essays may have died on my fingers. It is often, as an aspiring writer, hard to read someone who has such an admirable skill set that it’s intimidating. Yet as a reader, Solnit is a wonderful read. I’ve read A Field Guide to Getting Lost, which is somewhat less personal than this, and both are excellent reads, but somehow The Faraway Nearby is just that little bit more brilliant. What Solnit has to teach us about art, about sorrow, about reading, about solitude, about friendship cannot be described in this blog so my advice to you is just go out and read it. You won’t be sorry. I’ll leave you, here, with another example of her extraordinary writing.

“In darkness things merge, which might be how passion becomes love and how making love begets progeny of all natures and forms. Merging is dangerous, at least to the boundaries and definition of the self. Darkness is generative, and generation, biological and artistic both, requires this amorous engagement with the unknown, this entry into the realm where you do not quite know what you are doing and what will happen next. Creation is always in the dark because you can only do the work of making by not quite knowing what you’re doing, by walking into darkness, not staying in the light. Ideas emerge from edges and shadows to arrive in the light, and though that’s where they may be seen by others, that’s not where they’re born.”  

Speedboat by Renata Adler

By happy coincidence, my reading of Speedboat by Renata Adler coincided with the discovery that a paperclip makes a perfectly adequate bookmark, as this is exactly the kind of off-beat fact that could (though didn’t) make an appearance in Speedboat. It’s a strange type of book. It’s not factual, it’s not a memoir, but it feels factual and it feels like a memoir. It’s not a story, yet it is. It is unlike any other book I’ve ever read.

Speedboat is best described, I think, as a series of loosely linked anecdotes, about which something is a little off-kilter. The unnamed narrator is a journalist, and the anecdotes are her observations about her life, her friends, the structures they interact with like schools and universities, their frailties and oddness. It is a book which defies any kind of definition and which, in the end, speaks better for itself. It is funny, sharp and observant. I found myself re-reading passages for their amusement value. It is incredibly well written, an homage to the beauty of a sentence, a paragraph, well constructed. Like here:

“I often wonder about the people who linger over trash baskets at the corners of the city’s sidewalks. One sees them day and night, you and old, well dressed, in rags – often with shopping bags – picking over the trash. They pick out newspapers, envelopes. They discard things. I often wonder who they are and what they’re after. I approach and cannot ask them. Anyway, they scurry off. Sometimes I think they are writers who do not write. That “writers write” is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all.”

Somehow that small passage gives me hope. Or here:

“It is not at all self-evident what boredom is. It implies, for example, an idea of duration. It would be crazy to say, For three seconds there, I was bored. It implies indifference but, at the same time, requires a degree of attention. One cannot properly be said to be bored by anything one has not noticed, or in a coma, or asleep. But this I know, or think I know, that idle people are often bored and bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel. It is no accident that boredom and cruelty are great preoccupations in our time. They flourish in a single region of the mind. Embarrassment, though, on the scale of things to feel, is trivial. It does not even constitute – as do humiliation, envy, guilt – an actual emotion, a condition of the soul. Its command of the attention is absolute. Someone who needs and does not have a handkerchief is likely to be as preoccupied as someone scared to death. Most of the safest form in this is established by form, by sameness, by rote. For others, the stereotyped is most embarrassing. It is by no means clear on which side of this question humor is. A surprise can be comic, as can a certainty. Leaving humor out of it, there exists embarrassment pure. Alas.”

It is an odd book which keeps you reading in spite of the apparent lack of structure, lack of clear narrative. It is a book that goes nowhere and everywhere. It is funny, silly at turns, observant and penetrating. It is slightly off-beam in a way that simply works perfectly. It is a book for the reader, for the lover of a well-balanced sentence. It’s delightful and witty and it feels very fresh and unlike anything else. An enjoyable and invigorating read. 

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

 I’d heard a lot of conflicting reports about Gone Girl, even before acquiring the battered second-hand copy that’s been sitting on my shelf for a good few months unread. I think the conflicting reports really put me off reading it, no one wants to start a book thinking they’re going to hate it, and originally Gone Girl wasn’t going to be in my #TBR20 list. Plus someone at work vocally let out the ending, having seen the film and thought it ‘terrible’, which also put me off (and nearly resulted in a lynching of that individual). Then I let my daughter pick a book for me, and for some reason she was determined that Gone Girl was going to be it.

Thus committed, I decided to put Gone Girl higher up the list. I sighed. I cursed the weirdly soft cover that makes my fingers itch just thinking about it. I cursed the press and the reviews I’d read and the underlying feeling of certainty that I was just going to hate it. Then I started reading. Then I read some more, and before I knew it I’d finished the book. Did I hate it? No. Is it a great book? No.

In case you don’t already know the story, Gone Girl is the story of a marriage coming apart. Nick and Amy have been married 5 years. They were forced to move from New York, Amy’s home, to Missouri (Nick’s home) due to redundancies and sickly relatives. Then, on the morning of Nick & Amy’s 5^th wedding anniversary, Amy goes missing. Somehow Nick doesn’t seem as sad about it as he should be, and soon the suspicion falls to him; perhaps because that’s exactly how Amy planned it.

The story is told in alternating chapters from Nick’s then Amy’s point of view. It soon becomes very apparent that neither Nick nor Amy are very nice people. In fact Amy, it appears, is something of a psychopath and Nick is an adulterous coward and a liar. I think that pretty much sums them up. I can understand the number of people who have complained that neither are sympathetic characters.

Fortunately for me I am not put off by unsympathetic characters, and in fact I rather enjoy them more than sympathetic ones. This whole novel swings back and forth between the two characters as they sink deeper and deeper into their own depravities. In Amy’s absence both characters come to appreciate something about the other, that perhaps they are better together than apart whilst recognising that neither is exactly ‘catch of the year’. As Nick reflects here:

“[…]Amy was blooming large in my mind. She was gone, and yet she was more present than anyone else. I’d fallen in love with Amy because I was the ultimate Nick with her. Loving her made me superhuman, it made me feel alive. At her easiest, she was hard, because her brain was always working, working, working – I had to exert myself just to keep pace with her. I’d spend an hour crafting a casual e-mail to her. I became a student of arcane so I could keep her interested: the Lake Poets, the code duello, the French Revolution. Her mind was both wide and deep, and I got smarter being with her. And more considerate, and more active, and more alive, and almost electric, because for Amy, love was like drugs or booze or porn: There was no plateau. Each exposure needed to be more intense than the last to achieve the same result.”

Okay, so the punctuation is a bit iffy, but this is the 21^st Century and no one cares about that now, right (forcing myself not to care)? Gone Girl covers a lot of ground about fakery and what is ‘real’, the difficulties of establishing a true and honest identity in an era defined by relentless advertising and media, in which the idea of ‘self’ has never been more under attack (or so it seems. Always hard to judge against earlier eras). This is particularly drawn out in the character of Amy who, it appears, is always playing a role whether it’s ‘Amazing Amy’ the character from her parents’ series of books, obsessive Amy, the ‘too nice to be true’ Amy from her diary, or ‘Cool girl’ which is an identity I encountered in this book then saw all over the place. As Amy describes here:

“That night at the Brooklyn party, I was playing the girl who was in style, the girl a man like Nick wants: the Cool Girl. Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gangbang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry: they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.

Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men – friends, co-workers, strangers – giddy over those awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe this kind of woman exists and might kiss them.”

This kind of social commentary peppers the book, with Amy and Nick’s disastrous relationship serving as a pivot for a deeper view of human interaction in the media age. It makes for an entertaining read. At its heart the concept is a bit silly, and the execution edges on the ridiculous, but even so I enjoyed watching Nick and Amy slowly tear each other to pieces realising along the way that perhaps they were still the best person for the other. The lengths to which they each will go to punish the other are extraordinary, and in the end the story is not in any way believable, but it is fun and entertaining and rotten to the core and I enjoyed it. 

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

This book was a gift from a friend, and it’s been languishing on my shelves for some time (as books often are) waiting to be read. It’s exactly the kind of book I would like: non-fiction (because I am trying to read more non-fiction…and succeeding), written by a woman about a woman, sciency. All those things add up to a considerate gift. So why had it been sitting on my shelves for so long? The answer: it seemed like quite a daunting read. So when I signed up to the #TBR20 initiative over on Twitter, this seemed like the exact kind of book that should be on my list.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks tells the story of one woman’s search to find the story of the life of another woman, a poor black woman who died in the 1950s from cervical cancer, whose cells have changed the face of modern medicine. The cells, known as HeLa, have allowed significant medical advancement to be made because they were the first cells that were successfully grown and kept alive outside the human body. As a student of biology Skloots learned of the HeLa cells and how important they’ve been in medical science – enabling development of a polio vaccine, cancer therapies, cloning and gene mapping – but discovered that little was known about the woman herself. So she set out to write this story which is at once a personal history - piecing together Henrietta Lacks from her medical records and the vague memories of friends and family, many of which have suffered as a result of the famous cells - as well as a potted history of cell culture, including both the development and ethics of this branch of medical science.

What follows is an incredibly engaging story. Skloots is open about her investigations, she manages to insert her search for Henrietta Lacks’s story into the book though it’s neither arrogant nor self-serving or intrusive. Instead we learn through Rebecca’s eyes how the Lacks family have been affected both by their personal loss – the loss of Henrietta as a mother, partner, cousin – as well as the impact of having Henrietta’s famous cells linked to their family. There is also the ethical impact: in the case of the medicine industry millions of dollars have been earned selling Henrietta’s cells, yet the Lacks family, including Henrietta’s children, are so poor they can’t even afford medical insurance. Henrietta’s cells have benefitted millions, enabled many people to become rich, yet not the Lacks family itself.

This leads, neatly, onto the question of medical ethics which is explored in some depth in the book. Skloot manages to sit very carefully on the fence neither judging for or against the medicine industry. On the one hand there is considerable benefit in allowing the medical profession to conduct research openly and freely, so the idea of allowing individuals a proprietary interest over their tissues and cells could inhibit medical progress. On the other hand, some appalling abuses have taken place in both the context of medical research programmes and the acquisition of samples from living patients. It raises some interesting questions about the nature of informed medical consent that still need to be answered today. I found myself horrified by stories of medical experimentation such injecting healthy and unhealthy patients with HeLa cells to see if they developed cancer, without telling them that there was a cancer risk (many injectees went on to develop tumours). In many cases these experiments were conducted on black people, and there’s a sense throughout the book that the black community were subjected to some terrible treatment simply on account of being black, including Henrietta’s deaf & dumb daughter Elsie who died shortly after Henrietta in an overcrowded and dirty asylum where she, too, had been experimented on. There’s also the question of whether allowing organisations to apply a proprietary right over things like genes is, in and of itself, a greater inhibiting factor. The idea that organisations must be allowed to make money or research will not happen is a silly one; history is peppered with examples of scientists undertaking research as a matter of following curiosity, or out of a personal interest (loss of a family member) or simply for the common good. Included in this is George Gey, the man whose lab took Henrietta’s cells and grew and grew them. Cells that he gave away, freely, enabling others to conduct research and make money whilst he remained always on the cusp of broke.

But this is a story about Henrietta, and Skloots manages, through careful piecing together, to construct the story of Henrietta Lacks. It is a name more of us ought to know, to understand how her contribution has led to significant medical advancement. Her story is not an untroubling one; her children have led difficult lives and are variously proud and fed up with the story of HeLa. Skloot doesn’t let us forget that this is a story about a woman, a family and a community, that at the heart of the HeLa story is a dead young woman who left behind a grieving family which have never quite recovered from her loss.

Was it a daunting read? No, it wasn’t. At times it was infuriating (arrogant researchers); at others it was touching, sad, uplifting. It was certainly enlightening, and definitely a worthwhile read. Many thanks to the considerate friend who saw this book and knew it was perfect for me.