Monthly Archives: April 2014

April 30, 2014 · 8:08 pm

“Flatliners” and Larry Dossey’s “Healing Words”–My occasional confrontations with the hinterlands of science and belief

Have you ever been in need of a sort of “spring tonic” for what we call, for lack of a better word, the soul (but I’m almost sure you have, who hasn’t?)?  Of course, we don’t all call it “the soul,” some of us call it “being in need of a personality overhaul,” others of us call it “a desire to take up a new hobby of some kind,” “being depressed for no particular reason,” “feeling under a curse,” “wanting psychotherapy,” “feeling lost,” etc.  This state I’m speaking of can take place in the comparative absence of anything objectively wrong in one’s life, so that it may happen in a condition of extremity in general or just when suddenly for no particular reason one feels deeply out of sorts.  It may also happen for specific reasons of an emotional or spiritual nature that we have long ago despaired of having any control over.  And when it happens, it happens just as often unpredictably as it does when we expect it to happen, and for differing spans of time, both long and short.  My own condition of “soul-lethargy” goes back in time for several years, but it hasn’t been uninterrupted by better times.  In fact, during the last few years of finishing up my thesis and getting my doctoral degree (in 2012), it was noticeably absent, but returned intermittently when I no longer had that particular kind of energy occupying my time.  Every time I work well on my novel(s), it goes away for a little while, until I once again hit a snag.  It’s easy to get dragged under by a sense of sterility sometimes, especially when work isn’t going well, someone is sick (either I or someone close to me), when I am too busy with work-a-day affairs and don’t have the time to assess things properly–in short, this condition is a sort of lack of attention to my inner being which may come about for a variety of reasons.  If left alone long enough, it can cause a sort of “soul sickness,” not the same as something mental or emotional, I don’t think, but feeling just as debilitating if not more.  And it’s sometimes accompanied by very unpleasant side effects.

For example, one of the most frequently occurring negative evidences these days is a hypnagogic nightmare of a sort of black tangle of bad energy hovering on or in or near me as I struggle back into wakefulness to fight it, an angry, evil non-auditory snarl of sorts, which must be blocked out and done away with by a sort of internal prayer which I have learned to make rise from my consciousness (I know, it sounds loopy), the struggle going on sometimes for several moments, the bad energy making as many as two or three passes in a row.  This is not a mental or a physical event, is not accompanied by a speeded heart rate, or clammy palms, or waking hallucinations of any sort.  In fact, a hypnagogic nightmare occurs when one is in the earliest stages of falling asleep, and can simply wake one back up to deal with some startling effect of consciousness.  The awareness of the “ball of negative energy” as a non-pictorial, non-dramatized (by human dream actors) reality of a stage of sleep is a relatively new thing:  it’s not that I never before in my life had hypnagogic nightmares, but when I was younger, the occasional negative energy most of us at one time or another experience “blamed” itself on someone in particular, had an actual theme and plot and human or other living actors, people I knew, things, events, or animals I was afraid of, etc.  This, I understand, is the more usual pattern.  In a way, though it’s still bad news, it’s better to deal with a disembodied energy than to have to try and figure out later why such and such a person or such and such an event, possibly someone I like or something I enjoy doing, is the confusing source of negativity.  From this you may guess that though I’m an inverterate navel-gazer, I’m trying to break the habit of so much non-productive interiority and go instead for the more productive kind, whatever it may prove to be.

As well, there are times (rarer and rarer lately, but still happening sometimes) when I wake in the middle of the night (not in hypnagogic sleep, but after dreaming REM sleep); just after dreaming that someone is standing by my bed looking down at me, I’m terrified until I turn on the light and sit for about five minutes.  Though I’ve heard it said by others who have this sort of dream that this is in fact a normal and reassuring dream to have, and even that it indicates that someone at a distance may be concerned about you, I’ve so far never gotten over my fear of this kind of dream.  Where is she going with this disquisition on odd and unsettling states of mind, you ask?  I’m not sure that I can make my point well, but I figure it’s better to make the attempt than not to speak of something which I’ve found illuminating and perhaps allow you to share it, so here goes:

By and large, for the preponderance of my life, I have been a sceptic about spiritual beliefs.  I say “spiritual beliefs” rather than “religious beliefs” because I’ve always had a tendency to prefer things messy rather than cut-and-dried and rigid and in a prescribed shape.  People annoy me who believe things easily, or who seem to me too gullible; it’s as my brother often says, I feel no innate sympathy with “Gullible’s Travels.”  Still, there have been times of extremity in my life when I feel, upon looking back on them, that some creative urge has come without warning into my life just when I needed to be shaken up or in some way made to observe something other than whatever I happened to be fixating on at the time, particularly if it was something unhealthy or bad for me.  I wanted today to write about just two of these incidents, a time back in the 1990’s and a time just about a week ago (in both of which cases, however, the malaise preceding the incident of creative activity had gone on for some time).

During the first instance, I was deeply depressed by the bad fortune I’d had in my personal life, and was in an extremely strong funk and was disinclined to be forthcoming to even the most sympathetic friend or relative, most of whom had in any case already heard what I’d had to say and had been encouraging but not effective.  This was fairly usual, because I’ve often found my own personality to be generally intractable to influence once I really decide that I think or feel something strongly.  By chance, I happened to be in a group of strangers one night, and someone suggested watching the latest thriller out, the movie “Flatliners.”  For those who didn’t see this basically negligible thriller, it was about a group of medical students who were curious about the afterlife or the lack thereof, and even more curious about the near-death experiences of some case studies they’d read, in which people basically experienced a moment of death or near-death and then “came back” to life.  All the concerned case studies had apparently reported sightings or experiences of paranormal events or encounters with already deceased friends or relatives, and etc.  The medical students one after the other caused themselves to “flatline” (“die”) while the others stood ready to revive him or her after a given number of seconds.  The movie portrayed the startling experiences of what each encountered, but I believe the climax of the movie occurred when the young experimenters had difficulty reviving one of themselves.  I can’t really recall what happened after that, whether the subject in question lived or died, which may seem odd.  All that stuck in my mind was a strong impression of the basic story line:  even doctors had to admit that there was something beyond their materialistic universe, though no one, least of all I, could say exactly what or draw any solid conclusions from the fictional experiments.  Truth to tell, I’ve always been more impressed with stories and tales than with so-called “facts,” so perhaps it wasn’t a fair test of materialism.

There have been other times when I have needed something from what one could refer to as “the infinite” if one has that inclination (and I can at least tolerate the expression now without a total sneer), and it has stepped up to bat for me, though it’s not a regular occurrence by any means, nor one that I can just hope for and have it happen.  I can’t “deserve” it and make it occur, either.  I am probably the most surprised of all when it does happen, though whom I’m comparing myself to in that assessment, I don’t know.  This is the first time I’ve ever written anything about it, for example.

The other occasion that I found a book (in this case) to be of use (even inchoate, undirected, imprecise use) was a couple of nights ago, when I was in the process of reading Larry Dossey’s book Healing Words.  I can honestly say that I have never before read a book about prayer, have never willingly or deliberately allowed myself to be prayed for, though like everyone else, I’ve had transient moments in the midst of some turmoil or other when I appeal to a force I often profess not to believe very much in with a “Oh, god, let this turn out right!”  The most interesting thing about Dossey’s book to me wasn’t in fact any encouragement to pray or be prayed for, but was his open-mindedness to other states of being than the verifiable, materialistic world of science and medicine which rules so much of the world today.  He has apparently written other books, of which I had never heard, having only happened across this book on a library online website and picked it up sheerly out of a kind of curiosity, sure that I would be annoyed enough to drop it before long (you may recall in this connection that Ralph Waldo Emerson said “The power men have to annoy me I give them by a weak curiosity”).  Instead, I finished the whole book.

Dossey did not become an advocate for any one religious system or belief, and in fact seemed to consider many alternative forms of healing under an umbrella of spiritual endeavor, whether they employed a sense of the named Divine or not.  That was what was so liberating about his book, the mere possibility that there are ways of doing things other than the dose, cut, and sew of conventional medicine, or at least that there exists a serious and valid accompaniment to the usual medical tools at most doctors’ disposal.  The book came in handy for me a night or so ago not in relation to any specific malady I had, but in one of my occasional nightly fights with the hypnagogic nightmare, familiar by now but never gladly tolerated:  I was able to reduce the size of the dark ball of gunk and rid myself of it in fairly quick order, and not because of any proclaimed “power of positive thinking” which had been “proven” to work–Dossey says such beliefs often lead to guilt when employed in this way because people are blamed for not believing enough or being “positive” enough to shake their malaise, whatever it is–but because I had allowed for the possibility in myself that whatever causes the negative energy is within my power to affect to some degree, sometimes.  And more than that, more than just ridding me of an inconvenient nightmare, the openness and simultaneous strenuous examining of the book helped me fight through some waking situations which I’m still engaged with, but which I feel a better hope of affecting positively now.

I’m not saying that I’ll automatically become rich and famous for my fiction, or find a lot of new friends and acquaintances in my daily life who are muy simpatico, or do something, anything, else which causes my life to be distinguished much from other people’s.  But now I feel, due to Dossey’s book in part, that people and their “souls” or “intelligences” or “personalities,” whatever one wants to call them, are what he indicates they are, continuous and not isolated, whole and not separate, and that is a very comforting feeling (or belief, or conviction) to be going on with, for now.

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April 23, 2014 · 2:52 pm

Edwidge Danticat’s “The Farming of Bones”–There’s no such thing as a small massacre

Ours is a time in which people of conscience are becoming more and more aware of the cruelties of wars and “police actions” which have been fought across the globe from times so far back we have lost count of them, and often it’s the “big” conflicts which have been memorialized, the battles which have resulted in more deaths in sheer numbers which are remembered and moralized on most.  In modern times, some of these are the French Revolution, the American Civil War, WWI, WWII, fighting in Korea, the Vietnam War, the wars in Sarajevo, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan.  Many of these wars are remembered at least in the North American continent because the United States has been involved, and the United States, to whatever degree right or wrong, sees itself as a “major player,” and often people in the United States either ignore or are not aware of conflicts in which they play mainly a passing role.  But in order to realize that there is no such thing as a “small” war or massacre, one has only to understand from the testimonies from writers around the world that cruelty is an absolute, not something of numbers and degrees, which when it is employed wreaks havoc and shock and causes a maximum of human suffering regardless of how many people exactly were persecuted or died.  One such writer who leaves vital and pertinent testimony is Edwidge Danticat, in her novel The Farming of Bones, a book about the 1937 “unrest” between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, in which Haitians were massacred and brutalized in their thousands by the Dominican Republican dictator Trujillo’s forces and also by civilians.  I call it “unrest” ironically, because it was much more than that, but the “Yankis” who are referred to only as a former interfering force in the book would have called it so, from their perspective of “big” wars and conflicts.  They are merely a shadow in this book, which is upclose and personal when it comes to the characters who are affected.

The book begins with a quote which is not only thematic, but also becomes part of the plot structure in a later incarnation of event.  The quote is from Judges 12:4-6, describing how in a war between the men of Gilead and the Ephraimites, the men of Gilead held the fords, and tested all passersby by their ability to say the word “Shibboleth.”  If instead they were unable to pronounce the word and said “Sibboleth,” they were killed.  The Bible records that 40,000 were killed in this manner, and though the number is not the issue, it shows the extent to which a by-word can be applied and misapplied in a world of danger and cruelty.

But for at least half the book The Farming of Bones, the setting is in the Dominican Republic, in which the French and Kreyol-speaking immigrants from Haiti are employed as house servants, workers in the cane fields, and otherwise “peasant” labor, while the Spanish-influenced Dominicans are the gentry and aristocracy of the area.  And at least half the book tells the story, both in the present and through flashbacks, of Amabelle Désir, a daughter of herb healers and an employee of the Duarte household, her daily life in the Dominican Republic as a second-class citizen, and her love for Sebastien Onius, her man, who comes to her at night sometimes.

The gentility with which the two treat each other is an indirect comment upon the harshness of Pico Duarte, Amabelle’s employer, and his relationship with his wife, Valencia, with whom Amabelle was raised after her parents died in a flood and she was left an orphan.  Sebastien lives at a distance from Amabelle, and one night he wants her to undress and they simply sit in the dark, for as he tells her, “It is good for you to learn and trust that I am near you even when you can’t place the balls of your eyes on me.”  By contrast, Pico leaves his wife in childbirth and goes to support the Generalissimo in various actions, returning to see the babies (twins), but leaving again after the boy baby dies, and not perhaps valuing the girl baby as much.  As Amabelle says of Sebastien, “When he’s not there, I’m afraid I know no one, and no one knows me.”  Again by contrast, Valencia, her “milk sister,” is supported by her whole family, her father “Papi” (Don Ignacio), his estate, the local doctor and priests, and the servants.

When word first comes that the Dominicans under Trujillo are killing Haitians (who have been employed by them and who are currently living in the Dominican Republic, where the first part of the story is set), Amabelle does not believe it to be true, and many around her also think of it as a rumor.  She finally makes plans to meet up with Sebastien in order to go back to Haiti by cart with the local priests and the doctor, all of whom are thinking of helping to get Haitians safely across the river and the mountains back to Haiti.  The sad results of the delay with which the original news was greeted by many, however, have their part to play, and it is in a company mostly of strangers that Amabelle finally leaves the place which has been her home for many years.

When the group Amabelle is escaping with reach a town nearer to their destination, where they are hoping to meet up with others, they are greeted by a rowdy and violent crowd of Dominicans, who “try” them by the verbal system with the word “perejil,” or “parsley,” a common herb to both parts of the island.  When they can only say “pesi,” they are brutalized, though in fact their tormenters already have made their minds up about them in advance.  Amabelle thinks that she could say the word the “right” way if she had time to gather her thoughts, but she isn’t given the chance.

The rest of the story deals with Amabelle’s life without Sebastien, on the Haitian side of the border, except for the end, some years later, when she bribes a driver to drive her back across the border.  She goes to visit Señora Valencia and hear about her daughter Rosalinda, who is now married, and also meets Sylvie, the current servant.  It is now that she mentally revisits the past and realizes that she and Valencia were really ever only strangers to each other, for all that they played together as children, their different parts and roles in the household of Papi holding them apart.  Finally, she goes to try and find a cave which she associates with Sebastien, but has no success in finding it for certain.  Much of this novel is in fact the mourning for people and things lost through wars, battles, conflicts, actions, hostilities, and quarrels.  As Edwidge Danticat writes on her last page, “And the very last words, last on the page but always first in my memory, must be offered to those who died in the massacre of 1937, to those who survived to testify, and to the constant struggle of those who still toil in the cane fields.”  Truly, there are no small massacres; numbers are not what we should be concentrating on when we discuss genocide and political murder, but the sheer inhumanity of the manner in which we often use other people, and the quick escalation of hatred which threatens to sink us all into obliquity, both victims and persecutors.

Danticat’s book is simultaneously a beautifully written testiment to human survival, which persists though the human spirit is insulted and damaged by its encounter with the dregs of harshness and meanness that inspire people to consider others less than themselves because of factors of birth and nationality, caste and class.  All of us can surely benefit by exposure to her marvelously supple prose and insight into what really constitutes a loving human situation, and her cues as to where the human equation needs to be re-configured.  Danticat writes with love even of the loveless, with compassion even of those who show they have none, and with certainty that in the moments of uncertainty we have our survival, when we hesitate to pronounce on someone else’s fate.  This book is one of the simplest and yet most complicated I think I have ever read, and is in my estimation one of the best books of its time.

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April 16, 2014 · 2:07 pm

Radclyffe Hall’s “The Unlit Lamp”–Anatomy of a Failure

I am imagining to myself as I begin this post that it will probably be one of the shortest I will write or have written, because I can think of very little to say about this book.  I didn’t enjoy reading it, but read it as a follow-up investigation of a book called The End of the Novel of Love, which was reviewed in a very interesting, informative, and vital post by Caroline on her site.  The theme of this novel is the living through of frustration and angst caused by the failure to achieve freedom of chosen lifestyle, and because it is the living through that is illustrated copiously, I call it an anatomy of a failure.  Once again, as occasionally happens, I feel the need to compare this book to Andy Warhol’s eight-hour movie on sleep, which is simply a movie of a person sleeping.  This book has no really strong climaxes or surprises, it’s simply a book about a woman’s failure to leave her mother and home and achieve a fresh life of her own, either with a man who wants to support her career and marry her, or another woman, who also wants to do much the same.  Instead, Joan Ogden (the main character) is too weak and indecisive to insist that her hypochondriacal mother release her to a life of independence, and the book instead traces every step of her failure to achieve a free life, and the consequences.

As Zoë Fairbairns says in her 1980 introduction to the Dial Press edition of the book, “It pre-dates by four years The Well of Loneliness, the lesbian love story for which [Radclyffe Hall] is best known and which was banned as obscene in 1928, but it is much better written:  both novels suffer, in their accounts of women’s love for each other, from purple passages, moments of overstatement, pedantry and authorial intrusion; but The Unlit Lamp is more powerful because more controlled.  It is also remarkable as a first novel for its management of three main characters as well as a number of important minor ones, only a few of whom degenerate into mouthpieces and devices.”  Frankly, the novel is so bad that a few more “purple passages” might even have made it more interesting; the “moments of overstatement” are ones about which the reader senses the writer nearly pulling her hair out in frustration with her own characters because there’s nothing else to be done with them, they simply won’t move and breathe on the page with any independence from the main theme; the “pedantry” is all of a piece with the turgidity and constipation of the prose; and the “authorial intrusion” isn’t nearly as obnoxious as the fact that the same message is being given over and over again, without variety or change.  It’s like being beaten over the head with a stick until one is dull and senseless.  In order to make it through the book, one has to remind oneself that the book was a new and different thing for its time, and thus the value in terms of which one is reading is that of pure historical interest in a form, a solely cerebral function which leaves the emotional catharsis of the reader unsatisfied with the torture the character goes through from beginning to end.

I guess I’m saying that it takes a certain amount of masochism on the reader’s part to get through this book, at least the kind of masochism which recites the mantra in the back of the reader’s head:  “My education won’t be complete unless I finish this book; my education won’t be complete unless I finish this book…” etc.  The best of authors sometimes torture their characters to make a point to the reader, and not every book can be a sunlit fantasy world of birds, trees, dappled clouds, and flowers, nor am I asking it to be.  But this book is like an unpleasant grimace or rictus on the author’s face as it is fronting the reader, and I have only limited patience for staring at a gargoyle.

Finally, this book is not an art work which flows as freely as song, hitting high notes, low notes, and some in-between:  rather it is like a long-drawn-out screech without variety, or a prolonged unpleasant discordant chord which won’t go away.  By all means, read it if you’re curious about Radclyffe Hall’s works or her first novel, if you’re interested in what used to be called “Boston marriages” between two women, if you are a psychologist in need of a case study of repression, manipulation, and misery:  but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

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April 10, 2014 · 4:20 pm

Wally Lamb’s “I Know This Much Is True,” Wayne Booth’s “types of literary interest,” and the fictional “memoir” form

Having within the month finished another huge book, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, and feeling nostalgia for the slow but steady pace of reading a long book and the satisfaction that comes from completing it and having a certain vision of the whole, I picked up next Wally Lamb’s I Know This Much Is True, lured by the philosophical glamour of the title as much as by the heft of the book itself.  It wasn’t what I expected, but I enjoyed it nevertheless.  The idea of a bare minimum of knowledge that could be absolutely counted on, I figured (that title again) was something I or anyone might want to know about.  In its neatness, it reminded me of Paul Simon’s lyric from his Graceland album, which I dearly love:  “I know what I know/I’ll sing what I’ve said/We come and we go/It’s a thing that I keep in the back of my head….”  As we’re all aware who have even a smattering of Greek philosophy, Socrates is responsible for the notion that the wise man knows only that he knows nothing, and any time someone claims to know even a smidgen or a smattering, I want “to know” about it.

And as I said, I enjoyed the book, but it wasn’t what I expected, and the philosophical statement as such came only at the very end of the book, and didn’t really satisfy my curiosity, though it did represent fairly adequately the growth of knowledge in the primary narrator.  It’s a strangely uneven book, one which is too long perhaps, and which perhaps could’ve used another editing than the one it received, but I remain unsure of those conclusions because after all, I had been interested enough to follow it cover to cover, and to complain of the length or editing once one has “eaten the sweet” is perhaps a bit precious.  I Know This Much Is True uses matter-of-fact, work-a-day, rarely technical language thoughout most of the book except for the short philosophical lyrical passage at the very end which somehow seems insufficient for all the weight of the story as it’s told.  There is an interior story as well, the written narrative of the main character and primary narrator Domenick Birdsey’s grandfather Domenico Tempesta, full of grandeur and bombast and thoroughly unlikeable even to the primary narrator himself.  But it is by way of the past and this narrative, as well as through contemporary events and psychological analysis, that Domenick, the “sane” brother, learns to understand his twin brother Thomas (afflicted with paranoid schizophrenia), his family, and even his own place in the world.  And it is because of the closeness with which this narrative sticks to plain, ordinary, everyday (if sometimes harsh and brutal) events that I happened to recall what the renowned scholar Wayne Booth said about “types of literary interest (and distance)” in his famous work The Rhetoric of Fiction, and to see how it might be applied to this novel.

Wayne Booth said:  “The values which interest us, and which are thus available for technical manipulation in fiction, may be roughly divided into three kinds.  (1)  Intellectual or cognitive:  We have, or can be made to have, strong intellectual curiosity about ‘the facts,’ the true interpretation, the true reasons, the true origins, the true motives, or the truth about life itself.  (2)  Qualitative:  We have, or can be made to have, a strong desire to see any pattern or form completed, or to experience a further development of qualities of any kind.  We might call this kind ‘aesthetic,’ if to do so did not suggest that a literary form using this interest was necessarily of more artistic value than one based on other interests.  (3)  Practical:  We have, or can be made to have, a strong desire for the success or failure of those we love or hate, admire or detest; or we can be made to hope for or fear a change in the quality of a character.  We might call this kind ‘human,’ if to do so did not imply that 1 and 2 were somehow less than human.  This hope or fear may be for an intellectual change in a character or for a change in his fortune; one finds this practical aspect even in the most uncompromising novel of ideas that might seem to fall entirely under 1.  Our desire may, second, be for a change of quality in a character; one finds this practical aspect even in the purely ‘aesthetic’ novel of sensibility that might seem to fall under entirely under 2.  Finally, our desire may for for a moral change in a character, or for a change in his fortune–that is, we can be made to hope for or to fear particular moral choices and their results” (p. 125).

In Lamb’s work, Booth’s categories 1 and 3 are strongly marked, category 2 not so much:  the burden of carrying the category 1 rhetoric falls fairly strongly on the interior narration of the grandfather’s handed-down manuscript, in which our curiosity and interest in “the facts” of the family history are satisfied.  Booth’s category 3 rhetoric is developed in the main narrative, which I would refer to as the “external frame story” were it not for the fact that it is much more voluminous than the average frame, yet that is in effect what it is.  Perhaps for those who have read or will read this book, the best way to understand the way in which the category 2 rhetoric is less significant herein is to place this book side by side for comparison and contrast purposes with some of the heavily “aesthetic” novels of Virginia Woolf, like The Waves or Mrs. Dalloway, in which the completion of pattern and form is of a sublimated, almost entirely thematic kind.

Finally, the shape that comes most strongly to mind in reference to this work is that of a memoir (albeit a fictional one) as I have come to understand it from the website of Richard Gilbert, an expert in the form.  The three elements which Gilbert mentions as essential to the development of the memoir in his reviews, interviews, and guest posts from other memoir writers and teachers are:  structure, scene, and persona.  This work of fiction reads very much like a memoir in its development because of the strength of the persona ( or since it is a work of fiction actually, the voice) of Domenick Birdsey and the tight structuring of scenes with flashbacks closely tied to each cautious step forward in the contemporary day action.  As well, as has been commented on in Gilbert’s site, a memoir is different from an autobiography in that an autobiography attempts a chronological development, whereas a memoir attempts a more “thematic” development.  In I Know This Much Is True, the overall theme is one of Domenick’s attempting to overcome the fear and anger he feels at his twin brother Thomas’s insanity.  That he manages to deal with his demons is clear from that last, atypical, lyrical passage, which I give here not only to prove my point, but because it will not be necessary to issue a “spoiler alert” for types 1 and 3 of literary interest, and I think it will encourage readers to pick up the book to see “how” the novel develops:  “I am not a smart man, particularly, but one day, at long last, I stumbled from the dark woods of my own, and my family’s, and my country’s past, holding in my hands these truths:  that love grows from the rich loam of forgiveness; that mongrels make good dogs; that the evidence of God exists in the roundness of things./This much, at least, I’ve figured out.  I know this much is true.”

The beauty of that final passage points up the only real quarrel I have with this book, which is that I wish it had more such fine lyrical passages in the rest of the novel.  Putting this one in at the ultimate position does give it major emphasis, but I would feel more comfortable with the book as a whole if it were all of a piece, and did not leave that final summation to do for all the narration what needs to be done in the way of ending things with the correct emphasis.  Be that as it may, this is a good novel, and should be read by anyone who has an interest in the topics of mental illness, twins, the history of family generations, period history, feminism, in short, it covers a lot of ground.  And for its good qualities, I would recommend making it your next long read.

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