Poetry Friday: 1935 and Countee Cullen

I know it’s been a slow week here at FP, but it’s been a busy one in my world, as my mother’s visit has been a lot of fun—family history research at the Newberry Library, poking around a few new neighborhoods (and some old favorites) to show her the city, etc.  Anyway, to kick off our return to more normally-scheduled programming, who better than one of my favorites, the beautifully structured and emotionally precise Countee Cullen, whose The Medea and Some Poems was published in 1935, the year of my current Pulitzer novel.  For our collective consideration, I present his work, “Every Lover”:

There were no lovers bowed before my time;
Before this treachery was none betrayed;
No blown heart pricked and thinned; drained as a lime;
Interred beyond the skill of pick or spade.
Mine is the first that like an egg Love sucks,—
Sly Love the weasel, Love the fox, the asp,
Love wearing any guise that rends or plucks,
Slits with hid fang, binds with a golden clasp.
This pain is my sore heart’s unique distress,
An alien humour to thy common brood,
Invading once in time our littleness,
Mingling a god’s disease with mortal blood.
Surely this visitation is divine;
No breast has fed a malady like mine.

Look how smoothly Countee captures the gross egotism of heartbreak, the way we immerse ourselves in the emotions and almost deign to pity those stone-hearted others who will never feel the agony we feel.  The epic grandeur of his pain is almost funny, but not really funny (is it), because we all know how easily we fall into these moods ourselves.  Even if we know as we think these thoughts that they are not accurate, we cannot help relishing them—why, I cannot say.  Is it because it allows us to live out the pain as if on stage, somehow remote from our mundane lives?  Or because it makes us feel special at a time when we feel very un-?  There’s something in us that wants that feeling of being the lone Dido on the burning pyre, the one scorned like unto whom Hell hath no fury.  Something that I think we dare not feed too often, lest it outgrow its cage.

And Countee is such a sly one, isn’t he, with these phrases that just make your mouth drop open.  “Sly Love the weasel, Love the fox, the asp”—it’s like reading Sophocles in translation, some kind of antique wisdom, because for all our technology and modernity we are still the soft-skinned primates, weak to fang and claw and the bite of love.  His little allusions to the “god’s disease” I think must arise from his translation work on Euripides’ Medea, which fills the first half of this book of his, and I like the way he plays with myth here because that’s really what we do in these moments.  We cast ourselves as something more (and less) than human, like one of the demigods who live somewhere between the humdrum world of the Greek peasant and the mercurial angers and passions of the Olympian immortals.

Okay, okay, I dig Cullen too much, but not many 20th Century pens had his way with a sonnet (did you catch that? 14 lines, people.  The Muse is strong with this one) and Cullen can make even our pettiest feelings and thoughts seem just slightly important because he knows what really goes on in our hearts—what we are proud of, and what we would rather deny.  More from Now in November, my current (and promising) novel on this crazy journey, coming up in a day or two: until then, enjoy the weekend.

September 11: A Decade Later

I don’t know if it’s obligatory for all bloggers to post a reflection today, a decade after September 11, 2001—to dig up memories of the unforgettable morning, the emotions that surrounded all of us that day.  It feels obligatory for me, given my blog’s exploration particularly of America and Americans, to confront in some sense that day on which I felt most American: American in a way I will probably never fully feel again.

I have a lot of memories of that day.  Waking to find one of the towers gone (the West Coast time difference really mattered that day) and watching in silence with my mother in the living room as the second tower fell.  Driving to work, realizing upon arrival that I could not last the day not knowing what was happening, then running out to buy a cheap FM radio and headphones at the nearest drugstore at 9 in the morning.  Relaying reports to co-workers all day: “they say that 30,000 might be dead”, “they say there may be several other planes hijacked”, “they say Saddam Hussein might be connected with this”.  After the workday, a meeting of YMCA Youth and Government advisors (I have no idea how we conducted a meeting that evening) and then dinner with Graham and Josh at a local Subway where we struggled as 20-something guys to articulate feelings we couldn’t get ironic distance from.  Driving over to Betsy’s to find her crying, since her father had told her we’d probably go to war and I’d get drafted (thanks again to my father-in-law for that, by the way), and attempting to console her without really knowing how, without really knowing if her father was wrong.  These fragments don’t quite fit together—I return to the jigsaw puzzle that is my memory of that day to find half the pieces missing.  There are things I saw and felt that day I cannot retrieve, and perhaps it is better that way.

I have a lot of other memories that surface today.  The 1^st anniversary, when my boss gave us the morning off to do whatever we thought we needed to do, so I went to St. Mark’s and was one of a handful there for Morning Prayer.  Afterwards I walked around memorials in the nave, and stopped at the book to write remembrances and prayers for the dead.  I wrote down Jason and Alina’s names, because, although their deaths had nothing to do with 9/11, somehow the personal tragedy of March 2002 was inextricably wrapped up for me with the communal tragedy of that day—in a year, so many good things were unexpectedly gone.  And then the wars, both of which I supported at the outset—I’ll admit it, I believed Colin Powell and the President and the rest when they told us we had to stop Iraq or there would be another day of death and sorrow.  And since then, the long years of death and sorrow.  The names of the military dead read aloud every week at St. Margaret’s, each of them a man or woman who will not return to family and friends, each of them a life irrevocably altered by that day, ten years ago.  And the names we do not read, but which every week I contemplate in my silent praying along—the names of the innocent dead, collaterally damaged, thousands of them, Iraqis and Afghanis, whose fates are bound up in this as well.  We do not learn their names; we do not display them on monuments or read them solemnly at the end of our newscasts.  As much as possible, we forget them entirely, not because we are inhuman, but because we are human.  We don’t know what to do with all of this.

I don’t know what to do with all of this.  We live in a nation that will be shadowed by 9/11 for as long as my generation lives, in the same way that Britain and France lived out a generation in the shadow of Verdun and Ypres and Passchendale and all the other trenches that claimed millions of young men, in the same way that I see the shadow of Hiroshima falling over every film that Miyazaki has ever made (and doubtless the art of many other Japanese writers and painters and film-makers, if I was only well-read and widely traveled enough to know them).  I am not convinced that the presence of this powerful memory has worked to our benefit more often than to our harm.  I find that when I am most haunted by 9/11, when the emotions of that day come back to me most vividly, I am not the man my country deserves.  I become frightened, defensive, and filled with vengeful anger at men who could have done such horrifying things.  My vision fills so fully with the smoke of the collapsing towers that I cannot see anything else.  And it is no disrespect to the memory of the lives lost that day, over three thousand of them, to say that seeing only that day blinds me to America, and blinds me to who we need to become.

I think the real trouble with 9/11 is that we cannot find the right emotion for the day.  Anger led us into conflicts which have not quenched that rage.  Fear continues to maim us as a country, restricting what we feel we can say or do, restricting most of all those among us who look or sound or act in ways that we associate with our fears—I talk about living in the shadow of 9/11, but who among us is more gravely affected by that day than American Muslims, whose love of country and whose commitment to peace are under constant scrutiny, and whose motives are always suspected by a vocal group that I pray is a minority, not a majority, of my countrymen.  And talking of nobler and better sentiments can seem strangely inappropriate—I personally believe in the power of love and forgiveness to transform human hearts, but in using those words in this context, will I offend you?  Will you tell me that I have no right to talk of forgiving murderers since I lost no one I loved that day?  That I have no right to talk of loving people who acted with such hatred for their fellow human beings?  Maybe you would be gentler than that with me…but not everyone would.  And it is hard for me to know how to deal with all of this: to know how I really expect love and forgiveness to act on something of this magnitude.

I am paralyzed by today, not because of the depth of my feelings (though they are present again, and real), but because I do not know how to navigate waters that are so painful for so many.  I think this is the paralysis present in the whole nation.  We do not know how to confront something like this—to say “move on” can sound like “we don’t care about the people who died”.  To say “never forget” can sound like “never leave behind the feelings of anger and fear”.  I have written and discarded at least three different endings to this post today, and I can’t say if I should have written or discarded any of them.  All I know is that I feel compassion and sorrow for too many people today.  For those I know who lost someone on 9/11 and still feel the searing pain of it, and for those I know whose countries and cultures and religion have been demonized and abused because of America’s attempts to take away that pain.  I can’t compartmentalize it today—can’t “just” remember those who died on 9/11 or the heroes of that day, and ignore all I feel about what’s happened since, both good and bad.  And I can’t oversimplify it today, either, and say that I know exactly what we should have done in Afghanistan, or Iraq—that I know exactly what would have been the right thing to do at the time.  I know how I feel today, but I know how I felt on 9/12, and how I felt in the spring of 2003 when we were headed for war with Iraq.  Feelings are hard to trust.  And increasingly I live in a world where it is hard to say what I “know”.

I know this.  I want to live in a more loving nation.  A more forgiving nation.  I want to live in a nation where 9/11 is not a day to remember our anger and fear and sense of powerlessness, but rather a day to celebrate the lives of those we love and how we have been inspired by the examples of heroic and selfless sacrifice exhibited by so many, not only that day, but every single day and all across the world.  I want to live in a nation that can distinguish between revenge and justice, between hatred and honest criticism, between those who want to destroy us and those who, having been hurt by us, want that pain made right somehow.  Frankly, I want all of the above, not only for my nation, but for my planet.  I don’t know if the kind of reflection and conversation happening today can get us closer.  But I think it’s worth a shot.  In the meantime, wherever you are today and however today touches you, may peace be with you.

Poetry Friday: 1931

At last we move forward—Years of Grace takes us to 1931, and for the first time in many months, I glance at poetry from a specific year, as part of my curiosity about the parallels (or lack thereof) in art from a given point in time.  We are in luck with 1931: among the worthy publications of note is a collection of sonnets written by one of my favorite poets, Edna St. Vincent Millay.  The collection, entitled Fatal Interview, chronicles the rise and fall of a love affair, expressing Millay’s greatest hopes, worst fears, and most lingering of regrets.  One of the sonnets in particular, Sonnet XXX, is moderately well-known: I taught it on more than one occasion, and have heard a recording of Millay declaiming it in a very stirring voice.  Below, find the sonnet, and beyond it my reflections:

Love is not all; it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain,
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.

I think this sonnet holds in tension two ideas that are hardly original to Millay here—the first, that love is a trivial emotion that is hardly worth all the attention and praise lavished on it, and the second, that love is somehow more enduring (after all) than anything else on Earth.  I’m sure of the first (the sonnet is, after all, pretty direct about it), but the second’s a matter for dispute, I think.  I’ll try to say why I see it in the poem later on.

What “sells” this sonnet for me, and has me convinced it’s one of the better sonnets ever written by an American (the Italians and the English invented the form, and are generally best at it, I think), is Millay’s skill with words.  Look at the power of the first four lines: Millay goes right after love, and the punch of the lines is in their simplicity—36 words, of which 32 are one syllable.  The strength of a line like “Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink”, is in how swiftly it gets past your defenses with good sturdy Anglo-Saxon words that don’t have the beauty of some longer Latin-based compounds, but make up for it in being direct.  Even more powerful, I think, is the rhythmic bobbing of “sink and rise and sink and rise and sink again”, where you feel the drowning man’s struggle as the voice rises and falls with the words (it is no accident, I think, that “rise” sounds uplifting, and “sink” plummets in tone).  I’m overanalyzing this, but it’s because I really love how Millay constructs the poem out of the simplest possible language.

This is not always her approach: I’ve read plenty of what are, frankly, mediocre sonnets by Millay in which she loads down the poem with classical allusions and darling little flowery phrases.  This kind of simplicity is what she does when she’s at her best, and comes (I suspect) from really serious feeling.  At the end of this sonnet, she looks her lover squarely in the eye and says that she might easily trade all memory of their love, if she could, for something real and reliable like food or safety.  And certainly the sonnet leading up to that moment makes that sentiment plausible.  But it deflates suddenly with the understated line “I do not think I would.”  The tide of emotion she’s restraining there feels enormous to me.  Maybe I read too much into the poem, but I think Millay is screaming inside by that point—she wants to tell him that despite the utter helplessness she feels in trying to love him, despite her knowledge that it can all evaporate tomorrow and that she can be left behind, completely forgotten, there is nothing in the world that could tear her away from him.  I recognize the poem can be read differently—that Millay is genuinely uncertain.  That she loves him but she does not know if it is a love that could withstand the kind of stress that really exists in the world.  I don’t think so: I think the fact that she expresses the sentiment so late in the poem, and with such reserve, is her way of undercutting the sonnet—executing “the turn” that poets put at the end of many sonnets, like Shakespeare admitting that despite his mistress’s eyes being nothing like the sun, he finds her more rare and lovely than anyone he’s ever known.  But what do you think—am I reading this right?

Poetry Friday: 1930

1930 is an exceptionally good year for poetry, especially for two of my all-time favorites.  In 1930, Gerard Manley Hopkins (long since deceased) made his second appearance in the marketplace, as Charles Williams (an Inkling, for those of you who know what that means) released an expanded edition of his poetry that published a few more poems of Hopkins’s that no one had ever seen.  Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Wystan Hugh Auden released his first “real” book (he’d self-published a small edition two years previously) entitled simply Poems.  Auden would go on to write some of the finest poems of the century, and helped create the modernist style (admittedly, few of his imitators have his natural grace and talent).  So, with Hopkins (the incomparable) and Auden (the remarkable) in the mix, I thought it would be good to give you one of Auden’s poems of 1930, in which he attempts Hopkins’s style of “sprung rhythm” and nearly gets it right, in my opinion.  Enjoy this untitled poem from August of 1930:

Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle,
Upon what man it fall
In spring, day-wishing flowers appearing,
Avalanche sliding, white snow from rock-face,
That he should leave his house,
No cloud-soft hand can hold him, restraint by women;
But ever that man goes
Through place-keepers, through forest trees,
A stranger to strangers over undried sea,
Houses for fishes, suffocating water,
Or lonely on fell as chat,
By pot-holed becks
A bird stone-haunting, an unquiet bird.

There head falls forward, fatigued at evening,
And dreams of home,
Waving from window, spread of welcome,
Kissing of wife under single sheet;
But waking sees
Bird-flocks nameless to him, through doorway voices
Of new men making another love.

Save him from hostile capture,
From sudden tiger’s spring at corner;
Protect his house,
His anxious house where days are counted
From thunderbolt protect,
From gradual ruin spreading like a stain;
Converting number from vague to certain,
Bring joy, bring day of his returning,
Lucky with day approaching, with leaning dawn.

“My dear, Uncle Pio is the most delightful man in the world, your husband excepted…”

“…He is the second most delightful man in the world.  His conversation is enchanting.  If he weren’t so disreputable, I should make him my secretary.  He could write all my letters for me, and generations would rise up and call me witty.  Alas, however, he is so moth-eaten by disease and bad company, that I shall have to leave him to his underworld.  He is not only like an ant; he is like a soiled pack of cards.  And I doubt whether the whole Pacific could wash him sweet and fragrant again.  But what divine Spanish he speaks and what exquisite things he says in it!”

This penultimate section of Thornton Wilder’s novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, focuses on the character of Uncle Pio, who I couldn’t possibly describe more succinctly or scathingly than the Marquesa just did in that excerpt from a letter to her daughter.

He is a delight.  His whole life is a poem, and I don’t want to say too much about it—I just want you to pick up the novel and read it.  The central aspect of his life is the complicated relationship he develops with the temperamental actress Camila Perichole (a woman who is woven in and out of this novel, beginning with her mockery of the Marquesa on stage and the subsequent astonishing apology), who he looks on with—what?  Love, yes, but what kind of love?  The whole question of love and humanity is present in everything Uncle Pio does, and Wilder soars to real heights in this section.  I haven’t quoted him extensively since he’s not normally turning phrases that demand to be shared, but he finds a rhythm and a style in this section.  Just look at this paragraph describing a social gathering he and Camila attend—

“All night they talked, secretly comforting their hearts that longed always for Spain and telling themselves that such a symposium was after the manner of the high Spanish soul.  They talked about ghosts and second-sight, and about the earth before man appeared upon it and about the possibility of the planets striking against one another; about whether the soul can be seen, like a dove, fluttering away at the moment of death; they wondered whether at the second coming of Christ to Jerusalem, Peru would be long in receiving the news.  They talked until the sun rose, about wars and kings, about poets and scholars, and about strange countries.  Each one poured into the conversation his store of wise sad anecdotes and his dry regret about the race of men.  The flood of golden light struck across the Andes and entering the great window fell upon the piles of fruit, the stained brocade upon the table, and the sweet thoughtful forehead of the Perichole as she lay sleeping against the sleeve of her protector.”

It’s not ornate like Fitzgerald (who would have taken far more words with this party, and forced me to the dictionary at least once), but it feels incredibly powerful to me.  I think I’ve discovered what makes Wilder work, and what makes this novel so different from the others I’ve read.  Wilder thinks that a person’s life moves at a much gentler pace than other novelists do.  Most writers tackle detail with a passion, revealing character in the thousand tiny moments that make up a day, a conversation, an encounter.  Wilder sees us as speaking our selves in the long cadence of our lives, an unbroken line of chant that arcs up and down over the course of years, of decades.  Some writers gloss past details that they can’t quite make work, hoping we’ll follow the plot past the speed bump, and for a while it seemed like that was Wilder’s M.O.—a long sloppy plot that hadn’t been worked out well.  But I see how this book works on me.  He reveals the details of a life carefully, stacking the dominoes gently and slowly, until when we reach those rare moments of dialogue (written dialogue occurs perhaps 5 or 6 times over 40-50 pages on Uncle Pio) we can see all the threads of his life weaving together in the simplest of sentences.  It heightens the tensions underlying every conversation because Wilder has established why that conversation matters.

There is more to say, but I won’t say it.  How Uncle Pio comes to the end of his life, and the shock I felt when I read the last vignette before his plummet from the bridge, need to be experienced directly, not through the filter of this blog.  The next post on this book will surely be the review—the last section is short, and will (I now trust) tie together these lives in a way that both clarifies and deepens the mystery.  Wilder’s trying to get a good hold on life, deep in the marrow, and see it for what it truly is.  I think he’s getting somewhere.  Go get the book and read it.

“Love is inadequate to describe the tacit, almost ashamed oneness of the brothers.”

This section of Wilder’s novel is about twin brothers named Manuel and Esteban.  It is as powerfully symbolic as the scenes I’ve described already, if not more so (and takes on added significance for me, at least, as I read it during Holy Week approaching Good Friday and Easter).  I think the best place to start is by telling you part of what Wilder does with these brothers.

The brothers were foundlings abandoned at the door of a convent.  They were so identical that, even when grown, none could tell them apart.  They went everywhere together, almost completely silent except for the invented language they spoke to one another.  They were hard workers, sharing in labor together, eating meals together…their lives centered around each other.

But then Manuel met a woman, a beautiful woman.  She was so famous and beautiful and desired, and he so poor and simple, that he knew they could never be lovers.  Yet he was completely transfixed by her, and so he began doing work for her, secretly—simple work writing letters for her, mostly to men she conducted torrid affairs with.  He kept this life secret from his brother, until one night it all came out, disastrously. For Manuel had room in his heart to love two people, but Esteban could not conceive it; he could not imagine a world in which Manuel cared for someone else, lived to be in someone else’s life, and not his own.  Wilder doesn’t portray this as jealousy or possessiveness, but rather simplicity (almost inadequacy), as Esteban struggles to understand.  Esteban tells his brother to go, to follow his heart and be with the woman, to leave him behind.  Manuel refuses, sees the pain in his brother’s eyes, and announces that he will never speak to her or look on her again.

This he does, faithfully.  And then Manuel is injured and falls ill.  In his weakness he lashes out at Esteban, who tends him gently and with care for days without rest—Manuel accuses him of destroying his happiness, only to repent of these accusations whenever the pain subsides a little and he can think more clearly.  At last Manuel dies.

And here the strangeness really settles in.  For Esteban tells all he meets that his brother Esteban is dead.  No one can tell them apart, and all believe what “Manuel” is telling them.  The body of Manuel is buried under the name “Esteban”.  Esteban roams the streets.  He makes a name for himself as a hero who saved children from burning buildings.  Finally, having encountered two people who have borne awful griefs for those they loved, he admits to the second of them that he is no hero.  That he raced into the burning buildings so that he might die—he says that it is not permitted to seek one’s own death, but to risk it is not sinful.  He prepares to take a journey, to travel the oceans far from Lima where he will not be known.  And as he travels to the sea to embark, the bridge falls and Esteban is given into death.

I tell the whole story (or much of it, at least) because it is impossible to understand how powerful this is without seeing all these parts in concert.  Any one of them is not that distinctive or impressive—a brother who prevents happiness, a man mistaken for being a hero when he is really a taker of suicidal risks.  But the organic whole is a vision that caught me up completely.  I still don’t what to make of all these pieces—what does it mean that they spoke a language none could understand, for example?  But I can see the heart of the story.  Somehow, some way, Esteban seeks out death, by burying his name, by abandoning his reason to the flames of a burning house, and by leaving his only home forever, only to find death unexpectedly and abruptly.

Wilder promised at the beginning to make sense of the deaths of these people on the bridge—I don’t know…I just don’t know yet.  There is something that ties Esteban, the man who cut off his brother from love and then cut himself off from life, to the Marquesa who sent letters to a daughter who would not love her and forgave a woman who had not offended her, and to the Marquesa’s serving girl who would not risk herself by sending a letter admitting love and admiration.  There is something powerful behind the simplicity of Wilder’s writing (which is not ornate—I’m intentionally paraphrasing rather than quoting because his language doesn’t win you over in a sentence like Wharton’s….he’s playing a much slower and more patient game).  I don’t know where I’m being moved to yet, but I’m being moved.

“Camila had intended to be perfunctory and if possible impudent, but now she was struck for the first time with the dignity of the old woman.”

There is a remarkable beauty to the scene that begins with the above quote.  The situation is this.  The Marquesa, an increasingly confused old woman (in part because of alcoholism she uses to blunt the pain she feels at the cruelty of her daughter), attended a theatrical performance in which the greatest performer in Peru acted and sang.  The Marquesa was so taken at the beauty of the actress, the quality of her voice, and the pathos of the play, she was oblivious to the fact that the actress, Camila, had added songs between scenes of a satirical nature.  These satirical songs took many verbal jabs at the Marquesa, mocking her age, her looks, etc., to the great amusement of the audience, until finally the Marquesa’s serving-girl convinced her to leave (with the Marquesa remaining blissfully oblivious that she was the target of the laughter).  The Viceroy, a powerful man who wants to stay on the good side of the Marquesa’s son-in-law, decides he cannot allow a middle-class actress to take such liberties with the noblewoman, and orders her to go to the Marquesa, dressed in black, to apologize.

This is where Wilder creates a scene that is almost philosophical.  Camila, the actress, is indignant—she cannot believe that she must humble herself to go apologize to this strange, ugly old woman who is a joke to virtually everyone in town.  But when she comes to the Marquesa, she finds a woman strangely serene—serene, of course, because the Marquesa is still unaware that Camila had been mocking her from the stage.  In fact, the Marquesa is extraordinarily kind to Camila, praising her talent, assuring her of how much she enjoys her performances.  This behavior fills Camila with shame, with real humility, at the graciousness of this elderly woman who will not so much as allude to the offensive way she had been treated.  And so as the scene unfolds, Camila expresses her repentance with the sweetest sincerity and the most genuine regret to a woman who does not understand it, while the Marquesa offers a benevolent forgiveness without even knowing it.  This ought to be humorous, as I describe it, and yet it isn’t—it feels like deep truth.  There is something real and honest about the idea that we often forgive more than we know; that we regret offenses that have offended no one.  I found the scene very moving in a way I’m struggling to articulate here.

And the whole of the Marquesa’s story affects me in this way.  I don’t have time to dig into this whole section of the book, but the relationship of the Marquesa to her serving-girl (a novice from a convent who is being trained by an Abbess who is wise to the world’s ways), and their respective relationships to the women they care about (the Marquesa’s daughter and the Abbess, respectively) as expressed through letters, are really wonderful to read.  And even though I’ve known from the first sentence of the novel that the bridge falls, the end of this section, with its simple conclusion that “while crossing the bridge of San Luis Rey the accident which we know befell them,” hit me with a sadness I’ve only felt once or twice in the Pulitzer journey thus far.  The only problem with Wilder’s approach, of course, is that all of the characters I’ve grown attached to are now either dead or irrelevant, as we move on to the next victims of the bridge’s collapse—I’m not sure he can sustain my emotional connection to the novel.  But if he can, this is shaping up to be a very solid reading experience and a book worth recommending to others.