Enon

Sometimes just plain really good writing is enough to carry the day.  Tinkers won the Pulitzer, and I can't quibble with that decision.  Enon, Paul Harding's next novel is equally as good.  A small family is utterly destroyed by a cycling accident that kills the 14-year-old daughter.  This short novel follows the father for the calendar year after the incident.  It's not a pretty picture.  The marriage ends quickly and abruptly.  He descends into a hell of guilt, grief, and substance abuse.  By the end he does reemerge into the light, but very much wounded and transformed.  Life will never be the same.

Of course the roots of much of the trouble were there before the accident, but sometimes fate has a way of intervening and tipping the balance. The book contains many reminiscences of his relationship with his daughter.  Of course they are slanted and a bit unrealistic.  But that's the nature of grief.  We mourn what we've lost at the same time that we're figuring out what that loss might be.

Maybe the best way to recommend the writing is to quote a few passages at length.  These appear near the end of the novel. I hope that the act of copying them here will teach me just a little about good writing.

I walked across the meadow and into the woods, into the Enon River sanctuary near where my grandfather and I and Kate and I had fed the birds from our hads so many times. I imagined the birds dropping dead from the trees until the ground was covered in a tangled mass of corpses, the beak and broken wings and soiled feathers and needle-thin bones of one animal interlaced and looped with those of the next and all the bodies knitted together. And I imagined that the plaited bodies might be lifted in a single pane and draped over my shoulders and clasped together at my throat with claws and worn like a cape or robe. It would be very light, made as it was from feathers and hollow bones. It would be very long and I would wander from the tame boundaries of the sanctuary out into a real wilderness with a great train following me that would comb up insects and grass and bark and snag on stumps, and that would constantly force me to stop and turn to gather or yank free or untangle, only to have it catch again a moment later on another barb. Bones would snap and wings unscrew from their sockets and I would leave a trail of looping feathers and scattered limbs. My thrashings would knot the garment as much as they rent it. The garment would attract living, wild birds as I passed below their nests and they would alight on it and become entangled. Over time, the garment would be transformed, expelling those first, tame birds and accumulating dark pheasants and crows and elusive little songbirds. After many years, the cape would no longer contain any of the birds from which it had been originally formed. It would become more and more gruesome as it metamorphosed from entirely dead birds to a mixture of the dead and the living. It would writhe and twist with black and brown and flutter scarlet and yellow and purple.  The snared birds would peck one another bare and pick out one another's eyes and preen themselves and eat one another an defecate upon one another and couple, all while they screeched and sang and made nests and brooded over eggs that were not theirs but had boiled up beneath them through the thickets of bones and plumage, even as their own eggs had sifted away to hatch somewhere else or fallen from the cloak onto the ground or in cold puddles, where their quickening yolks would cool and cloud to mere jelly.  Sparrows would raise waxwings and crows beget finches and there would be generations of birds that were born, lived, sang, struggled, and died wholly ensnared in that monstrous cloak.

And from just a little later:

My grandfather always told me that whether or not I believed in religion or God or any kind of meaning or purpose to our lives, I should always think of my life as a gift. Or that's what he told me his father had told him and that his father had told him, In a tone of voice that suggested that such a way of thinking had seemed to him as remote and as equally magnificent and impossible as it did to me, even as he passed it along as practical advice. But it's a curse, a condemnation, like an act of provocation, to have been aroused from not being, to have been conjured up from a clot of dirt and hay and lit on fire and set stumbling among the rocks and bones of this ruthless earth to weep and worry and wreak havoc and ponder little more than the impending return to oblivion, to invent hopes that are as elaborate as they are fraudulent and poorly constructed, and that burn off the moment they are dedicated, if not before, and are at best only true as we invent them for ourselves or tell them to others, around a fire, in a hovel, while we all freeze or starve or plot or contemplate treachery or betrayal or murder or despair of love, or make daughters and elaborately rejoice in them so that when they are cut down even more despair can be wrung from our hearts, which prove only to have been made for the purpose of being broken. And worse still, because broken hearts continue beating.

The writing takes on a life of its own.  The rhythms and sounds are often more important than the meaning of the words.  Yes, nothing much happens in this book.  Bur read it as poetry, and enjoy the creative use of language. I'll happily read anything he publishes.