A Fortunate Age

My review of A Fortunate Age by Joanna Smith Rakoff, as published on The Rumpus.net: 

“With their shining hair and bright, clear eyes, they, all of them, were the dewy flowers of the upper middle class…” writes Joanna Smith Rakoff in the first chapter of her superb, acutely insightful first novel, A Fortunate Age. “But this group, our group, wanted nothing to do with money, the whiff of which had, they thought, spoiled their brash bourgeois parents… [they] were interested in art, though they wouldn’t have put it like that.”

Rakoff, who has contributed her keen commentary on contemporary society to The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Vogue and The Oprah Magazine, has written a modern-day version of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, or an intellectual Sex and the City. Acknowledging her debts to Sylvia Plath, Dawn Powell, and Mary McCarthy, Rakoff brilliantly captures and tracks the lives of a group of Oberlin graduates in New York around the turn of the 21^st century, as they pursue their dreams, marry, and start families, crossing the boundary into “the difficulties and practicalities of adulthood.”

The five protagonists are Lil, the pretty poet, whose wedding cheerfully opens the novel but later catapults into tragedy (“She was a perfect, devoted, obsessive friend, who always remembered birthdays and brought too many perfectly chosen gifts… The light of her affection shined too brightly for any one friend to bear”); Beth, a loveable academic who struggles between her love for a complicated Englishman and a narcissistic musician (“Beth had a nurturing personality and blossomed when she had someone to take care of; and yet, by the same token, she was also a fragile girl and needed someone to look out for her, to remind her to rest and take her vitamins”); Emily, a struggling actress who lives with her mentally ill sister, and whose life contrasts starkly with that of Tal, whose budding acting career takes him all over the world; and Sadie Peregrine, “with the aspect of a serious child—a child from a Dutch painting, prematurely aged by the rigors and politics of court.”

Joanna Smith Rakoff

Although ultimately Sadie’s story, Rakoff’s novel rotates through these viewpoints, making for intensely and vividly imagined character portraits. She is particularly skillful at illustrating the dilemma these women face between ambition and independence on the one hand, love and dependency on the other:

“But once you settled on someone—settled in with someone—you lost the contentment and confidence that attracted him in the first place. You began worrying abouthis happiness, and his goals and wants, so that you internalized them, and your own happiness and goals and wants were banished to some dark and musty part of yourself.”

The different ways the friends navigate these choices affect their relationships and generate tension as they compare themselves to one another:

“They were, [Emily] supposed, the Ghosts of Marriage Future, with their glib, superficial chatter; they seemed positively terrified that she might engage them in some sort of real conversation and pierce the fragile bubble of their unions. And yet—and yet—she was jealous, stupidly, embarrassingly jealous of their clichéd resentments and their domestic squabbles and even their boredom…”

Rakoff is also very funny, a gentle (or sometimes not-so-gentle) mocker of various bourgeois disguises. The vegan/wannabe-reactionary Caitlin Green inhabits an unnecessarily modest apartment with her trust-fund boyfriend, “subsisting on various grains and nuts and legumes.” In a similar vein is the “mommies group” Sadie encounters, “which met each Wednesday afternoon at various pet-free, peanut-free apartments, to drink watery decaf, debate the merits of Huggies versus Pampers (versus the sleeper, Seventh Generation), and compare notes about the various tradespeople they employed to renovate and clean their apartments.”

One of the achievements of A Fortunate Age is its ability to encompass so many different tones and moods. Like the lives it so compassionately describes, Rakoff’s story is deeply complex in its layering, twisting and unpredictable, beautiful and magical, as well as dark.

Ultimately, this is a novel about growing up, about a group of young people waking up to the realities of adult life. When they reunite for a funeral, Sadie reflects upon the six years that have past since Lil’s wedding. “How long ago it seemed, how impervious they’d thought themselves to the pedestrian dangers of adult life… How stupid they had been.” This is an important debut from a serious and accomplished new voice. A Fortunate Age will stay with you long after you’ve read the final, heart-wrenching page.

Listening Below The Noise

My review of Anne LeClaire's magical new book "Listening Below The Noise: A Meditation On The Practice Of Silence", as  published on http://www.therumpus.net, the new Harper's:

 

Anne LeClaire’s new book explores the many faces of silence

I have never felt comfortable with silence. Alone in the house, I insist on having the radio or television playing in the background. I write in cafés, not in libraries or log cabins in the middle of nowhere. If there is a gap in a conversation, I feel the need to quickly fill it, even with some dull observation about the weather.

It was therefore with much curiosity that I witnessed novelist and journalist Anne LeClaire practicing an entire day of silence. We were at a writing workshop in France in the summer of 2005; I had begun her latest novel, The Law of Bound Hearts, and wanted to tell her how much I was loving it. When I approached her, I was greeted by a placard that read, “I am having a day of silence.” LeClaire smiled serenely whilst I, perplexed and awkward, struggled to remember what I had come to say.

Listening below the Noise: A Meditation on the Practice of Silence is LeClaire’s first book-length work of nonfiction. Part memoir, part philosophical inquiry, it discusses her extraordinary decision seventeen years ago to spend two days a month in total silence. Each neatly themed chapter opens with an evocative photograph by her son, photographer Christopher D. LeClaire; the poetic and intimate prose that follows describes the rewards and the struggles of her practice, and the reactions of her family, friends, and strangers.

Woven into her own experiences and musings are engaging stories and quotations from history, literature, and religion that place her exploration in context. From Saint Arsenius: “I have often repented of having spoken, but never of having kept silent.” Herman Melville: “Silence is the one and only voice of God.” Confucius: “Silence is the friend who never betrays.”

Anne LeClaire

Listening below the Noise resists simple classification as it richly draws on this “history of silence” as much as it does LeClaire’s personal journey. Her keen self-awareness helps her see subtleties and make important distinctions. She is careful to emphasize the two-fold “Janus” face of silence, to place voluntary silence in sharp opposition to imposed silence: “To be silenced is crippling, constricting, disempowering. Chosen stillness can be healing, expansive, instructive.”

And silence, of course, enables other activities, helping one to develop important skills. There is a wonderful chapter on differentiating “the four kinds of listening”: “1) Listening but not hearing, 2) Listening and connecting with one’s own agenda, 3) Listening and hearing without a personal agenda, 4) Intuitive listening, meaning not only hearing what is being spoken but what is not being said. Deep listening.”

Other chapters explore different boundaries—between aloneness and loneliness, a busy life and a meaningful life, mindful and mindless living— and how silence can help us get, and stay, on the right side of the fence. “Silence, along with the attention it fosters, is our anchor to the present, to the here and now… I [found] in [the practice of silence] the meaning of commitment and attentiveness, the center of soul.” A writer by profession, LeClaire also has much to say about the relationship between silence and writing: “Creativity and imagination require space to flower, and I had long known the truth of Picasso’s statement, ‘Without great solitude no serious work is possible.’”

Listening below the Noise is a refreshing and important book for an age in which people increasingly tend to avoid silence, continually tuning in to noise and information: cell phones, iPods, the Internet. In this context, silence can seem strange, even magical—as it does in Kevin Brockmeier’s story “The Year of Silence,” featured in last year’s Best American Short Stories anthology. It is precisely this magic that LeClaire urges us to seek in her closing chapter, offering advice about how we can carve out time to devote to silence in the midst of our demanding modern lives.

There are many ways to sow the seeds. Listen and in the quiet you will hear the direction of your heart.
The garden of silence is always there.
Patiently waiting.
We only have to claim it.