“…sour pit of the arm, scarred hollow of the
elbow…” “The holes in my ear never hurt like the hole in my tongue.” “The red
fur of the fox swirls down Tianna’s spine, and her teeth are long but broken.”
These are the broken people.
“I let the sky pour
through me.” “There are 300 ways for a family to be shattered.” “…the stringy
ligaments of her thighs, the rippled bone of her sternum…” “…all her fragile,
breakable bones…”
I am a broken person.
the permanently bent
finger that got stuck in a fleeing person’s belt, scars on my fingers from the
industrial-strength cleanser used in the pickle factory, like so many of us the
ride to the hospital which I will carry past my grave, the yawning dark space
behind a bookshelf
You are a broken person.
reading of “ice needl[ing] [your] bare arms” and living it, too; the winds and waters of
your body, the refractions and ripples of your perceptions, feeling “the exact
size and shape of things inside [you], heart and kidney, [your] sweet left
lung…”
These are the beautiful people. The beautiful, broken
people.
“But there it was, my
heart again, throbbing in my fingertips.” “…how to move like water through her
and out of her…” “Didi never asked the stray children for anything.”
These are stories of the beauty of scrap and scar, of love
perverse and pure. No sin stalks these pages. We are all broken people,
beautiful because we are not fallen, not even close.
No fallen souls—only people who made mistakes. And sometimes
those mistakes neither echo nor ripple, for both echoes and ripples eventually
end: sometimes consequences beat through a life, as insistent as the two and
four of a simple rock and roll song.
“I don’t believe in forgiveness for some crimes,” says Ada,
narrator of “Father, Lover, Deadman, Dreamer,” but I forgive her, and I feel
the voice behind the story does, too. She accidentally kills a man and
manipulates her father into unknowingly covering it up for her. When he learns
of her crime, he flushes her out of his life, and he is torn apart, bodily.
And survives. Broken
Nothing is fair. Compassion bursts from these gorgeous
sentences:
“It loved her, this
germ [tuberculosis]. It loved her lungs, first and best, the damp dark, the
soft spaces there. But in the end, it wanted all of her and has no fear.” “You
wanted to hurt, and the hurt was love, and love roared back into you.”
I come away from this book of hurting characters, some of
whom also cause great hurt, with no dread or disgust for life. Somehow, Thon
acknowledges and affirms our deepest obsessions and most destructive habits and
keeps on loving.
It comes, I speculate, in the poetry of her language—language
being the source of our articulation and so often our very home. There is a comfort
in the lisp and lay of this randomly
selected sentence:
“Twenty-one years
since I met Vincent Blew on that road, twenty-one years, and I swear, even now,
when I touch my bare skin, when I smell lilacs, I can feel him, how warm he
was, how his skin became my shadow, how I wear it still.”
The use of repetition, rhythm, soft and hard consonants, and
alliteration craft this sentence into a textured being unto itself, one that
says, in its very crafting, "For all our brokenness we can be beautiful: (whisper) Here’s how."
Why did I choose to randomly select a quotation? Because I
have such confidence in the textured life of Thon’s language that I knew every sentence
in this book would be both fertile and complex.
After reading these stories, it is a little easier for me to
live with flaws and foibles and failures. They will always partly define both
me and us, as broken and beautiful.
___________________________
Melanie Rae Thon is the author of numerous works of fiction including The Voice of the River (FC2), which will be reviewed here in the upcoming weeks. She is a professor at the University of Utah.
In This Light's page at Graywolf Press.
Graywolf Press is located right here in Minneapolis. They published Tracy K. Smith's Life On Mars, which won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
___________________________
Melanie Rae Thon is the author of numerous works of fiction including The Voice of the River (FC2), which will be reviewed here in the upcoming weeks. She is a professor at the University of Utah.
In This Light's page at Graywolf Press.
Graywolf Press is located right here in Minneapolis. They published Tracy K. Smith's Life On Mars, which won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
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