full fathom five

Coming Home III

We spent the last two weeks in February on a whirlwind trip to Florida to break up the winter.  We could only afford two weeks away from work, so we had to get down and back fast - five days' total - to optimize time basking in the sun.  We had to keep expenses down, so we drove our hybrid Honda, at 44 mpg, and stayed with friends when we could.  We spent the bulk of our time at friends' in Bonita Springs, just below Naples. There, we swam in the neighborhood pool, biked around the neighborhood, went to the local farmer's market for flowers and oranges, walked on the beach, and gloried in the sun and freedom from parkas, mittens, and face-masks when we walked outside.  Our friends' condo backed up on a golf-course which has been abandoned, so there were ibises, mockingbirds, buzzards, and other birds foraging in the dried brown grass.

     And on our seven-hour/day full-bore drives down and back, we had audio books to eat up the miles.  On route 95, 72 miles would woosh by in three or four good chapters.  I heartily recommend audio books - except remember to take them with you in a tote bag whenever you leave the car in warm weather for extended periods of time.  If they're left in sun in a hot car, their plastic cases will bubble, earning you a considerable replacement cost when you go to return them.  (They're so expensive, I'm just assuming no one buys them, that we all get them from the library).  

     On this trip we discovered Michael Connelly, a very good detective-series writer, much less formulaic than P.D. James. His protagonists are flawed and gritty, making you root for them because you're intimate with their vulnerabilities.  There's uncertainty whether they'll succeed for the same reason, upping the suspense.  

     We listened to two Connellys: "The Lincoln Lawyer," and "Echo Park."  I'd recommend them in that order.  We listened to a Peter Carey Booker-prize winner, "The Kelly Gang," and turned it off after the first disk.  It was beautifully written, but moved too slow for a road-trip.  We listened to a P.D. James novel: "Unnatural Causes" all the way through, but that was before we discovered Connelly, who blew James out of the water.  James is a good writer but follows a mystery formula, so her world seems narrower than Connelly's.  James has a cozy, limited circle of characters who could have committed the crime; Connelly seems to have all of L.A., or Denver, or whereever his books are set.  This makes his work edgier, more suspenseful.  

     And the last book we listened to was "Death Match," by Lincoln Childs, about a high-end couples matching service.  There was some flawed writing, but the work was well researched in the fields of computer science and psychology, and keeps you turning pages - or, in this case, listening intently for two full days.  

    When we got home, we were disappointed that winter didn't seem to have receded at all.  There was 16 inches of new snow and a three-day power outage.  The power company had restored power to all but our little town on the morning we got home.  Our neighbor had kindly turned on our back-up heat: a small propane stove in the livingroom, the night before to keep our pipes from freezing.  And another neighbor had plowed our drive.  Both of these acts were unbeknownst to us, so we again felt grateful to be in such a small, caring town.   

     It seems we hardly got the power restored when we were woken up by a call from the retirement home where my husband's mother lived in the skilled care unit.  The nurse told us that she had passed away.  She had pneumonia, and was in her late eighties, so it wasn't a shock, but it was eerie to get the call at 2 am, and then to drive over there in the middle of the night.  The fog was thick on the roads because of the high snowbanks on either side releasing moisture that condensed, sending thick white clouds of steam up from the pavement and over our windshield.  It would have been impossible to see deer or other hazards right in front of us.  Luckily, we have deer-whistles on the front of our car, but still we kept to 45 or 50 on the highway.  

    The eerieness of the travelling blind in a white cloud at three in the morning was conducive to reflection, and we talked about Win's mother, the new perspective that we had on her character now that her story is done.  I was glad to note that my husband has her abundant sweetness, a wonderful legacy.  

     My husband had about a day to plan the funeral and write the obituary, and then we were hit by yesterday's storm.  While Win snowblew the drive, I shovelled some of the snow off the deck.  Its accumulation from two storms was three feet deep and four in the corner where the deck meets house.  I was afraid it might collapse.  

     But even with vigorous shovelling, my fingers turned numb in my warmest gloves because of the unrelenting wind.  Fierce winds seem more prevalent this winter than ever before.  They, and the frequent heavy storms, remind me of the predicted effect of global warming: more extremes in the weather.  

     I think it's time for Obama to draw on his large store of political capital to ask this nation to do all it can to reduce its carbon footprint.  I think we're ready to pull together, sacrifice things like unmonitored electricity use, frequent car trips to the store, energy-hogging appliances like clothes dryers and hair dryers, etc.  If we know we're doing it together under systematic leadership and evaluation to effect significant change, I think we could really get behind it and feel good about ourselves.

     Anyway, those are my thoughts on coming home.  It's great to be back, but we're ready for spring.              

The Black Prince, and The Sea, The Sea, by Iris Murdoch

A wonderful book that I finished about a week ago is the above titled novel in Iris Murdoch's large fictional output from the early fifties till the seventies or eighties.  She is an amazing writer, and I'm so happy to find that I have about twenty more novels of hers waiting for me.  I've only read two, "The Sea, the Sea" being the other.  Both these novels are extended studies of unreliable narrators, both middle-aged men who fall in love obsessively, and late in life.  Neither knows his love-object at all.  The narrator of "The Sea, the Sea," decides that the little girl he grew up with is really the love of his life; he looks her up and finds she's been happily married to the same man for almost forty years, and is now an overweight, gray-haired grandmother.   The narrator of "The Black Prince" is a pudgy middle-aged man who falls suddenly and irrevokably in love with his best friend's daughter, who's almost forty years younger than him.  

     Like the grandmother of the first book, this young woman is nothing special.  This fact lends credence to the obsessive quality of these narrator's loves; they are almost totally one-sided.  The grandmother doesn't return the narrator's love; in fact, she withdraws from him and wants to avoid him, thinking him predatory and dangerous.  The same is true of the young girl in "The Black Prince."  Both women feel that they are in danger of being suffocated, having their identities obliterated, by these men with their all-encompassing obsessions.  Both women are spirited away by the narrators to lonely cottages by the sea and end up escaping, running back home to their families. 

     Murdoch captivates us through both novels by the puzzle of how much we can believe these narrators.  Both books keep us turning pages to solve the mystery of who these men are, and how their obsessions will end?  Both narrators could either be saints or monsters; they have moments when they personify both.  

     Murdock intensifies the question of how reliable is the narrator in the second book, the Black Prince, by first letting Bradley Pearson (BP) tell his own story, giving us his autobiography, and how his life suddenly changed by falling in love.  And then we hear from the characters around him: his family and friends.  They narrate their own opinions about him after he's been imprisoned, and we don't know whether their judgments of him as a monster are because he lied to us in his own narrative, or because he was formally judged as a criminal by a judge.  If we believe BP's family and friends, then he's a criminal, deserving of his life-sentence.  If, on the other hand, we believe BP, as I tended to do, then there's another criminal /monster in our midst, and BP is truly a saint because he has forgiven this person for framing him.  

      Read these amazing mysteries.  They will keep you guessing till the last page, and their settings are seductive and inspiring.  Despite the less than savory characters, you want to be there.         

Wally Lamb's "I Know This Much is True"

This novel, Lamb's second, came out ten years ago, and I never got around to reading it.  But over Christmas, I spied it in a friend's bookshelf and borrowed it.  I had liked Lamb's first book, "She's Come Undone," because of his emphasis on psychological growth in his characters. 

This second novel covers the same territory, showing the main character's growth from childhood to middle-age, embodying the uplifting message that humans are capable of substantial changes in attitude at any age.  This novel is narrated by Dominick, who has a twin brother, Thomas.  Dominick's dominant emotion is anger, and his brother's is sweetness.  So Dominick is aligned with his stepfather, "the last of the genuine tough guys," who fought in both WWII and Korea, and thinks all generations since his are full of spoiled weaklings.  He regularly terrorizes his wife and kids, is a petty tyrant that they all tiptoe around.  But he's easier on Dominick, because D. imitates his toughness, his anger.  And so he reinforces the behavior.   

Thomas shares his mother's sweetness, and the two have secret tea parties together after the boys come home from school.  They post Dominick by the front window, to warn them when Dad is pulling into the drive.  One evening, Dominick doesn't warn them, Dad finds a tea party in progress, and sweeps all the cups and tea things off the table in a rage, then takes a belt to poor Thomas to "toughen him up."  

Both Dominick and Thomas grow up hating their stepfather, but that doesn't keep Dominick from blindly fashioning himself after him, imitating his angry retorts and bullying ways.  It's not until he grows up and loses his child and is divorced by his wife, that he realizes he's no longer being served by that behavior.  He stumbles into the world of psychiatrists and social-workers because of his brother's late-blooming mental illness, and - in trying to negotiate his brother's care, must tell his own story to his brother's psychiatrist.  She ends up treating him as well, and we learn about how twins depend on each other, compensate for one another, and must eventually forge their own independence.

Dominick is a great narrator, speaking for an entire generation of baby-boomers whose anger at their parents simplistic John Wayne values erupted in the sixties, catalysing them to come up with something more fully human.  Dominick realizes that he's spent untold energy avoiding the kind of sweetness that makes Thomas loveable.  He finds it in himself, and finally lets it out, thereby winning back his estranged wife and eventually forgiving his stepfather.  

For any reader fascinated with family dynamics and psychological growth, this book is un-put-downable.  But be careful; it's thick, weighing in at almost 1000 pages.  And another hesitation I had besides its length is Lamb's titles.  I've had trouble remembering both of them, and I can't seem to even be able to recommend the book to friends without it right there, where I can check the title.  It's a slight nitpick in an amazing work, but it's important.

And now another tidbit for readers.  Yesterday I did a booktalk at a local library, and over the lunch which followed, the library director told me that their circulation figures have sharply risen as the economy has declined.  There's been a surge in demand for fiction, especially.  

I've always heard that movies do well in bad times, because people want escape.  But how wonderful that they're turning now back to books, the source of movies and other genres of entertainment.  Makes one proud to be a reader.       

Homecoming II

Finally, I'm home from my last out-of-state trip to promote my book.  I'd recently gone to Seattle, which is one of the most beautiful, liveable cities I've ever visited.  But it's so nice now to be home for good.

    I've been trying to get my old sleep patterns back; this Fall's travels have had me waking up after only 3-4 hours' sleep a night.  After trying warm milk and honey, camomile tea, melatonin and other over-the-counter sleep-aids, I had to resort to prescription sleeping pills.  They kept me functioning, but they had a side-effect of making me feel like I was coming down with the flu during the day.  That reminded me to pack vitamin C and other supplements which I think kept me from getting the real flu, but now that I'm back home for good, I've jettisoned the sleeping pills to try to get back to my natural sleep cycle.  And finally, this past week everything came together, and now when I first wake up in the morning, it's dreams I remember instead of long bouts of tossing and turning trying to get back to sleep.  This is the first week in months that I catch myself feeling odd moments of bounce, anticipation, during the day.  It's the first time I don't feel like I'm trapped in a kind of half-life, putting things off till I have more energy.   

    Here's how I did it, in case any of you are experiencing the same problem (sleeping the first part of the night, then staying awake from 1 am on).  1. No more than one cup of coffee each morning 2. No alcohol on week nights, 3. An hour's fast-walk each morning (this has cured our dog's itchiness, which just developed this Fall when we had to interrupt our morning walks)  4. Weight-lifting three times a week, and 5. sleeping with the window cracked for fresh air (plugged open with a sock).   

    As with all goals here in middle-age, I don't expect to stick to all five of these rules every single week.  Goals, in this more relaxed time of life, have become something to aspire to, not something to chain myself to.  I'm hoping that one more week of loose adherence to this schedule will cement the sleep pattern I've just now started to enjoy.

   This has been the big homecoming reward, getting back to normal nights' sleep.  But within that, on a smaller return from a visit to the local dogpark the other day, my husband and I found a bluejay lying on its side in front of our garage.  When we tried to set it up on its feet, it flapped a wing but kept wobbling over onto its side.  

    We'd left the garage door open, and I suspect the bird had flown in and couldn't find his way out, and - lured by the light in the windows, beat himself against it to a broken wing.  My husband and I put the bird in a cardboard box and brought it into the cellar so it wouldn't freeze.  Then I dialed the Audubon Society, and - referred to a long list of wildlife vets and bird rehabilitators - I finally found a place within an hour's drive where I could hand the bird off to another driver who would take him to a rehabilitation center called Avian Haven.  This is a network of volunteers who rehabilitate birds and release them back to the wild. Their website has wonderful stories of their work.  They're based in a small rural town two hours' north of us, aptly named Freedom, Maine.  

     There's something poignant about people in this challenging economy and fierce winter climate trying to help birds - for no pay and little recognition.  These people x-rayed our injured jay, didn't find any breaks and thus determined some neurological injury, probably because of flying into one of our windows.  They put him in an incubator and hand-fed him for about five days.  But he got weaker every day and finally died.  On autopsy, they found that he had a skull-fracture.  

      We've put audubon silhouettes of hawks on a number of our house windows, which has cut down such incidents, but now it's time to do it to our garage windows as well.  It's the least we can do, seeing as we've built up the bird-population around our house - and thus their risk of injury - by putting out bird-feeders.  

      This is a part of homecoming as well: small sorrows in the deeper joy of ongoing engagement.  There are always improvements to make, maintenance to make our home more natural, less intrusive and threatening to wildlife.  It's good to be home, to have the energy once more to take on the daily challenges of rural winter.                           

Coming Home

I just got home after two weeks in Tuscon, Indianapolis, and Richmond, Ind. giving book-talks.  When my husband picked me up at the airport in Manchester, N.H. for the two-hour ride back to Maine, I kissed him and then got into the back seat where our dog Cody was standing with his nose pressed against the window and tail wagging.  He'd recognized me.  

When I got into the back seat and took him in my arms, he gave an open-mouthed whine that sounded like human crying.  He stepped across me on the seat and leaned against my chest, pressing me hard into the seat-back as if to say, I'm never letting you go.  While I could hardly breathe, he stood with his head down, nose in my hands, crying and crying.  He stayed like that for about fifty miles, through Exeter, N.H. and on past Portsmouth.   

Once we got on the Maine turnpike, as if feeling that he could relax being closer to home, he finally lay down across my lap, and I stroked him the rest of the way.  It was so good to sink my fingers into his husky-like coat, so thick and warm.  I pulled an occasional tick from around his ears; this is the latest and coldest I've ever seen ticks.  I cracked the window to put the ticks out.

When I began telling my husband about the trip, Cody drew back to lift his eyes to mine.  He seemed to be re-memorizing my face and voice.  I can't remember ever having a dog who looks straight into my eyes as I talk.  This was one of the things we learned to teach our dogs at the obedience classes we took Cody to when we first got him, but I can't believe it really took.  Yes it did, and it's a great way to feel closer to a dog.  When I use words that he recognizes, like "go," "play with the doggies," "food," "treats," "walk," "leash," his pupils widen with lazer-beam attention.  I know it sounds absurd or that my husband's falling down on the job, but it feels great to be so closely listened to.

When we got home, the first thing I noticed when I walked in the door was how warm the house was and how familiar it smelled.  A vague, faintly musty smell, but clearly signalling home.  It was so noticeable and welcoming, that I asked my husband if we could have some friends for dinner in a few nights.  I wanted to enhance the homey smell with a thyme-scented slow-cooked potroast and root vegetables in red wine sauce.

Even though my husband and I were both too tired to clean house, we told our guests to just take us as we were, and when they walked in and ooohed and ahhed over the aroma of pot-roast and apple crisp, shedding their coats in our messy bedroom and coming into our living-room to join us by the fire, I felt my bones go gluey as all the tension of travel and meeting deadlines finally fell away.  I felt profoundly thankful to be home.

And since I've come home, I want to pass on another blessing: Ian McEwan's On Chesill Beach.  This is the perfect novel to read on cold winter nights in front of the fire. 

A timely reminder from heroes

    I've been away book-touring, so I haven't posted here for a long time.  I'll be leaving again tomorrow as well, but it's been wonderful to be home this week of the election, and to reconnect with my ESL students.  They are mostly Chinese, with one Thai woman and a Columbian for an interesting variety of perspective.

   The Chinese students work about sixty hours a week among local Chinese restaurants, so they're always tired, always dragging a bit to class, yawning, and resigned to nothing more than their present routine throughout their lives.  They're working for their children,  and have no expectations for themselves.

    But yesterday, the morning after the election, the students walked quickly into class, their heads up, making eye-contact.  It made me smile, and I asked M., one of the three with citizenship so that he could vote, if he was happy.  "Yes," he said.  "Yesterday I make my dream come true."  

    Another, L., had stayed up late to see Obama's acceptance speech.  Despite the fact that she'd had only a few hours' sleep and was facing into another 12-hour work day, she looked fresher, more alert than I'd ever seen her.  She said her son, in his last year at N.Y.U. and eyeing a particularly tough job-market, had called in tears after the speech.  "Now we have hope," she said.  

    I know that M. and L. were thinking of their children when they said these things, but I find great comfort in Obama's shining the light for a few moments of these last few days on people like my students themselves.  He eulogized his grandmother, who died election eve, as an unsung hero.  

    As someone new to the definition of hero, having had to research and write my way to an understanding of my father's sacrifice in WWII in my late-fifties, I finally can appreciate people who uncomplainingly sacrifice sleep, comfort, status, dignity, vacations, health, any hope of retirement, and even their lives - for future generations.  In Dreams of My Father, Obama's grandmother has to forfeit her dreams for retirement after her husband's sales career stalls, and re-enter the work-force in middle-age, slowly working her way up at a local bank.  Obama makes her sacrifice come alive in showing her pretzling herself every morning into a suit and heels, coming home at night with aching feet to cook dinner.  

    Before I got home from my recent book-trip, I was bemoaning the fact that the economic debacle will make it impossible for my husband to retire next year as we'd planned.  It only took a day back with my students to realize how lucky I am that we can think of retirement at all, any time.    

                    

Balancing Act

Everyone I know is trying to economize, and the hard thing is to compromise, just slow down our consuming rather than bring it to a grinding halt, thereby contributing to the freezing up of business.  Slowing things down means going a longer time between haircuts, dental cleanings, and oil-changes; and substituting high-priced goods like organic coffee-beans, arugula, and fresh salmon for cheaper ground coffee in a can, Boston lettuce, and chicken.  It's hard, even so, to avoid hurting small local businesses in these attempts. 

    But it's the only way I can think of to get some sense of control in the chaos of this past week.  This and trying to focus on the riches we still have: freedom to think and speak our minds, domestic peace under the rule of law, peak foliage season here in the Northeast, our health, and good friends.   

The Debates

Today on NPR, commentator Daniel Schorr called the Vice Presidential debate a draw because neither candidate fulfilled negative expectations. Palin didn't look naive and Biden wasn't too wordy.  I earnestly hope this is true, because it looked to me that Palin won, based on my assumption that the portion of the viewing audience who decides things based on appearance far outnumbers those who have to step back, read, research, and reflect before they can decide. 

Palin shows an impressive grasp of how to sell herself to this first kind of voter.  She smiles often, talks readily and forcefully, and is almost always positive.  This latter technique means that she almost never addresses problems, or if she does, she quickly summarizes them with a catchy phrase like "bridge to nowhere," and moves on to the sunny future McCain will give us.  And so, while Biden answered the moderator's questions by identifying the problem so that we could follow the reasoning of his proposed solutions, Palin skirted the questions, going straight to bright futures.  For instance, when asked how they would fix the economic crisis or end the Iraq War, Biden outlined policies of the Bush administration that got us into both messes to underscore how his solutions represent change.  Palin then responded to Biden by saying something like "There you go again, looking backward.  McCain is forward-looking, pointing the way to a better future." 

And Biden replied to this with "The past is prologue,"  - and I wanted to turn off the TV.  The number of viewers who don't understand what he means by that, or won't bother to figure it out, and who would rather hear palliatives like "a better future," far outnumber the viewers who want to hear problems clearly addressed. 

I'm not saying this out of elitism or because I live in the liberal northeast or because I'm cynical or prone to seeing the glass half-empty.  I'm saying this because of the last election, when Bush - who talks platitudes rather than problems - beat Kerry.

Another way Palin resembles Bush is that neither of them correct themselves when they mispeak.  They just blunder on - with confidence.  This is brilliant on Palin's part, because when she said things like "The toxic mess of mainstreet has spread to Wall Street," or misnamed the general in Iraq who replaced General Petraeus, she didn't blink.  She went right on talking forcefully and with a smile.  My ESL students, who aren't even fluent in English, noticed at least one of these times, and ventured that maybe Palin isn't smart enough to realize that she's made a mistake.  I told them I don't think so, and I differ here from many of my friends, too, who say that neither Palin or Bush are very bright.  I'm afraid this is wishful thinking.  They are smart, to my mind, in knowing that they project strength, reliability, and know-how if they talk past their mistakes rather than saying "oops, I mean the toxic mess of Wall Street."  It takes a lot of practice to perfect this sprightly flow of words, to rid oneself of any show of hesitation, even of any ums and ahs. 

I think both these people are superb politicians.  They have a sophisticated grasp of what pleases the majority, and that plus their ability to deliver it should never be underestimated.          

Three Elephants in the Livingroom

I find three things missing in all the talk about the financial bail-out.  Although there is endless acknowledgement that we, the taxpayers, will be responsible for having to bail Wall Street out of a mess that they clearly made, there has not been one apology to us.  Not in Bush's speech last night, nor in Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke's, nor from any of the failing Wall Street firms', Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae's, CEO's.  And none of the pundits even mentions this lack.  Am I the only one who "hears" this gap as a silence that deafens?  Am I the only one who thinks it's the epitome of boorishness and incivility to blame, blame, blame, yet never offer a whisper of apology to us, the people who will have to clean up the mess?

    And in these words "have to," above.  Isn't that the way it is?  And yet suddenly we're hearing all kinds of talk as if it's up to us.  Talk like: The American people should get some quid pro quo for their money.  They should demand more oversight of financial markets, an investigation of who got us into this mess, and no more golden parachutes for executives of failing firms.  So it seems there's another glaring omission, another elephant in the livingroom: that we have no choice.  We will be taxed to clean up the mess, just like we were in the late '80's with the savings and loan debacle.  And yet we're being advised on what we should demand of lawmakers.  Hmmmm.

    And another omission in all the talk of the financial meltdown is The Iraq War.  Doesn't the fact that the U.S. treasury, after nationalizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and rescuing AIG, must now turn to the taxpayers to bail out the rest of Wall Street, have something to do with the billions of dollars that have been streaming out of this country since we invaded Iraq?  Doesn't it stand to reason that we would have had some kind of a cushion against this bail-out if not for the war? 

    If I'm wrong, I'd love to know.  Just let's talk about this possibility, get it out in the open. 

    And, as usual, it's not enough to rant and rave here on a blog.  I've now got to write to my congresspeople, which is what I recommend to any of you who feel these and undoubtedly more glaring gaps in recent public discourse.    

The Loss of a Great Voice

I'm very surprised at the fact that since the death of David Foster Wallace, author of the postmodern novel Infinite Jest and numerous unforgettable essays, I've felt the loss of his voice, his sardonic-yet-compassionate take on the world, every day.  Since September 13th, when I first heard the news on National Public Radio while we were off sailing, I've braced myself against a new silence, the weakening of a shared sense of absurdity - surely D. F. W. knows how ridiculous this is, my addiction to Roger Federer's footwork - when I smack up against a new subculture.  So he was with me, albeit unconsciously, when I insisted to my husband that we interrupt our cruise to veer off to Rockland Harbor so I could spend two nights in a loud, mildewed-smelling basement poolroom of a waterfront sports-bar to watch key matches of the U.S. Open tennis tournament.

    Only Wallace's passing has alerted me to the fact that I internalized something of his world-view, how it feels to stand on the threshhold of a new subculture, with its contradictions and absurdities winking at you, but also feeling a new sense of one's own frailties.  And now with this new sense of missing him, I want to recommend three of his essays that lodged him so unobtrusively but firmly in my mind. Two are in his 1998 book: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.  The title essay is about a Carribean cruise on a Club-Med-like commercial cruise-ship that - like almost all his writing, surprised Wallace in what this subculture of excess showed him about himself.  He wrote the piece for Harper's Magazine, I think, and he boarded the vessel with the assumptions of his audience: that the experience would be cheesy, gluttonous, and absurd, which he showcased by men in lurid leisure suits and women in lamay evening gowns oohing and aahing over the butter sculpture centerpiece that towers over the dining-room.  After cataloguing such scenes in a colloquial voice that sounds like your funniest friend, he shows himself in his cabin getting ready for the last night's banquet, gaping at the tuxedo t-shirt he brought in place of the required black-tie, having second thoughts about his sardonic choice.  He says that if you think it's easy being the only one who breaks a rule - no matter how silly - in a self-contained world that you can't get out of, think again.  And as he chastises himself for being literally paralyzed, confined to his room by this sudden need to fit in, he underscores the fact that life is continually surprising, continually challenging to our idea of self.

    The other two essays are about the tennis players Michael Joyce and Roger Federer.  The first one is in the book of essays above, about the subculture of the sattelite tennis tour, the minor-league of professional tennis.  The second appeared in the New York Times a year or so ago.  Google "Roger Federer as Religious Experience."  It's about the preternatural grace of Federer, and the experience of seeing him live as opposed to TV.  In both these essays, Wallace deconstructs physical movement and the geometry of the court to make us newly appreciate what these athletes do while at the same time retaining the mysteries of the game.  Such as the way Federer seems to float a foot above the court.  The fact that he never gets injured, while most other players have to wear ankle, knee, or thigh supports, attests to what otherwise would seem just a fantasy or trick of the eye. 

    These pieces, and I'm sure all the rest of Wallace's work (I haven't read much more than this because I find the trademark footnotes of his fiction interruptive), show us a voice that is very funny in a sardonic and ironic way, and yet is never mean or mocking.  We are so lucky that he's left this rare balance, a feat akin to Federer's footwork, behind.