In Saunders’ story collections the authenticity of these voices is the moral work of fiction. Here there is no heavy ethical lifting, no neatly turned conclusion or lesson – there doesn’t need to be. The best of his short stories enact their own morality. Just hearing these unheard people speak changes you forever. But a novel wants something more; it yearns towards metaphor; it cannot live on voice alone. Saunders is too good an artist not to know this, and he works diligently to make his Lincoln stand for something. But this effort undoes what he does best. The dead souls who skim around Lincoln, feverishly telling and retelling their stories, are the ones truly alive – and the single living character feels, if not dead, half asleep. Saunders forgets that Lincoln is just another person. He stuffs him with novelistic responsibility. And again, it feels deliberate, where in Saunders’ other work this effort is invisible.
If ever a country needed a metaphor, America is it, and Lincoln in the Bardo, with its towering, sombre stand-in for all that yearns towards decency in American life, provides just that. Containing multitudes, Lincoln manages to embody a united people at a time when the country seems in a million little pieces. Because of this, and its author’s astounding powers of invention, Lincoln in the Bardo is a novel that will and should be celebrated. You can’t compare George Saunders to other writers – he is doing something riskier, more exciting, and finally more meaningful. It’s only if you compare George Saunders to himself that Lincoln in the Bardo disappoints – just a little.
* * *
If you are a reader like I am you will have become closely acquainted with more than one body of work. There’s something particular in the reading of one author’s entire oeuvre. Easy with Austen; less so with Dickens. I have read every book written by Jane Austen, Tim Winton, Helen Garner, David Malouf, Charlotte Wood, Jonathan Franzen, Kazuo Ishiguro, Alice Munro, James Wood, Alan Hollinghurst and George Saunders. In this way you enter into a lifelong conversation with the author. You watch their material change, their attitudes to it shifting. You learn how to read them. Tim Winton has said of Munro that she has ‘trained the reader – and the editors of most significant US magazines – to read her as Alice Munro. A bigger achievement than it first seems.’ This training is possible with any writer, if you love them enough. And by this I do mean them, not just the work. Through long acquaintance with their writing and, in my case, natural curiosity about the person themselves, you feel you begin to understand what they want, what they are trying to do. As with old friends, you forgive their bad days, their misconceived ideas. It’s inevitable that you won’t always think their efforts successful.
George Saunders’ writing has its limits. But those limits are staked so far beyond everyone else’s. There he is, right at the edge of the cliff, the wind blasting around him, joyfully at work. How exciting it is to be alive at the same time as this remarkable writer.
Georgia Blain
In October 2015 I walked up to a cafe in Leura to meet my friend Georgia Blain. She was in the mountains for the weekend and had texted me to see if we might catch up. It was the same as all of our meetings: Georgia was there before I was and had already ordered something to drink. She gave me a big grin as I sat down and off we went, making no small talk. Our subjects were these: our children, most particularly our teenage daughters, as this was common ground; our writing; what we were reading; our mothers. My own mother had died more than a year earlier – Georgia was in the process of moving hers, the writer and broadcaster Anne Deveson, into a nursing home. Anne had Alzheimer’s, and it had become impossible to look after her in her own house.
On this particular day Georgia steered us towards what was understandably preoccupying her. She had two pieces of news. First, she’d finished her latest novel, Between a Wolf and a Dog. It was about a woman who has a brain tumour. The main character, a mother of two grown-up daughters, chooses to end her own life, rather than let the cancer end it.
The second piece of news was that Georgia had just learned that the writer Rosie Scott, her closest friend, her first reader and second mother, had been diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumour.
It was hard to believe. There was so much to process. Grief, which Georgia was already too familiar with. Shock at the coincidence. And then the painful dilemma. The book was due out in six months. What should she do?
I’m speeding across the surface of this long, complex conversation, in which we circled the problem, always returning to Georgia’s devotion to Rosie and fear of hurting her. We drank our coffee. People came and went from the tables around us. And we reached the decision I’m sure Georgia had already reached without me – that she should go forward. The book was written. It would be published. Georgia was not sure what she would say to Rosie.
* * *
The rest has become common knowledge to Australian readers. A month after this, Georgia herself had a seizure in her backyard in Marrickville. In hospital, she had brain surgery and was given a diagnosis: glioblastoma, the same tumour that Rosie had. It was not a story that made any sense; it had already used up all its right to drama. As Georgia wrote, ‘If this were fiction, I would say it was too far-fetched.’
* * *
The last time I saw Georgia was after lunch with our friend Charlotte Wood. The car was full of the quiet sounds of two people settling themselves; clicking our seatbelts, Georgia pulling her bag onto her lap, me turning the key in the ignition, putting the windows down. We were talking about writing, and Georgia said, ‘These days, I think it’s just about telling a story.’
‘Like Rosie’s work,’ I said. ‘When I started reading her, it felt like I started to notice stories. How nice it was to be told a story.’
‘Exactly. She’s modest,’ added Georgia as we drove up Juliett Street. ‘She just wants to stay in print.’
These are painful words to write because they recall so vividly the feel of those days – bright and clear, warming up for a terrible summer that Georgia wouldn’t have to endure. The conversation with Charlotte at the cafe was still in the air around us, the talk about our work, other writers, people and their folly, our husbands and our children, and Georgia’s impending death. You knew not to be a chicken when you were with Georgia, because she was one of the bravest people you’d ever meet. You knew what she was facing, and that any terror or discomfort on your own part had to be overcome in order to make the space for Georgia to say whatever she needed to say.
* * *
Georgia died thirteen months after her diagnosis. In those thirteen months, after the operation, during chemotherapy and radiation, and in the very brief respite she had from treatment, she wrote almost continuously. After the publication of Between a Wolf and a Dog came her series of columns for The Saturday Paper, ‘The Unwelcome Guest’, and then her last book, The Museum of Words.
Rereading Between a Wolf and a Dog, I’m returned immediately to the two of us in the car, talking – that simple, corporeal there-ness that becomes so hard to let go of when a friend dies. And of course I’m returned to the idea of story. I’m sorry to say that the first time I read Between a Wolf and a Dog I did so too quickly, my eyes sped along the lines by grief and fear at what I would find. I was a chicken. I couldn’t take it in properly. I knew too much about it.
But now I can read it for pleasure. Of course the people in Between a Wolf and a Dog are all suffering in some way. It’s not just Hilary, who has a brain tumour and has to make a choice between letting it kill her or killing herself; there’s Ester and Lawrence, whose marriage has broken up; there’s April, Ester’s sister, who has committed a crime against sisterhood that can’t be forgiven; and there are Ester’s clients in her psychotherapy practice, all fighting their way through unhappiness. It’s in many ways a sad book. But sadness is not the point. This is a story. You really want to know what happens, and you can feel the riddle of each character moving closer to solution as you read. The book brings you deep satisfaction as well as tears. It’s the work of someone who’s spent a life
time writing fiction.
The Museum of Words is different. A short book. Not a memoir of dying, although it is about illness and treatment, and the impossibility of leaving loved people behind. It moves between its subjects, using the writer’s illness reflexively, leading into description of the things most important to her. In this way the book is about language and its function in a writer’s life. It’s about Anne Deveson, and growing up with a writer as a mother. It’s about Rosie Scott, whom Georgia met through Anne, and her importance to their family. Georgia describes fights with Anne, ending with the two of them rushing to be the first to tell Rosie – hearing the engaged signal on Rosie’s line let her know that Anne had got there first. The book is also about Andrew, Georgia’s partner, and Odessa, their daughter.
This is a book with spaces in it. Georgia wrote relatively spare prose, drifting only occasionally into the kind of lush description that opens Between a Wolf and a Dog. In The Museum of Words the spareness feels less willed. I had the sense as I read of the writer on the spine of a bare hill, making her way carefully across a sentence with the concentration of someone who might lose her balance and has nowhere to fall. Georgia’s editor at Scribe, Marika Webb-Pullman, says the decision to leave in some of these spaces was deliberate. A book should enact its subject matter. There is of course something beyond story – otherwise, why write, why not just tell? The art is in the form.
Webb-Pullman and Georgia’s husband, the photographer and filmmaker Andrew Taylor, have been sensitive editors, allowing Georgia’s words, which describe loss of language, to also demonstrate it. One feels a meticulous effort to preserve the original.
The book has some of its spaces filled by photographs. Many of these were taken by Andrew: portraits of Georgia that reveal how luminously beautiful she was, images from the hospital where she received treatment, a final photograph of the carpet of blossoms in the backyard where Georgia collapsed with her first seizure. The impression is of punctuation rather than illustration, as though each image is part of the book’s syntax, as in the work of W.G. Sebald or the early novels of Michael Ondaatje.
For anyone who knew Georgia, the effect of reading this book will be filmic – a sequence of Georgia’s words and Andrew’s images cut with moving pictures of Georgia as she was: statuesque, as though the word had been invented to describe her; laconic (she spoke in a deep drawl that always contained the possibility of laughter); briskly unsentimental. It is odd to recall that because Georgia did not indulge in sentiment, her company allowed feeling to expand. You felt you could say anything to her, and she to you. Her first book of nonfiction, Births Deaths Marriages (2008), was an open conversation with her readers about some of the most intimate experiences of her life; The Museum of Words continues that exchange.
Perhaps my favourite sequences, because they dwell on Georgia’s most beloved subject, describe Odessa. Georgia was always cautious about including Odessa in her writing, ‘wary about reducing [her] to words’. But in showing Odessa making her way through the study of two languages – French and Latin – by looking carefully at her daughter at work, she doesn’t expose her but respects her. She recalls the toddler Odessa’s phrase, ‘I hope so the blowflowers’, but swerves away from talking about loss into talking about language: ‘It was the dandelions she was wishing for.’ Again, absence – always a feature of Georgia Blain’s writing, but at its most powerful here – does its work. In refusing to be sentimental about her daughter, Georgia evokes a terrible grief. Impossible to read these sections without tears.
* * *
How to make sense of all this? I find some comfort in two scenes; one, from Andrew Taylor’s introduction to the book. The copy-edit of The Museum of Words has come back. Georgia is too tired, too far gone, to work on it. Andrew sits at the kitchen table with his laptop open. Georgia lies on the couch, the TV on, with Odessa by her side. Andrew calls out changes. Georgia responds, or Odessa does, or Andrew makes the change himself.
And this, one of the book’s final images: Georgia is visiting Anne in her nursing home. Anne isn’t able to retain the fact of Georgia’s illness. Because of this, Georgia was denied two things: she couldn’t receive comfort from Anne, who didn’t understand that her daughter was dying, and she couldn’t properly mourn Anne herself. ‘I’ve learnt that the best thing to do is tell her that I love her and sit in silence holding her hand. There is not much more that I can do… I know that I have limited time.’
I remember when I first heard the news of Georgia’s diagnosis, and the urge to communicate with her was immediate. I sat in the backyard, staring at my phone, wondering what I could possibly say to my friend whose life had been overturned. I remember the awful irresolution of being unable to find the right words, of being unable to generate a narrative that might make sense of this.
Georgia died in December 2016, and Anne three days later. In May 2017, Rosie also died. There is no special reason why these three remarkable women shared so much ill luck, and there is no narrative that will restore order to the utter chaos of life. Perhaps you are next; perhaps I am. What we do have is this: a small family, sitting together; a daughter holding a mother’s hand; and this fine book that looks chaos directly in the face and attempts to record it.
* * *
On that day in Juliett Street, after lunch with Charlotte, we’d wound down our talk about writing and we were talking about our thought patterns, the way certain painful ideas could lodge and be difficult to shift. I asked her if anything was preoccupying her at the moment, and she sighed and said, ‘No. Just saying goodbye.’
Georgia was pressed by circumstance into these exchanges time and again. She hated false profundity and sentiment, and she would hate it if I pretended that we had shared something very remarkable at this moment. She was only interested in the truth, and would have laughed or snarled at the neatness of this ‘final memory’ of her. Georgia’s writing was about people close up, the truth of an exchange like this one, the inadequate way we are in the face of death.
We kept driving, and talked about Odessa, and Andrew, and The Museum of Words. We pulled up at her house. The sun shone, there were new leaves on the trees, her dog – ‘the only one in this house who carries on like a pork chop’ – barked at me, and she gave me a quick kiss on the cheek. We planned to catch up again soon, and though we wouldn’t do that, we texted jokes, banalities, and some messages of love until a few days before she died.
A mole, a viper, a toad
In the Dark Room (2005) is Irish writer Brian Dillon’s first book, a memoir of his childhood and early adulthood. Dillon’s mother suffered from two lifelong conditions, one of which killed her. She had depression, severe and unremitting, caused in part by her other condition, scleroderma, a disease that comes with a terrible bouquet of symptoms, including thickening and tightening of the skin, as well as other organs and the arteries and veins. As the disease progresses, sufferers of scleroderma find it harder and harder to swallow, to breathe, and finally, to move at all. Their oesophagus comes to resemble, and feel like, ‘a glass tube’; the skin of their face, at first as though cosmetically tightened, can begin to show lines and then deep lesions like cuts or slices, known as ‘en coup de sabre’. The sufferer can also experience Raynaud’s syndrome, in which blood flow to the extremities is stopped. Dillon’s mother wore gloves to try to keep her hands warm, but also to hide the fact that her hands were becoming like claws. She died when the author was sixteen, leaving him with his father and two younger brothers in a house enclosed in a constricting silence: ‘In the evenings, I retreated to my bedroom. My brothers started to do the same.’ The three brothers did not learn from their restrained, reserved father how to manage or even to talk about grief, and they’d learned only unhappiness from their mother, who used to say that she felt her head would explode – whether from the depression or from the literal pressure of her disease isn’t entirely clear.
Five years later, Dillon, still living with his father and brothers, is at u
niversity. He wakes one morning, having slept late, to see his brother Kevin at his bedroom door. Kevin is saying something about the police. It takes some moments for his meaning to become clear. Their father is dead, after a heart attack in the street, ten minutes from their house. Dillon experiences a kind of disbelief, while his body becomes obedient to the new truth:
My father is dead. No, my mother is dead (I know, because I was here: I lay here, in this room, on this bed, the morning after she died.) But my father is dead too. In a second, I am at the end of the bed, dressing. All I can think is: what do we do now? What exactly are we supposed to do now?
The three boys make arrangements with the undertaker who buried their mother. They return to the house. And now they are alone – alone, but together, until the two younger boys have finished school.
Before publishing In the Dark Room Brian Dillon had written essays, criticism, fiction and history. Dillon is the Head of Critical Writing in Art and Design at the Royal College of Art in London; he is the UK editor of Cabinet magazine and the essay collection Ruins and the author of Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (2009), a study of illness and imagination, which includes such diverse subjects as Andy Warhol and Florence Nightingale, and The Great Explosion (2015), a Sebaldian account of an accident at a factory in Kent in the early twentieth century. His latest book, Essayism, was published in 2017.
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