THESE PRECIOUS DAYS: ESSAYS by Ann Patchett

Patchett writes with unflinching honesty and a keen eye for life’s big and small moments. All, she portends, are meaningful in their sorrows and joys. Among the twenty-three essays, we are treated to an array of Patchett’s more challenging forays into everyday life and relationships. There’s Three Fathers about her, yes! three fathers: one biological, the other two stepfathers; the one about her decision not to have children; another to forgo shopping for a year; and in How to Practice, her decision to give away possessions after a friend’s father dies. The star of the show is the essay These Precious Days, about her newly formed friendship with Tom Hanks’ assistant, who ends up living with Patchett and her husband in Nashville as she undergoes treatment for pancreatic cancer. I read it when it was first published in Harper’s Magazine and never forgot about Sooki and Ann and their yoga mornings and nightly vegetarian dinners during the pandemic lockdown. Rereading it was dessert at the end of this tender but unsentimental look at gratitude. Gratitude for being present to write about all of it.  

Favorite line(s): Nothing is more interesting than time: the days that are endless, the days that get away. Certain days of the distant past remain so vivid to me I could walk back into them and pick up the conversation in mid-sentence, while other days (weeks, months, people, places) I couldn’t recall to save my life. One of the last things I understand when I’m putting a novel together is the structure of time. When does the story start and when does it end? Will time be linear or can it stutter and skip and circle back? At what point does our understanding of the action shift?

THE EASY LIFE by Marguerite Duras

The easy life is anything but. Set in a remote farming village in France in the 1940s, Duras’s second novel begins with the death of live-in-uncle Jerome, who dies after a fight with his nephew Nicolas. In the early pages, the novel’s narrator, Francine, Nicolas’s sister, explains why and how this happens (yes, she has something to do with it). Jerome was sleeping with Nicolas’s wife and was responsible for losing the family’s money. Francine is in love with Tiene, the farmhand and a friend of her brother’s. The parents are a bit “off” and in declining health. After her beloved brother’s death, Francine takes off to the coast to grieve. This is where we are immersed in Francine’s interior world, and the question of when will her real life begin and how long will she have to wait. When she returns home, she does so as a changed woman. Unexpectedly and uncharacteristically braving the future.

Favorite line(s): I noticed my anger, noticed that chaos lived in me too. It surged through my body; the boredom surrounding me was black, a never-ending night. I thought of my age, the age of all those sleeping in this house, and I heard time gnaw at us like an army of rats. We were good seeds. We had let him live for twenty-four years. We had counted on time to impose order on the affairs of the house. Time had passed. Chaos had won out even so. It was now a chaos of souls, of blood. We could no longer heal, we no longer wanted to. We no longer knew how to want to be free, we were dreamers, degenerates, people who dream of happiness, a true happiness that will overwhelm it all. With Jerome dead, Clemence remained. And our nonchalance, twenty-four years old. We still pleased ourselves, and we desired nothing else in the end except to continue to believe that we were made for an impossible life.

SEA OF TRANQUILITY by Emily St. John Mandel 

Mandel’s fantastic speculative foray into the time-traveling world of simultaneous timelines intersecting through several centuries is not a novel to pick up and put down at random. The way to a satisfying read is all in one delicious gulp. The author makes the extraordinary settings ordinary on the moon and Earth where the stories unfold. The novel begins in 1912 when a young man exiled from his family in England moves to Canada. There he has a “vision” in a forest where he meets a man, Gaspery Roberts. In 2020, a woman, Mirella, learns her friend is dead. There’s another vision in the same forest with Gaspery Roberts making an appearance. Jump to 2203, and an author is on a book tour. Yep, Gaspery Roberts shows up as a time-traveling interviewer who warns the famous author of a plague he knows is coming. The vision in the forest begs the question, are we living in a simulation? Is all of reality a simulation? How are we in or out of sync in our lives? Is this the end as we know it? How for centuries the populations all believed it would happen in their time.

Favorite line(s): I had a fascinating conversation with my mother once, where she talked about the guilt she and her friends had felt about bringing children in to the universe. This was in the mid-2160s, in Colony Two. It’s hard to imagine a more tranquil time or place, but they were concerned about asteroid storms, and if life on the moon became untenable, about the continued viability of life on Earth—and my point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.