Alison Oatman

A Marriage to Envy

July 10, 2017 by Alison Oatman Leave a Comment

The Woolfs had a routine that seldom varied. Every morning at about nine-thirty, right after breakfast (which Leonard always served Virginia in bed), they went to their separate rooms to write. They wrote from nine-thirty until one. The Woolfs had spent so many mornings of their lives in this way that by 1934 they had written more than a score of books between them. At one, they joined each other for lunch…After lunch the Woolfs would read their mail and the newspapers. Afternoons were usually devoted to typing out and revising that morning’s work or taking care of business related to the Press. When the weather was fine (and often even when it was not), Virginia liked to include a long walk in her afternoon schedule.
–from Mitz by Sigrid Nunez

Sigrid Nunez has written a perfect little book about the Woolfs’ marmoset Mitz. Told through the eyes of this little monkey, the novel’s real focus is the Woolf household and the comings and goings of Mitz’s guardians, Virginia and Leonard. Their marriage is an extremely directed and productive union couched in much tenderness.

There are other recent examples of married writers who work in their own little hives. Poets Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon used to scribble away in adjoining rooms in their New Hampshire farmhouse. Jonathan Franzen has written about his marriage to his college sweetheart and the intense bond that allowed them to write around the clock and discuss books and ideas at all hours. (Much better than an MFA program!) And how about Sartre and Beauvoir? (Whatever that means!)

Yes, the Woolfs (or Wolves?) were privileged but also extremely fortunate to have found in each other a real partnership, like perfectly matched tennis players. You could say their daily routine was rigid and unforgiving, but there is so much freedom that comes from discipline! No, the Woolfs weren’t closing bars most nights or dancing in fountains, but they were doing something just as exciting. Even a little girl like Mitz could see that while perched on Leonard’s shoulder or sitting snug inside his waistcoat. To Mitz, these humans were as singular as they were friendly–always providing fresh worms and a chin-scratch and as much endless entertainment as the biggest show on earth.

The Beauty of Brevity

July 3, 2017 by Alison Oatman Leave a Comment

I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction. It is the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated, ill-shaven giant (but a giant who’s a genius on his best days)…How often one reads a contemporary full-length novel and thinks quietly, mutinously, that it would have worked out better at half or a third the length. I suspect that many novelists clock up sixty thousand words after a year’s work and believe (wearily, perhaps) that they are only half way there. They are slaves to the giant, instead of masters of the form.

–from “Some Notes on the Novella” by Ian McEwan (2012 New Yorker article)

Sigrid Nunez has written six novels and one memoir, but her entire literary output stacked back-to-back would be the size of a toaster. I first discovered her memoir about Susan Sontag (118 pages) a couple of years ago, and I felt that not one drop of ink had been wasted. In a way, it is sad Nunez has gotten so much attention for the Sontag book–mostly from those who want the inside scoop about the deliberately puzzling icon–at the expense of her six previous books.

Take her first novel–A Feather on the Breath of God. It is full of satisfying “writerly” description, such as “fiery red sausage with specks of fat like embedded teeth” and “the ash-pink dawn” and “women with feet like little deer hooves.” She also includes many insightful musings, like “I had discovered the miraculous possibility that art holds out to us: to be part of the world and to be removed from the world at the same time.”

Her second novel–Naked Sleeper–isn’t as well-combed as the first and there are several speed bumps that could have been worked out. But its 235 pages are still written with delicacy and a well-honed sense of humor. When her character Nona finally meets up with the man who has sent her so many heated love letters, the letdown is both devastating and absurdly comical.

Four more Nunez novels await to be polished off in a good binge-read, or maybe in a series of tiny snacks, like trail mix or exotic appetizers or a light borscht. (Not to mention a bottle of cherry Kombucha!)

The smaller, the better…

Is King Lear on Your Bucket List?

April 5, 2017 by Alison Oatman Leave a Comment

Edgar:

Hadst thou been aught but gossamer, feathers, air
(So many fathom down precipitating),
Thou’dst shiver’d like an egg: but thou dost breathe,
Hast heavy substance, bleed’st not, speak’st, art sound.
Ten masts at each, make not the altitude
Which thou hast perpendicularly fell:
Thy life’s a miracle. Speak yet again.

–from Shakespeare’s “King Lear”

Dr. Natalie Elliot–a Political Science professor at St. John’s here in Santa Fe–gave a talk tonight on “The Weight of Pathos in King Lear” and it was so hefty and lumbering (the most zaftig of discussions!) that I rushed home to unburden myself of a passion to reread the play immediately.

When Shakespeare was writing the play in 1606, falling body experience (the theory that all bodies fall at the same rate) was all the vogue in scientific circles.

So when it comes to the scene above from the end of Act IV (in which Edgar–disguised as a beggar–leads his suicidal father–the blinded Gloucester–over what Edgar pretends are the cliffs of Dover–and then makes his father believe he has survived a great fall) it is a sort of science experiment. Gloucester cannot trust his senses–and at the same time the language is all about “weightiness” and “welling up”–the “pathos” in the title of the lecture.

Six years ago, my father was hospitalized next to a Shakespeare scholar who had been run over by a taxi. (Leave it to my Dad to find his match as a conversationalist in his hospital roommate.) The two got to talking about “King Lear” and the academic said it was Shakespeare’s best.

“King Lear” is the classic father-daughter play. (Though I always feel sad when Shylock’s daughter Jessica runs off with his money and breaks his heart in “The Merchant of Venice.”) Cordelia is Lear’s heroic and truthful daughter.

At the time, my father had terminal cancer, and he had never read “King Lear.” What a perfect book to bring him, I thought to myself. Pretty heavy stuff but sort of a primer on mortality.

But when I handed him a paperback of the play, he was horrified that his roommate might see him reading it. He didn’t want to seem that uncool. Anyhow, he was reading a thick volume about World War II that he had just started digging into.

At first I felt sad that he was missing out on what I felt were “key” books–everything from “Anna Karenina” to “Middlemarch”–and so on. Shouldn’t he be burning to read the “classics” (i.e., all the books I held dear) before he died? This was more than a little self-righteous!

In the end, my father never did read “King Lear.” And was he the worse off for it? Probably not. His life didn’t need more heaviness and pathos. He was plenty wise. And if I had been very sick, would he have brought me a door-stopper of a book about World War II to cheer me up in my hospital bed? No, he would have brought me something I liked–just as he brought me comic books when I was a little kid with bronchitis.

And in the end, as Shakespeare wrote, “Thy life’s a miracle.” You don’t have to read “King Lear” to know that much.

Risk of Deportation Looms

February 16, 2017 by Alison Oatman Leave a Comment

The last week or so has thrust the family into a state of extended emergency. On Feb. 5, Ms. Vizguerra called a family meeting over dinner, banning electronics from the table to convey the seriousness of the matter. The family cats, Miranda and Zayra, meowed as she explained the plan.

If officials were to come to the home in the days before the meeting at the I.C.E. office, no one should answer the door, she said. If they gained entry, Luna, a reedy middle schooler with braces, should use her phone to film the events. Roberto should open the emergency contact list in his phone and begin to call family friends and advocates. And Zury, the youngest, should go straight to her parents’ bedroom, close the door and stay there. “I told them, ‘I know it’s going to be difficult for you,'” Ms. Vizguerra said. “‘I want you to be brave.'”

Three days later, the packing began, with the children stuffing their mother’s leggings, sweaters and shampoos into suitcases and boxes. Terrified by the prospect of familial separation, Ms. Vizguerra began to consider taking refuge at the First Unitarian Society church in Denver, whose congregants previously gave sanctuary to another immigrant.

She reminded Luna which drawers belonged to which child and told her it would be her job to make sure her siblings dressed properly. She showed her where the extra soap, toothbrushes and toothpaste were kept.

Then Ms. Vizguerra stocked the refrigerator with microwave dinners, something even a 6-year-old could make.

–“Immigrant Mother in Denver Takes Refuge as Risk of Deportation Looms” by Julie Turkewitz in today’s New York Times

As the Trump administration takes a wrecking ball to our democracy, it is hard to examine each individual crack.

Yet soon we will experience an unraveling of our immediate communities and the society at large if the deportations continue.

As the Trump administration bullies the press and treats news organizations as the opposition, stories like that of Jeanette Vizguerra–mother of three–serve as authentic news.

The image of twelve-year-old Luna preparing to take care of her younger siblings is a sobering dispatch from a cruel world. It looks like her youth is officially over.

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