What work it is, to ferret out and purchase the works of fiction that are actually worth reading, the ones that bob like corks in the annual deluge of new novels, most indistinguishable due to the careful muzak that is bookjacket-ese. So many "luminous" books that you glance around for the Geiger counter. So many men apparently consent to be labeled "heir to Cormac McCarthy" that you marvel there is not some huge paternity suit between publishing houses. It can make you tired. These novels can make you tired, and dispirited, suspicious that the clones of Cormac have their baseball bats poised, at the ready to crack the knees of your lot, who wonder if there is life after grit lit.
Timothy Schaffert's The Coffins of Little Hope is the best novel I've read in a while, and I suspect it's because he seems uninterested in being anyone's literary heir. I would like to take this occasion to publicly thank Schaffert for that obstinacy, and for leaving this novel like a trail of breadcrumbs for the weary to follow. I don't know Schaffert's earlier works, but I will soon.
What's this book about? An old lady writes obituaries. A newspaper goes down. American folk still have the propensity to band together over just about any issue, just like de Crevecouer said Americans were wont to do, only now they do it via serially published bad books, or case histories of missing girls. Loss can become something akin to religion, if you let it. Family ties somehow hold, even as the flood of happenstance flows through them.
But that's not what the book is about; it's about the wealth of life that accompanies any human moment. I think. I'm still scratching my head over this, and how Schaffert did this.
Aside from that, Schaffert's playful but wise writing makes this one a keeper. It's good to read in the presence of an intelligence not satisfied with surface cleverness, one that knows nuance in human currents.
Here's a snip:
What will you most remember? It's a question I've asked of the grieving hundreds and hundreds of times. The people I ask almost always take a deep breath and exhale. "What will I most remember?" they most always say, looking up and off as they're thinking back. Their first responses, which come too quickly simply to fill the silence in the room are unexceptional: her infectious smile, his playful wink, her bubbly laugh, his gruff demeanor, which disguise his sweet, soft heart. But here's what I do: I write nothing down. I give them absolutely nothing, as if they've not yet said a word. I sit my skinny legs crossed beneath my long skirt, my steno pad atop my knee, the point of my pen pressed on the paper but not moving, not even to doodle. They know that I know they can do better than that. To please me then, they see past their grief and breathe vivid the life back into their beloveds, in idiosyncratic detail.
What I will most remember about this book: the way it made me believe in novels again.
