Torch by Cheryl Strayed

The fact is that as organic beings, we are situated towards death. Martin Heidegger announces that one of the universal and necessary conditions of being human is being-towards-death; he calls these universal and necessary conditions existentialia. So many authors have written about this experience of living in the shadow of death, but few have written as honestly and insightfully as Cheryl Strayed on experiencing the death of a loved one. In her 2005 novel, Torch, Strayed lays out the confusion of emotions that surround the death and dying of a thirty-eight year old woman, Teresa, and skillfully changes voices to describe the reactions of a college age daughter, Claire, a high school senior son, Josh, and a loving husband and step-father, Bruce. While it is Claire’s voice that is both the most convincing and complete, I was very impressed by Strayed’s ability to speak for the son and husband as well.

Strayed now lives in Portland, and since the debut of this sad and lovely little novel, she has published a memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Coast Trail (2012), and has identified herself as the voice behind the advice column, Dear Sugar. So many excellent novels (especially first novels) are thinly veiled autobiographical sketches, and this is certainly true of Torch. Like Claire, Strayed lost her mother to cancer at an early age, and she experienced first-hand her own wild grief and the different, though no less profound, reactions of a brother and stepfather.

I won’t be giving away much of the story by telling you that about the first third of the novel describes the illness and death of Teresa, and the last two thirds focuses on the attempts of her family to deal with her death.

The mother, Teresa, in addition to working hard as a waitress, is also well known locally via her radio talk show, Modern Pioneers. Teresa’s children are alternately proud of their mother’s local fame and ashamed of the homespun stories and advice she delivers on her show and strives to live out in her daily life. At the end of each show, she invokes her listeners to “Work hard. Do good. Be incredible!”


Claire is called home from college when her mother gets the shocking diagnosis that she has only a short time to live—maybe weeks, maybe months, at most a year. For a little while, she and others in the family try to carry on with their normal routines, but as the disease rapidly progresses, each has to face the fact that there will be no return to normalcy—not now, not ever.

Claire stared at her mother as she slept or tried to sleep. The longer she watched her, the more foreign Teresa seemed to her, as if she hadn’t known her all her life. She’d felt the same peculiar dislocation years before, when it had been explained to how babies were made. It wasn’t the facts that had confused her, or the mystery of sex or birth or creation, but the question of why. Why should there be people at all? Or fish or lions or rats? Now she felt a new wonder washing over her. If there were to be people and fish and lions and rats, then why should they die? And why, most of all, should her mother die?

Bruce, the loving husband who has become a devoted father to Claire and Joshua, attempts first simply to deny that his wife is dying; her death seems inconceivable. It is she who is the glue of the family, the wise mother and pioneer. And when her death becomes inevitable, when she in fact dies, his second attempt at denial is to suppose that when she dies, so will he. He can see no other solution, though he worries about how his children will respond to this second death.

Joshua, still a senior in high school, also attempts first simply to deny. He refuses to visit his mother in the hospital, not only because he hates to see her so changed, hates to see her and hear her suffering, but because in some confused way he supposes his refusal will prevent her death. Even before she becomes so ill that she has to be in the hospital, Joshua has taken to staying away, not attending school, secreting himself in a storeroom above the restaurant where he worked before his mother became ill.

On occasion he made an appearance, showing up at home a couple of times a week for Bruce or Claire so they wouldn’t worry, and at least once a day he saw Lisa Bourdeaux {his girlfriend}. But mostly he liked to be alone, in silence, or listening to his music as he lay on the unfurled rug in the apartment or sat by the river on the rock, not remembering where the world was. Remembering it, but willing himself not to. Often this meant that he could not allow a single thought into his mind, and he got good at it, forcing his mind to go separate and blank, imagining himself not human, but rather an animal that hibernated or went into torpor.

Strayed is incredibly good at dissecting the grief of each member of the family, showing how their very different reactions sometimes drive them further apart when they so desperately need to be closer together. When Joshua asks his stepfather what he is going to do now that Teresa is dead, Bruce wants to reach out, wants to comfort his son.

And he almost reached out and put his hand on Joshua’s shoulder and said, ‘Suffer for a while, but then we’re going to be okay.'

But he said none of those things. He wasn’t that man. Not in this instant. He was so alone that he could not speak. He remained silent for so long that the silence seemed to absorb the question entirely, so that it would have been stranger to answer than to leave it be.

It would be a big mistake to suppose that Strayed is simply noting that boys and men attempt to deny or flee death and grief, while girls and women have to deal with it. In fact, she is both perceptive and exceedingly kind in her descriptions of the varied responses. Each character deals with the death and dying as she/he must, and while this is not a happy book, neither is it simply bleak and tragic. I would say that in the end she is hardest on Claire, perhaps because she expects the most from her, from herself. But in truth the author shows great empathy towards and understanding of each of her characters, and if there is no final summing up and redemption, there is acceptance and understanding of this universal and necessary condition of what it is to be human. This is a fine book, and I expect more from this wonderful writer.

How It All Began by Penelpe Lively

What is it like for a being to live in time and to be consciously, even obsessively, aware of living in time? This question has captured the attention of so many philosophers in the past hundred years or so, but it is novelists who actually describe the threefold process of living simultaneously in the past, constantly anticipating a future, and so in the grip of memory and anticipation that the present is barely noticed as it tumbles into the past. Penelope Lively, in all of her works, takes on this description of lived time and the tricks and vagaries of memory. In her latest novel, How It All Began, she focuses in on how one seemingly insignificant event triggers huge changes in the lives of so many. A retired high school English teacher, Charlotte, is knocked down and mugged on a London street, sending her to hospital, one consequence of which is that her daughter, Rose, is unable to accompany her employer, Henry, to an academic convention. This in turn leads to a summons to Henry’s niece, Marion, to stand in for Rose, which in turns leads to Marion’s sending a last minute text to her lover, Jeremy, canceling an assignation. “I can’t make it on Friday. Have to escort Uncle Henry to Manchester—his PA out of action. Bother, bother. I’m so sorry. Love you.” Her lover, Jeremy, who is usually so assiduous about deleting text messages, has this time left his mobile phone at home, which again due to circumstance, leads to his wife, Stella discovering the text-message and she almost at once instigates divorce proceedings, immediately impacting the lives of their two teenage daughters. And these are only a few of the people affected in large and small ways by the impulsive, chance actions of the young mugger. Rose’s husband, Gerry, is affected because his mother-in-law Charlotte, whose hip is broken in the process of being knocked to the ground by the mugger, comes to live with them while convalescing. While staying with her daughter, Charlotte, who has been a superb teacher most of her life, and even in retirement has taken on the task of volunteer teacher of English as a second language for older immigrants, finds the idleness of convalescence almost unbearable. This leads to her taking on one of these immigrants in a one-on-one teaching task, which brings Anton, the eastern European immigrant, into contact with her daughter Rose, who to her amazement, mixed with both delight and chagrin, finds herself falling in love with Anton. And let’s not forget Marion, the niece called into the service of her aging academic uncle due to the actions of the mugger; she is an interior designer who by happenstance meets a shady investment broker at the academic convention she attends as PA to her uncle, and the broker engages Marion to restore and decorate an upper end London flat, which in turn, affects the lives of the Polish men whom she hires for the restoration. All these consequences spinning off of this chance mugging.

You may think I have given away too much of the story already in laying out the butterfly-effect above, but in truth, the reader comes to know all of this in the first few pages of the novel. The brilliance of Lively as an author is in her uncanny ability to speak in monologues for each of her many characters and to give the reader glimpses of their inner lives and their particular forms of being-in-time. Again like so many of the philosophers and writers of the past century, Lively does not believe in an external telos somehow guiding human endeavors. There is no such thing as fate or destiny. Instead, there is this incredibly complex network of causation directed by nothing and no one, but hurtling us all towards a chancy and unknown future. We may feel secure in our beliefs about a cozy and fixed future, but it is an illusion that can be exploded as myth in a second by what can only be described as a chance event.

I have been in the thrall of Penelope Lively since I picked up a collection of her short stories many years ago, and each time I read a new novel, I am struck again by her talent as a writer and by her grasp of the existential condition. She is now in her late seventies, but I can detect no erosion of her immense powers of observation, nor in her ability to describe in detail the inner lives of her characters. For me, reading her is like picking up a conversation with an old friend, and she, too, seems to have just such relationships with so many other authors I love: Henry James, Iris Murdoch, Carol Shields, Dostoevsky, and many more whom she mentions in the course of this novel. Perhaps she speaks even more particularly to me now as she talks of the process of aging and the speeding up of lived-time as one grows old.

You are on the edge of things now, clinging on to life’s outer rim. You have this comet trail of your own lived life, sparks from which arrive in the head all the time, whether you want them or not—life has been lived but it is still going on, in the mind, for better and for worse.

I have concentrated on Lively’s treatment of lived-time and on her conviction that there is no human-independent purpose for existence, no external telos, only an unfathomable web of causation and chance. But I could as well have focused in on her views about literature, reading and teaching—all of which get a lot of attention in this novel. She realizes that teachers are, at best, conduits or catalysts; rather than filling empty vessels (one particularly noxious view of education), good teachers simply provide opportunities, suggest books, provide sparks that ignite the inquiring mind.

Let me sum up this wonderful novel using Lively’s own words:

So that was the story. These have been the stories: of Charlotte, of Rose and Gerry, of Anton, of Jeremy and Stella, of Marion, of Henry, Mark, of all of them. The stories so capriciously triggered because something happened to Charlotte in the street one day. But of course this is not the end of the story, the stories. An ending is an artificial device; we like endings, they are satisfying, convenient, and a point has been made. But time does not end, and stories march in step with time. Equally, chaos theory does not assume an ending; the ripple effect goes on, and on. These stories do not end, but they spin away from one anther, each on its own course.

I have been talking about an incredible author, Penelope Lively, and of her newest book, How It All Began. I hope you will allow Lively to enter into the stream of your lived life, transform and metamorphize it.

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The Outsider by Richard Wright

Since this is Black history month, I’m going to depart from my usual practice of reviewing contemporary fiction and, instead, talk about an often misunderstood novel by a truly great American black author, Richard Wright.

Most readers know of Wright because of his early works, Native Son and Uncle Tom’s Children. Some have also read the first part of his autobiography, Black Boy (the second half of which was intentionally suppressed because of Wright’s affiliation with the Communist Party, and only much later published under the title American Hunger). But for many and rather complex reasons, the novel that most explicitly states Wright’s philosophical views, as well as his understanding of and fascination with psychoanalysis, has been largely ignored. He called the novel The Outsider, and it is indeed an incredible exploration of a bright and deeply troubled man who is on the outside in almost all ways. He is outside the powerful white culture simply because he is black, and no one understands better than Wright the economic and social oppression of American Blacks. But he is also outside the black community that he lives in, because he is an atheist, and harshly critical of religion as simply a flight into illusion and myth in the face of this oppression. And finally, he is a morbidly self-reflective man with an acute sense of his own existential isolation and who understands always the distorting lenses through which others, both white and black, view him.

This novel was published in 1953, when McCarthyism was at a fever pitch in this country. No doubt anti-communist sentiment had much to do with the initial response to the book, along with a fear of even appearing to be interested in anything tainted with communism. But the novel was also met with suspicion on the Left, at least partly because Wright had severed his ties with the Communist Party and was thereafter overtly critical of Soviet style communism. Like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the French Marxist who felt impelled to criticize the lack of democratic process in the Soviet controlled CP, and eventually to expose the Siberian work camps, Wright insisted that it was his very understanding of Marxism that led him to reject the Soviet Union and the control it exerted over the CP. Jean Paul Sartre, too, although not wanting to alienate French workers, and thus always portraying himself as a Fellow Traveler with the CP, used plays as a mechanism for criticizing the authoritarian structure of the Party. So, both left and right were uneasy with this dark and violent novel, and academicians in this country (including those in philosophy departments) were so resistant to European existentialism (especially French existentialism), that by and large they simply ignored it—literally rejecting it out of hand, that is, without bothering to read it.  Wright, on the other hand, had both read and comprehended the major themes in existentialism, understood it on an emotional as well as intellectual level. Iris Murdoch once said that Marx and Freud changed the course of intellectual history forever, and I would certainly argue this to be the case in Wright’s development as an intellectual.

Damon Cross, the lead character in The Outsider, is a very bright and very dangerous man. He is also the spokesman for Wright, and in long, intricate passages lays out both a thorough understanding of the existential condition and a total rejection of theological consolations. The story, itself, is a long and complicated one, and I have no intention of giving away the twists and turns of the plot. I will say however that Damon Cross, not by divine intervention, but by chance intervention, is given the opportunity to begin anew, in Sartre’s words, to become the author of his own existence, to be really and truly and frighteningly free.

Damon is trapped in a low paying civil service job; trapped by a deeply religious and disappointed mother whom he both loves and resents; trapped by an early marriage to a woman with whom he feels no commonality, but with whom he has three children; trapped by a sexual relationship with a very young woman whom he comes to learn is not even of age, but pregnant and insisting that Damon get a divorce. Alienated from his co-workers and lost in a whirl of alcohol and daily thoughts of suicide, chance delivers him via a subway accident that leaves many dead, one of whom Cross manages to switch identities with. He is abruptly free; no past, no identity. His insurance money will go to his wife, so he is more valuable to her dead than alive. The girlfriend, Dot, will now have to do the sensible thing and get an abortion that she has so far refused. Even, he thinks, less a disappointment to his poor mother dead than he would be alive.

Now a stranger in this very strange land, Damon Cross flees from Chicago to New York and becomes Lionel Lane, black intellectual working for the Communist Party.

As the train wheels clicked through the winter night, he knew where his sense of dread came from; it was from within himself, within the vast and mysterious world that was his and his alone, and yet not really known to him, a world that was his own and yet unknown. And it was into this strange but familiar world that he was now plunging.

Cross, like Wright, is an intensely proud man who cannot be made to feel or act inferior because of his blackness, nor to blame race for his own condition. But he sees how racism affects others, and he bridles at the injustices he witnesses much more than at anything that has happened to him. He sees how powerful white men in the CP use black people for their own ends, how they distort and misuse the very Marxist principles that he admires simply in order to further an agenda that in the end supports an authoritarian power-structure, denies the importance of the individual, and thwarts democratic process at every turn.

In describing a character in the book, Wright could well have been describing himself:

…he had the kind of consciousness that could grasp the mercurial emotions of men whom society had never tamed or disciplined, men whose will had never been broken, men who were wild but sensitive, savage but civilized, intellectual but somehow intrinsically poetic in their inmost hearts.

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