220620 modern novel

 June twenty

Regarding Anne Tyler (see yesterday's post): In the late nineties, a dear friend had a stopoff in Toronto, and left me a book she had read on her flight. I think it was Breathing Lessons. I was not eager; I am not a big fan of "modern novels", but waded in anyway. I went on to read another handful of Tyler's novels. I learned a bit about the "modern novel" genre and began to get it. I love Tyler's work: it is full of ordinary extraordinary people. I was reviewing her works just now and I see that I have some catching up to do.

The current bedside selection. There are a couple (or seven!) more ebooks open, but I like paper books, a more concrete experience, a learning and memory involving more of the senses (?), but maybe that is my age. I have not cracked the Faulkner.

Poem, dated January 1998, not about the Tyler novel.

modern novel

so modern it's hardcover

full of crisp clever writing

the author should have been a poet

her words cut like ice into spare

sharp-edged pictures

even the pages - matte white

the letters small and measured

in almost-black ink

but i don't want to read it

already there are shadows of a future

torture

in the woman's back 

as she holds the telegram

in the younger woman's spine

curving against her dress

as she turns away

I want to turn away close the book

read something I've already read

so I know its pains

its happy ending

the characters familiar 

friends

not some old man who limps

wounded by his soulless life

this modern piece abandons me 

to my own devices and pain

infiltrates

becomes a memory of something

left unfinished at the end of the day

i don't understand it 

as i do for instance jane austen

story of a woman

the subtle change of relationship

in the words of a sentence

and turn of a hand

this novel is 

over my head like a jet 

unbelievable ton of metal

engine rivets and electrical pulses

holding it together

in a sky thin as paper

thin as air this writer's words

and I can't grasp it - the jet

except to envision its crashing

bent and in flames

bodies and smoke spilling out

much easier to believe 

in the coach and four

a scene in the snow

in rural somewhere 

before there were planes and this      

stilted 

cautious artist's tale

fragment upon fragment

measured out slow as morphine

dripped too late for the patient's 

waves of pain

take this book back to the seller

i wish it unbought

don't even give it to a used book store

without some warning to fainthearts

pencilled in the cover

HK 1998