Review: Liquid, Fragile, Perishable

I had the privilege of reviewing an early copy of Carolyn Kuebler's recently released, debut novel, Liquid, Fragile, Perishable, for the Middlebury College alumni magazine. I loved it, and highly recommend it. But will warn those of you who favor more traditional forms: there are no paragraphs.

There are lines. Individual sentences for the most part. A cluster of three at most, set apart by a single stroke of the return key. And not just for a page or two. The entire novel unfolds this way, one line at a time, through shifting points of view. Many shifting points of view

It’s a risky choice. 

Because you can’t hide bad writing with your sentences displayed like that. It’s le mot juste all the time, with every line at haiku-levels of word choice intentionality. Add to that the warnings writers are given to not overwhelm readers with too many characters and their myriad perspectives, and Kuebler has set herself a high bar.

Which she clears with room to spare. Like a master weaver, Kuebler threads her characters’ wants and needs, their backstories and observations, line by line, as if the novel were the warp and weft of a great loom. The resulting narrative is not only an inventive, emotionally engaging page turner, but also a metaphor for the resilience of the community that animates this subtle, surprising book.

It’s a community this Middlebury-based writer clearly knows well. Set in the fictional village of Glenville, Vermont, the story takes place over the course of twelve months, beginning and ending in springtime. A New York family of three — Sarah, Jeff and their teenage son, Will, —  has decided to make Glenville their permanent home and built a pricey, off-grid house on the site of the family’s old hunting camp. Their arrival sets off a chain reaction of events. Like a web, trembling throughout when the least strand is touched, the fabric of this small town is forever altered after the Calpers move in.

One afternoon, Will, out for a walk, stumbles into a trio of high school girls and encounters the incandescent Honey, daughter of the local evangelical beekeeper. The web trembles as these two meet: Will, lonely and directionless, counting down the weeks until he leaves for college; Honey, beautiful, home-schooled and hungry for a life beyond the strictures set by her parents. Their chemistry is palpable.

Throughout the unusually early spring and warm summer — “Winters just aren’t so long these days,” observes Jeanne, who runs the corner store/local post office and sees all the comings and goings — Will and Honey embark on a series of secret, woodland trysts. Few know what’s going on between these two and those who do aren’t happy about it, least of all Eli LeBeau. The overlooked, often-mocked outlier of a notorious Glenville family, Eli is obsessed with Honey, and has beaten countless criss-crossing footpaths through the forest in order to watch (some might say stalk) her. Oblivious to Eli’s watchful eye and increasingly resentful, wrath-full heart, Will and Honey pursue their relationship — with inevitable results. Readers won’t be surprised when 16-year old Honey reveals her pregnancy. But when events take a tragic, unexpected turn, the members of this community are compelled to dig deep, to confront hard truths about what happened, and ultimately to ask, “How do we move forward?”

Kuebler’s storytelling genius lies in the way she weaves an underlying menace into the fabric of this lovely place. At any given moment, we sense this cosseted community could arc toward tragedy: when middle-aged Nell who lives alone climbs a ladder to mend her roof; when Steve, married to Leila, has one gin too many and becomes overly familiar with Jenny Rose; when Cyrus, determined to make some quick cash, receives suspicious packages in the mail. Lulled into the rhythms of the seasons and comforts of the familiar, the inhabitants of Glenville tend to lose sight of the potential danger that lurks behind their individual choices. How one’s poor decisions could set everything asunder for many.

It’s an oversight that resonates beyond the confines of this one village. “Easy to forget that the planet is on fire when you’re up here, looking out over the treetops,” Sarah Calper muses from the porch of her bright, pretty house.

But while loss, change and rebirth are inevitable, the question of whether and how we survive — in our relationships, in our communities, in our world — remains. Kuebler leaves us with no easy answers, although it’s no accident that the final gift in this book is a shawl, woven together by Sarah and Honey for the new baby. 

Ultimately, the connections and commitments we form to each other and to the place we call home, are what endures.

 

New Year, New List

Finally, FINALLY … the first real snowfall of winter is blanketing the northeast and I don’t know about where you live but here in Maine we are collectively 1. Pulling out the nordic skis for the first real run of the season and 2. Settling in with some good books. I’m unabashedly one of those nerds who thinks “Read any good books lately?” is actually a terrific conversation opener, so … here we go. A few of my latest reads/reading/to be read obsessions.

Tracy Kidder (Pulitzer Prize winning author of “Mountains Beyond Mountains”) has done it again with “Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim, O’Connell’s Urgent Mission to Bring Healing to Homeless People.” It’s hard to know where to begin here. First of all, it’s classic Kidder, so well-written and beautifully researched, a compelling, important story. But given our national, growing crisis with homelessness: an urgent story. And at the heart of the story: an amazing man, Dr. Jim O’Connell. 

I first heard of Jim O’Connell when my daughter, who was living in Boston and volunteering at Boston Health Care for the Homeless, the organization which O’Connell helped found, handed me his book called “Stories From the Shadows: Reflections of a Street Doctor.” A Harvard-trained physician who turned down a prestigious cancer research fellowship and instead devoted himself to working with Boston’s homeless population, O’Connell has profoundly influenced the way the medical community sees, hears, and treats the chronically unhoused. A clearly brilliant yet strikingly modest man, O’Connell brings to life in “Shadows” patient after patient who has endured/survived/suffered the streets, and helps us understand and better empathize with their plight. Kidder expands on this in “Rough Sleepers,” and introduces us in even greater detail to the marvelous, miraculous team O’Connell has amassed over the years. Needless to say: this one’s a Must Read.

I wouldn’t have picked up Eleanor Catton’s “Birnum Wood” if my book group hadn’t chosen it for this month. And I’m glad they did. And glad I read it. That said, as I was wading through some VERY wordy passages (think: the emperor in the movie Amadeus, telling Mozart his music has “too many notes”) I couldn’t help wondering HOW is she going to resolve all this?? And without giving away anything I’ll tell you: As they deserve. Every one of them. Everyone gets what he/she deserves. And if you’re willing to wade (one wonders why we need to know every single damn thing in Tony’s backpack) you’ll find yourself turning pages very quickly.

Catton won the Booker Prize for her novel “The Luminaries,” so trust that we’re in capable hands in “Birnum Wood.” Which yes, is named for the line in Macbeth, but in this case is the name of a guerrilla gardening collective that plants crops where no one will notice. The group has taken an interest in an abandoned farm, owned by a recently knighted pest control magnate, who is negotiating selling the farm to an American billionaire who claims he wants to build an end-times bunker on the property. Which is a lie. The billionaire is illegally mining rare-earth elements from an adjacent national park. And has to figure out what to do about the Birnum Wood hippies who have stumbled into his path.

“Birnum Wood” contains many moments when the characters are engaged in topical, relevant conversations about the state of our world today, and for that I give Catton a helluva lot of credit. It was an interesting way to bring all that to life. Plus, the plot twists are quite good. That said: this is a long book and life is short, you know? Read Barbara Kingsolver’s “Demon Copperhead” or Percival Everett’s “Trees” before diving into this.

Have you ever been to the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston? Most of my friends LOVE it. Love love love it. I find it stresses me out. It’s … cluttered. So packed with so much. I can’t take it all in and can’t make sense of it. My daughter, who is more artistically bent than I, and actually studied art collection curation in college, visited the museum and concluded that Gardner was “an art hoarder.”

So, it’s been quite illuminating for me to read Emily Franklin’s new book, “The Lioness of Boston,” which is a historical fiction retelling of Isabella Stewart Gardner’s life. I’m reading the novel alongside “Mrs. Jack,” which is her official biography, written by Louise Hall Tharp and for sale in the museum gift shop, as well as “Sargent’s Women,” which profiles four women (including Gardner) who were painted by the famous portraitist John Singer Sargent. 

And while I STILL think the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum is a mess of a collection, I now so deeply appreciate WHY she left it as she did, who she was, and what she overcame. She was a smart, spunky, resilient woman who lived in an era of incredible repression for women, and in spite of her wealth and privilege had much to overcome personally. Fans of the museum — and the inimitable Mrs. Jack — will deeply appreciate this book. Non-fans will learn much.

Finally, in my to-be-read stack is “The Corpse Bloom, a new novel by Maine author, Bryan Wiggins.Written in consultation with neurosurgeon Dr. Lee Thibodeau, this book has been described by Kirkus Reviews as “a taut, nuanced medical thriller.”

Basic plot: a kidney transplant by a preeminent Boston doctor goes bad. Doc takes a leave of absence and accepts a job at a remote transplant clinic in Mexico. After a few months transplanting kidneys from unknown origins into wealthy patients, the Doc realizes his employer isn’t who he thought he was … and his only way out and back home is muy risky.

My first medical thriller was “Coma” (published in 1977!) and I’ve loved the genre ever since, so I’m super excited about Bryan’s new book. It’s next up for me after “Lioness.”

Okay 2024, we’re off! What are you reading?