on I’ll Come To You, a novel by Rebecca Kauffman
In his book-length poem Sphere, A. R. Ammons wrote, “the shapes nearest shapelessness awe us most, suggest the god.” For an artist, the mystery of how one’s work takes shape from nebulous impulses is akin to the mystery of how a life takes shape from the ferment of needs, desires, pleasures and hurts. The photographer Robert Adams surmised that the most meager of shapes provoke us “because most of life seems shapeless most of the time, and the art that squares with this powerful impression seems most convincingly to confront disagreeable fact.” I could say that my daily routines lend a shape to my life — but don’t exactly comprise my life. I could say that preparing for the holidays, tending to a newborn child, abiding by the rules of a divorce settlement, or caring for a spouse with early dementia give shape to the lives of characters in Rebecca Kauffman’s superb fifth novel I’ll Come To You. Deceptively simple in its sonics and gestures, this novel transports something shapeless within it as it proceeds.
I’ll Come To You is a novel without a hook, and therefore, it has not been written for an algorithmic “cohort” of readers who give permission in advance for whatever ax will be ground. It is an ensemble novel with six main characters and a few essential walk-ons. An ensemble novel, I think, deprives the novelist of employing the psyche of a singular character as the conduit for conveying perception. I like to imagine Kauffman at her writing desk, sketching out the routines of her characters but keeping herself from knowing too much about them – and perhaps about herself. Her method here, for the unnamed narrator, is to speak as one of and among them.
The story takes place over the course of one year, each chapter naming a month. To begin, there’s Ellen (school bus driver for 35 years) out on a blind date with Gary (retired bank teller). “Ellen said, ‘How were your holidays?’ ‘Lousy.’ Gary took off his reading glasses and slipped them into the pocket of his jacket. ‘Yours?’” We’re at the eastern edge of the Midwest, the fading white middle-class looking for deals at J. C. Penney, taking modest vacations on the Jersey shore. Ellen (Kauffman has given her a last name, Leach, but not the other characters) is benign and separated from Michael (who has no speaking part). Reading chapter one, already I want someone better for her than Gary: “He had fuzzy gray hair and was slumped on a bench” when Ellen spots him at the restaurant. Then we meet Janet and Bruce; their pregnant daughter Corinne is married to Ellen’s son Paul. Janet had a tough childhood that has left her with a sour disposition; Bruce (church custodian) has early onset dementia and keeps a notebook in which he writes to his unborn granddaughter, “The vast majority of the things I’ve thought, I’ve not said aloud.” The unspoken is dense here. When Paul considers why his father left Ellen, the narrator says, “Paul didn’t know what to feel for his mother” – which leaves the reader in the same spot. Then there’s Rob, son to Janet and Bruce, who struggles with a self-esteem deficit, behaving alternately as an innocent victim and inflated hero. Birthdays, Thanksgiving and Christmas bring this family together.
A car salesman, Rob goes to his son’s school to give a talk about his job. Ellen attends a banquet where she is congratulated for her 35 years of service (the school presents her with a $35 gift certificate to Kmart). Ellen’s air conditioner breaks down. Corinne and Paul have an appointment with their obstetrician. Janet, Rob and his girlfriend Kai work a shift at a food pantry. Bruce falters. Not every character is burdened – Ellen seems mainly puzzled about her husband’s departure and uncertain about including Gary in the holidays, and Corinne is preoccupied with her newborn daughter (though in two scenes with minor characters, what she witnesses and recalls gives the novel its harsher sexual awareness). But “Paul could not rid himself entirely of his trivial daily concerns or his unflagging pessimism, which for his entire life had shoehorned its way into every happiness.” The ordinary begins to ripen, but slowly.
In his essay “The Lives of Others” (2020), Richard Russo specified a way for writers to avoid the familiar narrative shapes that confirm what we already believe. He wrote, “You learn, over time, to identify not so much with what’s important as what’s important to you … In the end we tell stories because we must. And the real source of that must isn’t knowledge or the authenticity that derives from research and lived experience. It’s mystery. What we don’t understand beckons to us.” I’ll Come To You is a record of how Kauffman enacted her approach to a mystery – what do family members — what do people — actually want from each other, and what gets in the way of providing or receiving it?
It startled me, nearing the end of the novel, to discover what had been accumulating patiently, slyly, in the narrative. I’m not saying that Kauffman has larded her final pages with an epiphany – she’s too artful a writer for such gestures, too respectful of her audience. I’ll Come To You is the address of a vulnerable person to implacable forces, all internal. I wouldn’t use the word “compassion” to describe Kauffman’s feeling for her characters; I prefer to say “magnaminity,” which assumes an immeasurable, forgiving spirit in the writer and leaves readers free to put a price on their own understanding. The phrase “I’ll come to you” occurs twice – both times uttered by Ellen as she feels her way towards making a gratifying connection with someone else. I feel that Kauffman approached me with the same diffident grace.
[Published by Counterpoint on January 7, 2025, 224 pages, $16.99 hardcover]
To read Ron Slate’s review of Rebecca Kauffman’s The Gunners (2018), click here.
* * * * *
on Paradise Close by Lisa Russ Spaar
Near the conclusion of Paradise Close, Lisa Russ Spaar’s debut novel, Marlise Schade and her daughter attend an exhibition of Emily Dickinson ephemera in Manhattan. The sumptuous privations of Dickinson’s verse always come to mind when I return to Spaar’s poetry, which I’ve admired since her first collection appeared in 1982. Perhaps sound matters most to the writer who senses the overbearing character of daily language that abets our claims of managing and explaining everything – and thus who must adapt language for the demanding task of discovery. Almost 40 years ago, Spaar had a notion for a story about a woman who tries to kill herself by crashing her car. In an afterword to the novel, Spaar writes, “Why I was haunted by this fictional figure would take me many years to fathom, but as other characters and their stories developed around her, I came closer to articulating the question I’d been leaning into: why do some of us survive travail and some do not?” As Richard Wilbur said of Dickinson, “Her chief truthfulness lay in her insistence on discovering the facts of her inner experience.”
The narrative opens in 1971 as 14-year old Marlise, an orphan since infancy, arrives at her family’s battered homestead, The Close, located in south New Jersey, where she has been allowed to stay unchaperoned after spending several months in psychiatric institute that her depleted (or raided) trust fund can no longer afford. She had previously attended a private school where her anorexia intensified: “The problem was her body. The palms of her hands, her shins, hurting at night, breasts like welts, the blood that started, a private surprise of thrill and confusion.” At the institute she is befriended by Silas, a high-strung 20-year old suicidal art whiz who ignites her spirit – and who, out of unbounded generosity, will later attempt to save Marlise. The story leaps ahead and returns, pivoting between decades, with glimpses of Marlise’s mother and her lover in 1955, then ahead to the 60-ish Tee Handel who tinkers with old timepieces and still feels the loss of affections from a long-ago breakup with a spirited artist.
There are novels that scatter a trail of bread crumbs, playing connect-the-dots with the reader, ultimately flattering their aptitude for perceiving a solution. Paradise Close isn’t one of them, even if there are aha! moments. Spaar’s main characters are those who select their own society (or recall those who did so) and live through the intensities of their bodies – illness, erotic desire, grief, and their hands’ gratification in the making of art and craftwork. In the world of this novel, if quietude arrives, it is through the very indigence that had restrained it.
In 2017, Marlise considers her past and her daughter’s life: “And that was the thing about the self, Marlise continued to think (was she actually thinking? Forming thoughts? … The child self, the emerging self, the aging self, any self – is always imperiled. Yet if it is glass-like in its breakability, its fragility, it is also glass-like in its tensility. Its obscurity, its clarity.” This may sound like conclusiveness, but Spaar isn’t just consoling us. If she is indicating that every search for clarity and connections must proceed through what constrains us, she also wants us to sense that constraint through her measured tone, locutions, the particularity of description, and leaps of attention. She wants us to work for it in a manner similar to the gropings of her imaginaries.
The context for fiction, I often think, is a questioning about our origins. The function of story, at least in Paradise Close, is to provide a ritual for addressing the other about such intuitions (even more than devising the fixities of “meanings”). Towards the end of Paradise Close, the unnamed person who has been addressing me speaks of Silas, the young artist: “… even he must have known that a part of each person belongs to the not-Time; it is what is in us before and beyond the whatever that we’re born into and expire out of, eluding time’s reach.” Paradise Close, like poetry, is built on the pacing rhythm of time, with the purpose of providing a glimpse and whiff of the not-Time – or as Richard Wilbur said of Dickinson’s verse, “It is in their ways of annihilating time and space that bliss and despair are comparable.”
[Available in a new paperback edition on March 18, 2025. Published by Persea Books on May 31, 2022, 223 pages, $25.95 hardcover/$18.00 paperback]
To read Lisa Russ Spaar’s On The Seawall conversation with Jasmine V. Bailey (2024) about Paradise Close, click here.
To read Ron Slate’s On The Seawall review of Lisa Russ Spaar’s poetry collection Orexia (2018), click here.
* * * * *
on Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato
In Bruna Dantas Lobato’s debut novel, Blue Light Hours, a young woman from the Brazilian city of Natal enrolls at a college in Vermont. The school has offered her a full-ride scholarship, and she works in the campus mail room. As the story begins, her friend Najwa, a student from Palestine, tells her that “I thought traveling would be easier once I as at a fancy international school in Europe, that I’d feel like the world was small, that I could just hop on a flight and be back home. But in the four years I spent in the Netherlands, I didn’t go back to Palestine once.” But her friend Safia responds that when she was at a boarding school in Pakistan and went home to visit, parting from her roommates always made her cry. Our unnamed narrator says, “I stared into my green tea, wishing someone like Najwa had warned me about how hard it would be to leave, how hard to stay.”
“I’ve always felt that there was no immigrant novel that gestured toward home in any significant way,” Dantas Lobato remarked in an interview. She spent almost a decade crafting Blue Light Hours to fill that gap. “How hard to leave” glances back at origins and the care one has received there; “how hard to stay” is articulated by the young woman as “I belonged to this school and to this town, but they couldn’t belong to me.” Back home, the mother, who has not been well and is caring for her own aged mother, is constantly concerned for her daughter; the daughter in turn fixes her attention on her mother during their routine Skype calls. Thus the blue light. The mother asks, “What’s going on?”
Nothing, I said. I just needed an early morning break.
She smiled.
Good, she said. So no news?
Always the news with her, like our lives were made of headlines.
I teased her, joked that our computer screens were TVs and we were hosts and anchors on our own show.
The situation appears stable at the moment, I said. No further information has been released. How is it back in our studios?
Her video froze, then it moved again. She widened her eyes, cackled with laughter.
No, but really, she insisted, What else?
What else what?
What you’ve been up to. I want to know.
There isn’t much to tell, I said, shaking my head.
Tell me anyway. Soothe this old heart.
Blue Light Hours has a placid surface, not quite toneless but reserved, reflective. The troubles that arise may disturb the speaker’s composure, but their persistence provides a basis for assessment and wondering. Although the novel certainly fits into the category of immigration tales, it isn’t preoccupied with alienation or discrimination. It is, rather, a novel essentially about decision-making and the uncertainties involved in experiencing a crucial change. In one sense, the reader is in the same position as the mother – one hears the spare prose, the quiet clarity of the student’s urgencies, and asks for more even if the “news” is modest. On the other hand, only the reader is privileged to hear the continuity of her thoughts, and to envision scenes such as a dorm party.
In another interview, Dantas Lobato recalled establishing the novel’s parameters, but then having confront its implications. She said, “I spent a lot of those years wondering, What if my characters’ concerns aren’t obstacles meant to be overcome? What if their grief doesn’t reach a climax but accumulates instead? What if their pain can’t reach an end but is continuous? Is there room for a story like that, is there even a way to tell it as a novel?” In other words, what if she were to write a novel that isn’t based on stock gestures, and instead dwells within its triggering tension?
It might have been in Dantas Lobato’s “best interests” if she had made a grievance-based anti-nationalist pro-immigration novel – money in the bank. Just as her main character says, “I thought of yet another start, yet another new life, one where I’d be better, lighter, smarter, friendlier, well-liked … reinvent myself in America and so forth.” But both she and Dantas Lobato remain loyal to their more obsessive impulses.
[Published by Grove Atlantic/Black Cat on October 15, 2024, 178 pages, $$17.00 paperback]