Schroder: A Novel (31 page)

13. The language in
Schroder
is often beautiful and poetic and sometimes at odds with the story you are telling. What is it about the use of particular language that aids in the telling of a story?

I was just debating with some students about whether the use of a “fancy prose style” makes a narrator seem more or less reliable. I think probably less. But I don’t come at writing that way. Any poetic lurches are born out of my writing mind, the mind that’s deep in concentration and imagination. John Updike once said that it is the responsibility of every writer to try and convey how the world “hits his or her nerves.” I think the poetic language in this book and my previous books is my attempt to convey the same.

14. Why did you choose to end
Schroder
when you did? Do you know what is next for Erik and Meadow?

I don’t know what’s next! I feel sad for them both. When I started writing the book, I had this somewhat unrealistic notion that this confession would give the two of them a clean start. I even thought that Laura would forgive Eric, and maybe she would realize that Meadow needed Eric in her life. I
do
think Meadow needs Eric in her life. Because he’s her dad, and you only get one of those. I think total estrangement is bad for the child. It’s too confusing. I have spoken to people who were estranged from parents and said they would have preferred some limited contact over total absence. Or silence. I guess I would hope for their family that silence could be avoided. I think that’s what Eric would want. That he wouldn’t become the new “unspoken” or secret shameful thing for his daughter. He’s come clean. And later, if he makes good, I hope they forgive him. I believe in forgiveness.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank many who supported the writing of this book, including Emily Foreland, Emma Patterson, Libby Burton, Brian McLendon, and editor and believer Cary Goldstein. I honor here Wendy Weil, my beacon and friend, and my mother-in-law, Ellen Arnold Groff; I miss you both. I’m indebted to the Corporation of Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and Amherst College. For their expertise, I thank the Scott-Kunkel family, Mira Kautzky, Dan Hart, and Leah Rotenberg. For their insight, I thank Adam Haslett, Nam Le, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Jonathan Franzen, Youna Kwak, Sarah Moore, Judith Goldman, Daniel Hall, Catherine Newman, and Ted and Kathy Beery, as well as the works of Adam Jaworski. I also thank my family, Karina Gaige, Norman Cohen, Robert Groff, Ted Watt, my invaluable mother, Austra, my remarkable son, Atis, his baby sister, Freya, and most especially my husband, Timothy Watt, whose love, wonder, and literary spirit inspire every word of this book.

“Tired of Being Alone” words and music by Al Green. Copyright © 1971 Irving Music, Inc. and Al Green Music, Inc.
Copyright renewed. All rights controlled and administered by Irving Music, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.

“The Terms in Which I Think of Reality” (7 l.) from
Collected Poems 1947–1997
by Allen Ginsberg. Copyright © 2006 by the Allen Ginsberg Trust. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

AMITY GAIGE is the author of the novels
O My Darling
and
The Folded World
. Her essays, articles, and stories have appeared in various publications, including
The Yale Review, The Literary Review
, and the
Los Angeles Times
. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, residencies at the MacDowell and Yaddo Colonies, a Baltic Writing Residency Fellowship, and in 2006, she was recognized by the National Book Foundation as one of five outstanding emerging writers under thirty-five. She is currently the Visiting Writer at Amherst College. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, with her family.

ABOUT TWELVE

TWELVE was established in August 2005 with the objective of publishing no more than twelve books each year. We strive to publish the singular book, by authors who have a unique perspective and compelling authority. Works that explain our culture; that illuminate, inspire, provoke, and entertain. We seek to establish communities of conversation surrounding our books. Talented authors deserve attention not only from publishers, but from readers as well. To sell the book is only the beginning of our mission. To build avid audiences of readers who are enriched by these works—that is our ultimate purpose.

For more information about forthcoming TWELVE books, please go to
www.twelvebooks.com
.

ALSO BY AMITY GAIGE

O My Darling

The Folded World

1
. What is a pause? For the purposes of this document I will restrict my answer to conversational interaction only, in which a pause is a cessation of speech between two or more participants (not, for example, a moment of counterargument during one’s solitary existential inner monologue in the bathtub). Compared to a silence, a pause is briefer, a kind of baby silence—the sort of hesitation that occurs while one is fishing for the proper way to put a thing, for example. Or when one is reflecting upon what one just said with a measure of criticism or regret. Or when one is distracted by a second subject or a loud noise but wants to appear thoughtful. Nobody asked me, but I would personally time a pause at two to three seconds in duration. It may be true that pauses are, at least historically, second-rate silences, whereas silences—those yawning spans of time in which the heart sinks, the mouth dries, the truth dawns—are infinitely more consequential and worthy of study. However, this writer maintains that both pauses and silences may be what the theorist and mother of pausology Zofia Dudek calls
functionally deficient
(i.e., a nothing that is a something). Both are worthy of study and attention.

2
. How comfortable one is with conversational pauses depends largely on cultural norms, and which his society values more, taciturnity or volubility. Take the Finns, for example. A notoriously silent and somewhat depressing people. Contrast the Finn to the archetypal American and suddenly the Finn appears to be suffering from selective mutism. The American goes to the other extreme. For him, no matter his socioeconomic background, talking for the sake of talking is viewed as an evolved social skill. An American who can banter for a reasonable length of time is seen as a social savior, a dispeller of tensions, the person who might tell a joke to other persons trapped in the same darkened elevator, for example. An extra beat of silence—what we might call an
awkward paus
e—is, in many cultures, a thing to be avoided. Often such pauses divulge feelings that much of our speech has been attempting to suppress. Dudek, in her seminal work
Pausologies
(1972), would call this
communicative silence
.

Let’s take an example from the Brits. Pause #33: Margaret Thatcher’s when asked if her successor, John Major, had yet become a great prime minister. The question was followed by resounding communicative silence. “I think he has carried out his duties,” Thatcher replied, but not before her awkward pause had already lodged itself in the annals of British politics.

3
. Of course you did not fight. It is not natural to stand and fight. The truth is, it’s natural to run.

4
. The problem has nothing to do with being German. The problem has to do with countries. And that countries exist.

5
. I tend to agree with Chesterton. In early days, before parenthood, when nothing at all was wrong yet, I still didn’t feel comfortable being silent with you. There was a sunny corner of the apartment on the top floor—we called it our Florida room—where the light blazed in for several hours in the late morning. I remember the starfish of your hand through the thin, illuminated newspaper, the uncombed crest of your hair above the front page, and the shameless gap in your robe. I’ve never been able to pay attention to anything for very long. I can’t even really pay attention to the newspaper. So you would read, and I would chat, or fix breakfast, or run my hand down the back of the cat we fostered for a single winter. I used to mimic her voice—nasal, complaining—and you would laugh, half listening. Once you’d dressed and tamed your hair, we’d go outside, blinded by the daylight. I can remember our twin shadows against the brick buildings, and kissing on rigid benches, and how you warmed your hands between your thighs, and pints of stout, and sports bars, and the small hit of vindication I got whenever I glanced at your profile, how you made me want to brag, how you made me feel large, and how I wanted to be seen with you. Sometimes, alone together, what I felt for you was too much. But the noise of the street and the bars relieved it. You looked dreamily out of windows. Games went into overtime. I could just brush you with a hand or leg, and you were there.

6
. No one intends to build a
wall
[emphasis mine].

7
. Blue herons, grain silos, deserts, angels, monuments, satellites, poems, vigils, statues, moons, poison, burglary, courage, footprints, shipwrecks…

8
. I never quite got rid of a tendency toward respiratory illness. Part of me thinks that I’d made some kind of connection between being ill and getting attention from women. There was a period of time in West Berlin when I was seven or eight and I got in the habit of going to the school infirmary, which was an alcove with walls painted robin’s-egg blue containing two long vinyl daybeds. The nurse was an angel with cold hands who drew her divining rod out of a glass of antiseptic and placed it under my tongue. On my first visit, I was invited to lie down on one of the biers, and there I stayed until my aunt could come and get me. I was an old man, I decided, and the nurse was my wife, and my classmates, my petitioners. Not only did I have the full attention of my nurse, but then I got to go back to the apartment and play whist, no one else around, none of my cousins, nor my withholding father, no one but me and my crazy auntie. I must have gotten away with it a half dozen times before the jig was up.
I know what he’s suffering from
, my aunt said to the nurse, both of them standing over my prostrate body one afternoon at school,
Wall sickness. Mauerkrankheit
, she said.
No medicine for that.

9
. Maybe I should have done that.

10
. I’d like to borrow an example here from poetry. Since poetry is written in lines, sentences spill over from one line to the next, lending a tiny but not insignificant pause right there at the line’s precipice. (Stick with me here. I’m just trying to get at how I felt.) Sometimes the subsequent line satisfies the reader’s expectation. But sometimes expectation is reversed. I like this example, from Allen Ginsberg:

Here we’re overwhelmed

with such unpleasant detail

we dream again of Heaven.

For the world is a mountain

of shit: if it’s going to

be moved at all, it’s got

to be taken by handfuls.

NB the fabulously cruel enjambment of “For the world is a mountain / of shit,” in which “of shit” reverses one’s own quiet and perhaps more optimistic mental rendering of a mountain made of, you know, boulders and moss and mountain laurel and that kind of thing. When Ginsberg swaps your imagined mountain with shit, you feel… well, I can’t say how
you
feel, but I feel disappointed (not with the poem, but with my own tendency to err on the side of the romantic). There are poetic reversals like this in life, is my point. There are pauses between knowing and understanding. Pauses in which we wait for delayed news of ourselves to spark along the sagging wires.

11
. In source material as ancient as Pseudo-Dionysius, the researcher can find evidence of an ongoing debate that is probably at the heart of my personal interest in silence studies. We’ve heard that talk is silver, but silence is golden. As someone who is widely considered talkative—
too
talkative—the suggestion is provocative to me: Do I say
less
than a silent person? Is silence truth,
in itself
? That is, is silence the sole expression of the incommensurability of the truth with our rudimentary powers to speak it? Do I have a mouth that can talk like that? Do you have ears that can listen like that?

12
. Maybe you’ve heard this one:

An elderly man was feeling ill and had his wife drive him to the doctor. After the exam, the doctor sent the man to a waiting area without saying much and asked to see his wife.

“What is it?” she asked when they were alone. “Is it serious?”

“It’s very serious,” said the doctor. “He has a very rare condition that will kill him within three months. Only one thing can save him—you must have intimate marital relations with him twice a day, every day. That and only that will keep him alive.”