The Brambles

The dramatic events of this week are giving me the urge to blog a la Not Quite Sure. I mean, with K-Fed now Fed-Ex, and our country once again d/Democratic, there is much reason for joy and much to blog. But I am nothing if not disciplined (OK, I'm nothing), and I must stick to the topics at hand. Which today are apparently Tessie and Eliza Minot (who of course is not the kind of writer to have a website, but if you have the infamous Times Select, you can learn something about her here).

Eliza Minot is an exquisite writer. Her instrument of choice is the comma, and with it she plays a symphony of daily life, the images and details accumulating like Mozart's notes (apologies if the Mozart reference destroys the metaphor, but I know next to nothing [see above] about classical music, and I just have the barest inkling that I don't want Beethoven here, because he is ponderous and bombastic, and perhaps Mozart would work because he is light and full of notes, but I'm probably completely wrong, and all I know is I don't want to say Pachelbel, even though that is kind of a little bit what I'm thinking, because the connotations of Pachelbel are so lame, but then again sentiment might be a useful reference, so if anyone can help me here, either because they have a sense of what I'm trying to say, or because they've read the book, it would be most useful).

Minot really is a beautiful writer, and she is startlingly observant, the kind of writer who makes you go, again and again, "Yes! How did she know?" Or rather, "I know that too, but how did she think to write it down, and so evocatively?!" And I'll provide lots of examples in a moment, but first, two larger observations.

1) I've been feeling, lately, that I remember nothing about my children and their lives. What was E like at two? How did M learn to read? I'm known in my family as the one with the memory, but my children are so present, in the here and now, that they erase their own pasts. And then I wonder, too, if I notice them enough in the present. I mean, I live with them, and they are everything and everywhere, and yet, who are they? Do I really know them? All these other mothers seem so aware of their children, their children's thoughts and issues and needs, but I just kind of feel like mine are there, and I hang out with them, and I help meet their needs as best I can, and I (mostly) enjoy them, and I (sometimes) wish they would disappear, and that's about it.

Eliza Minot will not have this problem. It's hard not to read Margaret Bright, heroine of The Brambles, suburban New Jersey mother of three, as an avatar for Eliza Minot, suburban New Jersey mother of three, and I often had the same feeling I have when I read Ayelet Waldman's Mommy-Track Mysteries, which is that she could only be writing this if she had experienced it, which is not to take a totally essentialist tack on the writing process, but to note that the realist details are so realistic that they seem as if they can only come from life (or else Minot has the best imagination for motherhood divorced from motherhood itself of any writer I know) (or, to decouple this analysis from motherhood altogether, just think Hemingway, World War I, and the hospital).

2) After a while, all that exquisite prose and intensity of detail did, I must admit, get a little wearing, even, perhaps, bordering on cloying. I started to feel a faint desire, amidst the beauty, for plot. Then, eventually, plot came, and it was a bit preposterous. I suppose the plot was meant to explain the pain suffered by some of the characters, but it didn't really suffice, and the pain itself was somewhat preposterous (why didn't Max just tell his wife already? oh yeah, to keep the wheels of fiction turning).

If I could do that below the fold thing, which once, between them, Phantom and Dawn enabled me to do, but I have long since forgotten how I, or, really, they, did it, I would do it now, because what follows is a string of quotes that struck me, those moments when I went, "Yes, that's how it is!" So if quotes aren't your thing, you can stop reading now, because all that's left is quotes, and maybe a little commentary on the quotes.

Back then she looked in mirrors at herself, Rollerbladed the days away, saw movies, lots of movies, sometimes alone, sometimes back to back. (15) (I still look in mirrors, and I never rollerbladed, but the movies, oh how I miss the movies.)

They were like hired private detectives, the way at least one of them would descend upon her after she'd hung up, demanding immediate information. Usually at least one of them was there long before the phone call ended, asking for things they already had in their hands, orbiting the room, winding through her legs like a cat, getting in her way, looking for things, even if they'd been happily involved in something before the phone rang. (51) (Oh yeah, the phone thing, makes me INSANE.)

After getting dressed she brushes her hair, tosses the excess hair from the brush into the toilet... (88) (Does everyone do that, or just me and Eliza Minot?)

The huge bathroom (meaning two people could stand in it) had both a bathtub and a window, with a tiled floor of tiny white octagons and a thin ribbon of black around the border of the room like hockey tape. (103) (Every bathroom in New York, but whoever thought to write it down?)

Margaret puts it up there on the fridge for no reason that she's aware of...But most likely she put it up there for the same reason she tapes up the paroxysmal paintings and precise drawings done by her kids, as a method for trapping time somehow as their long little lives race ahead so quickly like tossed balls of yarn. (166) (Why am I saving E's coloring sheets from kindergarten, black xeroxed pumpkins overlaid with her orange crayon? Exactly.)

She's thought before that her life is simply made up of snippets, a connect-the-dots of moments of clarity, of instants, big and small, where life softly explodes in her head, which remain with her either because she simply decided to remember them for no reason at all or because it was something that was seared into her consciousness as if with a branding iron. (170) (A reverse description of the memory problem: I remember specifics, images, events, some important, some so minor I can't believe I remember them, but the big picture, the big picture always escapes me. Then again, this is a problem for me in general.)

It makes Margaret think of when her babies were born, that deferment of time and reality with its disrupted sleep and emotions like you're on drugs. (214) (I loved the weeks after my babies were born, and that is a perfect description of it.)