Unputdownable

A good friend says she has no trouble finishing books. "Well, if you read fast," she says, "it's not that hard." Infuriating... I'm forever starting a book, getting pulled away by another book that seems juicier, then getting pulled away by a third, and so on, until I end up with a talus heap of unfinished reading to trip over when I get out of bed.

But there's one author whose books I can count on finishing. I've always been a little hazy about what "suspense novel" means (as opposed to "mystery novel" or "crime fiction" or "novel with murder"). Sometimes it seems to mean that the villain's identity is obvious and the only question is how to thwart him or her; sometimes it seems to mean lots of cheesy atmosphere and improbable action. But if it means simply a book that compels you to keep reading, sleep and social commitments be damned, then the English writer Robert Goddard is the king of suspense.

For some unfathomable reason he's not wildly popular in the U.S. A lot of his books are out of print here, though in the past year or two Random House has been making commendable efforts on his behalf. They've reprinted some of the best of his backlist (including my personal favorite, Into the Blue)and are issuing his new titles only an eon or so after their English publication (I have to count on my fast-reading friend to get them for me from Canada).

It's a little hard to say just what makes Goddard so unputdownable. In many of the books, there's a two-track structure: a mystery in the more or less distant past somehow leads to intrigue and violence in the present. Nothing particularly unique about that, though; maybe it's just that he's particularly deft in intertwining the two lines. Sometimes there's a whiff of the supernatural in his books, but just a
whiff--and you seldom know until the end whether the supernatural element is real or faux.

Maybe that's his real strength--the ability to write, not just about a crime that needs solving or a danger that has to be overcome, but about mystery in the deepest sense, mystery so powerful that it makes us question the very nature of reality. Something happens that makes no logical sense--a woman disappears into thin air, a scholar is summoned to a meeting and instead witnesses a kidnapping, a man kills himself at a wedding reception--and it's the start of a long convoluted path that leads first to confusion and more mystery, but ultimately to resolution. And you know you'll get there; you just can't imagine how.

That, to me, is what the mystery novel, and maybe all storytelling, is about: the revelation of unforeseen connections, the explanation of the inexplicable.

Two Poets (Part II)--The Song of Your Life

This past weekend I went to a memorial gathering for another poet, a friend from my previous bookselling incarnation at A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books. To call him a poet is not exactly right, since most of his friends knew him as a musician, but at the time we met he was writing more than he was playing. We were in a writing group together, and so I saw a lot of his work--old-fashioned stuff, I guess most people would say, as he found free verse just a tad too free and easy. He wrote a good number of sonnets for the group, toyed with even more arcane forms like villanelles and rondelles, and started an epic fantasy poem. Later on he and I wrote a couple of songs together.

Like any poet or songwriter, he touched on a lot of subjects, but the one story he always came back to was his love for his wife Peggy. They were high school sweethearts in Kentucky, then drifted apart, then--thousands of miles and a few relationships later--came back together. It was the kind of improbable happy ending that you'd scoff at in a movie, but in real life it was a pleasure to witness--all the more so because they both knew how lucky they were. You could scarcely have an extended conversation with either of them without the subject coming around to this.

The memorial was informal, really just a party in celebration of Jeff's life. A band he'd played in, not his latest one because his absence left too big a hole in that group, played by the pool. On the table in the dining room were dozens and dozens of photos, a biography in images: Jeff and Peggy dressed up for their high school prom, Jeff as a juggler in Louisville in the 80s, Jeff with his dogs at China Camp, on Mt. Tam, in the Sierra Nevada, Jeff and his son Winston wearing suits and looking like a couple of characters from The Godfather, Jeff meditating, Jeff drinking beer with his co-workers from the bookstore.

A friend had helped Jeff put together a video clip of some of his music, and thirty or forty of us crowded into the half-darkened living room to watch it. First came a few songs with bands he played with in Louisville in the 80s, big productions with Jeff belting out the lyrics like a kinder, gentler Jim Morrison. Then, Jeff solo on a bluesy love song, pained and passionate; and a number with his last band, the Junkyard Buddhas.

At the end of the clip were some still photos of Jeff and Peggy, with an audio track of a song he wrote for her in the last month of his life. I'd talked to him a good deal about this--over the years, he'd written any number of songs for her or about her, but he felt that he'd never written the one killer love song he wanted to, and he was determined to do it. In addition to all the usual difficulties of writing a song--let alone the song of your life--his illness made it hard for him to remember or even read lyrics he'd just written. So the upshot was that Peggy had to whisper them to him when he stalled out, and then the recording engineer edited out her whispers.

I can't describe the song, really, except to say that it took in the whole of their love story, from their days as teenage sweethearts in Kentucky to the last bittersweet weeks, and a vision of what might be beyond. And of course Jeff sang it with all the sweet force that made his music special. When it was over--warning, cliche ahead--there was not a dry eye in the house.

No matter what the circumstances, it's always hard to lose a good friend, and it's particularly shocking and unfair when he's young and still seems to have so much ahead of him. But Jeff did not want to be seen as a tragic figure, and he handled his awful situation with amazing grace and humor. Most of all he felt that despite the appalling theft of so many years, he'd lived a great life, had some extraordinarily good times, and been lucky enough to share it with a woman he truly loved.

And that's how I'll remember him... as a guy who knew what his life's work was, and who accomplished as much of it as he could in the time he had.

Two Poets (Part I)-- The Real Reasons

The other day I was freshening up a window display in the bookstore, wedging some of this fall's new children's picture books in among a menagerie of stuffed animals, when a poet I know stopped by. He works in the neighborhood, at a school a few blocks away, and he'd wandered in during his lunch hour.

He's certainly serious about his day job--he's published one book on teaching and is working on another--but I know him as a poet and editor. He spent five years, pretty full ones I gather, publishing a well-thought-of literary journal that featured mostly local talent. My connection is that he published one of my stories, probably the best one I've written, in the journal.

He's a soft-spoken man with curly salt-and-pepper hair--in his mid-fifties, at a guess. He's retiring next year, he says. Presumably he'll have more time to write. He's putting together a collection of his prose poems. His poetry is elegant and erudite, a good workout for the mind without being inaccessible. Most of the pieces in this collection have been published in one journal or another, and he's had one book of poems published already, so he's confident he can find a home for the new volume.

That seems like a good place for a poet to be. I wouldn't know. I've published half a dozen poems, but the form is pretty much a mystery to me. I do a little better with short stories. I've had about fifteen published, of which maybe six or eight still feel pretty O.K. to me. This is enough for a collection, he tells me. I'd like to agree... but then short story collections are supposed to be so hard to sell... and it's not like I'm in love with more than a couple of the stories... Also I guess I feel I'm still a few stories short of a full volume.

My friend is one of the most agreeable people you'll ever encounter, so you won't find him telling you you're full of BS even when you know you are... So he doesn't contradict me. "Maybe so," he says to my demurral, "but there's something about getting it out there." He can't know that I've been toying with this collection idea for years, but I haven't written those last few stories I need to, I haven't even started a new story since... ouch, don't think about it. "There's something about accretion. The more you get under your belt the better you feel."

And a few minutes later, with a half-wave and a wry smile over his shoulder, he's gone... leaving me to ponder the real reasons that story collection isn't finished.

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Overheard in a Bookstore

"You should read this. It's enlightening."

"What's it about?"

"It's like enlightening."

"Tell me what it's about already."

"It's enlightening. It's about a guy who goes on a journey."

"Is it going to be too hard for me to read?"

"A fourth-grader could read it."

"What's an alchemist, anyways?"

"Uh... I don't know."