the author has always written close to the bone, and Of Memory and Margins sharpens that instinct into something approaching grace.
An issue from the Hudson archive — essays, verse, and review of the season's most necessary books.
Character, here, is not announced; it accumulates. We learn who these people are the way we learn it of our neighbours: through small refusals, half-finished meals, the books left face-down on a kitchen chair.
Listening to the Margins
Character, here, is not announced; it accumulates. We learn who these people are the way we learn it of our neighbours: through small refusals, half-finished meals, the books left face-down on a kitchen chair.
“It is the rare novel that grows larger as it grows quieter.”
Plot, in the conventional sense, is almost beside the point. What propels the pages is closer to attention — the writer's, then ours — turning over the ordinary until it gives up its odd, persistent light.
Character, here, is not announced; it accumulates. We learn who these people are the way we learn it of our neighbours: through small refusals, half-finished meals, the books left face-down on a kitchen chair.
Listening to the Margins
There are passages in this book that ask to be read twice, not because they are difficult, but because the first reading is too occupied with surprise to register the music underneath.
What lingers, after the last page, is not a verdict but a temperature. Of Memory and Margins leaves the room a few degrees warmer, a few degrees more honest.
