Essays undermine magic of story
Print Edition
Rebecca Solnit’s latest book, a series of essays loosely about story telling, has a table of contents that sits on the page like a mountain tipped on its side. The essays’ titles mirror or refract one another, imparting symmetry. The summit, a chapter titled “Knot,” evokes another of the book’s metaphors, the bringing together of narrative threads. The tipped mountain shape resembles the traditional rise and fall of story structure. But this isn’t the only visual conceit. “Imagine all the sentences in this book as a single thread around the spool that is a book,” Solnit writes. You needn’t imagine it: An unspooled essay runs like a news ticker along every page.
Shape as a preoccupation makes sense in a book about storytelling. Shapes and lines create order out of chaos, or at least highlight possible orderly paths through it. Solnit’s personal “story of sorts” brings together episodes from a difficult year in her life, one that included a breakup, a brush with her own mortality, and her mother’s descent into Alzheimer’s.
It would make sense to articulate what exactly she means by “story.” Here, story appears to include all narratives and ideas, whole or partial — anecdotes about friends, summaries of fairy tales, histories, intellectual musings — as well as what happens when you stitch these together. Solnit’s resistance to providing a set of parameters results at times in an obscurity of meaning.
In lieu of clarity, she offers a variety of complications. But I would argue that a story is a made thing — different from place, from lived experience, from abstraction. There are infinite ways of telling a story, but once it has a shape, it does begin.
Creating links between seemingly disparate ideas is Solnit’s gift, her stock in trade. It’s what gives her writing its eccentricity, its spirit and frenetic energy. This worked well in her popular 2005 book, “A Field Guide to Getting Lost,” which explored all that the unknown had to offer.
Some of her most interesting ideas are born of wild mash-ups. In “The Faraway Nearby,” for instance, after describing vanitas paintings, which portray emblems like bubbles or clocks to suggest “the futility of human cravings, aspirations and attachments in the face of the transience of all things,” she leaps to the image of her breast on a mammogram: such digital X-rays are modern-day vanitas pictures, she writes, “reminders of your frailty and the fleetingness of all things, particularly your own flesh, a bubble sustained by breath.”
If we hold her to the idea that stories help create empathy, then her narrative’s personal aspects, which are some of the most specific, work quite well. She writes with feeling about her difficult mother, who though she “brooded on slights for decades ... could never remember her own rage the day before.”
But instead of becoming the story, Solnit’s personal anecdotes work like scaffolding, holding up her real passion: the ideas and subjects that compelled her during her difficult year, and the way they made her think.
For a writer who has made so much out of meandering, her reliance on digressions and ellipses here, her lavish inclusivity and loose threads, prevent the reader from experiencing the ultimate joy of the form that she means to celebrate: that inimitable sensation in which the world falls away and we’re lost in the details, the observations, the certainty of a path through chaos, the magic of story itself.
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