The art of saving those we love through storytelling
By Sarah Towers |
July 1, 2012, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
ONE of the pleasures of Christopher R Beha's 2009 memoir, "The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else," in which he sets out to spend a year reading the Harvard Classics, is being diverted, along with him, into another, much more personal project.
"The book I intended to write," he tells us, "was essentially a comedy, about a feckless, somewhat lost young man who shuts himself away from the modern world." But when he learned that his adored aunt had terminal cancer, his reaction to her suffering created a very different book: His love for her became both his subject and his inspiration.
"I allowed myself to think that, no matter what happened ... I could save her in some way if I got everything down just right on the page."
If only. But the wish to save people (or save oneself) through storytelling stayed with Beha. His first novel, "What Happened to Sophie Wilder," is about many things - the New York publishing world, the growing pains of post-collegiate life, the rigors of Roman Catholicism - but at its center it's a moving meditation on why and for whom we write.
"When we are inspired," the British psychologist Adam Phillips has observed, "rather like when we are in love, we can feel both unintelligible to ourselves and most truly ourselves." Just ask Dante. Or Charlie Blakeman, Beha's 28-year-old novelist narrator. When first met, Charlie is renting a room from the uncle of a college acquaintance in a town house on Washington Square. He has published a novel that almost nobody noticed and the future of his writing career looks bleak. Enter - or make that re-enter - Sophie Wilder, the wise (Sophie), wild (Wilder) love of his life, whom he first encountered almost a decade earlier in a writing workshop.
After a final falling out, Charlie and Sophie lost touch, but as the years passed he never stopped thinking about her. And when she finally reappears at a party in New York, announcing that she has separated from her husband, Charlie feels as if he has "summoned" her back into his life.
But people change - or, rather, people aren't often precisely who we make them out to be - and Sophie no longer fits easily into Charlie's story line. Then she vanishes once again. This time, though, Charlie sets out to find her and finish their - or is it only her? - story.
As the title suggests, Beha likes mystery, and there's a nice suspense here that gains speed after Sophie has disappeared.
The universal drive toward storytelling is one of the only ways we can attempt to contain our existence, to make narrative sense of our actions and beliefs.
And what if the narrative of your life doesn't turn out the way you wanted it to? Well, if you're a novelist you can rewrite the ending. You can imagine what happened to Sophie Wilder. You might even be able to save people from dying.
"The book I intended to write," he tells us, "was essentially a comedy, about a feckless, somewhat lost young man who shuts himself away from the modern world." But when he learned that his adored aunt had terminal cancer, his reaction to her suffering created a very different book: His love for her became both his subject and his inspiration.
"I allowed myself to think that, no matter what happened ... I could save her in some way if I got everything down just right on the page."
If only. But the wish to save people (or save oneself) through storytelling stayed with Beha. His first novel, "What Happened to Sophie Wilder," is about many things - the New York publishing world, the growing pains of post-collegiate life, the rigors of Roman Catholicism - but at its center it's a moving meditation on why and for whom we write.
"When we are inspired," the British psychologist Adam Phillips has observed, "rather like when we are in love, we can feel both unintelligible to ourselves and most truly ourselves." Just ask Dante. Or Charlie Blakeman, Beha's 28-year-old novelist narrator. When first met, Charlie is renting a room from the uncle of a college acquaintance in a town house on Washington Square. He has published a novel that almost nobody noticed and the future of his writing career looks bleak. Enter - or make that re-enter - Sophie Wilder, the wise (Sophie), wild (Wilder) love of his life, whom he first encountered almost a decade earlier in a writing workshop.
After a final falling out, Charlie and Sophie lost touch, but as the years passed he never stopped thinking about her. And when she finally reappears at a party in New York, announcing that she has separated from her husband, Charlie feels as if he has "summoned" her back into his life.
But people change - or, rather, people aren't often precisely who we make them out to be - and Sophie no longer fits easily into Charlie's story line. Then she vanishes once again. This time, though, Charlie sets out to find her and finish their - or is it only her? - story.
As the title suggests, Beha likes mystery, and there's a nice suspense here that gains speed after Sophie has disappeared.
The universal drive toward storytelling is one of the only ways we can attempt to contain our existence, to make narrative sense of our actions and beliefs.
And what if the narrative of your life doesn't turn out the way you wanted it to? Well, if you're a novelist you can rewrite the ending. You can imagine what happened to Sophie Wilder. You might even be able to save people from dying.
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