But reading aloud in this way, to and with my children, still feels like a new experience. I had to train myself — it took a couple of years, honestly — to be able to say the words on the page and to also take them in, to understand them, as I would if I were reading alone, to myself, in my head. It’s a many-layered pleasure, chiefly because, unlike with movies, one can supply one’s own images, one’s own sensory details. And I’ve learned some strange things about myself from paying attention to how I do this. For instance, I do not imagine fictional characters as having facial features — in my mind, though I can smell characters and touch the fabric of their clothes, their faces are blank, gray patches. I often wonder why this is and what it says about me.
As a parent of a child with special needs — who is, in special-needs parlance, “very involved,” meaning deeply affected, extremely different from me — a central question of my life is what he is understanding, how differently he apprehends the world. When he hears words, what do they mean? All the context for language that my life — that a typical life — has provided doesn’t apply to him. When he hears the word “red” — he also has cortical vision impairment, meaning that his eyes work perfectly, but they’re like windows his brain isn’t always looking out of — he can’t possibly envision what I do.
I think Roth is speaking for a great many writers, especially novelists. Writing is a lonely and isolated desk job, and although I have no hard psychological or statistical data on the subject, my intuition is that many of us like it that way, we want our whole life to be about writing in a room by ourselves. That’s why we became writers in the first place.
Yet even the most reclusive of us, either at our own or other people’s insistence, do feel the need to leave that room every once in a while; and stepping outside for a walk, a drift, a meander, a perambulation, is the easiest and perhaps the most obvious way of doing it.
Lauren Groff’s new story collection is a portrait not so much of a place as of a particular kind of feeling about a place, as experienced by a series of characters, some of whom seem to be the same woman. She is the mother of two sons, and – like Mathilde in Groff’s acclaimed 2015 novel Fates and Furies, named book of the year by both Amazon and Barack Obama – she is furious beyond all measure. Unlike Mathilde, though, she has children, which raises the stakes. Also unlike Mathilde, she has no name.
It seems somewhat facile to claim that a new myth can solve the wicked geopolitical problems at the heart of climate change, but storytelling is our oldest and most powerful technology. One story, told at the right time, can tear down a wall, build a city, or inspire a revolution. Frank's book isn't the one story about climate change — but it's a good story, and a valuable perspective on the most important problem of our time.
This sense of something being separated from what made it whole runs through the novel. Ms Kilalea sketches this sad, slightly surreal situation without mawkishness or morbidity. “OK, Mr Field” introduces a striking new voice in fiction.