“The good ones can be remembered like that, yes,” the doula said to me. On the other hand, a traumatic birth, she said, handing me a cup of tea, usually has a beginning, middle, and end. There is no narrative arc to my son’s birth.
Even a week afterward, sitting on the couch with the doula as she rubbed my leg with her confident hands, the discrete moments of my labor hadn’t yet cohered into a story. Pregnant, I hadn’t thought much about labor until its inevitability hung over the last month, and then it was all I could think about. Normal tasks receded into a haze, so consumed was I with this single extraordinary thing I was about to do. In bed one night, days before I gave birth, my toenail snagged on my sheet and I wondered at the fact that life went on amid my anxiety, that my toenails still grew and required clipping.
What comfort is there in the truth? It’s a question weighed and refracted in a thousand different ways in Danielle Evans’s “The Office of Historical Corrections,” a magnificent, searing collection of six stories and a novella.
As “An Unquiet Englishman” maintains, Greene was a product of his political and cultural context. But what made him truly remarkable was his ability to transcend that context and his personal quirks to create literature that is, to quote Ezra Pound, “news that stays news.”