Thinking about my life and the history of my family is interesting to me—just as it was for my mother—and I agree with Marilu Henner, who writes, “We all owe it to ourselves as living beings to take full advantage of our own experiences.” My preservation projects have given me a nearly Einsteinian view of time and mortality. I picture myself in a nursing home—not soon, I hope!—surrounded by photo books and letters and e-mail excerpts and portable hard drives, busily adding images to text, reading and rereading everything, creating compilations of compilations, contentedly living forever, backward and forward, until the end.
The narrator of What Kingdom never tells us her name—we don’t need to know. She tells us her friends’ names, though, and in the mental institution of Gråbøl’s imagination, selfhood is slippery and symptoms spread fast, so by learning their names we learn enough to recognize her too. Sara, Marie, Hector, Lasse, Waheed: her fellow patients; peer-sibling-soldiers stuck in the same peripheral space, struggling against psychiatry’s cold logic and diagnostic silos; actors forced to follow commonplace scripts of supposed care and cure. Incidentally, these narratives are as unrealistic and trite as too much fiction, especially fiction focused on institutionalization. These stories manage to find meaning and nuance only when their form refuses traditional narration, typically displacing normative, protagonist-based structures with an ensemble cast of characters you can’t always tell apart—characters stigmatized as ill and who might seem insane until you start to see through their eyes, until your newly clarified gaze lingers awhile in previously undiscovered corners that, however strange, often harbor truth.
Much of the interest in Long Island lies in what is not said: when someone is asked a question but doesn’t answer; when Jim finds that “there was nothing to say […] nothing he could find the words for now”; or when a character enters a room looking for someone, finds it empty, and the reader’s heart drops three floors. These silences and absences at the core of this subtle, intelligent and moving book mean the reader has to do a certain amount of work – but it is work very well rewarded.
As an example, there’s the question of form or genre. “And Then? And Then? What Else?” comes positioned as a memoir, but that’s not quite accurate. Neither is “craft book,” although there are a lot of notes on craft. More accurately, it’s what I want to label a process book, walking us through the author’s process as writer and reader. It is also a book that means to tell us how to make a life.
Handler gets at this from the outset: “What am I doing?” the book begins. It’s not a rhetorical question but a reflective one, and it opens a line of free association, of opinions and observations, that push back against our expectations. Yes, the author recognizes, we will have preconceptions; how, after all, could we not? Regardless of whether we’ve read the saga of the orphaned Baudelaire children, Handler’s reputation, the work he’s produced, carries its own cultural weight.