Joan Frank’s exquisite, moving novellas feel like short novels: each one has so much in it that reading it felt like living several different lives. I was a fan of her work already and bought this book at a reading (along with her new collection of essays, Try to Get Lost), right before we went into sheltering in place.
Her sentences are extraordinary, full of electric perceptions. "People need to smooth the ground over the crater-blast, to believe that catastrophe did not happen (and never will again) if they can make themselves forget it enough, that most days they will get up to place two feet on a firm floor and find the objects and people and rules of living pretty much as they left them the night before. How else to continue, how else do our dailiness? How else can our brains not explode?"
The first novella starts with the story of a long love affair (or addictive relationship) between two artists who meet at an art colony, a young woman and an old rapscallion composer, genius and vampire. She’s remembering him after his death, that “demented need,” and wrestling with her memories. Then we get the story of how an older woman, recently widowed, starts to painfully come back to life—Frannie, a character I loved in the novel before these books, All the News I Need. Next there’s “Cavatina for Passsenger X,” the story of a youthful marriage and a complicated friendship. And finally the title novella, in which the blankness of wealth, the bitterness of poverty, the sweetness and bafflement of marriage between such different people is all swept away by death, but the ending of this one brings a kind of happiness I hadn’t foreseen.
Music weaves in and through this book, like the waves so beautifully described here, like the sentences and lists that are music and waves themselves. The closer we get to death in the course of these four intricate stories, the closer we get to nature. There’s a movement, over the four novellas, from the self out into the world. These lives are connected, thematically, emotionally, and reading all four feels like a journey I am so glad to have taken.
In the middle of this time when we are afraid for everyone we love, and the scale of human death has become surreal and catastrophic, it is so precious to come back to this work that insists on the importance of each life, that celebrates all the details of life, resilience after loss, our ability to live with such puzzling irrationality in our lovers and friends. This is a wonderful book, perfect at a moment when so many of us are not just trying to survive but also thinking about what our lives are, and have been, what gives our lives meaning.
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One woman’s reappearance throws her family into turmoil, exposing dark secrets and the hidden, often devastating truth of family relationships.| Learn more
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