Absolute Gentleman

Reviewing or talking about a book written by a friend is risky. I came home from a rainy camping trip with my family to find the always thrilling (seriously!) pile of mail waiting for me when I got home. Oh, Margaret…there were packages, big stuffed envelopes, bills: I even loved you, Bills. I was fine with you, because we’re not worrying about money right now, and you have as much right to be there as anyone, Bills…Billsees…Billabowwows…

Included was a postcard, one of many I receive because I graduated from an MFA Program, and that, apparently, included a subscription to every art show opening, bar mitzvah, poetry broadside, writing contest, and book announcement even remotely attached to an MFA graduate. Most of them I scale like I used to do with my baseball cards against the gargantuan cement wall of Edith L. Slocum Elementary School when I wasn’t chasing one of Vinny Fazzolari’s monster foot launches during kickball; when I wasn’t sitting in the shade, digging little rocks out of the ground with Jimmy Gaertner, talking about how much he missed his father, who had fallen to his death from a forty-foot ladder that school year; when I wasn’t running from Diana Marletti or getting kicked in the shins by Rose Angelone; or when I wasn’t dreaming about being able to hold hands with Michelle Mastrangelo for just one time around the roller rink during a slow song…

This postcard was from a woman I met at the post-graduate conference at Vermont College, which is really a great thing if you can work out a deal. She had graduated from the MFA program a couple of years before I did, so it’s ok that she has a book. If I get a postcard from that fucking monkey I graduated with, though, I will lose it, will lock myself in my office with the new matchstick blinds and jasmine scented candles until I bang this mo-fo out ala Junot Diaz.

Alexandra was unassuming and quietly talented, which is how we like our talented people to be. She’s a disciplined writer with a real vision, and when I received her postcard with a special ink acknowledgement of my existence, I immediately got excited and bought a copy of the book. I was not disappointed.

Well, actually, I was slightly disappointed at the beginning of the book, because it seemed tight. It’s the story of a recovering alcoholic who walks out on her husband and daughter. Her family owns a small island off the coast of Maine, and after spending some time there, and rediscovering herself, she decides it might be a good idea to try and regain custody of her daughter. The start of the book felt over revised, but I didn’t realize it until I move through the book. It seemed that Alex was more experimental and became much more comfortable as she got deeper into the story and her protagonist: someone who you’ll start to loathe, but then reconsider — which is how great characters are often written. It reminded me of the refined first fifty or so pages of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which is easily one of the great first fifty pages of post-post modernist fiction ever stolen, stylistically, by Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss. Like Eggers’ book, Alex’s doesn’t hold together too tightly in the later chapters, but that’s perfectly fine with me. I don’t care whether it’s fiction or nonfiction: I like being able to figure out the choices the writer is making while I’m reading a story or essay.

I was fascinated what Alex did with the concept of oblique dialogue, the idea of indirect response to the person you’re talking to, and I loved the climactic Big Sur moment on Bride Island, which brings the reader into the tormented world of the protagonist. I’d buy her next book even if I didn’t know and respect her very much. So that’s saying something…