Crawling from the Wreckage: The Evening Hour

Last year, Silas House, the author of Clay’s Quilt and co-author of Something’s Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountain-top Removal, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times called “My Polluted Kentucky Home.” It referred to a sit-in at the offices of governor Steve Beshear to protest his support of mountain-top removal, and said in part,

Since it was first used in 1970, mountaintop removal has destroyed some 500 mountains and poisoned at least 1,200 miles of rivers and streams across the Appalachian coal-mining region. The news media and the rest of the country typically think of mountaintop removal as an environmental problem. But it’s a human crisis as well, scraping away not just coal but also the freedoms of Appalachian residents, people who have always been told they are of less value than the resources they live above.

Mountain-top removal, most commonly used in West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky, is exactly what it sounds like: In order to get at elusive seams of coal buried deep inside the mountains, explosives are used to blast the the mountain tops and ridges off, bringing them down hundreds of feet and piling the rubble into 200-foot-high walls in the valleys. The material used for blasting is ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel—the same thing used to blow up the Murrow Building in Oklahoma City—but stronger. Ten times stronger.

House goes on to itemize some of the other consequences of mountain-top removal: arsenic in drinking water, destruction of roads by overloaded trucks, polluted pond water, the threat of sludge dams collapsing, and air clouded by pollutants.

Those of us who protest mountaintop removal do it for the environment, but we’re also fighting to prove we are not unwarranted burdens. Our water and air are being poisoned, but the most dangerous toxin is the message that people don’t matter.

Which brings me to the debut novel by Carter Sickels, The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury, $15), a searing, unsentimental story about a rural, tightly–knit community stripped of its humanity by greed and indifference, and the damaged few who still cling to the land they’ve called home for hundreds of years.

Once a heaven for the people who grew up, lived and worked there, Dove Creek, West Virginia, now looks more like hell. Smells like it, too, with the odor of “sulfur and scorched earth” lingering after the mining company explosions each day. After a decade of brutal mountain top removal, the constant blasting, flooding and pollution has driven the natives either out of their homes or out of their minds. Their water’s undrinkable, their houses are cracked beyond repair from the explosions, and the coal company’s offers for the now worthless land they own keep dropping.

But some still hold fast to this wasteland of dilapidated houses, dried-up wells, deserted churches, “shot-up road signs and little white crosses,” abandoned gas stations, and “scarred places where trees had been cleared for mining, like giant razor gashes across the land.” Double- and single-wide trailers house the human wreckage of a ruined community—including one Cole Freeman, a 27-year-old nursing home aide who has lived there all his life.

Raised by his grandparents when his mother abandoned him as a baby, Cole’s ties to the land—what’s left of the 20 acres his family has owned for generations—keep him determined to stick it out. His plans to escape crashed and burned ten years ago, and anyway, the business he’s run for several years—call it his night job—is profitable enough to convince him to stay.

At the nursing home where Cole works, the residents love him. He’s got a gentle touch with people as scarred and ravaged as the land surrounding them. Known them all since he was a kid, knows what they’ve been through, understands their quirks and tolerates their grievances. He remembers their names, stops to chat with them as he makes his rounds.

Larry Potts was parked in a wheelchair, twiddling his thumbs. He had thick meaty hands, but his thumbs twirled like little jewelry-box ballerinas. Scenes like this still managed to stop Cole in his tracks. He put his hands over Larry’s, felt his thumbs buzz against his palms like insect wings. Larry used to work the deep mines, crawling on his hands and knees in the dark.

He even maintains his own regular outreach program, driving up the mountainside to check on the house-bound elderly, bringing them food, cigarettes, and drinking water.

Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? for a 27-year-old nursing-home aide trapped in a hellhole. But Cole also remembers which patient owned which watch, ring, brooch and bracelet—every valuable he can steal when their backs are turned—that he unloads at the pawnshop after he gets off work.

The cash he makes comes in super handy during those outreach visits, because the helpless grandpas and grandmas he ferries necessities to are also his “suppliers,” selling him their unused prescription drugs for cash to pay their bills. Last stop: the local junkies and speed freaks, many of whom are former classmates and friends, to resell the pills that they’ll crush and snort.

The way Cole sees it, as long as no one “gets hooked,” and the old people who give up their meds feel no pain, “it wasn’t a bad thing, what he did. People needed him, counted on him. He gave them what they asked for.”

Besides, it’s not that different from the example his grandfather set, a Pentecostal preacher who once showed his grandson how to care for the “dying, the sick and the broken,” who taught him Bible verses and how to hear God’s voice up on top of the mountains: “God talks to you, but he don’t talk to your ears, he talks to your heart.”

Not that Cole’s ever heard it. Between his mother’s disappearance, the stutter he battled growing up, and a shameful secret he’s buried so deep it’s forgotten, he’s pretty God won’t be talking to him anytime soon. Yet Bible verses still run through his head during the lonely drives to his after-hours deals: “It was times like this, in the darkness and quiet, that the words sometimes returned, ghostly and pale like the Indian pipes hidden in the woods.”

Novels about Appalachia have to work hard to overcome hillbilly stereotypes—the methheads that have replaced moonshiners, the snake-handling Holy Rollers, the ignorant, the toothless, the isolated communities clinging to superstitions and ignorance. Sickels, who grew up in southeastern Ohio, close to neighboring West Virginia, has a unerring eye for the complex makeup of the men and women who still try to make a life in towns like Dove Creek.

Cole is a series of contrasts. He’s a thief and a drug-dealer, but also the unwitting pastor of his own makeshift church, the drugs his offerings, a pill book his Bible. His spare, unsentimental tones reflects the resignation and bitterness of a man determined to go down with the ship, but he believes in the “world beyond this one” where there’s “more than a person could see just with his eyes.” Speech doesn’t come easy to him, but inside, his appreciation for the beauty around him erupts in flashes of concise poetry, as when he remembers how the mountains looked to him as a child: “Light shining through the tops of the trees; green moss on stumps; blooming foxglove and little pink azaleas, like teardrops.”

Other well-drawn characters—a gay ex-con caring for his dying landlady; Cole’s wild, long-lost mother, Ruby, with her “furious, lovely eyes” and hopes for a fresh start; and his former best friend, Terry, now deep into drugs—flesh out Cole’s “congregation,” which grows more needy and broken each day.

Over the course of a year, his grandfather dies, and Cole draws closer to his mother and to Terry, trying to administer to everyone while ignoring the cracks, like the now-splintered walls of his grandmother’s house, that have begun to appear in his own foundation. When events climax in exactly the kind of apocalyptic “evening hour” his grandfather predicted, Cole’s forced to choose between saving a dying community and saving himself.

I reviewed this book for the AJC a few weeks ago, but needed a do-over. Something about it eluded me; I wanted to talk about the way it left me wondering about how we heed—and by this creaky old-fashioned word, I mean listen or pay attention to—our conscience in a changing world. What happens when the place where you feel safe, in touch with yourself—where you sense that you’re watched over by some form of benevolence—is being destroyed?

For many years, I lived in a house here in Atlanta, set in the middle of a huge lot. Hundred-year-old water oaks shaded most of it, with four beautiful old beeches that lined the sidewalk out front. Something about that place spoke to me from the first night I spent there, recovering from the end of a marriage. I lay on the floor in the living room without a speck of furniture and watched the leaves fall past the windows and thought, Now I’m safe. While I lived there, my dreams talked to me and my heart sang every morning when I saw sunlight pouring through the back porch—about the only place it poured. I loved that place to death and it seemed to love me in return. I healed a rotten back problem by lying on the old, weird cement table that sat in the back yard, big enough for a human sacrifice.

When I left that house and those trees, I felt pretty sure, and I still do, that I was leaving something profoundly healing and important; it was like a second marriage.

So this is something of what I found in The Evening Hour. Whatever your beliefs, and whether you believe that God talks to us—in nature, in the places we know and love, in the people we see each day, in dreams—or not, it’s a novel that offers an aching glimpse of how to listen. I am still thinking about it, and still listening.

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If you would like to read more about mountain-top removal, check out this thorough, extensive report by John McQuaid.

And the winner is … Salvage the Bones

Winner of the 2011 National Book Award, announced Nov. 16 at the 62nd National Book Awards Ceremony and Benefit Dinner.

Imagine a movie camera, one that stays focused on a poor family in coastal Mississippi, Claude Batiste and his four children—Randall, Skeetah, Junior and their sister Esch—in late August of 2005.

Now imagine that the camera follows them everywhere for twelve days, that it never looks away.

It records the poverty and the daily squalor in stark black and white, documenting each scene with gritty realism. The camera finds the youngest child eating uncooked ramen noodles, and captures the father, shambling home drunk, as he tries to pick a fight with his older sons.

It zooms in when the family pit bull gives birth in a filthy shed, and it follows the pregnant 15-year-old daughter into the single bathroom each morning as she throws up, while her brothers bang on the door to get in.

It will be running even when Hurricane Katrina hits.

Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (Bloomsbury, $24, 272 pages) is the implacable lens that captures in grainy, dramatic close-ups a family’s hopes tied up in the narrowest of futures: A basketball scholarship. The price a litter of prize fighting dogs might bring. The money to be made after a hurricane “by a man with a dump truck.” A young girl’s dreams of becoming a goddess in the eyes of a boy who never looks at her.

Like her first novel, Where the Line Bleeds (2009), Ward’s second takes place in the fictional Bois Sauvage, based on the author’s hometown of Delisle, Mississippi.

Pulphead: Essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan

By the time I finished the first three essays in this book, words like “virtuoso” and “damn!” were coming to mind, and I started having to take breaks, where I’d walk around the house alternately bouncy with the joy of finding something so terrific to read, and thinking I’ll never, ever be this good, at anything.

Before I get lost in embarrassingly worshipful paeans about the pieces on Axl Rose (“with the wasp-man sunglasses and the braids and the goatee, he reminds one of the monster in Predator, or of that monster’s wife on its home planet”) and Michael Jackson (“a god moves through him; the god enters, the god leaves”) and the rest, let me stop and explain.

Pulphead (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $16), by John Jeremiah Sullivan, is a collection of ruminations about American pop culture and politics interspersed with a look at cave paintings in Tennessee, a portrait of a misunderstood 19th-century naturalist, a tender and revealing ode to a former teacher, a story about the author’s brother—basically, things that you wouldn’t expect to find in a book called Pulphead.

So, not your usual hipster quotient. Of the blend of subjects Sullivan found interesting enough to dig into, he said in a Flavorwire interview: “They all are chronicles of some obsession or some subject I couldn’t get out of my head.”

Sullivan was born in Louisville, KY. His father was a sportswriter for the Louisville Courier-Journal. In his first book (Blood Horses), he recalls moving from Louisville to Columbus, Ohio, when he was twelve; in his new one, he says he grew up in southern Indiana, not too far from where Axl and Michael grew up. He attended the University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee, and now lives in Wilmington, N.C. with his family. Currently the (first) Southern editor for the Paris Review, Sullivan was previously an editor at the Oxford American magazine and has written for Harper’s and GQ.

Sullivan is a guy you can imagine wearing a velvet smoking jacket and a pair of Doc Martens. He might smoke a pipe. He combines a brainy, academic style with an earnest, restless enthusiasm and a lack of cynicism not often found in journalism today—there is almost no snarkiness in his writing. As I was reading Pulphead, a certain word came to mind. Paul Westerberg used it once to describe himself in an interview: Grandpaboy.

“I grew up sooner than I should have; I was an old man before my time, I think,” said the former Replacements lead singer. “Grandpaboy is the best explanation. I felt old and crotchety even when I was 19.”

Take out the crotchety part and it’s perfect: Sullivan’s still in his thirties, writing about reality TV and Bunny Wailer—but  when he gets stuck on an old blues lyric he’s fact-checking (as editor at Oxford American), he turns to the OED, then to “this 1398 citation from John De Trevisa’s English translation of Bartholomeus Anglicus’s ca. 1240 Latin encyclopedia, De proprietatibus rerum,” where he finds out that the singer isn’t saying “flowers,” but “flour.” Which is, you know, exactly where I would have looked, sooner or later.

He has a kind of ageless, classless ability to identify with his subjects, from the 20-something Jesus freaks at a Christian rock festival to a naturalist who’s been dead since 1840. He can hang with Tea Partiers as easily as Miz from The Real World. What Sullivan says of the late, great David Foster Wallace (“Too Much Information,” GQ, May 2011) could also be said of Sullivan:

You’re in a room with a bunch of human beings. Each of them, like you, is broken and has healed in some funny way. Each of them, even the shallowest, has a novel inside. Each is loved by God or deserves to be. They all have something to do with you: When you let the membrane of your consciousness become porous, permit osmosis, you know it to be true, we have something to do with one another, are part of a narrative—but what? Wallace needed very badly to know.

Except that unlike Wallace, Sullivan’s personality doesn’t take over the story; for example, in Wallace’s cruise ship piece (the title essay of A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again) he not only goes to eat at the ship’s buffet but eats so much it makes him sick, and even though it’s of course about barfing on greed and excess, we can’t help but focus mainly on the guy who would do such a thing. When Sullivan goes to the Christian rock concert, he limits himself to some pan-fried frogs’ legs and tries to blend in.

In his piece about Jackson, simply titled “Michael,” he upends most of the agreed-upon public opinions about the King of Pop, including Jackson’s alleged pedophilia and the “self-mutilated creature” he became. “Of all the things that make Michael unknowable,” he writes, “thinking we knew him is perhaps the most deceptive.”

Describing Rose’s “Final Comeback,” Sullivan wishes he could dance like today’s new, improved Axl, who “from the beginning … has been the only indispensable white male rock dancer of his generation,” and who now, after the familiar fluid moves onstage in New York, “is gazing at the crowd with those strangely startled yet fearless eyes, as though we had just surprised him in his den, tearing into some carrion.”

In “Feet in Smoke,” a jaw-dropping essay about his brother getting electrocuted and the alternate reality he consequently inhabited for a time, Sullivan gives us the notes he took while his brother was hospitalized.

Evening of the 27th. Unexpectedly jumped up from his chair, a perplexed expression on his face, and ran to the wall. Rubbed palms along a small area of the wall, like a blind man. Turned. Asked, “Where’s the piñata?” Shuffled into hallway. Noticed a large nurse walking away from us down the hall. Muttered, “If she’s got our piñata, I’m gonna be pissed.”

Two essays not in the book that should be: the above-mentioned review of Wallace’s posthumous The Pale King, and a piece about Disney World, “You Blow My Mind. Hey Mickey!” I don’t want to confuse the issue by stressing either of these too much, but the first is really one of the most perceptive and intelligent essays about DFW on earth.

The second (you can read it in full here), about two guys determined to stay high during a family weekend at Disneyland, belongs here as another outstanding example of the way Sullivan becomes one with whatever he writes about.

He’s not the pothead of the story—it’s his old friend Trevor who has brought the special guide listing the “isolated footpaths that didn’t see much traffic [and] places where you could hide under a bridge by a little artificial river”—but Sullivan goes along with it, inhale for inhale—the same kind of “I’m in!” you find over and over in Pulphead.

As when, exploring the prehistoric cave paintings in one of the “Unnamed Caves” in Tennessee, he discovers that access was not a matter of walking upright into a nice cool alcove and shining a flashlight up on the walls. Nuh-uh. “The pictures are found in dark-zone sites—places where the Native American people who made the artwork did so at great personal risk, crawling meters or, in some cases, miles underground with cane torches…”

And so do Sullivan and his guide. “We squeezed through on our bellies,” he writes. “The squeeze got tight enough that, as I wriggled on my stomach, the ceiling was scraping my back…” His guide mentions that “they’d had to dig a couple of people out.”

Okay. Deep breaths.

Then, to reach the next cave he visits, all he has to do is position his body “horizontally between the walls of the cave—sideways—with his feet against one wall and his shoulders against the other, thrusting his muscles to fix himself there.” Then sidle his body to the right. “That’s how you’d pass over the sixty-foot drop in the floor.” (My italics.)

Going with the flow has always been one of the prime components of serendipity, synchronicity—especially when it comes to getting the story. Without it, the element of chance that leads mysteriously to meaning might never emerge.

There are a lot of those moments in Pulphead.

Being as game as Sullivan is has a bit of godliness about it. It could be seen as taking chances. But it comes across more as surrendering himself.

If he has to squeeze himself toothpaste style through rock walls to see an 800-year-old mud glyph, he wriggles. When the good old boys at the Creation rock concert cut the legs off live frogs and throw them into a skillet, he eats them. When his 92-year-old mentor, Andrew Lytle, in the grips of dementia, asks Sullivan to join him in bed to keep him warm, he snuggles.

Because I am the kind of grandma girl who only likes to read about this kind of risk-taking, it’s the perfect book for me.

John Jeremiah Sullivan will be appearing in Atlanta on Friday, Dec. 9 at 8 p.m. at one of my favorite literary events, the True Story Reading Series held at Kavarna, located at 707 East Lake Drive. Find out more here.

P.S. By now, you may have seen Werner Herzog’s recent documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, which takes the viewer inside La Grotte Chauvet in the south of France to witness animal paintings more than thirty thousand years old. In this Q & A, Sullivan talks cave art with Herzog and archaeologist Jan Simek, who makes an appearance in Pulphead.

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“A god moves through him; the god enters, the god leaves.”

When I Paint My Masterpiece

In his superbly imagined debut novel, Kevin Wilson asks what life would be like for the children of two famous 1970s-80s performance artists whose most firmly held belief was that having kids would kill their art.

And you thought you had it tough, with your narcissistic mother and your insensitive, absent dad. Wait until you meet Caleb and Camille Fang, whose now-dysfunctional adult children spent most of their childhood as props in their parents’ absurdist guerrilla theater.

The Family Fang takes a common side-effect of growing up—the way our parents influence and disfigure us—and sets it on a slow boil, cooking up a bizarre but believable plot every bit as outrageous and confusing as an Andy Kaufman mud-wrestling bout.

Mystery Achievement

Narrative Urge. That’s right, I’m talking to you.

Just wanted to say thanks.

In case you’re unfamiliar with him/her/them?, Narrative Urge is the anonymous presence behind Atlanta’s $10 Art Mystery letter, the first of which was originally sent to news weekly Creative Loafing’s Arts & Entertainment editor, Debbie Michaud.

Each letter contained a ten-dollar bill, a note urging the recipient to “find me,” and a strip of paper with a sentence or two typed on it.

When the sentences were published, Atlanta writers recognized them as excerpts from longer stories and essays they’d written.

There were other clues: a drawing of a UFO, references to French stuntman Henri Rechatin, and to the Biltmore Estate, and to Horace Burgess, who built a 10-story treehouse inspired by a divine vision.

In June, Michaud and CL Events editor Wyatt Williams went in search of answers.

They didn’t solve the mystery, but they did smoke out an entity called Narrative Urge, who thanked them—and everyone—for taking part so far. At about the same time, an interested puzzle solver cracked the “code,” leading to a web page that, in turn, launched two Facebook pages: Narrative Urge and 10 Stories High. In all the excitement, the letters made the news and now the project has its own Wiki page.

Atlanta mobile deal company Scoutmob even interviewed Narrative Urge, who agreeably revealed some of the details behind the project:

The story fragments must be from Atlanta writers, except for the Leonard Cohen lines (envelope #10), which I used because they fit the other criterion: they go well with story I’m shaping around the fragments. There are a few lines (envelope #35, mailed to John Lemley at WABE) from Gone with the Wind, a story that some people believed significant to the project; otherwise, all writers are local. Obviously the “drops,” as I call them, can be found by anyone. Drop locations … are chosen somewhat randomly: inside restaurant menus (the Graveyard, the Majestic, Manuel’s Tavern); Midway Restaurant (under an eraser near the dartboard); Videodrome (near the Frida Kahlo movie starring Salma Hayek); Junkman’s Daughter (inside Tara McPherson’s book, Lost Constellations); in the information box outside that yoga studio on Estoria in Cabbagetown.

Notes on Narrative Urge’s Facebook page added some memorable personal facts I’ve squirreled away for after-midnight wild goose chases on Google.

At first local, the project has now spread to Minneapolis and Chicago. Fierce debate has ensued about who this secret sender could be, with several local literary lights denying it just as fiercely. Maybe a little too fiercely.

And then, days ago, another letter wended its way to Kate Sweeney, writer, radio producer/host (listen to her on John Lemley’s “City Café”) and co-founder of the Atlanta’s bimonthly (and my favorite) non-fiction reading series “True Story.”

Inside was an excerpt from a post at 8 Hamilton Ave.

I’m thrilled. I have always wanted to be part of a puzzle, and I don’t mean the kind I can’t figure out, like, well, areas of my personal life or why I can’t remember whole chunks of my high school years.

I’ve been toying with the 10 Stories High clues for months now. Picking up more here and there. I’m certain there’s something in the names Biltmore House and Horace Burgess—as in take away the shared letters and unscramble what’s left. But I’m terrible with anagrams. I wonder if we’re supposed to add the stories of the structures (the Biltmore, the treehouse, etc.), or if the excerpts—if they all turned up—would make another story when pieced together.

One big story from all of us.

The Buddha in the Attic, Julie Otsuka

Julie Otsuka works small, and slowly, with remarkable compression and artistry, and she writes in longhand, using a fountain pen. The gemlike details found in her slender, spare novels reflect her habit of writing and polishing her sentences one by one, as she has explained in interviews:

You get up every day and you sit down at your desk and you put down a word, or a sentence, or, on a good day (I work very slowly) maybe a half page. You add a word here, you take one away, you sketch out a scene….

Her first book, When the Emperor Was Divine (Knopf, 2002), based on her own family history, looked at the Japanese internment during WWII through the eyes of a Japanese-American family from Berkeley, California.

In “The Buddha in the Attic” (Alfred A. Knopf, $22, 160 pages), coming out this week, she reaches further back into history, to the early 1900s when hundreds of Japanese “picture brides”—mail-order wives—came to America to marry men they had so far seen only in photographs.

To tell their stories, Otsuka uses a first-person plural chorus of women who speak as one: “Some of us came from the mountains and had never before seen the sea, except for in pictures, and some of us were the daughters of fishermen who had been around the sea all our lives.”

During the passage from Japan, in the opening pages, each woman clutches a picture of her future husband, the dashing or respectable or successful man she has agreed to marry:

Handsome young men with dark eyes and full heads of hair and skin that was smooth and unblemished … they looked like our brothers and fathers back home, only better dressed, in gray frock coats and fine Western three-piece suits. Some of them were standing on sidewalks in front of wooden A-frame houses with white picket fences …

Only later do the women discover that most of the pictures are 20 years old, the eloquent, persuasive letters that accompanied them written by professionals. Or that “my husband’s handsome best friend” had posed for the photograph.

Memory Wall, Anthony Doerr

I’ve just finished Anthony Doerr’s Memory Wall, now out in paper. With only six stories, it seems like a slender collection, but the title story is nearly 80 pages long, and the last, “Afterworld,” runs to 55 pages. Although they’re clearly the two powerhouses of this collection, what I came away liking best were two others: “Village 113” and “The River Nemunas.”

Doerr seems uniquely qualified to write about memory. He was a history major who writes a column on science books for the Boston Globe. His novel, About Grace (2004) was a meditation on loss, memory, precognition and water; in it, a hydrologist who occasionally dreams events that later come true runs away from one of them, leaving behind his wife and infant daughter. It’s a wonderful book to get lost in, filled with dreams and snow, one of those novels I recommend to people I know will overlook the improbable plot.

The title story in Memory Wall is about an elderly South African woman suffering from dementia in a futuristic society where technology enables her to access her memories through a science-fictionlike device that “reads” memory tracings pulled from the brain and recorded onto cartridges. While the elderly play back their entire lives, one tape at a time, a kind of piracy has grown up around the tapes, which are traded on the street. There are also “memory tappers,” people whose heads are implanted with ports that allow them to read the cartridges.

It’s all a bit spooky and creepy, reminiscent of Vonnegut without the humor.

Doerr complicates things further by giving the old woman, Alma, a dead husband who was on the brink of a fantastic and wildly profitable discovery—he had found “a rare Permian fossil” called Gorgonops longifrons, a complete skeleton of which would be worth millions—when he had a fatal heart attack. Alma was with him that day but has never been able to remember exactly where they were.

A cutthroat fellow fossil hunter thinks the spot is still lodged somewhere in her head, and he’s using a memory tapper, a 15-year-old boy named Luvo, to exhaustively scan each of Alma’s hundreds of memory tapes in hopes of recovering the exact location. How this eventually happens and what becomes of everyone involved is less important than what Luvo eventually understands: “It’s the rarest thing … that gets preserved, that does not get erased, broken down, transformed.”

This is the heart of every story in Memory Wall, where characters from all corners of the world—Cape Town, Minnesota, Korea, Idaho, a Chinese village named 113, Lithuania, Hamburg—try to restore or sustain that elusive memory. The language Doerr fits to this search is like the vocabulary of memory: sometimes elegiac and lush, sometimes sharper and exact, a strange blend of science and poetry.