This response is for my dear friend Mike who asked me to read this
book. I am grateful that she did. Others should know it contains spoilers and
may be best read as commentary after finishing the book.
" 'Let the music play on'
would be my legacy. I think the whole world is dying to hear someone say, 'I
love you.' I think that if I can leave the legacy of love and passion in the
world, then I think I've done my job in a world that's getting colder and
colder by the day."
Lionel Richie NPR interview April 2, 2012
A man and his wife have a fairy-tale marriage. He loves her so
much he counts the ways. Each day he writes one thing he cherishes about her on
a note and leaves it on the refrigerator. They read like this: “I love the
three perfect moles on your shoulder --
like a line of buttons. I love the sound of your voice over the phone
when you’re trying to hide the fact that you’re doing a crossword puzzle from
me. I love your lopsided smile….” Each
day she finds the note and copies it into a diary.
But the ever-after ending is not to be.
One Friday the couple, Patricia and Jason Williford, flip and crash
their car. They are separated in transport to the hospital. There, Patricia, believing that Jason is
dead, can no longer bear the love diary she possesses. She passes that final
volume to the Carol-Ann Page, the woman recovering in the bed next to hers.
Carol-Ann
has severed her thumb sawing into a boxed package of alimony her ex-husband has
maliciously made impossible to open. When
she comes out of emergency room fog, her thumb is glowing as is Patricia who shortly
dies in a blaze of luminous brokenness. Without relatives, Page’s pain,
isolation and longing for love is depicted in the first of six episodes in Kevin
Brockmeier’s post-fairy world, the
Illumination, a fable of spectacular suffering.
For
Patricia and Carol Ann are not the only ones with pain made manifest in
resplendent light. That Friday at 8:17 p.m.,
auras of ache, halos of hurt, luminescent lesions and shimmering wounds reveal human
suffering in all its glorious variety. Suffering becomes the most beautiful
aspect of those endure it.
The
Illumination may be read as six stories loosely bound by the radiant pain
and the passing of the diary like a relay baton from one character and story to
another as the world adapts to this new phenomenon. But it is far more than
that -- the emerging portrait of a world in which the happy all-alike families
have been replaced with shards of family. Hardly just interestingly unhappy in
their own way, they are isolated individuals reaching out for a love that no
longer seems to bind the way it once did in either great novels or fairy tales. They are, in short order: (1) the divorcee, (2) the widower Williford; (3) an abused, bullied boy with autistic-like symptoms; (4) a missionary who has taken on his dead sister’s cause;(5) a writer/single mother and (6) a homeless man who gets brutally beaten. While some encounter compassionate gestures from others or even teeter towards the promise of love, they lose the story and never reach the happy ending of good old romance the diary suggests is possible.
The
book of sweet thoughts doesn’t do so well either. It gets hurled, highlighted, torn and tattered
as it passes from story to story only settling for a bit on the homeless man’s
blanket as an item to be traded or sold. It’s final abuse metaphorically echoes
the initial car crash. Its simple prose,
a catalog of the beloved’s ordinary gestures, serves as both arcane fascination
for the characters and a kind of chorus in an old-fashioned love song for the
reader. By contrast, Brockmeier writes
about suffering with the care of a medieval illustrator. In elegant prose with finally
wrought details, he creates an ornate encyclopedia of ailments.
Brockmeier
is too smart a writer to simply use the fabulist device of illuminated pain to
explore domesticity and romance in contemporary fiction. His light shines
through a prism of ideas. In Carol-Ann’s story we read how the world reacts to the
new pheonomenon – newscasters, churchgoers, internet scourers, voyeurs. People
are fascinated and changed a bit by peering in on others’ pain.
Jason Williford wakes in the hospital
wondering about Patricia, but to no avail: “It was like every time he asked
about her, as if his question had slid through some invisible crack in the air
and vanished into another world.” Those cracks are picked up by the writer much
later, a fabulist who writes a happy tale about reunited lovers. Jason’s job as
a photographer leads him to befriend disaffected teens who burn and cut
themselves for kicks – and because the pain is so beautiful.
Down
the street, a boy who can see a the pain of objects the way Temple Grandin
perceives the panic of cattle peers through the window at the distressed diary.
The boy also has a sense of what a family should feel like and knows that his
own doesn’t fit that perception. Several
acts of courage almost save him from his world.
Next
is the man who, following the death of his sister, takes up her work and becomes
a missionary because he “has nothing to lose” – no family. Teflon-like, he repels personal tragedy while
seemingly attracting natural disasters that destroy others everywhere he
treads. His story calls into question God’s role in human suffering and may
also question God’s role in human knowledge. The missionary lacks the knowledge of God that
his sister had. “Divine Illumination” is a pre-Thomas Aquinas
philosophical/theological term for God’s role in completing human knowing the
way grace completes human willing. Those interested may read about it
here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/illumination/
Next up is the writer, a single
mother whose child is the product of a drunken one-night stand. She has endless
lesions in her mouth and finds it painful to talk. She writes fairy tales about
the love that seems so elusive to her and then a fan starts following her on
her book signing tours. Perhaps inspired
by the diary, she writes a tale that mirrors what Jason Williford wished.
Here’s what she watches on TV to pass the time on her tours ( not as glorious
as the pain around her, but similar in substance):
“A
sitcom was starting, the image sharp and true on the plasma screen. She tried to
pay attention to the story rather than the play of shapes and colors, but it
was nothing special, a show like every other, where all the people were
assembled from light, and their problems made them lovable, and their smallest
gestures set off waves of swirling photons.”
The
final story is the most brutal, a tale that combines homelessness and street
violence in a world that seems almost post-apocalyptic, where (pardon the puns)
the nuclear family has been nuked, the fable writer has been benched and the
love notes have crashed. Here, Morse sells battered books to the two types who
are interested, Good Samaritans and readers; others avoid him. People in this
world include Adam, who has somehow
contracted poison ivy on his ankles and
Helen who is the mere shipwreck of Helen. Morse increasingly has the
ability to know other’s thoughts and feelings as he observes their artful
illuminations. His suffering is the most
brutally inflicted: his light the longest.
But
ultimately it is writer Brockmeier’s brilliance that shines as the evanescent ever- after of
happy lives succumbs to the light show
of eternal suffering in the Illumination.
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