July 12 & 19, 2010 Issue

I’ve spent the last couple of days in the stimulating company of Meghan O’Rourke’s writings. She has an interesting piece (“The Unfolding”) in this week’s issue. After I read it, I decided to go back and look at two other items by her that appeared recently in the magazine, namely, her great poem “My Aunts” (April 20, 2009), and her critical piece “Good Grief” (February 1, 2010). O’Rourke is preoccupied with death. She says in “Good Grief” that when her mother died she felt “abandoned, adrift.” “Good Grief” is not directly about O’Rourke’s loss of her mother; it’s an analytical piece about ways of grieving. It looks at Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s “stage theory” and finds that it is largely a fiction. O’Rourke views grief and mourning as “complicated and untidy processes.” Of course, she’s right. How could it be otherwise? Grief is a messy emotion. What I find interesting is that O’Rourke doesn’t delve into the messiness; she stays at a fairly abstract level in this piece. Similarly, in “The Unfolding,” she appears accepting of the oblique approach that Anne Carson employs in her memory book Nox to capture the feelings she experiences flowing from the loss of her brother. “The Unfolding” is a beautifully crafted review of Carson’s Nox. Nox is an unusual book, to say the least. O’Rourke describes it as being “as much an artifact as a piece of writing.” She says, “The contents arrive not between two covers but in a box about the size of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. Inside is an accordion-style, full-color reproduction of the notebook, which incorporates pasted-in photographs, poems, collages, paintings, and a letter Michael once wrote home, along with fragments typed by Carson.” Nox appears to be more like an assemblage than a book. The premise on which Nox seems to rest is that “Michael hides in these images, and the point is that all the words and analytical exercise in the world can’t rescue him.” My response to this is: of course, Michael can’t be “rescued”; but through painstaking description and analysis, could he not be made more specific? In Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost, which I am currently (slowly) making my way through, Mendelsohn visits Auschwitz. He finds the concentration camp too much of a “symbol.” He says, “I thought, as I walked its strangely peaceful and manicured grounds … [that] it had been to rescue my relatives from generalities, symbols, abbreviations, to restore them to their particularity and distinctiveness, that I had come on this strange and arduous trip.” Nowhere in O’Rourke’s review of Nox does she quote a description of Michael. She says Carson provides affecting details, “but she doles them out sparingly.” In O’Rourke’s most telling observation, she says, “The photos, the fragments of letters, the scraps of translated language enable her to ‘show the truth by allowing it to be seen hiding.’” But surely there is a better way to make use of these fragments? O’Rourke calls her piece “The Unfolding,” and I’m sure this refers, at least in part, to the act of opening up the “accordion” notebook inside the Nox box, but it could also describe memory’s sudden unfolding when it is triggered by an encounter with these scrapbook traces. O’Rourke doesn’t say whether Carson uses the traces of Michael contained in Nox as aide-memoire, but I suspect Carson doesn’t use them in this way. She doesn’t want to. O’Rourke quotes Carson as trying to convey “a certain fundamental opacity of human being.” I’m surprised that O’Rourke isn’t more critical of Carson’s opaque, metaphysical approach to writing about loss. Certainly, O’Rourke herself is not inclined this way, at least not in her delightful poem “My Aunts,” which when it came out in The New Yorker last year, I immediately identified as a keeper, clipped it from the magazine and put it in a folder of my favorite New Yorker poems. “My Aunts” is O’Rourke’s attempt to rescue her aging flamboyant aunts (how many is not clear; at least three, I think) from their mortality by representing them in such vivid, bright word imagery that they might live forever, at least in the form of this poem. It’s a breathless twenty-line sprint of exquisitely noticed (and remembered), crazy, funny details: “doing jackknives off the diving board after school”; “They used to smoke in their cars, rolling the windows down and letting their red nails hang out.” It ends in awareness of the aunts’ vitality imperiled by death: “Stop now, before the green comes to cover up your tall brown bodies.” Vitality and mortality, life and loss – these are O’Rourke’s dual themes. As in the midst of life we are in death, so, in “My Aunts,” in the presence of vitality, we feel its ephemeralness.