By Christmas, Colette was settled in her new apartment. The last day of the old year, 1908, brought something rare to Paris: snow. It came down all night, and it was still falling “like a chenille veil,” “crisp as taffeta underfoot,” “powdery and vanilla” on the tongue, when Colette and her dogs went out to play “like three madwomen” in the deserted streets.
They came in at dusk to doze by the hearth. “Here I am again,” writes Colette, “facing my fire, my solitude, and myself.” The snowfall and the dying of a tumultuous year made her pensive, and she gave herself over to reveries of seasons past, “the form of the years,” “the winters of the childhood.” When she roused herself, she found her shepherd bitch “steaming like a footbath” at her feet, the bulldog and the gray cat sleeping, and she was “astonished,” she writes, “to have changed and aged while I was dreaming.”
There are many suicides in Colette’s work — a fact she never noticed, she told a friend in the 1930s, until it was pointed out to her by a reader. Juliette’s isn’t among them, but it sharpened her consciousness of mortality. Sitting by the fire that New Year’s Day, she held up her hand mirror and found, in the “dark water of the glass,” the first fine “claw marks” of age. What makes them so poignant to her in the French sense of the work — poindre means to pierce — was that she could still see beyond them to the “adorable,” “velvety,” “elastic,” “rosy girl” who was gone forever.
“You have to get old,” Colette told herself then, with more bravura than conviction, trying — as she often did — to disarm an unpleasant truth by stating it. She was three weeks shy of thirty-six: a youthful woman no longer young by the standards of her age and facing the mortality of her beauty. “Don’t cry,” she commands, “don’t clasp your hands in prayer, don’t rebel: you have to get old. Repeat the words to yourself, not as a howl of despair but as the boarding call to a necessary departure.” Colette goes on to unwind the imaginary “ribbon” of a life well lived. After addressing a series of lyrical, stoic blandishments to herself — the kind of sentences that would make her wince as a more seasoned writer — she concluded: “If you haven’t lost your hair, left your teeth behind you one by one, nor your spent limbs; if the dust of eternity hasn’t, in the final hour, blinded your eyes to the wondrous light — and if, at the end, you hold a loved hand in you own — then lie down smiling, go to sleep, happy one, go to sleep, lucky one.”
Colette would die at eighty-one. At the end, her supple dancer’s legs had failed her. She wore false teeth, could barely see, and she was deaf, but she held the hand of the man who loved her. As it happened, she had, practically to the final hour, kept her head, which is not, curiously enough, on her departure checklist. Braced against physical disintegration — the loss of beauty, sensual acuity, appetite, strength — Colette forgets or omits to fear the loss of her mental powers. Productive to the end, and secure in that aspect of her integrity, she would be remarkable among modern writers — perhaps the great women in particular — for a sense of self not vested in her mind.
“Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me.” Billie Rowan was humming to herself as she walked up and down the stairs of 115 Gaffney. This was the first place she had ever lived that had stairs, and she was fascinated with them. She was unpacking slowly, one item at a time, shaking each plate, pot, and hairbrush loose from its wrapping of newspaper.
How cheerful to move on your birthday, she thought, with boxes of surprises to unwrap. It didn’t matter as much that her only gift for her twenty-second birthday was five dollars from her mother, tucked into a Hallmark card. There was nothing from John, yet, and the children could hardly be expected to shop. So her own belongings would have to do, and she felt a childlike thrill when the newspaper fell away and revealed something that belonged in a bedroom or bathroom, because it meant another sprint up and down the stairs. Seven steps up. Pause. Turn. Six more steps, and you were upstairs. Those thirteen steps made this a real house, not just another apartment. And, just maybe, a real house would lead to a real life, with a man who was home, not in prison, and two children who did something besides try her patience.
“You’ll curse those stairs one day,” her mother had warned her. But it had been a long time since she had listened to her mother.
By dinnertime, her few boxes were more or less unpacked and she had run out of reasons to run up and down. She and the kids ate some farina (she would have to do some shopping, soon) and sat on the bed in her bedroom, watching television.
A few minutes had passed when a noise that did not seem to come from the TV caught Billie’s attention. She went down the stairs, slowly this time, with tension rather than joy, but found nothing wrong in the living room or kitchen. She opened the downstairs closet. Nothing. The back door. Nothing. The front door. Nothing. Everything was quiet — so quiet that opening and closing all those doors seemed a rude intrusion.
She went back upstairs and settled herself on the bad when there was a second noise, different from the last but equally unfamiliar. She went downstairs again, and again she found nothing. The problem, she thought, wasn’t the noise, it was the quiet. She could not remember ever being anyplace this quiet. Then came another noise, another search, a fourth noise, a fourth search. Finally she turned off the television and began to put a few of her newly unpacked belongings — toothbrushes, diapers for the kids, clean underwear –into a bag.
She would go to her mother’s apartment in Schlobohm, she decided. After all, it was her birthday. Her mother would want to spend her birthday with her. And Shanda and little Johnny would be more comfortable there tonight. It would just be for one night. Except, of course, she had all those errands to run tomorrow — groceries and things, maybe a new outfit for John’s first night home — and the only stores she really knew were on the west side.
Maybe she would stay at her mother’s tomorrow night, too.
with 50,000 new titles published annually, it’s no wonder readers love
top 10 lists. As critics — people who spent the whole year damming the
tidal wave of review copies and publicity materials, informing our
discerning readers about just a carefully chosen trickle — this ought to
be our finest hour. Instead, as soon as we decided to choose our own 10
favorite books, we immediately began to fret about the ones we’d have to
leave out.
Nevertheless, we’re delighted with the list we finally produced
after weeks of bleary-eyed reading, endless cups of coffee and quite a
few frantic, transcontinental e-mails (“Argh! I wanted to write this one
off, but it’s just too good. Can’t we choose 20?”). These are the books
we’d wholeheartedly recommend to our friends, books we’d clear our social
calendar to finish, books we returned to eagerly even when we could
barely focus our eyes on a page. They remind us of why we fell in love
with reading and why we keep at it in a world that’s simultaneously
cluttered with mediocre books and increasingly indifferent to the written
word.
This, ultimately, was our criterion — despite the fact that, like
most list-makers and award-givers, we felt vague, ambient pressures to
make “representative” choices and tip our hats to titles that seemed
eminently worthy, if not much fun. As online journalists, we’re just a
click away from our readers’ feedback, a fact which gave us even more impetus to choose what we truly loved, rather than to cover our butts
ideologically. Fortunately, when it comes to fiction, Dwight’s favorites
this year were stories with a more intimate, domestic focus — “The
Family Markowitz” and “The Giant’s House” — while Laura hankered after
novels that tackle historical and social themes, like “The Moor’s Last Sigh”
and “Infinite Jest.” So our list is nicely balanced, with David
Markson’s exuberantly experimental “Reader’s Block” rounding it out.
As for nonfiction, we could have easily selected five memoirs, the form
is so prevalent and the quality so fine these days (that’s the only
pronounced literary trend we’ve observed, by the way). Mary Gordon’s “The Shadow Man,” Frank McCourt’s “Angela’s Ashes” and James Ellroy’s “My Dark Places” testify that the puzzle of individual history and identity remains a compelling theme. The two non-memoirs we chose —
Paul Hendrickson’s “The Living and the Dead” and Melissa Fay Greene’s
“The Temple Bombing” — are vivid examples of how a gifted writer can
find meaning in the chaos of daily experience and discover humanity in
history’s dry facts. In their different, eloquent ways, they showed us the personal dimensions of public
events.
We’re still, however, thinking about the books we couldn’t include,
ones that we nevertheless want to urge on you as provocative, thrilling,
enlightening, amusing and otherwise well worth your time.
We decided to limit the final 10 to books that hung together as a
unified whole, eliminating collections like Nicholson Baker’s droll book
of essays, “The Size of Thoughts,” and “Burning Your Boats,” a selection
of the late Angela Carter’s perverse, jewellike stories.
After reading Stephen Jay Gould’s “Full House,” we will never have a clear conscience about making judgments based on statistics — even if that middle
section on batting averages was tough going at times. Suzanne Berger’s
memoir of disability, “The Horizontal Woman,” made us contemplate the
unthinkable. Stephen Ambrose’s history of the Lewis and Clark expedition,
“Undaunted Courage,” is history made both gripping and immediate, and
kept us up late turning pages. Andrew O’Hagan’s essay on disappearing
people, “The Missing,” and D.J. Waldie’s “Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir”
gave us chills. Mark Singer’s “Citizen K” made us regard our own
profession with a jaundiced eye. Richard Ellis’ “Deep Atlantic” took us
to a strange, fascinating environment we’ll never visit in real life. And
John Thorne’s vigorous memoir/cookbook “Serious Pig: An American Cook in
Search of His Roots” made us hungry to read everything this Maine writer
has ever put to paper.
To avoid the appearance of nepotism, we ruefully eliminated
excellent books by our friends: Jim Paul’s remarkable fictional
meditation on the persistent irrationality of human thought, “Medieval in
LA,” and Jonathan Lethem’s disturbing, hallucinatory short story
collection, “The Wall of the Sky, The Wall of the Eye.”
We savored some “big” books by established novelists — John
Updike’s “The Beauty of the Lillies,” A.S. Byatt’s “Babel Tower,” John
Edgar Wideman’s “The Cattle Killing,” Paul Theroux’s “My Other Life,”
Jamaica Kincaid’s “Autobiography of My Mother,” Ron Hansen’s “Atticus” —
even if other titles wound up shouldering them off the list. Novels and
collections like Karen Joy Fowler’s “The Sweetheart Season,” George
Saunders’ “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” and Victor Pelevin’s “Omen Ra”
gave us reason to anticipate that these less-well-known writers will soon
become familiar names.
Despite the many times we’ve complained about the critic’s lot — plowing through piles of bad, boring and just plain mediocre new books — this project reminded us of just how many terrific books were published in 1996. In fact, our first New Year’s resolution is to get an early start on picking next year’s winners.
