Salon.com > Lindsay Amon

“The Tiny One” by Eliza Minot

Mon, 08 Nov 1999 17:00:00 +0000

"Children can feel, but they cannot analyze their feelings," Charlotte
Brontk wrote. Eliza Minot would have to agree, but in her first novel, "The Tiny One,"
she's chosen an awkward way around it.

When the book opens, 8-year-old Via Revere has just lost her mother in a car accident. She's in shock, understandably, and instead of trying to process the event -- how could she? -- Via retreats in her mind to
the day of the accident, looking to "find something in that day to hold on to like a
rope swing, to swing with." It's a poignant and comprehensible desire, but
what follows is a 200-plus-page dissection of Via's day -- recess, morning snack, social studies class -- interspersed with memories of time spent with her family and friends.

After pages and pages of clamming with Via's Mum and vacationing with Aunt Nellie in Bermuda, I was desperate for something, anything, that would drive this day toward the book's central event, the accident. But there isn't anything. The novel is simply a study of an innocent youth on the verge of a life-changing occurrence she doesn't even know is coming. While there are a few beautiful and true moments, they have to compete with a clutter of period details and clichis. (Remember Bonne Bell lip gloss, playing Marco Polo in the pool, touching your tongue to your nose, or trying to?) "The Tiny One" reads like
an excellent expanded writing exercise. It's barely a novel, and it's certainly not an investigation of consequential topics such as loss and grief.

Married, with books

Fri, 24 Sep 1999 16:00:00 +0000

"Do we really need this?" my fianci asks, holding up a pint-size copy of Wallace Stevens' "Selected Poems."

"Of course we need it," I reply.

"But we already have the 'Collected Poems' in hardback and paperback. Not to mention the New American Library edition."

"But this one's so portable," I say, searching for a reason to keep this completely superfluous book. It's New York in July, 98 degrees, 100 percent humidity, and OK, I'm a little irrational. We have to move a ton of books to Los Angeles. Not a figurative ton, but an actual one: 1,934 pounds. Our movers have just given us an obscene cost estimate that we can neither believe nor afford. I'm starting to wish I had grown up cultivating a less bulky obsession -- the flute, maybe.

We're standing in a maze of towering and precariously arranged piles of books, removed from the built-in shelves that line all four walls of all three rooms of our Brooklyn Heights apartment. How did we end up with this gross overload? I flash back to our blind date two and a half years ago. Joan, the cupid who set it up, kindled our interest with book talk. "She loves to read," she told Matthew. "He may be the best-read person I've ever met," she told me. Eight months later we merged book collections and lives into a miraculously affordable apartment that could house us and our books. A small fourth-floor walk-up? Circa 1920? No problem. We continued to ply each other with favorite novels, thick poetry collections and glamorous never-to-be-opened gifts such as "The Architecture Pack."