Michael Joyce is a master at evoking a sense of loss, memory and how unreliable it can be (the line from “afternoon, a story,” the seminal hyper fiction, is a great example: “I want to say I may have seen my son die this morning.”), and connections.
When I read fiction by Joyce I’m most often reminded of someone who’s woven a fine tapestry. Or a rug. He leaves out the strands from the finished cloth for you, the reader, to grab a hold of, and sometimes he’s woven them in tightly, and it takes some work to ferret them out, to realize that you are slowly unraveling the whole story. In a story like “Twelve Blue” he just comes right out and shows you the story that way, the threads running alongside the text you’re reading and you can leap from strand to strand like some reading, hyper monkey. It’s a method of storytelling he can’t help but do.
I’d just finished reading The Genie at Low Tide (Ploughshares Solos)
“Going the Distance
Let’s just say I’m a sucker for baseball fiction, whether I’m writing it or reading it. But there has been plenty of commentary on how the game lends itself to literature, and Joyce, himself, quotes from A. Bartlett Giamatti’s “The Green Fields of the Mind” to kick the whole thing off, which is the where I’ll leave the analysis of baseball as a suitable fictional setting:
“The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone.”
But what makes the book amazing is that that’s just one thread. It could stand as a pretty good book all on its own as a baseball story, if that were all there were to it. But he weaves in Emma’s story, Wolfman, Restless, the story of aunt Bertie, living life in front of the TV, the story of the whole of Jack’s family, left behind in North Country New York along the river, fastened to the river, it seems, which becomes a character in its own right.
It’s a beautiful, lyrical novel, and well worth your time as the baseball season draws towards its conclusion. Or anytime, really.
