About Grace - Anthony Doerr

Another great read.

Doerr, Anthony. About Grace. New York: Scribner, 2004

“He called them dreams. Not auguries or visions exactly, or presentiments or premonitions. Calling them dreams let him edge as close as he could to what they were: sensations—experiences, even—that visited him as he slept and faded after he woke, only to reemerge in the minutes or hours or days to come.” (7)

Not exactly a story about the inevitability of the things that happen to us in life, About Grace nevertheless touches on the themes of fate, chance and the sentiment expressed so well in the paeon by Henley, “Invictus,”ⁱ that we all ponder from time to time. Winkler studies and photographs snowflakes and is amazed that despite them all being different (something we all learned in science class in elementary school), those that fall intact always have six points—not four, never five, always six.

Winkler’s friend, Naaliyah, becomes fascinated with small things as well and studies insects at university in Alaska. What governs the events of insects’ short lives? What governs ours?

And as indicated in the quote above, Winkler’s story turns on his observation that dreams he has—detailed and dramatic—are coming true. For instance, he dreams that a woman in a supermarket line-up will drop an object and he will pick it up. He dreams that a man is run over by a bus. The events happen shortly thereafter, exactly as he dreamed them. 

His conundrum is whether or not the predicted event has to happen, or if he has power to change or prevent it. In this light, the core event of the plot—a dream that their home will be flooded and that he will attempt to carry his young daughter to safety but will accidentally drown her—leads him to run far from home so that the instrument of his daughter’s death in the dream (himself) is not available to fulfill what he dreads.

Unfortunately, being far away in the Caribbean, he’s unable to know whether his flight has saved his daughter or not. The remainder of the story is reminiscent of the picaresque novel (although with relatively little humour) as Winkler begins a search for a lost family through the Caribbean, the contiguous states of the USA, Canada and Alaska. The journey is captivating; the characters encountered along the way memorable.

Because it leans so heavily on the reality of premonitions, many readers may have to suspend disbelief or assume they’re reading what’s called “magic realism.” I’ve had one experience that led me very briefly to the David Winkler conundrum. A high school friend stayed at my house on a weekend because we’d planned a trip to a national park. He related a dream to me as we drove. He’d been driving his truck (which he had to hot wire because the boarding school didn’t allow student vehicle use without special permission), had rolled the truck at the railway crossing and dented the roof. He’d searched for and found a jack to force back the dent in order to prevent detection.

A week later, my friend and his date were killed in a car/train accident at a that crossing.

I became convinced later that my mind had switched the sequence of events and that I myself had dreamed of my friend's dream after the accident. 

The shape of snowflakes, the life cycles of insects are determined in the structures of their cells. The butterfly cannot come before the caterpillar, the snowflake cannot have five points. I am a skeptic of things magical, like Winkler, particularly because of the observation that, in the human mind, these orders and laws don’t necessarily apply. Memory can reorder events as if we were living in a universe of magic realism. Hysteria, mental disease, even stress can cause the mind to imagine a universe so vividly that we can do nothing but take for granted that it’s reality.

And yet, like Winkler, I’m aware that this view of the universe might also be the result of a mental aberration.

And like Winkler, I want to know what laws govern events, what events are random. Chaos theory provides a good description of the way chance events change everything, all the time. That old idea that if one had stopped to talk to a friend for one minute longer, the accident would (or would not) have happened. Some people place God in that niche as the one who governs chance events; the overwhelming evidence, however, is that the suspension of stable, universal laws governed by the miniscule behaviour of cells, atoms, molecules, neutrinos, etc. are never tampered with by outside forces. If God is a handler of puppets, a controller of events, that control must most certainly be confined to the mind, the consciousness, of people and the actions that take or change courses as a result.

We are individually elements in the lives of every other being. The fact that we exist deflects the course of life for everyone else, sometimes infinitesimally, sometimes hugely, wonderfully—or catastrophically. We watched It’s a Beautiful Life a few days ago. The protagonist played by Jimmy Stewart concludes at one point that his family would be better off if he were dead. It’s this conundrum writ large that faces David Winkler in About Grace; what would we give up to save the life of a loved one? Jesus said, Greater Love hath no Man than this, that he give his Life for a Friend. (John 15:13)

Is it by design or by chance that we find ourselves in families? Have we the courage to take upon ourselves the nurturing of our families when only we can provide it, and at what expense? And how much are we prepared to give to gain back what chance has deprived others of?

For me, About Grace is a parable about family, about courage, about winning and losing and the indomitable perseverance of love. A terrific read.

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i It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

The Shell Collector

Doerr, Anthony. The Shell Collector. New York: Scribner, 2002

A high school student once asked me, “So when is a story a ‘short story’ and when is it a ‘novel?’” I explained that it didn’t have to be either, that there were stories called ‘novelettes’ that fell somewhere in between and that lengths were arbitrary. I added that a ‘short story’ is a story that is short. No good. We finally agreed that a short story was one written to be read at one sitting and compared it to a movie which we watch all-at-once versus a series (like Downton Abbey) that we come back to a number of times. That seemed to satisfy students, but not me necessarily.

Anthony Doerr’s ‘short stories’ range from ten to thirty-five or so pages so at a modest reading speed of 300 words-per-minute, the shortest would take about twelve minutes to read; the longest about forty minutes. For slower readers—say 200 wpm, the range would be about eighteen minutes to around seventy.

So ‘short story’ fits.

Anthony Doerr’s books have fetched general acclaim and prestigious awards including the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for All the Light we Cannot See. I actually haven’t read any of his novels—yet—but About Grace is on the coffee table here at my daughter’s home in Panama, and will be my next read. Other novels by Doerr include Four Seasons in Rome and Memory Wall.

Reviewing a short story collection can become something akin to reviewing eight novels: what seems true about “The Shell Collector” needn’t be true about “July Fourth.” My choice is to talk a bit about one of Doerr’s stories, namely the last in the collection, “Mkondo.”

The plot follows a man by the name of Ward Beach who has been sent by a museum to Tanzania to collect a fossil of a rare, prehistoric bird-dinosaur. During his sojourn there, he meets Naima in the most bizarre of encounters; she’s running down the middle of a road so that he’s unable to pass her with his Land Rover. She finally stops, jumps onto the hood of his vehicle and says, “Keep driving, I want to feel the wind!”

Her wild energy captivates him and he begins to “court” her, driving over rough roads to the hut where she lives with her parents. But courting her isn’t easy; every time he visits, she challenges him to catch her and she takes off through paths in the forest with him in pursuit. She always outruns him; she’s too fast and there are too many trails criss-crossing. He goes on a fitness regime to the point where he can almost keep up with her until one day she leads him to the edge of a cliff where her footprints cease. Beach falls over the cliff and finds himself in a deep pool at the bottom where Naima awaits him. He asks her to marry him and she consents. It’s as if she wouldn’t have him until he proved himself able to take “the final step.”

But this is only background. This beautiful, wild creature doesn’t fare well in Ohio. Like a plant in a drought, she wilts from grief at the loss of the Africa she feels she’s left forever, the loss accentuated by the tamed grayness of Ohio. Finally, her despondency is so intense that Beach no longer tries to reach her, she no longer invites him to reach out to her.

Until she discovers photography, that is, a medium through which she reacquaints herself with clouds and skies, light and shadows to the point where she is obsessed with the possibility of reclaiming a world she’s left behind. Mastering the intricacies and excelling in the art she’s discovered gives Naima the courage she needs and she takes herself back to Tanzania and the house in which she grew up.

The story doesn’t end there, but as is typical of other stories in the collection, Doerr avoids the gratuitous supplying of meanings and outcomes, causes and effects, a skill that separates the seasoned storyteller from the amateur.

Doerr’s diction is highly accessible and evocative.

“The truck bounced over potholes, lilted into curves. Still she clung to the hood. Finally the road ended: there was a dense tangle of vines below a steep ravine at the bottom of which the rusting frame of a car lay mangled and bent. Ward opened his door; he was nearly hyperventilating (185-6).”

“Another year passed. He dreamed of her. He dreamed she’d sprouted huge and glorious butterfly wings and circled the globe with them, photographing volcanic clouds rising from a Hawaiian caldera, tufts of smoke from bombs dropped over Iraq, the warped, diaphanous sheets of auroras unfurling over Greenland (212).”

What is true of virtually all the stories in The Shell Collector is the uniqueness of the characters. Griselda is a gangly, six foot something high school volleyball player who marries a metal eater (he swallows razor blades, armours and is purported to have eaten—piece by piece—a Ford Ranger) as a touring show. And there’s Joseph Saleeby, an escapee from the brutal civil war in Liberia who takes a job as a caretaker of a millionaire’s summer home . . . and forgets to take care of it. The title story “The Shell Collector” is centered on a blind collector of shells—a former professor in his field—along the beaches and shallows of a marine park in the Lamu Archipelago in Kenya. The development of believable characters—especially the eccentric kind—is difficult without losing verisimilitude. Doerr amazes with his ability to create characters that live, and with an economy of brush strokes: a rare thing.

I’ve always been partial to short stories. I find most novels too long and you don’t come across many published novelettes anymore. As Anthony Doerr has demonstrated here, the short story genre is able to deliver all we expect when we eagerly pick up a book.