Books in a Time of Grief

I read many books over a year. I’ve taken to keeping a list on my phone of annual reading highlights, trying to keep track, or pay testimony, or something. The list begins in 2020, that year of the beginning of zones and curfews, remoteness and removal. A time of images of refrigerator trucks parked on Manhattan streets and accounts of nurses holding the hands of dying patients in ICU and isolation wards. This year’s section of the list ranges widely across genre and country and era and form. It always does, but this year is different somehow, the year of the grief, the continued bombings and violence, bombs falling on Iran, my fears for family members there leaving their homes and returning to them, travelling on dangerous roads, my parents’ ageing and mortality coming into focus, my own. Rows of titles, fiction and non-fiction, in my diurnal and nocturnal seeking out of poetry and prose, Rilke’s angels of beauty and terror, the everyday and night reflected, inflected, familiar experiences, and the unfamiliar, narrated. Striving to comprehend, to understand, to stay afloat (not much wide-eyed-wonder-about-the-world reading, that kind of writing is not for me in these days).  

More recently my reading has curved towards narrative, to story. In the midst of life, I find myself reading novels about death, and as about death. I find myself thinking about novels and the novel form and all types of beginnings and endings and continuations. The End is a universal human proposition, surely, if anything can be called universal. But each reading, as Atwood says, is a specific act, with its own history, context, subjectivity. And I am making this reading, these readings, here and now. This reader, in my own private dance with ageing and mortality (we stepped in closer, the year I got my scar), with faith systems and institutions, holding on, letting go. On a site of settler colonialism, in an ongoing genocide, in the wake of a pandemic, among the mass graves, under our feet and across the globe. Many deaths, and the intimate cataclysm of each death, as I grieve a particular loss. For me, and the others who loved her, there is now the disorienting absence of one person.  

In the light – or shade – of it all, I turn to novels. 

I turn to novels, and death haunts my reading, my familiar places, my reading about familiar places. Safer places here, not the unfathomable numbers in Gaza, the relentless violence, but death in the shadows too. I turn from my phone, with its grotesque, daily, hourly unfurling, the blood. I don’t turn away, but I do turn to novels, and they seem to stalk death, in general and in the particular. Or perhaps I am reading as a raptor, circling.  

I turn to Andrea Goldsmith’s The Buried Life, its inner-suburban landscapes, the buildings I see around me, the streets. The profound intertextuality of this novel, its web of reference, satisfies and nourishes me. It reminds me how consistently humans rely on art in the face of grief and death and mortality, as expression and outlet, as a seeking. How I am doing the same. I turn to this novel and read of characters turning to novels. As Keziah Ferguson, the young friend and neighbour of the protagonist, Adrian Moore, lies dying in the ICU of a Melbourne hospital, Adrian holds vigil, keeping at bay the parents who rejected their daughter for her sexuality and her unbelief in their fundamentalist Christianity. His expulsion of these people from the room, where they were praying over the sick woman (Keziah ‘squirming beneath her parents’ hands, struggling to throw them off; stifled sounds emerged from behind the respiratory mask’) and Keziah’s final, triumphant utterance to them (‘large printed letters’ in a notebook: ‘I DON’T FORGIVE YOU’) steal away from religion the prospect of a reconciled, capitalised ‘Good Death’. Goldsmith instead offers a secular good death, in the lead up to which Adrian reads to Keziah from The Secret Garden, a ‘favourite book from childhood, indeed the favourite book of all children who don’t fit in’. Keziah dying, who had been parented by a novel. A novel itself framed by death. The Buried Life tells me, and shows me, that reading a novel is a situated, serious, responsive act.  

I circle back, further back. Childhood, the country, the language of the church, the Prayer Book and the Bible, in Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional. I return, in reading this novel about returning; returning to place, to childhood, to the ground. The way the rituals of prayer, in the Monaro nunnery, are also a ‘[r]eturning and returning and returning, a prescribed revisiting.’ If readers seek resolution in the novel form – and I usually say that I do not, that’s not why I read, to see loose ends all tied up – I find it here nonetheless, in this looping, tracking circularity. The novel’s account of returning to the earth, to this particular unceded ground. Its moral wrestling, with grief, with faith, and mortality; with colonisation, and mass graves, and the church, and with our capacity to inflict harm on this earth and to this earth. For this is my wrestling too. 

I’ve been reading Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. This is a book that takes and makes time. Like a Victorian novel, I can settle into its rhythms, I must do so, to read it in its own tempo, its beat, its pulse (these blood words). And of course Death is there, his breath hot on some of the pages. Two lovers caught in danger swimming in the ocean, they make it back to shore, they lie on the beach, eyes closed: ‘[t]hey could quite easily in this moment of being alive be dead. Life was thin and terrifying on the side of not having died.’ I don’t share this particular experience, but I know that feeling, I have known it many times these past months, this past year. Thin and terrifying. These words capture the panic in breathing and blood, lungs and veins, when death has swooped close – pandemic, genocide, bombed places, a cruel disease – and what is left in its wake. 

I turn, I return, to literature, to novels. My private, enduring liturgy; my Office of Hours. It’s the only thing I know to do in the light, the shade, of it all. 

I write novels and read novels, and I think about novels. How beginnings and endings and time passing are the bones of the novelistic endeavour. I went to a bookshop salon event in the middle of this year with my daughter and the speaker commented that writers should take full advantage of the particular qualities of the literary form in which they work. I think about the capaciousness and allowances and scope of the novel form. Representations of life and death are granted narrative space and discursive time by as well as within the novel form; that expansive vessel whose capacity is often understood in temporal and spatial terms. ‘TIME plus SPACE’ in the configuration offered by Kate Briggs’ brilliant novel about the novel, The Long Form. A narrative shape that is a container (Briggs again, reading Fielding, ‘a recipient. A sort of folder. A holder.’)  

I look down my list of reading and discern patterns, likenesses, and consider the way that novels constantly talk to each other. In my scholarly work, I do this formally, explicating textual chain reaction in the afterlives of Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters. What readers and writers do to and with novels by Austen and the Brontës, in-filling and elaborating, re-telling and re-casting and re-positioning characters and plots and scenarios in constant, ever-changing variety, so that the stories will keep on beginning and ending. My own habit of re-reading books springs from a similar impulse. I want the novels I love to continue ending and beginning and speaking. Fervent reading, if Becca Rothfeld is correct in her assertion that ‘to want something with sufficient fervor is to want it beyond the possibility of ever getting enough of it.’ Novels live differently, each time they are encountered, in different life stages, circumstances, years. There is longevity, a continued, variegated resonance, in what returned-to novels say, in how they say it. Vivian Gornick writes of the ‘nerves of the prose’ in books to which she repeatedly returns, and I like this image. There is something vibratory about it, which exemplifies how meanings from the same set of words can emanate in waves of infinite variation. 

The quality of self-consciousness that came home to me when I was reading, and re-reading, The Buried Life is encoded in the novel form.  Even when an individual novel is resisting, or refusing, its conventions, it is still, self-consciously, being a novel and (self-consciously) reflecting on its own novel-ness. Novels work off and from an awareness of the traditions and histories and functions of their form, announcing themselves as novels, and as novel (following Briggs, following Fielding), in always-promised variation. This is the contract, the conditions under which they are read and re-read. The novel is always calling attention to its form. Look at me being a novel, it says. But believe me, believe in me. 

The type of novel I habitually inhabit, or that inhabits me, and to which I turn and return over the years, in years like this one, is realist fiction – novels set in places and landscapes that resemble those of the real world. They make use of breaks, including chapters, which produce a cartography of discursive space. Discontinuities in text, stopping, resuming, blank areas on the page or across a volume, also contribute to the visual impression of a book’s spatiality, its physical delineation of a realm resembling our own. This mimesis is self-conscious; as Terry Eagleton notes, ‘[t]o call something “realist” is to confess that it is not the real thing’.  The characters in this type of fiction act and speak in recognisable ways, with verisimilitude; they ‘live’ and (crucially, here) they ‘die’, because the western realist novel’s traditional (hyper)focus on the experiences and the voices of the individual, on characters who make their quixotic way in and through imagined environments, permits (or invites) the prospect of death as a distinctive personal destiny, as well as universal destination. The end shimmers perennially on story’s receding horizon. 

Death, Walter Benjamin asserts in his essay on storytelling and the work of Nikolai Leskov, lends the storyteller authority, and sanctions the story itself. For in dying, ‘not only do knowledge and wisdom, but especially one’s life experiences – that is, the material of which stories are made – become most communicable.’ These things become the stuff of story, the impulse of telling. So we could contend that all novels rely on death; that they are ultimately about death. Take to its conclusion Hemingway’s much-quoted maxim that ‘all stories, if continued far enough, end in death’, then even the marriage plot is really the death plot. The novel form does lend itself generously to rumination on death, to presaging it and imagining it and depicting it. Literature has, according to the editors of The Routledge Companion to Death and Literature, a persistent engagement with ‘the ever-evolving relationship humanity has with its ultimate demise’. In fiction, over and again, writers and readers confront death, rehearsing the moment that can only be experienced once, in real life, by any single protagonist. Benjamin writes that ‘[w]hat draws the reader to a novel is the hope of warming his shivering life at the flame of a death he reads about.’ Death comes to fictional characters, or the characters come to it, or are brought to it. Plots turn on deaths, and little deaths, or dwell in the wake of them. 

I don’t really like the term ‘passed’. I don’t use it. I say ‘dead’, ‘died’. But I will say that the narration of a novel renders everything passed. This is an effect of the conventional novelistic past tense, yes, but the same is true even of novels written in the present tense. We take up any novel and, as James Wood observes, ‘ the entire story is already complete … [w]e hold it in our hands.’ It is fully realised. Perhaps this is why novels are working for me, here and now, as well as always. The narrated, being already uttered, provides a fixed point while everything else is in flux (some days, I say, in freefall). A fixedness that is also death. Wood says that fictional form ‘is always a kind of death’. And not only a death, but a killing: ‘not just because people often die in novels and stories, but more importantly, even if they do not die, they have already happened.’ True, whatever happens to characters, living or dying on pages, everyone described in the made-up place of the novel is (or was) always, already dead.  

I look into the Prayer Book of the tradition in which I was raised, and check the words against my memory. I find the burial service; it says that in the midst of life we are in death. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. A smudge on the forehead. I often say I write to understand myself, to ask what made me this way. And in language, through repetition and rhythm and ritual, this Book helped make me. Before I could read the words, my mother's finger tracked along the lines for me to follow as the congregation spoke the responses.

It is present in the funeral scene in my novel, Diving, Falling,  which is set in the aftermath of a death – in the turbulence, my friend calls it, and I like the way this image evokes white water, the idea of being tossed about in, carried away by, what is churned up around us when someone dies. It is apt, too, because this novel’s symbolic environment is a waterscape – river and sea and, in its title, a twisting, twinned descent into a body of water, asking who, in any relationship, has control, or intent, or autonomy. It, like its protagonist and narrator, Leila Whittaker, goes to the sea. The ocean is symbol, escape, barometer, the Underworld; and in the final painting done by her dead husband, Ken Black, it is art. There is a lot of dropping, falling, drowning in this novel. Things slip and fall away, emotional ground too. In the midst of its life, we are in death. 

And grief. Writing this novel, I carried a responsibility to depict the complicated nature of Leila’s particular grieving, and of grief itself. The watery way that overwhelms, and ebbs and flows, and lies in wait, to break upon us in the details, the ambush of the last-opened bottle in the cupboard. The stark prospect of no more, ever again. The lasts and all the firsts – the first Christmas, birthday, anniversary – lining up like waves in readiness.  

Diving, Falling is a novel of middle age, a travelling towards, a looking back. Written in middle age. I wanted to develop the character of a mid-life woman, with her desires, and in all her complexity and contradictions and accumulated experience. It depicts a time of flux and change, it is charged with a fear of time running out. My fear of time running out, as well as Leila’s. According to Carl Jung, in this life-stage, people find that ‘we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life’s morning’. Leila is discovering that: in her parenting, her friendships, her creative work. The collusions around which she had built her life. This novel is in many ways about time; time of life, time in life. In a slant way, it is also about narrative time, and about novels. It begins with a death, but its first word also resists, or plays with, or refuses, the idea of beginnings. In line with the form’s capacity for self-reflection, the beginning and ending were always going to be about beginnings and endings and narration. Diving, Falling starts with ‘And’ – small active word, connective narrative tissue – thus making visible the narratorial precept that stories merely start (and stop) being told at some point. The underlying story of my novel, any novel, precedes its telling, and continues after it. The way that stories are narrated, existing as they do, in interstice, mirrors the way that Carl Jung characterised life itself as ‘a short episode between two great mysteries.’  

Crafting a novel around a protagonist and narrator who is herself a novelist gave me scope in Diving, Falling to develop the theme of the cost of writing (and who pays it); how what is written (all writing, fiction, pieces like this one) can impact the people around the writer, loved people. It also allowed me to explore the loneliness and provocations and consolations of a literary life, of all this turning to novels. It asks if artists of all kinds look to pay testimony with their art – a victory over forgetting, or perhaps, some form of victory over death; the imprinted brushstrokes in Ken Black’s final painting seem to Leila to be saying ‘remember me’.  

Like me, Leila sees and experiences the world as both a writer and a reader. It is no accident that in the section of my novel in which she is writing her novel, she is also reading intensely: poetry, mythology, fiction. Two Woolf novels on her table in Sydney, the books she carried with her, to Ken, when she was a young woman. Leila thinks back through her (thinking back through mothers being one of Woolf’s quotable pronouncements in A Room of One’s Own), she talks about her, she thinks about her. (I dream about her).  

For Leila, and for me, no novels, or thinking about novels, without Virginia Woolf.  

I turn, return, to Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, in my reading and in my thinking about reading, considering narrative time and my own time.  This time, I’m reading the Oxford World’s Classics edition, the one with the woman on the cover looking into the ocean from a cliff. ‘On the Edge of the Cliff’ the painting is called. Of its numerous covers, I like this one. The expanse of the sea, like a sky. The woman’s strong hand on her sturdy hip, her foot positioned for stability with the poise of a dancer. She doesn’t seem on the edge of anything. Not like me, not like Leila in my novel, as she contemplates the fallout from art, feeling as if she were standing on top of a tall building, swaying. I turn to Woolf to recalibrate in the face of time, of life, and death. I return to her in the same way that I go to poetry. When I want language still and strong. Something audacious, dangerous in the wrong hands, safe in hers. 

I have been suggesting that a (my) preoccupation with time and death is an enthralment that has a particular grounding in the nature and characteristics of the novel form; its measuring and tracking of accreting narrative time, its travelling towards ends and an end. I see these things in the three-part structure of Woolf’s novel. The opening section, with its thwarted excursion to the lighthouse, and the closing one, a denouement, the journey of the remnant family to the lighthouse, and Lily Briscoe completing her painting, fulfilling her vision, endorsing the aspiration and the act of women creating. The middle section – ‘Time Passes’ – which syphons time, altering the flow, shifting, morphing, expanding and contracting the timespan. The passage – of text, of space, of time – exists in the interval between the more quotidian rhythms set up in the first section and resumed in the next. Interstitial, we might call it. Ten years compressed, between times, between the window and the lighthouse.  In it, Woolf announces death, parenthetically. Death. Decay. Ruins. War. The damage done by time, by history, in place. How the destiny of the house, of all houses and Houses, is balanced ‘in that moment, that hesitation when dawn trembles and night pauses, when if a feather alight in the scale it will be weighed down.’  

In this section of the novel, Graham Fraser argues, Woolf creates an ‘ahuman aesthetics of ruin’, in which ‘[t]he shaping agent is time’ rather than human actors. The thing about ruins, he points out, is that we find them beautiful, and this is one of their paradoxes. They provide an aesthetic pleasure that we would also prevent; for all their beauty of silence and light, ‘what we fear in ruin are mutability, loss, and mortality, which are themselves the sign of time passing.’ Reading this novel, all novels, I am momentarily suspended above the effects of time, of my times, so I can comprehend, in a long arc, time and change and mortality and loss, these things to which I must, in my life, surrender. Joan Silber observes that, in this novel, Woolf ‘plays with scale, something fiction is good at doing, and she uses all her powers, truly stretches them to the limit, to convey the tidal pull of time, the story under the story.’ This play of time, with time, short – long – short. Art fighting back. 

To the Lighthouse is an hourglass, in its narrative shape, famously sketched by Woolf as ‘two blocks joined by a corridor’, and in what it does with the time it holds. In it, in the ‘Time Passes’ section especially, I see and hear time’s unheeding, relentless march. I feel it, the sand slipping. All human life, all life, transient and finite; this sad, general, particular inevitability. When I turn to To the Lighthouse, to Mrs Dalloway, and The Waves, I read them in a different light, at this time in my life, this time in history, this year.  

I read Nevermore earlier this year. It made it to the phone list (a prescience, a response). The narrator is grieving the death of a friend while she works at translating the ‘Time Passes’ section of To the Lighthouse – another unnamed narrator, like Wood’s, making us say ‘the narrator’ when we think and talk about these novels, holding the novel’s identity as novel, as something that is being told, continually before the reader’s eye. I’m captivated by its scope – it takes in art, places, catastrophes, losses and rebuildings around the world, across time – and by what it says about translations and translating and language. But I also home in, I land (circling, again) on its meditations on grief. I dog-ear its pages. I annotate in my idiosyncratic system, using lines, squiggles, unusually, no waves. A straight line, in pencil, alongside this: ‘Absence settles in, it digs the way the sea sculpts the shore, continuously, stubbornly – and even if the water regularly withdraws, it always returns, relentlessly. Absence has the upper hand.’ 

In the end, it was like something in a novel; or, narrated, it becomes like something in a novel. We sat on the steps and raised our glasses to her. It was a bleak day, in all ways, but at times the sun shone through the trees.