Orange Juice, Contentment, The World Below

Big fat check from JDK came yesterday. To celebrate I immediately fell into a semi-coma, lay down on the couch and read Sue Miller's The World Below cover to cover.

Sue Miller's first novel, The Good Mother, was one of those books that chronicled a generational sea change. Let me spoil it for those of you who've never read it: it's about a divorcee with a young daughter who takes a lover, an artist, a – quaint word! – Bohemian.

One afternoon the artist is taking a shower when the little girl wanders into the bathroom.

"What's that?" asks the little girl, pointing at the artist's penis. "Can I touch it?"

He doesn't know how to say no. Or rather – the freedom, the innocence, the guileless way in which the three of them have lived and interacted over the past three months won't brook a negative.

Disaster ensues. The woman's ex-husband learns about the incident, takes the daughter away, brings the woman to court where she is flogged with the full weight of the American judicial system. She breaks off with the artist and when we see her last is an utterly defeated animal trying to find a hole on the periphery of her daughter's life which has become everything the woman didn't want it to be.

It was an interesting book for me because I had lived in communes where we all ran around naked every day and kids might touch a grown-ups' genitals – not in a sexual way, in an educational way, as though the grown-up were an extension of those human figurines that let you peer inside at the arrangement of organs and blood vessels. The Invisible Man! The Invisible Woman! A Reader's Digest article: I am Joe's Penis.

Huh,, I thought when I finished the book. It had never occurred to me that a child touching a man's penis in an artless way could be construed as wrong. It hadn't been wrong a few years before.

Sue Miller's subsequent novels never achieved the groundbreaking status of her first. I keep reading her anyway. Her style is effortless – think dumb-downed Alice Munro – and she writes about middle-aged, middle class women with identity crises -- a subject that interests me for obvious reasons. The World Below is about a woman who comes back to her grandmother's New England house after many years away and finds her grandmother's diaries in an old trunk.

Now the woman is not an interesting character but the grandmother is. Her seminal experience comes when she is diagnosed with TB and is forced into a sanatorium and has an affair with one of the other inmates:

In fact, it's possible it was his dying itself that attracted Georgia. For there was a phenomenon so common in the later stages of tuberculosis that the doctors had a name for it: spes pthistica, a kind of surge of life and false vitality that, oddly, often directly preceded the final decline.

Huh, and, huh…

Book doesn't work because, as I say, the present tense character and her problems are so utterly mundane and unengaging plus Miller makes no attempt to parallel the two women's lives. But the parts about Georgia's life are well done indeed, and as I lay on the couch reading – which I love to do – sipping orange juice, watching the sun dapple the big poplar tree growing in my front yard, I was filled with an enormous sense of well-being and awe that all it takes to feel good is money in the bank. Money! The seed of all happiness.

I worried because I had had to close the Little Store two days this week, the winds were so awful. And I worried about Nick and Purea's house in Corralitos, another Sue Miller link – they're like the golden family in Inventing the Abbotts.

I worried about my feral thirteen year old playing his video games, nursing his sense of injustice over the changes in fortunes that did not allow me to shower him with the advantages with which I was able to shower his older brother.

I worried about the older brother too, wondering whether – despite everything – I hadn't infected him with that Lone Wolf disease from which I suffer, that sense of apartness and difference from everything around me that I've never been able to cure.

I worried about the world. I worried that Obama will lose and McCain will win. I worried that gas will hit fifteen dollars a gallon. I worried that while every age has its apocalyptic scenario, the apocalyptic scenario our age faces is more drastic and horrible than any that has come before.

Still, all these worries as I lay there on the couch seemed to filter through the sunlight and its playful shadow. They weren't real. This was real – this lazy contentment, this story someone I'd never met was whispering into my ear.