Blog Archives

Grow Your Brain!

3/31/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
You first parents of the human race . . . who ruined yourself for an apple, what might you not have done for a truffled turkey?
Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
Born April 1, 1755

My Book World

Doidge, Norman. The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science. New York: Penguin, 2007.

I don’t often read “science” books, but I was tempted away from literature by my partner to read this one. Dr. Doidge, through years of research, proves that the human brain is capable of being rewired, even after being damaged, even in old age!

Neuro is for “neuron,” the nerve cells in our brains and nervous systems. Plastic is for “changeable, malleable, modifiable.” At first many of the scientists didn’t dare use the word “neuroplasticity” in their publications, and their peers belittled them for promoting a fanciful notion (xix).

One aspect that makes the book fascinating is the number of case studies that Doidge brings to the reader’s attention: people with brain injuries, people born with only the right side of their brain, people with extreme emotional problems resulting from childhood trauma. Doidge contends that with exercise, people can change their brain “maps,” can change their brains. He tells of Arrowsmith, a school that takes these kinds of exercises seriously.

The brain exercises are life-transforming. One American graduate told me that when he came to the school at thirteen, his math and reading skills were still at a third-grade level. He had been told after neuropsychological testing at Tufts University that he would never improve . . . after three years at Arrowsmith, he was reading and doing math at a tenth-grade level (41).

The concept of brain plasticity helps to explain or reexamine all sorts of problems or phenomena.

Language development, for instance, has a critical period that begins in infancy and ends between eight years and puberty. After this critical period closes, a person’s ability to learn a second language without an accent is limited. In fact, second languages learned after the critical period are not processed in the same part of the brain as in the native tongue (52).

One of the experts that Doidge studies, Michael Merzenich, continues the line of thinking:

If two languages are learned at the same time, during the critical period, both get a foothold. Brain scans . . . show that in a bilingual child all the sounds of its two languages share a single large map, a library of sounds from both languages (60).

Merzenich strongly believes that older persons should continue “intensive learning,” that such an activity strengthens our brains.

Merzenich thinks our neglect of intensive learning as we age leads the systems in the brain that modulate, regulate, and control plasticity to waste away. In response he has developed brain exercises for age-related cognitive decline—the common decline of memory, thinking, and processing speed (85).

Such activities as reading the newspaper, practicing a profession of many years, and speaking our own language are mostly the replay of mastered skills, not learning. By the time we hit our seventies, we may not have systematically engaged the systems in the brain that regulate plasticity for fifty years (87).

Wow! Doidge goes on to say that is why learning a new language in old age is so good for improving the memory generally (87).

To summarize the rest of the book, the author connects brain plasticity with love and personal relationships, imagination, rejuvenation, as well.

I concluded the reading of this book with great optimism. One’s brain does not have to wither and die with age. One can and should continue to learn. One may now approach the learning of things that he or she has always wanted to do but was afraid to try, with a totally new point of view, a renewed confidence. Doing so will increase the plasticity of the brain and thus strengthen it overall.

When I was young and would sometimes glance ahead, with fear and trepidation, to growing old, I often sought out older people for inspiration. The “seniors” I admired the most were the ones who continued to learn, continued to forge new pathways through life.

One woman in particular, Naomi, at age fifty-five—after finishing the rearing of her children and serving as caregiver to both her mother and mother-in-law—finished her BFA and moved to Taos, New Mexico. There she reinvented herself as a visual artist, who counted among her closest friends Agnes Martin, renowned abstract expressionist. Naomi lived well into her eighties, even outlived a daughter who died of cancer, before succumbing to the disease herself.

I still think of Naomi as a superb model for all of us. Whenever I’m tempted to feel sorry for myself, I think of Naomi and what she accomplished the last thirty years of her life. We must continue to learn, continue to forge for ourselves the lives that will most bring us satisfaction. By way of the Internet, by way of local schools and classes, we can learn almost anything we wish. It’s the least we can do for ourselves and for those who are to follow us. May they admire us as much as I’ve admired Naomi.

Related websites:
www.normandoidge.com
www.lumosity.com

WEDNESDAY: PHOTOGRAPHY

New Yorker Fiction 2014

3/27/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
Lists of books we reread and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves.
Russell Banks
Born March 28, 1940

Erdrich's Cat is Elusive

March 31, 2014, Louise Erdrich, “The Big Cat”: A nameless narrator, over time, marries two different women—one who snores and one who does not. ¶ As always, Erdrich’s story contains a bit of the mystical. The narrator and Elida, his first wife, spend a Christmas with her parents in a poorly insulated house, whose interior walls exude frost early in the morning. He tells his daughter the layers of frost are the snores of his wife and her sisters. Later, he divorces his first wife and marries Laurene, a rich woman who does not snore. Having sacrificed so much sleep early on, the narrator now takes afternoon naps to catch up. ¶ He has monthly meetings with Elida over their daughter’s issues. One day he kisses Elida, and they conduct an affair, then get back together and remarry. Of course, the narrator is faced with living with the snoring again. In the last scene, Elida’s snores now take on the “gurgling purr of a big cat digesting prey meat.” The narrator wakes, in a sweat, perhaps realizing that he may be the prey meat. Erdrich’s book, The Round House came out in 2012.
[The magazine gives no credit for the story’s illustration.]

TUESDAY: MY BOOK WORLD

More Canyon Photography

3/25/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.
Tennessee Williams
Born March 26, 1914

Yellow House Canyon Weekend

FRIDAY: NEW YORKER FICTION FOR 3/31/14

My Book World

3/24/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
Flannery O'Connor
Born March 25, 1925

Gray's Monumental Project

Gray, James. Teachers at the Center: A Memoir of the Early Years of the National Writing Project. Berkeley: National Writing Project, 2000.

James Gray, founder of the National Writing Project, writes of his many experiences with teachers who are also writers. The idea he develops is to send teacher/writers back to their classrooms to teach writing, not just English grammar. The earlier part of the book—filled with personal anecdotes about his own development as writer, anecdotes about teachers—seems more interesting than later sections about the political nuts and bolts of the organization’s formation.

Some nuggets from James Gray:

“I had thrived in Miss Popham’s class because she was in charge of her own curriculum. She had a wonderful idea and freedom to teach as she wished. I still think hers is the best way to organize a literature class in high school if the goal is to encourage wide reading and the love of books. My own best teaching in high school reflected my attempts to replicate the spirit of that 1943 class” (2).

“When teaching or learning new skills like reading Shakespeare or writing well, a teacher needs to keep at it. One way we learn to read and write is by reading and writing regularly and frequently” (15).

“This was a teachers-teaching-teachers idea, rare for its time [1961] and transparently sensible. Effective and experienced classroom teachers, rather than professors, did the job of teaching and supervising beginning student teachers. I accepted, and every year for the next fourteen years I taught fifteen beginning English teachers how to teach and visited them in their student teaching classes. Year after year, I had groups of gifted young teachers who, I always thought, could have chosen any career, but chose teaching because teaching is what they had always wanted to do” (25).

“I was thinking that I should have listened to my parents and gone to law school. The thought of facing thirty-four sixth-grade students on Monday without the slightest notion of what I was going to teach was terrifying. In frustration, I kicked at a rock partially buried in the mud. Out scurried several small green crabs. One half-dollar-size specimen picked the edge of my shoe as its next hiding place. I carefully kneeled down without moving my foot to take a better look. The obtuse angle of the setting sunlight caused the crab to light up. She was blowing phosphorescent bubbles from her gill slits. I crouched in the mud absolutely transfixed. Each cell of that animal was illuminated in flame. I momentarily lost my breath . . . as if I had been jolted to consciousness. I knew then that if I could share this type of feeling with my students, I would be teaching them something worthwhile” (74).

“During the summer institutes, BAWP [Bay Area Writing Project] works to maintain a balance between knowledge gained through practice and knowledge gleaned through research and literature in the field. As teachers prepare for their demonstrations, they are asked to describe not only what they do but why they do it” (95).

“From the outset, the writing project adopted a different take on inservice. We believed that if school reform was to be effective, inservice programs must be conducted by the folks on the ground. Classroom teachers are the linchpin of reform. School reform can’t happen just by passing laws, publishing mandates, requiring courses, or reading one more book. But real school reform can happen when teachers come together regularly throughout their careers to explore practices that effective teachers have already proven are successful in their classrooms. Inservice of this sort equals professional development, two terms that, alas, have not always been synonymous” (103).

I was heartened by this book even though I left teaching some time ago. Gray helps to reinforce the idea that I may have done a fairly good job of teaching. If nothing more, his book helps me to see that teaching composition was not a waste of time. Instead, it may be the most important thing that I did with my life, topping, in terms of consequence, anything that I’ve ever written.

WEDNESDAY: MORE PHOTOGRAPHY FROM YELLOW HOUSE CANYON

New Yorker Fiction

3/20/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
Compromise, if not the spice of life, is its solidity. It is what makes nations great and marriages happy.
Phyllis McGinley
Born March 21, 1905

Hadley Wins Again

March 24, 2014, Tessa Hadley, “Under the Sign of the Moon”: Greta, in her sixties, travels by train from London to Liverpool to visit her daughter and experiences a chance encounter with a much younger man. ¶ Hadley’s greatest gift may be developing character. She so thoroughly creates interesting individuals that the plot seems to unfold as a result of their willful actions—as if they are actual people. We are drawn along with Greta from her past—two husbands, her life as a wife and mother—to the present, as a woman recovering from cancer. The young man’s attentions seem odd; she speculates he must have a mother fixation to be so attentive to her needs. At the same time she feels rejuvenated.

. . . the way you might describe a limb getting over an attack of pins and needles—that she was coming back to life.

When Greta has a second stranger-on-a-train encounter with the young man, he awkwardly spills his drink in her lap, and while he moves to clean her dress, he places his head on her knee. She insists that he leave the establishment immediately. He has left her a gift, a worn copy of a historical novel, in which he has written what turns out to be her name (though he'd said her name was the same as his mother's):

Greta was confused, and for one long moment she really believed that it was fated, that this stranger had known her before he ever met her, and that he had written her name inside his book before she even told him what it was.

Hadley is comfortable with Greta’s ambiguous feelings, and it feels natural because often it is the way we feel about our own lives.

The New Yorker published three of Hadley’s stories in 2013, and with this one, she gives this year a great start. Hadley’s novel Clever Girl is out now.
Benoit Paillé, Photographer

TUESDAY: MY BOOK WORLD

Photography 3/19/14

3/18/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.
Philip Roth
Born March 19, 1933

Yellow House Canyon

FRIDAY: NEW YORKER FICTION 2014

My Book World

3/17/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
We are most alive when we're in love.
John Updike
Born March 18, 1932

Cunningham's Charms

Cunningham, Michael. By Nightfall. New York: Farrar, 2010.

I’ve now read everything Michael Cunningham has ever written, including several readings of The Hours, and I believe he may be a genius. A rare author it is who can create a world so airtight and yet breath-like, flexible, that it, itself, seems like a living thing. Rare it is that a contemporary author can compel me to sacrifice an entire morning to finishing a novel as if it were a conversation of the utmost importance.

In By Nightfall, a couple in their forties are forging a life for themselves in SoHo. Peter owns his own gallery, and is on the precipice of either making it big or falling into an acceptably mediocre state forever:

Get Groff (and really, would he blame Groff for going with a bigger gallery?) and he settles, quite possibly for good (he hasn’t been up and coming for almost a decade now), into a career of determined semidefeat, a champion of the overlooked and the almost-but-not-quite (228).

His wife Rebecca is an editor. When Rebecca’s brother Ethan (called Mizzy, because he, arriving quite late in the family’s life, is a mistake) comes for a visit, both are rather knocked for a loop. He is one of those charming, good-looking young men who can get almost anything or anybody he wants because he’s always been told that he is special. In reality, Mizzy is a charming and functional drug addict. But the reader senses that it’s only a matter of time before he must go into rehab again, and who’s up for it this time? Certainly not Mizzy.

To give more of the plot would be to ruin the joys of this book. Cunningham is a master of structure, characterization, and storytelling. The chapters, themselves titled, become short stories, yet each chapter leads in a linked manner from one to the other. Cunningham has a way of realizing character by way of reflection. Although he’s a master of dialogue, as well, we often learn more through what seem like the meanderings of the characters’ minds. Their inner and outer expressions combine to form characters that are as real as our friends, our family members. Cunningham creates an overarching structure, in which the characters are one way in the beginning, we watch them metamorphose, and then at the end, we see them broken, like shards of pottery that have been dashed against the floor. With the last sentence of the book, however, we realize Peter and Rebecca going to put their lives back together. At least they’re going to try.

In an interview Cunningham once said that with each book he tries to challenge himself to something larger than the last time. At first, this seems like a smaller, quieter, novel, compared to his previous tomes, but I'm not so sure. With this one he manages to equal, at least, what he has written in the past. Only time will tell if it is better.

WEDNESDAY: PHOTOS OF YELLOW HOUSE CANYON

New Yorker Fiction

3/13/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Albert Einstein
Born March 14, 1879

Reliving it Up?

Julien Pacaud

March 17, 2014, T. Coraghessan Boyle, “The Relive Box”: A nameless man narrates his tale of a “relive” box, by which he can recite a date and time and relive that moment. ¶ What makes this an enjoyable story is the universality of the conceit. Which one of us wouldn’t like to say “Reset,” and go to a time in our lives when we were younger, happier, livelier, sexier? Who wouldn’t like to relive those times we can’t quite recall in order to get them straight in our minds? Boyle’s characters make clear the potential problems with using such a device. We would wear ourselves out reliving the past. Oh, hm. We often do that anyway: reliving the times we were in love, in the throes of passion, relicking our wounds from some sort of battle so that we can “win” it the second time around. The narrator sums up the situation best in the last lines of the story. When his fifteen-year-old daughter Kate asks him—mid-trance by way of the relive box—if he is there, he replies, “I’m not here. I’m not. I’m not.” When we live in the past—with or without a relive box—we’re definitely not here. Boyle published When the Killing’s Done in 2011.
Julien Pacaud, Illustrator

TUESDAY: MY BOOK WORLD

Photography: Kayaks

3/11/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
You gotta have swine to show you where the truffles are.
Edward Albee
Born March 12, 1928

Kolorful Kayaks

On this day in October 2008, Idaho's Red Fish Lake appeared like glass. Though Ken and I returned to the lake several times in the coming years, we never saw a day that the water was this calm. Moreover, upon one visit, we would see the kayaks piled on top of one another, their vivid colors faded by the elements. This photograph seems to have caught them at their best. Also the sky. The forest. A perfect day, a perfect peace.

FRIDAY: NEW YORKER FICTION 2014

My Latest Story

3/10/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
The difference between life and the movies is that a script has to make sense, and life doesn't.
Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Born February 11, 1909

Read a passage from my latest published story, "A Certain Kind of Mischief," a narrative of two boys with way too much time on their hands.

I watch as he gingerly undoes the thin cambric material concealing his box springs and pulls out a miniature copy of the Adventures of Tom Sawyer. “Found it on my teacher’s desk in fifth grade,” he whispers. “I’ve read it like twenty times.” He replaces it by wedging it between a spring and the mattress. Untying some strings, he produces a jar filled with grasshopper legs.

“Gross, dude,” I whisper, and he giggles, tying the jar back in place. He produces a small jewelry box.

“Here, open it.” I do and inside there’s a gold ring with a red stone. “It’s my Meemaw’s high school ring.”

You can find out what happens to this latter-day Tom and Huck, in the latest issue of the Beloit Fiction Journal. Buy it for $10 by clicking here.

My Book World: On Neruda's Case

Ampuero, Roberto. The Neruda Case. Translated by Carolina De Robertis. New York: Riverhead, 2012.

Ampuero’s novel, The Neruda Case, is divided into five parts, each one named after a woman whom Pablo Neruda is involved with over his lifetime, either as mistress or spouse. This novel is one of those in which a historic figure, in this case, a distinguished South American poet, is employed as a fictional character (names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously).

A kind of realization of Neruda’s life, the novel takes place against the backdrop of a pre-Pinochet Chile. In the early 1970s, Cuban Cayetano Brulé meets Neruda at a party, and the poet hires Brulé to help him locate a daughter he never really knew, the only child he believes he ever sired. Even though Brulé has never worked before as a detective, he agrees to help Dan Pablo.

In the part titled “Josie,” Brulé realizes Neruda has cancer, and the poet first engages him to locate a certain oncologist in Mexico. Brulé’s “training” as a sleuth takes place by way of reading certain detective novels that Neruda recommends. Throughout the novel, Brulé compares and contrasts his methods, his capabilities, with the fictional detectives of this one author. In order to make Brulé look like a detective, Neruda dresses him, presenting him with a lilac-colored tie dotted with small green guanacos (llamas): “It had a coarse texture, though a nice feel. On the lilac background, the guanacos leapt joyfully, grazed placidly, or contemplated the horizon” (55). Don Pablo declares the tie is over forty years old. He wore it when he met “some of the greatest European intellectuals” (55). He also wore it when he “went underground” in the 1950s. Essentially, Neruda means for the tie to be a talisman, to bring Brulé luck as he heads out on his mission to find Neruda’s daughter. This visual cue appears many times throughout the novel. Is it also a motif representing Don Pablo when he is not present? A reminder of Brulé’s mission, his amateur status? One is not quite sure, but it is one of those delightful images that makes the reader feel that he’s returned to familiar ground.

Throughout, author Ampuero recaps certain points in order to keep the reader apprised (and interested): “My women never gave me children. Not Josie Bliss, who was a tornado of jealousy, not the Cyclops María Antonieta, who gave birth to a deformed being; nor did Delia del Carril, whose womb was dried up when I met her; nor Matilde, who had several miscarriages. I’ve had everything in life, Cayetano: friends, lovers, fame, money, prestige, they’ve even given me the Nobel Prize—but I never had a child. Beatriz is my last hope. It’s a hope I buried long ago. I’d give all my poetry in exchange for that daughter” (132-3).

Oh, come on! one has to say. Really? Such a statement makes for good character motivation, but would a renowned poet have said such a thing?

Brulé’s trip continues throughout the world, including East Germany’s Berlin. One comes to believe that each of the five women in Don Pablo Neruda’s life has inspired him to be the poet he becomes; each is an integral part of the work that expresses the human being he is. Without each, or by remaining with only one woman, he would never produce the work that he does. With three chapters to go, Neruda dies, and Brulé is never able to inform the poet the truth about his daughter. As part of the novel’s denouement, one sees the lilac tie with green guanacos three more times:

“He wiped his tears with his guanaco tie, and studied the corpse’s face again through the shadows” (361). This seems to be Brulé’s way of connecting with the poet one last time.

The way is not easy, in the time of great political upheaval, but Brulé is able to attend Neruda’s funeral. “He wore his best suit, a white shirt, and the violet tie covered in small green guanacos” (363).

“He bit his lips, still unable to place Ruggiero, who now pressed his index finger against Cayetano’s green-and-purple guanaco tie, and smiled. ¶ ‘A friend of mine pushed you into that truck,’ he said. ‘They took you to Puchuncaví” (371). This scene brings Brulé full circle to the point where he was at the beginning of the novel.

The Neruda Case is a very finely constructed and enjoyable novel—not only as a sophisticated whodunit, but as a literary novel, as well. And even though I usually dislike reading translations (something is always lost), this one is superb. Read it!

WEDNESDAY: PHOTOGRAPH AND SHORT ESSAY

New Yorker Fiction 2014

3/6/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
It was painful, but sometimes you must have these painful moments where you tear yourself away from something that isn't working.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Born March 8, 1960

The More Sheltered Woman?

Gracia Lam

March 10, 2014, Yiyun Li, “A Sheltered Woman”: Auntie Mae, a Chinese immigrant who works as a baby nurse in San Francisco, must decide if she wishes to continue her work or move onto something else. ¶ The use of internal monologue seems to enhance this story. If we didn’t know some of Auntie Mae’s thoughts, we wouldn’t know her very well. Would we know, for example, that she’s worked for eleven years as a baby nurse? ¶ The woman seems to have two personalities, one a rather mystical one that sees a statue of an egret fly away, but she’s also a woman who believes in strict routines for the beginning of a baby’s life. She talks to her late husband as if he were still around, yet she grounds herself in her work, sort of befriending a plumber her age, yet not really trusting him. ¶ Li asks much of the reader. To be patient in seeing the story develop. She asks us to forget that we never know how her husband died. We don’t know how Auntie Mae spends her money, keeping it a secret from all of us, as well as her new friend, Paul. ¶ The story is reminiscent, in tone, of Katherine Anne Porter’s “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” but while it mimics its tone, its mysteries, Li’s story does not seem to achieve the same depth. Maybe, however, in fifty years, high school students will be studying Li’s “A Sheltered Woman” for its mysteries, unpacking its gems during AP exams in which they must decide who is the more sheltered woman, Auntie Mae or the mother she is helping. Li’s Kinder Than Solitude was published recently.
Gracia Lam, Illustrator

TUESDAY: MY BOOK WORLD

Photos

3/4/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
For years of faithfulness even as a child are not thrown away, but yield . . . a strength at last in times of trial.
Constance Fenimore Woolson
Born March 5, 1840

Route 66 Meets New Destiny

This past weekend Ken and I took yet another chance to flee West Texas. While the Panhandle suffered single-digit temperatures, we experienced, by comparison, much milder temperatures in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The Laguna tribe has built a casino, The Route 66 Casino, on land that would otherwise be useless, and they seem to have turned it into a thriving business.

Unlike a number of other casinos we've been to, the Route 66 is kept clean from the busy carpet of old Route 66 icons, and an "asphalt" road making up all the major aisles of the casino and hotel to each and every machine. Employees work hard to keep ashtrays emptied and machines free of finger prints.

I find it easy to see how one can get hooked on gambling. The hum of the machines, each with its own two-speakered music coming at you, each with its own characteristic sounds. The thrumming reward you receive when you make fifty dollars on a Wheel of Fortune turn of the wheel. It spurns you to press the Max Bet a few more times. And then you win maybe two hundred dollars, and you think this will go on forever. And sometimes it does, all the way to four hundred dollars. Never mind that you've allowed the machine to suck you dry to the tune of a hundred dollars to win that much.

But then there are all the other machines. Penny machines. Dollar machines. Machines with almost every worldly motif: pyramids, TV shows, movies, myths, old and new. There's blackjack, if you're into that sort of thing. Real poker games, though video poker has its own rewards, if you're shrewd enough to outmaneuver the machine.

In addition, the place has three eating establishments, a pool, and a work-out area. It's not Vegas, but it's a nice weekend getaway! And it's only six hours from home.

FRIDAY: NEW YORKER FICTION 2014

My Book World

3/3/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
The creative process is a process of surrender, not control.
Julia Cameron
Born March 4, 1948

A Small But Beautiful World

Ackerley, J. R. We Think the World of You. New York: New York Review Books, 1960.

Several years ago (I’m always behind in my reading and follow-up) in the New Yorker, I became acquainted with writer J. R. Ackerley for the first time. From the same generation as my grandparents, as F. Scott Fitzgerald, he was a British man who published only four books in his life. Seems that it took him a long time in between to develop each one. The novel is about Frank, a young man in London, in love with a man named Johnny, Johnny’s wife, Megan, and Evie, Johnny’s German Shepherd pup.

We Think the World of You is built somewhat around the motif of the cliché embodied in the title. No less that seventeen times does Ackerley employ a form of it to demonstrate the offhand way the characters have of treating one another and Evie. And though the reader notices the repetition, it becomes an acceptable motif.

While we were talking about [Johnny, who is in prison], the scullery door was pushed open and a dog came in.

“Hullo, Evie,” said Millie.

I had forgotten all about Johnny’s dog.

“So this is the creature he wanted me to take?”

“Yes, he couldn’t get no one to mind her, so I had to have her in the end. Not that I wanted her, the scamp.”

She was certainly a pretty bitch, a few months old, rather large and long-legged, and lavishly affectionate in the fawning, insinuating way puppies have (22).

Evie continues to insinuate her way into Frank’s life, at least, while everyone else seems to shove her away. She’s destructive, probably because she is not exercised properly.

How she loved running, using her muscles, her strong young limbs! If Tom or the rebuffed boy took her out every day on the lead round these mean streets what use would that be to her? She ought to be bounding a daily ten miles over grass. She ought to be in the country (59).

There is some wrangling between Frank and Johnny’s wife and sister over the care of Evie, though they “think the world of her.” After Johnny is released from prison, Johnny spends some time with Frank and brings Evie with him. He is stunned how much she prefers Frank's company to his. There is an extremely tender love scene that, oddly enough, transpires with the three of them.

It was now, as the rest of our garments followed, that Evie began to exhibit an increasing perturbation as though whatever was happening before her eyes was having, upon the confidence she had hitherto shown in the distinctness of our identities, a confusing effect. Uttering little quavering cries of doubt and concern, she sat first upon our mingled clothes, gazing at us with wild surmise, then upon our mingled bodies, excitedly licking our faces as though she would solve her perplexing problem either by cementing them together with her saliva or by forcing them apart. She lay with us throughout the afternoon, her fur against our flesh, and we talked of her most of the time (177).

Throughout this trim novel, Frank is put in charge of Evie for short periods of time. Once, he even keeps her past a deadline, thinking that he will just keep her, to save her from the ineptitude of the others in her life. Finally, he promises Johnny he will pay him forty pounds for the dog.

“Did you mean what you said about the forty quid?’

“Of course.”

“Give it to me,” said he roughly.

In this way Evie became my dog.

In some way it seems a painful price; in other ways not. Forty pounds means little to Frank, who has some means. At the same time, it demonstrates how little Johnny thinks of Evie, to let her go for any price, and rather easily at that. After that Evie and Frank live peaceably for many years, yet for such peace, Frank pays a price.

Advancing age has only intensified her jealousy. I have lost all my old friends, they fear her and look at me with pity or contempt. We live entirely alone. Unless with her I can never go away. I can scarcely call my soul my own. Not that I am complaining, oh no; yet sometimes as we sit and my mind wanders back to the past, to my youthful ambitions and the freedom and independence I used to enjoy, I wonder what in the world has happened to me and how it all came about . . . . But that leads me into deep waters, too deep for fathoming; it leads me into the darkness of my own mind (209).

Anyone looking for a superficial and positive sort of dog story will be disappointed. We Think the World of You is so much more.

WEDNESDAY: TRIP TO A CASINO

Grow Your Brain!

My Book World

New Yorker Fiction 2014

Erdrich's Cat is Elusive

More Canyon Photography

Yellow House Canyon Weekend

My Book World

Gray's Monumental Project

New Yorker Fiction

Hadley Wins Again

Photography 3/19/14

Yellow House Canyon

My Book World

Cunningham's Charms

New Yorker Fiction

Reliving it Up?

Photography: Kayaks

Kolorful Kayaks

My Latest Story

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