There is only one story of our lives and we tell it over and over again, in a thousand different disguises, whether we know it or not.
-Pam Houston
A writing teacher once urged me to read my favorite authors’ first novels. They would pull back the curtain and better show their seams—what they were striving for before they hit their stride. So I read Cormac McCarthy’s The Orchard Keeper and Ann Patchett’s The Patron Saint of Liars, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Pale View of Hills. Each of them instructive and fascinating, especially in light of what came later. There is something thrilling in coming late to a brilliant writer and studying their evolution. Like binging all four seasons of Battlestar Galactica some cool-sounding show.
The first novel I came across of William Trevor’s was his last: Love & Summer. It’s one of my very favorite books. (His first is out of print; apparently he all but disowned it.)
Set in 1950s small-town Ireland, Love & Summer follows Ellie Dillahan, a quiet orphan girl sent to keep house for a tragically widowed farmer she eventually marries. Ellie is childless but content. Until she meets Florian Kilderry, a young man her own age, preparing to move away from Ireland.
Trevor is a master at slow-weaving multiple points of view until he utterly binds us to the anchor of inevitable tragedy and drops us overboard. His subtle prose is beautiful and though most of his novels (and short stories) appear quiet, they are wrenching and profound.
When I come across such a writer (especially one who is no longer living), I keep myself half-ignorant to their backlist, wanting to leave room for surprise. And so I was delighted this spring, visiting a lovely bookstore across the country, when I came across Trevor’s Death in Summer.
Written a decade before Love, it contains many of the same elements and themes—grand ancestral houses gone to ruin, obsessions over the past, young men unable to love, traumatized characters caught up in delusional realities.
Reading Death was like reading an alternate draft of Love. The gift of an author’s first run at an idea he would tackle again and again (and eventually nail).
In the wake of Alice Munro’s recent death, I’ve been reading her old interviews. She often mentions William Maxwell, a writer I’d never heard of. Resarching his work led me to an Ann Patchett “If You Haven’t Read It, It’s New to You” segment, where she spotlights Maxwell’s last book and compares it to his first. She says:
“It’s fascinating to think about a life-long obsession. And what you really realize is that we all do this. Any writer who has a full career comes back to the same things over and over again.”
I’ve added Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow to my summer reading list. (Along with William Trevor’s Two Lives because I just can’t help myself.)
What are your favorite obsessions to read or write about?
What’s on your summer list?
Cheers,
Lacy
Alice Munro every waking moment
Ill be reading as many Lee Child books I can get my hands on this Summer, can't wait!!!