As a book seller and book reviewer, I'm among the lucky ones who receives piles of galleys for free. It's almost as if books are breeding in my house. They just keep showing up - through the mail, via publishing reps, from writer friends and so forth. And while I always intend to read the books I bring home, before I know it, I'm all backed up and don't have time to crack them all. It could be I'm struggling through to the end of something else which has a deadline. Deadlines are good for motivation but they do sometimes squeeze out other books which look just as promising.
So then along came this novel- sent to me by an independent press - Dzanc - whose titles have interested me before. I put it in one of the piles and there it sat for a week or so, and then one afternoon, in the middle of reading something else, I picked it up thinking I'd just get a little flavor of it. Then I began to read more deeply and before I knew it, I could not stop.
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| extraordinary debut novel by John Englehardt |
The first thing I noticed was something that, in the hands of a less skilled writer, might have been contrived. That is, the author John Englehardt has chosen to write in 2nd person, a tricky voice to handle. It turns out to have been a brilliant choice. Because the story involves several disaffected people and culminates in a mass shooting, it needs to be handled with care, with an imposed distance but also with absolute truth, if it's going to avoid the pitfalls of sentimentality and sensationalism.
Englehardt's writing is pitch perfect. I stopped and marveled at times, and pondered what I was reading, and as I read some surprising and interesting questions emerged. Ordinary lives are interrupted by a dramatic, tragic and unnecessary shooting. But what was the journey of those lives before the shooting happened? How in the wake of a shooting can you get back to the genuine, to the mundane, because "you're constantly re-learning that to dig up a memory with nostalgia is to erase it." What happens when a marriage grows stale but you can't get out (and no - it isn't the shooter's life we're talking about here). What happens to people who have run through their marriage, when rejecting a partner "is like rejecting yourself - that the two of you have gone so far down a road together that no one else could possibly understand who you are."
I'd only got to page 37 but I was deep in these questions about an ordinary marriage. Speaker Eddie goes with his wife Casey to a club called the Riot Room where a band called Brutal Push "plays what sounds like a slow motion funeral procession. " The song ends and Eddie observes, "you try to remember that the reason you came here was to show how solicitous you could be. But you realize what's scary about this place is not that she prefers it to you, but that there's a good reason why she likes it here. ...She has to be bothered by the fact that your fights are like earthworms growing new heads after getting torn apart. And maybe she's closer to finding out why than you will ever be. .... She is waiting in the wraith-like smoke for a deeper understanding that is separate from you. She wants to discern the exact reason why sound can carry so much that it becomes deafening, why love can mature into a void."
Wow.
I hardly put this novel down until I had finished, and when I finished, I read the final, stunning paragraph several times over. Then I just sort of sat there, trying to let it sink in and settle. Bloomland stayed with me for days. Now I want to read it again.
In this story of a mass shooting at a rural university, Englehardt not only gets into the heads of community members, but into the head of the shooter himself, again via the same masterful use of 2nd person. He gets behind the trauma of a guy who knows that "if you're going to feel sad or scared you must do it in a secret place that even you cannot enter" and he gets into a community in mourning, even though it's practically impossible to "come together" as a community. because "it ends up isolating those closest to the tragedy only uniting those on the outside who - for some God forsaken reason - are trying to become part of the club."
At 200 pages, Bloomland isn't long, but it's a profound and deeply rewarding book. I read it months ago, and held off writing about it until now since I wanted my words to help the book get traction. So here it is, folks. This fantastic book comes out in just a few weeks so get yourself off to a bookstore and pick up a copy!
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| just another pile of books I hope to get around to soon~ #bloomland #johnenglehardt #debutfiction |
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