Brian Doyle died over seven years ago. I would have grieved then, but I didn’t know him or of him. This book review then is really a guise for what I wish I could have told him in a letter.
Dear Brian Doyle,
Where were you hiding? How were you hiding? After taking a closer look, it turns out you were prolific. OK, my fault, but still, how did someone not tackle me and subpoena me to the court of delight that is your writing twenty years ago? What a joy. I was given your book with a note from a friend. In his note he said, “You told me you didn’t know Brian Doyle, which may be true on one level. But you know each other.” I think what’s implied here is that you would be someone that I’d enjoy. A like mind.
As with all celebrity crushes it feels disproportionate to consider us equals in any sense, but hot damn if after having finished your book I didn’t relish the shit out of that judgment from my friend. Imagine being told you look like Brad Pitt or sang like Bono.
First, the biggest compliment I can conjure. I haven’t had as much fun reading a book since I read Wendell Berry. Or Harry Potter. Or The Great Divorce.
Second, thank you for liberating writing. I’m talking about that email that Dave Duncan included in his forward in which you cite Chekhov who asked “have you ever paid attention to Tolstoy’s language? Enormous sentences, one clause piled on top of another.” Not only is it a helpful hermeneutical cue for reading your work, but it’s a signal to the rest of us that good writing isn’t held hostage by the grammar Nazis or the editorial fuddy duddies.
Third, I don’t normally pay attention to the endorsements on the back of a book cover, but Mary Oliver endorsed your work, and her comment wasn’t even the best one if you can imagine that. Anne Fadiman won that Doyle-y, “How is it possible that someone who is no longer living can seem a hundred times more alive than the rest of us?” Yes, how is it that you managed to trap so much real-life-lived-love in your words? How do you do that? I read the whole book and am still mystified. It’s like watching a magician do a trick and then insisting she do it again so you can watch more closely.
I thought about your wife when I read your book. A lot. And your basketball playing brother who died. I thought about your kids. I thought about what it would have been like to talk to you. I imagined your mother-in-law with whom you mastered and appreciated the art of catty banter. And all the lives that filled your life with life. And the further I read the more I grieved your death in so much as it’s possible to do that through pages written by someone you never met. But I suspect that’s why what you did was so potent. Your work invited me into your life. And not just your life, but into real life.
Too many people have already connected your ability to infuse the mundane with meaning for me to try and elaborate on that. And while I want to emphasize how uniquely you do it, I’d rather not be rote. If I were going to try though I’d do it in the same way you wrote the essay about writing The Greatest Nature Essay Ever before in fact writing the greatest nature essay ever about sturgeon. I’d introduce the idea before illustrating it.
This winter my son invited over his four best friends that have all run in his rat pack since kindergarten. It was december. They ate pizza and exchanged gifts. Something compelled me to video 30 seconds of them eating pizza laughing and talking. With the miracle of TikToc I added a soundtrack. I selected the Lumineers’ cover of Deck the Halls. Not a Christmas carol of any kind of lyrical profundity, but Wesley Schultz performed a kind of alchemy with his voice. “See the yule blazing before us,” he asks with a few minor keys chiming on a piano behind his voice. The denotative takeaway is about a log giving warmth to those hovered around it (note the song originated as a Welsh New Year diddy in which locals would gather around an outside fire and sing a capella). The connotative we can play with, and in my imagination it harkens back to the Moses tradition of burning bushes. See what’s blazing before us? The video had a Gestalt effect on me. What I saw in film, the same moment I had seen a few moments earlier in person, took my breath away.
Now imagine it’s not the trickery of video editing that enabled me to see, but the writing of an artist. If I keep trying to explain this I’ll end up gushing. So let me sum it up this way. Parker Palmer, another writer from my pantheon of all time greats, said this of E.B. White, “Sixty years later, I’m still reading him, trying to figure out how he always manages to write from ‘the simplicity that lies on the other side of complexity.’” I think, and here I’ll invite reader to imagine me taking my hands off of the keyboard, resting them in my lap, and looking up to think about the magnitude of these words before, yes, I decide that this is not hyperbolic and I do mean to say exactly this, that you have written about the simplicity that lies on the other side of complexity better than anyone I know.