26 Miles

The Road

// March 8th, 2010 // No Comments » // Life

I’ve always had a preference for non-fiction, in a way. I’ve long held that reading non-fiction was more “useful” as it was filling my head with “facts” and making me smarter. The trouble is my bookcase is rife with barely-started or half-finished non-fiction, my usual adhoc bookmarks perched near the beginning or middle of most every book I own, like a hundred little flags waving at me and reminding me and the world of my inability to finish what I’ve started.

But what I’m finding is that the books I finish are fiction. Good fiction. Because my mind is so occupied by the daily work, it’s the novel that can take me away to somewhere else. Not just more dry facts, but a story, people to connect to and through and to live and be in the world beyond the everyday. The escape that I’ve looked for is right there in those little pages.

I spent a good chunk of my birthday weekend reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. It’s a bleak story with a narrow focus on the journey of an unnamed father and son trekking south on a desolate highway in a post-apocalyptic landscape. A grey world without sun or hope, where the daily struggle for food and life and dry warmth are constant and stark. Little is known of who they are, were, what they’ve been through, or what they hope to achieve other than moving on and “carrying the fire” of “the good people”. The chief threat they face outside of starvation are roving bands of starving cannibals who capture wanderers and store them as barely-living foodstuffs. Throughout, finishing the day alive and in each others company are victories for them both. Despite the uncertainty of their tenuous journey, that they have each other is something, enough, and in many ways everything. Their sparse dialog is not unlike so many fathers and sons: pointed, deliberate, with love painted around the edges of purpose and action.

McCarthy’s dialog is clipped, but his narrative is poetic, and his portrait of the miasmic, desperate existence after nuclear holocaust is unlike anything I’ve ever read and probably as accurate as one could imagine.

Dennis Lehane

// March 1st, 2010 // No Comments » // Life

I saw Shutter Island today. It was awesome.

Never wanting to spoil freshness of the initial cinematic experience, I try to always forestall any research into the movies I see until after I see them.

Now, for the third time, I realize after-the-fact that this awesome movie I just saw was based on a book by Dennis Lehane.

This guy is good!

The great work by Scorsese and DiCaprio notwithstanding, I confess I’m a little partial to writers.

Mystic River was the first one I saw, and it struck a chord with me. My own family history is punctuated by tests of honor, betrayal, and secrets held close for their own sake. This was a movie like I would want to make.

Next was Gone Baby Gone. A film I rented on a fluke and for which I had decidedly low expectations as it was directed by Jersey Girl scapegoat Ben Affleck. It’s honestly one of my all-time favorite movies. It explores so well many facets of the human psyche, frailty, and fears. It leaves your emotions and prejudices laid bare, grappling with your definition of a happy ending.

His masterful hand consistently paints a stunning picture of the richly-textured, rough, and determined Boston everyman, and the complex realities and strength of his neighborhood-centered ethic.

Another theme in his work is the victimization and abuse of children, sometimes overt, sometimes subtly through the selfish whim and prejudice of authority figures, but always with riveting effect. His storytelling revolves more around abusive relationships than abusive acts, which echoes my own feelings that most child abuse is emotional and psychological, rather than physical, but no less damaging. The children of his stories are forced into quick maturity through the hard realities of their environment, yet innocent and children all the same — sympathetic to the end. You want to hold them in your arms and take them away from the situation. He places you into situations where you know what you would do, but in the shoes of the character the answers are never as clear.

Finally, with Shutter Island, Lehane explores one of my favorite topics — madness.

I believe (though I’m hardly the first) that madness lies within all of us, and that it’s only by chance that ones particular flavor of insanity isn’t revealed.

Dennis Lehane’s work is a testament to this notion. He inserts hurting, damaged people into crises remote from most of our experience, but everyday happenstance in the world of his characters, and you watch who succumbs to their madness and who escapes (though he makes clear that no one ever really escapes).

While I’d argue I don’t revel in observing at arms length the darkness of man, I have learned to love the truth above all, and can take the good with the bad, so long as it’s the raw, unfiltered truth.

Dennis Lehane is a man who isn’t afraid of telling the truth of his characters, no matter how bright or dark — and I LOVE it!

I can’t wait to read his other books.