Evening (1998)

I worked with a student once who wrote instinctively, producing moments of dappled, denotative beauty, where nothing much happens, but when it does, resounds in line and form. These miniatures kept coming, and I encouraged them, suggesting sequences, thematics, and to read some Donald Bartheleme, some Lydia Davis; learn to understand your work in relation to its neighbours -- but stay true to your instincts!

Years later she sent me some of her more recent writing, and a note to say how a more recent teacher had turned her on to Susan Minot, whose writing (as it appeared to me through my former student's), was not so much a neighbour but an overbearing roommate. This recent teacher told her that her older work, the work I was dazzled by, lacked story. But most of all -- colour. Although disappointed at the loss of the earlier writer, I was happy for her as a person, and resolved to one day meet this roommate.

That day came twenty years later, as of last week, when I was looking through the bookshelves of the recently replenished East 12th Avenue Sally Anne, where I found a copy of Minot's Evening. Ah! We finally meet! So I purchased the book and cracked it that night.

Minot writes no more and no less than she needs to, which is a fair amount more than the earlier writings of my former student. She is observant of what lies around her, and the result is gorgeously rendered -- a sparkling sentence or clause that could be smeared on a slide, placed under a microscope and shown to students of one of Michael Ondaatje's informal cyto-prose master classes. Minot's writing asks little of its reader, apart from the ultimate compliment: the periodic gasping for air.

Here is how Minot (pronounced "Mine-it", in the American way) opens Evening:

A new lens passed over everything she saw, the shadows moved on the wall like skeletons handing things to each other. Her body was flung back over a thousand beds in a thousand other rooms. She was undergoing a revolution, she felt split open. In her mattress there beat the feather of a wild bird.

I remember reading an interview with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, where he talks about the writing of Richard Brautigan, whose earlier works he edited. Brautigan had passed away by then, so Ferlinghetti felt free enough to express his frustration with Brautigan for never maturing to be the writer he wanted him to become.

This came as a shock to me and perhaps to the many who appreciate what have come to be referred to as "Brautigans", those little "stories" that their author had not so much perfected but left behind like crumbs that lead nowhere but up, to the same place that allows us to discover them, consider them, take them in our mouths and digest them.

Brautigan's is one kind of writing, Minot's another. My former student, now an English professor and expert on Coetzee, has been both.