Stiltsville

Oh friends. I have much to tell you, much I want to write, so very many stories about my latest thoughts and adventures to share that lately I've simply been too overwhelmed to even know where to begin. My mind is running on overdrive, my thoughts scramble through my brain faster than I can write them down on most days. But begin we shall. One day. I promise.

In the meantime, I've just finished a novel that I adored. It's been a good year for reading, it seems. I've been fortunate that most of my picks in 2011 have turned out to be little treasures, with stories, plots, and characters I think about long after I read the final pages. By now we all know what I need to do after I finish a book that gives me pause, right? Write about it of course.

I loved Stiltsville from its very first pages. It's a book that pulls you in immediately, in its own quiet, subtle sort of way. It is the story of a marriage, a family. It weaves its way through decades of highs and lows, good times and bad, the human existence. It is, in the end, a book about life, about living.

These are always my favorite kinds of stories, my favorite kinds of books.

As is my custom, with good writing, I find myself jotting down choice passages as I read. Here are a few of my favorites:

"I felt tremendously calm. I felt caught in a swell of well-being. Maybe I was lulled by the waves and the sunlight, or maybe I believed there were no stakes on vacation, and had abandoned my usual anxieties regarding the future, that unnavigable ocean. When I returned home, I knew, I would spend evenings on the front porch of my apartment house in Atlanta, where I'd lived and worked since graduating from college, chatting with my neighbors and slapping at mosquitoes. Soon the sunlight would weaken and blanch, and I would add a quilt to my bedspread and unpack the space heater. A smattering of my still single college friends would get engaged or married, and I would swim through fits of loneliness like cold undercurrents. But that afternoon, on that clandestine ledge, I felt like a stowaway whose trip had begun. All I had to do was wait."

******

"I had the feeling that very soon there would be a tear in the fabric of my life, an enormous divide. On one side would be the time I moved through and things I did and the people I saw, and on the other side would be a great expanse of black time where Margo lived her life, and she and I would move parallel to each other like cars in different lanes, allowing only passing glimpses. I had to remind myself that, strangely enough, this was the way it was meant to go. They grow up, they move away."

******

"He was not nervous about marriage, of course: he was meant for marriage. He would be content in its warm headlock. But Benjamin knew, as I knew, that Bette was not made for marriage, and that if she didn't know it that afternoon, she would figure it out one day, perhaps in the grocery store while choosing a melon, or at the tennis courts on a sunny Saturday, or outside their children's school before the ringing of the final bell."

******

"Our mouths were uncertain. We kissed without embracing. We kept our eyes open. We could feel even then that we were at the beginning of something, I think - something that might go on and on before it ended."