Why one kind of self-examination and not another, in a book? Chez Sara Baume, I don't recognise her past, only her present, workaday West Cork, with cold swims and tea, the sayable stratum of our journalling world. Whereas I recognise Andrea Bajani, I recognise his family, whence he comes, his anguish and persistence. Twenty pages into The Anniversary he identifies his mother independent of his father; he puts her in the kitchen talking to her friends.
What they talked about as they sat in our kitchen matters less than the fact that now, as I write about it, I can see my mother separately from my father. Which is to say that the act of writing, of chipping away, word by word, at that monolith of family memory taken up wholly by him, succeeds in extracting my mother from the rock. This access, through invention, to what memory doesn't possess is the brutal power of the novel, which by almost always disregarding the real provides the truth. And the truth is my father wasn't home.
This is explanation on a glacier, a backup of ice moving a family inch by inch. Family porn. I know that need to hedge with explanation, to immerse and re-emerge, to use the novel as a thinking machine, as Bajani says. I'm particular, we all are, about the tune the machine plays, how excruciated and for how long.
He is closer in than Sara Baume, is all I can say.
