Which Brings Me to You: A Novel in Confessions by Steve Almond and Julianna Baggott

My review on Goodreads

rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have always thought the opening sentence of a book is the author’s best pickup line pitched at the reader.

More so, then, in a book where well-constructed paragraphs hold the explicit promise of intimate relations–that, at least, is the premise of this post-postmodern epistolary novel where the two hyperarticulate protagonists agree to reveal the nasty bits of their romantic pasts in letters before meeting up again in real life.

My former colleague Craig Stoltz put it best, I think, when he reviewed the book for the Washington Post:

This book is full of superb writing, and that is precisely its problem…The trouble is Jane’s letters sound an awful lot as if they’ve been written by an award-winning author and writing instructor with an MFA. So, alas, do John’s. To say this spoils the fun is to understate.

To return to the first line of the book, though, it reads: “I know my own kind.” I can only assume that many of the fine Goodreads members who give such lukewarm reviews below are not sympathetic to this kind. Whether the lack of sympathy for this kind is due to character, snark, or textual framing, the book’s prelude section remains a worthy meditation on a smushed boutonniere and contains a line of sexual absolution on page five that I have taken as a personal motto (curious? I thought so).

Moreover, how can you ignore the serious fun of keeping the conceit of a post-postmodern epistolary novel aloft for the length of a novel? I mean, really, our two protagonists always have stamps on hand?

And when one mails a drunken letter irretrievable from the postal carrier once deposited in the mailbox, a “remix” chapter follows with all the apology that comes after drunkdials and drunken texts/emails and none of the clarifying horror of the “sent messages” outbox (tell me the “sent messages” folder isn’t your favorite, and I will denounce you for the terrible liar that you are).

Perhaps I read this in one sitting because each chapter contains character details I covet. To have our hero admit he is a “marginalia junkie”; to be able to refer to a past lover as “the caramelized one”; to articulate an awareness of destructive tendencies and the wherewithal at seventeen to intuit that “boys were dangerous. Each one was shining, lit from within; their souls were torches.” Seemingly trivial and breathy at times, this is true stuff of the sort flawed, complicated, real relationships are built upon.

It’s worth remembering that epistolary works were originally “penned” by female characters (Aphra Behn, of course, used the form; male authors like Richardson would take pains to insist in the introduction that the female narrator’s story was “true”) when the novel was still crystallizing into a genre. Appropriately, the end of the novel careens a bit like its tipsy characters, and structurally, the multiple peaks within the letters throughout are followed by valleys leading to more peaks.

The very end comes together in that elegant way that always brings me to tears–not because it’s an emotional moment (it is), but because each reveals their understanding of the other’s most significant, sustaining source of pain, and those final admissions seal a narrative that the two characters share voicing–imperfectly, and, ultimately, full of hope.

Related posts:

1. kthread reviews: proof
2. kthread reads: middlesex
3. kthread reads: the wonder spot