Post-40 Bloomers: “Late” According to Whom?

This piece was produced in partnership with Bloom, a new site that features authors whose first books were published when they were 40 or older. 

1.
There’s a voiceover passage in Steven Soderbergh’s film Solaris that I particularly like. Toward the end of the film, a character tries to resume his old life after a harrowing experience on a space station:

“I tried to find the rhythm of the world where I used to live. I followed the current. I was silent, attentive, I made a conscious effort to smile, nod, stand, and perform the millions of gestures that constitute life on earth. I studied these gestures until they became reflexes again.”

The phrase has always stayed with me, because what are our lives, especially our early lives, if not a crash course in the customs of life on earth? We are trying to make sense of this strange world in which we’ve found ourselves, or at least I am, always, and there are moments when this world feels as foreign and inscrutable as the mysterious planet in the Soderbergh film. We perform the gestures of day-to-day life until they become reflexes, we try to walk the line between living easily in this life and disappearing into the crowd. A condition of being alive in the world is that we will not always understand this place, or each other.

I found myself thinking of the Solaris quote while I was reading Nicole Wolverton’s spare and harrowing debut novel, The Trajectory of Dreams. Not so much for the space travel aspects of the book, but for the protagonist’s profound alienation.

2.
Wolverton’s protagonist is Lela White, a Houston sleep technician with a secret life. Nothing about human interaction comes naturally to her. She has studied the habits of the species with diligence, but her reflexes are hopelessly out of sync. She’s spent some time practicing her smile in the mirror, for instance, but adults have a tendency to wince or gasp involuntarily when her smile “slams into place.” Children sometimes burst into tears.

She lives a precisely-ordered double life. She is competent and unfailingly professional in her job as a sleep technician, but her real life is played out after hours. Lela is of the generation of schoolchildren who watched the Challenger explode on live television. She’s convinced that her mother played a role in the disaster, and she believes the universe has entrusted her with a secret mission to protect the American space program from further catastrophe. The mission requires breaking into homes and observing astronauts as they sleep, an assassination plan at the ready in case one should wake up and see her standing there by the bed. It is of utmost importance that the astronauts sleep well.

Lela has lived alone since the death of her father a year ago, although she still hears his voice. Lela’s unhinged and abusive mother left when Lela was a child, much to Lela’s relief, although Lela finds herself troubled at times by the fact that her mother left all of her possessions — even her underwear — behind. It seems best not to think about this too deeply. Lela’s primary companion is her cat, Nike, with whom she discusses the finer points of her mission. Nike often has useful advice. Naturally, Lela’s convinced of her own sanity, but living in the world requires a set of skills that she knows she hasn’t entirely mastered, and she’s aware at times that something is amiss:
There had been times we’d been a happy family, but Mom’s weirdness as I got older made sure we didn’t stay that way. There was something that had constricted its grip on me after she was gone, too. The shuttle disaster, her role in it, my mother’s leaving… it all had something to do with the way my skin hugged me like a straitjacket.
She goes every day to a Russian tea house, where it’s important that she always order the same thing. Here she meets Zory Korchagin, a Russian astronaut on loan from his homeland. Zory’s beloved grandmother was mentally ill, he tells Lela, but she seemed normal to him. Perhaps because of this, he has certain blind spots. To Lela, their burgeoning romance is an opportunity for closer study; she’ll be able to take notes on Korchagin’s sleep patterns without breaking into his home. Although it’s always possible, of course, that the universe will require her to test her commitment to her mission by killing him.

3.
The Trajectory of Dreams is a wholly original and fearlessly dark novel, an interesting combination of psychological thriller and character study. In Lela White, Wolverton has created one of the most haunting unreliable narrators I’ve ever come across. Lela’s illness is a curtain between herself and the world. She can see through only dimly. She feels and sees things others don’t — “A howling rose out of the pavement and wound around my ankles” — and Wolverton is at her best in her depiction of the queasy mismatch between Lela’s perceptions and what the reader knows or suspects to be true.

She lives in a dangerous world of patterns and signs, of plots and assassination plans. If a coworker invites Lela to join her for lunch, then obviously the coworker is trying to kill her; the only question is whether Lela should strike first, preemptively, or bide her time. Lela has drifted very far from the realm of consensual reality, and the book’s considerable tension arises from the question of just how far she will go. She is heartbreaking, because for the moment at least she is lost. She is both deeply sympathetic and extremely dangerous.

The Trajectory of Dreams is Wolverton’s debut, but she’s been honing her skill for some time. Wolverton, who is in her early forties, has published several short stories and wrote a half-dozen other manuscripts prior to Trajectory, “which are mouldering away in a drawer,” she wrote recently, “never to be seen again. …I’m not sure who said it first, but there’s that whole thing about writing a million words of crap before you find your voice and get to a place where your writing isn’t wretched.”

She has come to a place where her writing sings with tension.

This post was produced in partnership with Bloom, a literary site that features authors whose first books were published when they were 40 or older.

1.
Every year I teach Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein to first-year college students, who can’t quite believe it was written by a girl their age. How could someone so young create a work so furiously complex, alive with the energies of need, anger, love, and alienation? But then, who would have known freakishness so well as a bookish girl in a male-dominated world, secretly convinced she’d killed the mother she never knew? “When I looked around I saw and heard of none like me,” the Creature tells his creator, Victor Frankenstein. “Was I, then, a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned?” Yet the Creature’s own consciousness makes avoiding this pain impossible, and, like any writer, he is drawn to examine it: “[O]f what a strange nature is knowledge!” he tells Victor. “It clings to the mind, when it has once seized on it, like a lichen on the rock.” Knowledge brings pain. But knowledge — and its exploration, in stories — is irresistible.

The sorrowing rage of a precocious daughter who felt spurned by her father and responsible for her mother’s death certainly drives the novel. But its origins aren’t quite that simple. Frankenstein was a book Mary Shelley had to write, for reasons she might never have been able to explain. That inward pressure is part of the alchemy that makes any novel an even bigger and stranger experience for its writer (and its reader) than the writer knows. While we may sometimes connect the real Mary Shelley with her brooding Creature, Frankenstein’s enduring allure comes from a much more mysterious place — an imaginative energy born of transgression, memory, fear, and desire, which may spring from real life but isn’t ever fully bound by it. That energy communicates itself to us, elevating the idea of the novel itself — to a heightened sensory tour of a recognizable human reality, fundamentally not responsible to any laws but its own.

Joan Chase, whose first novel was published when she was 47, is a writer whose work demonstrates this energy. She’s won many awards (including a Guggenheim, a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, and PEN America’s Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award), and, according to one online source, is “still writing.” Yet she’s a shy, little-known presence in the modern literary world, with no webpage or Twitter feed. When confronted with so specific a fictional realm as Chase’s, readers accustomed to copious author bios and Internet availability will find themselves baffled. Yet her fiction demonstrates just how little “authorial intent” or “biography” can matter. Chase teaches us what it means for a writer to submit herself to the story, letting fiction and fact alchemize according to the needs of the created world on the page and following wherever that world’s logic leads, regardless of literal “truth.”

2.
Recently reissued by NYRB Classics, Chase’s first novel, During the Reign of the Queen of Persia (1983), is narrated by a collective “we,” a group of sisters and cousins living in a matriarchal farm household in northern Ohio in the 1950s. “For as long as we could remember,” they tell us, “we had been together in the house which established the center of the known world.” Celia, Jenny, Anne, and Katie are cousins and sisters, “like our mothers, who were sisters” and who are all living in the house together at one time or another. “Sometimes we watched each other, knew differences,” they say. “But most of the time it was as though the four of us were one and we lived in days that gathered into one stream of time, undifferentiated and communal.”

The girls’ days are marked by farm-kid pleasures (kittens under the porch, playing in the hayloft with a hidden deck of cards) and violence (fighting with each other and their boy cousin, the sinister Rossie) and family crises that descend like weather: cancer, marital discord, courtship and impending marriage, abuse and making-up again. Family members come and go and come again until three generations — parents and their daughters, and the daughters’ husbands and children — have settled into the house. At every turn the girls feel knit deeper into the place:

Peaceable, we waited on the porch in the dappling noontime. In the Mason jars stacked up dusty and fly-specked on the side shelves, in the broken-webbed snowshoes hung there, the heap of rusty hinged traps waiting this long time to be oiled and set to catch something in the night, was the visible imprint of the past we were rooted in.

The girls’ world is presided over by a fierce, dominating goddess — their grandmother Lil. Nicknamed the eponymous “Queen of Persia,” Lil has been working her entire life, starting as a scrawny 11-year-old nanny for a neighbor with tuberculosis. Even an inheritance from a rich uncle, which enables her to buy a farm for herself, doesn’t soften her sense of grievance at the world. “She vowed it was peculiar,” say the girls, “her father spent his life in the West, searching for oil, when all along it was right out back under the corn crib. Now wasn’t that just like a man? Like life.” Focused in old age on her own self-protection, Lil widens her angry judgment of the world to include her daughters and granddaughters. Sometimes she condemns them, but sometimes she protects them. When her oldest daughter Grace dies of cancer, Gram squares off against Grace’s feckless husband, Neil. Yet at the novel’s end — after making a decision that shocks the reader — Gram snorts, “What did we ever have around here but dying and fighting? Work and craziness.” For the girls, Gram models womanhood as sheer cussedness and endurance, a “soiled and faded apron and her exhausted face, marked like an old barn siding that had withstood blasts and abuse of all kinds, beyond any expression other than resignation and self-regard.”

The man for whom Gram reserves most of her fury is her husband, Jacob, a stern Amish outcast who “was bigger than all the other men we saw who came around the farm…it was a bigness of bone, as though he were solid calcium with only skin stretched over him.” Cursing at the cows, backhanding Rossie into the barn wall for smashing eggs, and changing his long underwear only a few times a year, Grandad is a dark force of nature whose inability to interpret or express his own emotions makes him terrifying but, initially to Gram as a young woman, alluring:

Every night his eyes were watching, wanting her and letting her see it in him; but he wouldn’t touch her…though when she would pass close beside him she would hear his breathing, harsh and quick. It nearly drove her wild and her mind came to dwell on him nearly every second. Sometimes, when she lifted up the handle of the stove to stir the wood, the glutted, ashy coals crumbled at the slight touch and something inside her seemed to fragment in the same way.

Eventually, marriage — marked by furtive, rape-like sex and Jacob’s long absences — bends Gram’s desire into a thick club of anger, aggression, and dark humor with which she attacks everyone around her, and herself:

I seen more damned men than you would believe drinking themselves crazy, killing each other over nothing. And their women dying with babies or something else unnecessary. But you can’t tell them. I’m through trying. You can’t tell a young gal nothing, nor an older one neither. Not anything she don’t want to hear.

3.
Watching Gram hang on to her life exactly as it is — remaining married to a man she hates, stashing her money under the floorboards, and shaking up her family with daily small cruelties — makes the reader wonder: in a world that thwarts women, what makes a woman also thwart herself, surrendering to meanness and pushing against a hard life in a way that only makes it harder? What’s the source of that particularly Midwestern passive aggression, self-sabotage, and buried rage? And why hate the one who gets away from it all — in this case Aunt Elinor, a successful New York career woman whose efforts to care for her dying sister are mocked even as they are relied upon? “Aunt Elinor looked patient, as one who had seen a wider world,” the girls observe, “one she constantly made visible to the rest of us — accepting the fact that a wider world might mean a weaker place in the old one.” Why love a place where the ordinary marvels of life — “The wet orchard grass and briers gleamed like washed planking, while above, the branches held green sails to the wind” — are braided with such pain?

When you are immersed in Joan Chase’s writing, that love seems wholly inevitable. In her review of During the Reign of the Queen of Persia, Margaret Atwood described the girls’ connection to this place:

Will the ‘we,’ having known a childhood so all-enveloping, so histrionic and so collective, ever be able to resolve itself successfully into four separate ‘I’s? For despite the horror of some of the events they witness, the children’s life at Gram’s is fascinating and addictive, and they live with an intensity and gusto that prevent their final vision from being a bleak one.

Indeed, something in the girls cleaves to their “flamboyantly, joylessly unpredictable” grandmother, no matter what:

When we are grown up and have been through everything, we’ll be like that. We’ll order kittens drowned by the bagful. Then at night we’ll dress in our silken best, pile on jewels and whiz off to parties, bring home prizes for the family. We’ll bet on horses.

This thread of resilience brightens the otherwise dark weather of this novel, which nevertheless isn’t forced or melodramatic — it’s only doing what it must, only being what it is. Lacking answers to the questions we might ordinarily ask the author — Is this your family? Are you saying something about women and passive-aggression here? — we fall back on the novel itself and on our own reactions, delving deeper into the territory of self-investigation. Which is to say, into literature.

Like Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, which was published three years earlier, During the Reign of the Queen of Persia is poised on the border between strict realism and something like a dream. If the governing element of Robinson’s novel is water — the frozen lake, the drowned train — Chase’s novel is of the soil. Rooted in landlocked northern Ohio, it is replete with cluttered farmhouses and barns and deer stealing windfall apples from the orchard. Yet its effects are never showy or awkward, never just rural Gothic cliché. Like William Faulkner, whom Chase admires, this is novelistic imagination with no elaborate scaffolding between reader and author — just direct immersion in a stream of subjectivity and life we come to know through that immersion itself. In this, the novel echoes its subjects: terrifying, marvelous, and memorable things happen here, and that’s just how it is — here in this dark Midwestern Eden, with its gnarled and faithful apple trees.

4.
Chase found an early center of gravity in a large family homestead in rural Ohio like the one in Queen of Persia. “[I]t was wonderful,” she has said, “to have so much family around me.” On an “Ohioana Authors” radio program, she said, “When I began to write what became During the Reign of the Queen of Persia, I didn’t decide on Ohio as the setting, Ohio was just there, my imaginative heartland. It was the land of my childhood and from my perspective the most lovely and thrilling place in the world.”

These biographical statements (among the few Chase has made) don’t account for the elements of Queen of Persia that are less than “lovely.” But they don’t really need to; we all know that what is “true” doesn’t always make the best story. A writer must let the emotional qualities and images on the page shape the story according to her own emerging logic. This means that tracing a writer’s “biography” in a novel can be difficult. Particularly for the writer herself. And that, too, is perhaps as it should be.

Chase’s later works return to themes similar to Queen of Persia, although in more diffuse, experimental ways. Her second novel, The Evening Wolves (1989) explores how a feckless, wandering father warps his daughters’ lives. Francis Clemmons is charming and fierce, self-centered and often irresistible. The first-person narration (traded among his three children and second wife) is precise and pithy, rooting us in particular bodies and subjectivities: “My hair is straight, quiet hair,” young daughter Ruthann declares, “and my head feels peaceful, at least where it shows.” Elsewhere she tells how a boy “started rubbing my bones, their stone hearts luminous in the dark, binding me like stays.” Unlike Persia, the novel feels inconclusive, with an open-endedness that is employed to better effect in Chase’s short fiction.

Gathered in Bonneville Blue (1991), Chase’s stories are strange and shapely, centered around striking images from down-at-heel rural worlds reminiscent of Persia’s barns and backroads. Sally in “Crowing” accompanies a cranky old man around his barn: “People say farm animals know when the hog butcher is coming. Somehow. Even the day before, they will be restive, off their feed, as though word of the appointment has reached them.” Here, too, women are yearning yet uncertain how to act. In the lyrical “The Harrier,” an unhappily married woman dreams of a younger man:

I didn’t go with him up into that bed in the forest, not in the end, although as I said, in that winter of cold and driving spikes of ice he seemed to slam against my bedroom window all night like some night bird wanting in. But I chose to lie on, hugging the curve of my husband’s unyielding back, dreaming the smell that is feverish and rank, the distillation of roots and vines newly turned over.

5.
Like Elena Ferrante, whose novels of growing up in midcentury Naples have drawn fresh attention this fall — and who writes from behind an inviolable pseudonym — Joan Chase disrupts the links we seek between a writer’s life and her art to let her work stand alone in the public eye. Of course, Joan Chase is her real name. But her relative silence, while thwarting readers’ curiosity, serves us as Ferrante’s pseudonymity does by sending us back to the work, which stands on its own — enigmatic, dark, and gorgeous.

Reading Chase, Ferrante, and Mary Shelley all together reignites my curiosity about women, writing, and boldness. What interior permissions, or exterior disguises, or at-long-last states of peace and determination must a woman attain to in order to speak the story that wants to take shape, whatever that shape may be? I’m wondering, too, about the relationship between personal privacy and the kind of boldness we need to do our work. In the Internet age, Ferrante’s pseudonym and Chase’s quietness both suggest strategies to address that issue: if you want to avoid complaining family members, or earnest reviewers asking you about “which parts are autobiographical,” or random readers’ emails, short-circuiting the link between you and the public might help. Maintaining privacy might also quiet interior voices that insist a good daughter would never write this. Seeking recognition is just not what we do in this family. If you get the wrong kind of attention, it’s your own fault.

During the Reign of the Queen of Persia does make me wonder about Chase’s family’s reaction: whether they recognized themselves, whether they objected, whether they half-resented the one whose success they also envied. But ultimately, it’s not our business. It is enough that Joan Chase brought into the world a novel so vivid, risky, and beautiful, and that from it we can learn to trust our stories — to finger the jagged grain of those trees in our childhood Edens, those lost orchards of memory — and let them take us where they need to go.