“Like being on a bicycle again”
I’m a big fan of dark humor, that supple, muscular trope, which is for me as comforting and familiar as nightfall. But it wasn’t until I read Robertson Davies in the Middletown Public Library that I saw it put on a page in a way that I could relate to and recognize, at just that moment.
When I discovered him, I was a mother of young children—and young myself—meaning I was considerably overwhelmed. I would bundle the children up and head to the library, which was the only warm place I felt we could all find something worthwhile to do.
I settled my girls with the worn blocks and headless dolls that are particular to public libraries and I found Davies’s The Deptford Trilogy. I got to read for ten uninterrupted minutes and the pages lifted me out of my intensely enveloping and demanding life. It was like being a kid on a bicycle. The black marks on the page took off the restraining hands and I was off, and flying.
I didn’t write anything of my own for five more years. I had a full-time job and three kids. What came early and easily to me was not writing, but parenting. These sprawling, acerbic, compassionate novels by Davies poked me, comforted me, teased me. I was up at midnight, reading this bearded, irascible, demanding old man and I was grateful.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a lot of traces of Robertson Davies in my own work, but nevertheless, there was some tectonic shift after I read these books. I thought, Oh, yeah. Maybe so, maybe this is something I will do. It was a kind of permission to write as I intended to write, which was with humor and incident and the unexpected. It was less “Oh, that’s what I aspire to” than “Oh, oh, I see that. Let me take another look.” It was more of what is possible, a road sign pointing out: “You could take this exit.”
Although I’m choosing Davies, due to that particular, needful time in my own life, I have to mention another author: Carol Shields, another Canadian, as it happens. How is it that this woman who won a Pulitzer in 1995, one of the greatest novelists I’ve ever read, a brilliant storyteller and fearless experimenter in form, is nearly unknown?
Larry’s Party. The Stone Diaries. Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? Gorgeous prose. Humor so dark it tints all that you see. Compassion, wit, and vision. These books aren’t pompous doorsteps. They don’t preen. They don’t digress. They are just brilliant, illuminating novels about life. That’s all.
Sometimes young women writers ask me: Why are books by a man more known than books by a woman? The answer is because we give birth, and all those writers and readers, whether they’re male or female, have mothers. Not everybody has a father, but everybody has a mother. It’s just like that Nora Ephron movie years ago where the stand-up comic says, “If your children have a choice between you being happy and successful in LA, successfully pursuing your dream, or weeping suicidally in the room right next door after you make them a grilled cheese sandwich, they’ll take the sandwich.”
The fact is no one gives a shit if Mom is the president of the United States, as long as Mom is making a grilled cheese sandwich and saying, “Oh, honey, here’s a napkin.” When women accomplish things besides mothering, I think there’s a feeling that some bit of mothering, some piece of what we collectively need has been stolen away. Why is she doing that? Why isn’t she paying attention to me?
My own feeling about it, I’m sorry to say, is that until men give birth, it’s not going to change.
That doesn’t mean I’m not rereading Evan S. Connell. Or Dickens. Or Roth. Or Percival Everett. I do, all the time. I have all the crappy paperback versions of their novels that I loved and still love and refer to regularly. And my hardcovers of Davies and Shields are up there on the shelf right next to them.
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Amy Bloom’s most recent novel is Lucky Us. She has also written Away: A Novel and three collections of short stories, and is Wesleyan University’s Distinguished Writer in Residence.