Introduction

By Alex Shakar

It’s a curious feat that some of the most arrestingly realized characters in How to Read an Unwritten Language are also some of the most withholding. There’s the lovable and retreating Kate, whom the protagonist Michael meets in college, a budding artist so out of place among people she can only draw objects; all-too briefly in their relationship, she crests above the waterline of a silence ever ready to reclaim her. There’s Michael’s stern father Gerald, an endless wall of a man; his means of expression are almost exclusively limited to the silent plants that he grows in his garden store and the bowling pins he explosively fells on family outings.

Graham’s novel is tantalizingly rife with seeking and hiding, pining gazes meeting thousand-yard stares, children and lovers reaching out, parents and spouses pulling away. Michael’s mother, the emotional epicenter of his narrative, goes by innumerable names, donning a fresh personality every day. The behavior, which begins as a game with her children, devolves into a torment for them: behind her masks, she will never admit to being more than a passing stranger. Later in life, Michael’s sister Laurie flirts similarly with emotional masks and disappearing acts, to the desolation of those who try to get close. One of the central and deeply empathic insights of How to Read an Unwritten Language is that knowing others and allowing ourselves to be known are inextricable acts, and that, therefore, our efforts to hide our pain can prevent us from being available for the witnessing and mending of the pain of others.

Michael’s childhood of trying to scry his parents amid their evasions dooms—and as well, inspires—him to a life of looking. He becomes a student of the “unwritten language” of people’s secret tells, because once seen, he seems to believe, people will have no choice but to see him in turn. This un-language of tells extends not only to people but to the objects around them that have soaked up their stories. He becomes a collector, hoping that his menagerie of objects will silently speak to people, “breaking the spell of [their] inner knot[s].” But will they? Could they possibly? One can’t help but wonder, as Michael secretly knots his beloved’s boot with a shoelace from the collection that he’s never explained to her, hoping that its “subtle energy” will break her silence, whether this is magic or magical thinking on his part, whether Michael is himself succumbing to the disease of proliferating inwardness he hopes in others to cure. In this novel full of bracing questions, perhaps one of the most is whether Michael’s—and by extension the human—imagination amounts to a prison or to freedom itself. Do the inner lives we create allow us to imaginatively connect with others, or do they lull and goad and maze us in endless halls of mirrors?

Of course, it isn’t the objects Michael collects but the stories spun around them that matter, and once Michael grasps this fact, he comes into his true power. He becomes at once an artist and a witch doctor, wielding his talismanic objects and the stories he tells about them to change people’s lives—sometimes for the better, to bless and liberate, and sometimes, chillingly, to curse and ensnarl.

Toward the end, his story nearly told, Michael transitions to the direct writing and rewriting in his mind of the lives of the people he’s tried hardest to know, searching for the best possible endings for them that might still accord with the truth of what he’s seen of their trajectories. Perhaps Kate drowns in that sea of silence; or perhaps, mermaid-like, she finds in it her element. Perhaps Laurie remains alone and hidden forever, a theater act for no one at all; or perhaps she finds communion through literature, fictional stories to reach her in ways no living person can. Again, the reader may not know how to feel. Are Michael’s imaginings, presented almost as fact, a kind of retreat from his hard won lessons about the limits of storytelling without communication? Or are they something else—a moment of protagonist and author recognizing each other through a two-way mirror darkly, this storytelling character now spinning himself into authorhood? Maybe it’s cheating, a power grab. Yet maybe too it’s precisely the reverse, an acknowledgment of his limits as well his powers, limits which all of us share: We can reach out for others; we can read them and see them and speak our truth. And some, when seen, will see both themselves and us anew. And some will flee themselves still deeper and lose sight of us even more. And so the best we can do is dare to be both open-armed and open-eyed—to see, in each other and ourselves, the most loving reading that could be true.