Posted on by Kirsten T. Saxton

Senior Book Chat

The Heaviness of Things That Float (2016)

Jennifer Manuel

This book was difficult to find. We could not find copies in local libraries, but group members managed to obtain copies nevertheless as Carole’s note describes, in a brief anecdote that reminds me of the connections we make by reading together, connections that Bernadette, the protagonist of this novel, longs for:

“Linda and I live just a few minutes’ walk from each other and we’ve shared books for our group before. Usually, I’d finish and pass the book on to Linda, but this time we had a more elaborate arrangement. I found that I had no time to read during the day, so Linda had the book during the day and I had it overnight, since I seem to have quite a bit of awake time during the night these days. Mostly, we left the book for each other, inside my front gate or at Linda’s front door. Sometimes we met up for the exchange. It was fun to check in about where we were in the book and what we thought about what was going on. “

I was unable to access the book in an audio version; I had ordered a copy from a local bookstore, hoping I might be able to read parts with my magnifier, but it had not arrived by the time we met. So my contribution was simply a quote from one of the novel’s reviews I was able to access online. I quoted Carrie Breck’s Blog to open the discussion: “A truly conscientious writer brings first-hand experience, research, and timeless understanding, to a relevant issue.  For this reason Jennifer Manuel’s 2016 debut novel, The Heaviness of Things That Float is well worth talking about.” 

And talk we did, in a rich discussion led by Diane Anderson, who first suggested this book that touches on so many important topics. Diane writes:

There are 4 main themes in the book, as seen through the characters. They are starting over, loss, belonging, and the depiction of the indigenous community. The main character, Bernadette, has worked for 40 years as a nurse and is about to experience the loss of her job and identity: ‘Nobody could wholly know the heart of another, no matter which side of the unbalanced world we live in’ (284).  Bernadette longed to belong to the First Nation community, but the Tawakin people still considered her an outsider.  Her only sibling, her sister has recently died and left her a home on the mainland. She has rejected her former lover, Frank as a partner and has lost Chase Charlie, Frank’s biological child whom she loved. The author insists on people’s dignity and humanity in the face of unflinching sorrows (alcoholism, abuse, poverty, suicide).

The novel contains beautiful prose, describing the reservation as a community  where stories are

like organisms all their own, life upon life, the way moss grows around poplar trunks and barnacles atop crab shells, the way golden chanterelles spring from hemlock needles. They spread in the cove with the kelp and the eelgrass, and in the rainforest with the lichen, the cedars, the swordferns. They pelt down inside raindrops, erode thick slabs of driftwood, puddle the old logging road that these days led to nowhere.

I am sorry I could not read all of this evocative novel, but am lucky to have been introduced to it so well by this group of excellent readers. The novel reminds us that there are many sorts of community, and how important attentive belonging is.

Posted on by Kirsten T. Saxton

Senior Book Chat

Welcome to the Frog Hospital

Lorrie Moore (1994)

Lorrie Moore was wandering through an art gallery when she came upon a painting called “Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?” The work, by Nancy Mladenoff, depicts two young girls regarding a pair of bandaged frogs. Ms. Moore not only bought the painting, she also borrowed its title and imagery for her second novel.

The novel is narrated by Berie Carr. While vacationing in Paris with her husband, Berie recognizes that her marriage is deteriorating, noting that “I feel his lack of love for me. But we are managing.” Facing this disappointing state of adulthood, the book narrates her recollections of an adolescence in Horsehearts, New York. Berie looks back to 1972, when she was a wild teenager with her best friend Sils. They had summer jobs at Storyland, an amusement park where Sils plays the part of Cinderella and Beris works as a ticket seller. The emotional heart of this short novel is the intense friendship between the two young women. Berie is nostalgic 

for that summer in which she felt so alive: smoking and drinking and sneaking out, the passionate connections, the fearless quality that is so yearningly absent in her life as she approaches forty with a philandering husband and no zest for the present.

Moore’s precise period details take us to a specific moment in American history: the music, the styles, even the lip gloss, are familiar to readers who grew up in that time. As is the political climate, the illegality of abortion in much of the country, the gendered assumptions.

In our discussion, we differed widely in our response to the book. I was perhaps the most negative, confessing my disappointment in reading such a negative, hopeless account of a narrator less than half my age who yearns with such nostalgia for a lost adolescent exuberance and girlhood friendship but who, at not even forty, in good health, has so much time left, so much she can do, can choose. I wanted her to get a life in the present, to develop underdeveloped aspects of herself. 

Other members of the group enlarged my appreciation of the novel, describing it as sad, and quite accurate to how it can feel in middle life, to be stuck, not in the adult life one imagined, and yearning for a romanticized intense lost youth. One reader commented that if the marriage is hopeless, Berie may leave it and that she probably has decades of new experiences ahead of her.  Another reader read us the narrator’s description of singing in a girls’ choir and noted the magic and hope contained in that uplifting passage. Some readers and reviewers enjoyed tagging along with a narrator through memories of a youth so much more wild than their own, particularly when we are not troubled by the fear she will not survive it. 

It occurs to me that we really reacted to Berie as a person, or a cipher for the author, rather than a character designed by Moore to show us a set of emotions and memories. And that response speaks to Moore’s success as a writer. I will end with a couple of examples of her precise and powerful prose:

On her husband: 

[H]e studied Spanish once, and now, with a sad robustness, speaks of our childlessness to the couple next to us. “But,” he adds, thinking fondly of our cat, “we do have a large gato at home.” “Gâteau means ‘cake,'” I whisper. “You’ve just told them we have a large cake at home.” I don’t know why he always strikes up conversations with the people next to us. But he strikes them up, thinking it friendly and polite rather than oafish and irritating, which is what I think.

On femininity: 

I remember thinking that once there had been a time when women died of brain fevers caught from the prick of their hat pins, and that still, after all this time, it was hard being a girl, lugging around these bodies that were never right – wounds that needed fixing, heads that needed hats, corrections, corrections.”

After listening to our animated discussion about the plot, the character, and the writing, a reader who had lost interest in the novel and set it aside decided to finish reading it.