Lark and Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips

By Amy Weldon

Novelist John Gardner described writing as a “vivid and continuous dream” that the reader can enter only to the degree that the writer has created it: if the reader stumbles over a word, action, or image that doesn’t ring true, she’ll be awakened from the “dream” just like a rapt sleepwalker stubbing her toe. And, like the sleepwalker, the reader will hesitate to enter that novel again. So, for a novelist, the stakes are high. How can she be true to her own highly individual “dream” of character, situation, and place and fashion it into an accessible form? How can she render it in language that is both familiar enough to entice readers and fresh enough to be pleasurably vivid and strange? How can she recreate the visible world and make it her own?

Jayne Anne Phillips’ risky, luminous new novel Lark and Termite answers all these questions by carrying us into an ordinary world that comes to feel enchanted. The story accretes gradually, through characters’ alternating voices, and shifts in space and time: as we watch a precocious teenage girl, Lark, and her disabled younger half-brother (nicknamed “Termite”), prepare for a flood that will strike their West Virginia town in 1959, we also witness the death of Corporal Robert Leavitt at No Gun Ri, Korea in 1950, when, Phillips says in an interview, “several hundred civilians and the American troops evacuating them were mistakenly strafed by friendly fire.” Each locus of action includes a web of surrounding characters: Nonie, the children’s aunt; Solly, the rebellious boy who loves Lark; Tompkins, Leavitt’s comrade in arms; and two unnamed children in the tunnel who come, eerily, to mirror the children Leavitt has left behind.  Floating over and among all these other stories is the figure of Lola, Lark’s and Termite’s mother, Leavitt’s lover and wife, and a sensual, enigmatic presence who continues to destabilize the family she’s left behind.

Sounds interesting, you might say, but what do West Virginia and Korea have to do with each other? The answer, I think, lies in Phillips’ method: juxtapose different things just far enough apart to make connections interesting for you and your readers. Make each world vivid and intriguing, weaving subtle threads between them. Soon, the novel takes on the compelling logic of a dream, in which the startling and the familiar rub off on each other. And when readers put the book down, the everyday world will rise up new in front of their eyes, chancy, delicate, and beautiful, underwoven by connections they’d never seen. This is the way writers work, the way they create and enchant. “The writer gets addicted to any glimpse of the miraculous,” Phillips has written in her essay “Dreaming of Beauty,”  “and the real miracle is in the process itself.  Is this what we mean by beauty: no maps, no guidelines, no guarantees? Loving something fearsome, even terrifying, out of instinctual belief in what lies beneath the surface?” This could be a description of Lark and Termite and of the forces that hover “beneath the surface” of its characters’ lives: obsession, memory, and love. And this is what binds us to novels; we love them, enchanted, without quite knowing why, especially when they’re as skilled as this.

The world of Lark and Termite, like dreams themselves, is a place where the boundaries between past and present, one side of the world and another, one life and another, are porous.  “He commanded a platoon now,” Leavitt thinks, “and he sees that war never ends; it’s all one war despite players or location, war that sleeps dormant for years or months, then erupts and lifts its flaming head to find regimes changed, topography altered, weaponry recast…Leavitt senses the dead furling like smoke from the vented earth, wandering the same ground as the living.” He thinks of Lola’s letters to him about the child she’s carrying whom he’ll never see, who will become Termite: “he turns like a fish and he sees and hears for you,” Lola writes, “every sound, every thought I haven’t written.”

What Termite does know, and see, is another enigma; unable to speak coherently or to move from the chair in which he spends his days, he’s pure sensation, a stream of images and memories. “He’s alive all over,” says his sister Lark, who cares for him. “Nonie says I put thoughts in his head, he might not be thinking anything. Maybe he doesn’t have to think, I tell her. Just don’t you be thinking a lot of things about him that aren’t true, she’ll say. But no one can tell what’s true about him.” Like Leavitt’s, Termite’s thoughts are rendered in third person, not in first (as for Nonie and Lark), which makes him feel tantalizingly familiar yet foreign.  Although Faulkner’s Benjy Compson seems his obvious ancestor, Termite’s interior state is Phillips’ own creation, often mirroring or revising what other characters see: “Lark bends over him and her hair falls along his neck and shoulders, her hair moves and breathes over his back and chest in a dark curtain that falls and falls.” (Tellingly, this image recurs in Leavitt’s death, which Termite would have had no way of seeing or knowing; these hints of supernaturalism deepen the novel’s enchantment.) Termite loves to dangle strips of dry-cleaning plastic in the breeze – “he sees through the blue and it goes away, he sees through the blue and it goes away again” – an image that recurs, heartbreakingly, at the end of the novel, as Lola smokes a final cigarette: “Air pulls the thin blue trail out the window, into the evening.” Despite his apparent vacancy, Termite draws the other characters – and the novel – around himself, uniting the novel as a dream is united by a single image that haunts the rest of a waking day. “Termite is a kind of living secret,” Phillips has said in an interview, “but he can’t communicate that secret to anyone. He doesn’t even know what the secret is.”

Even as it immerses us into an ordinary world enchanted by Phillips’ careful writing, Lark and Termite also engages us with a subtle series of revelations that deepen the plot. She weaves together fear, suspense, delight, and eroticism, and her precise, lyrical tone never bobbles. Only after you finish this novel do we see how complex a structure she’s built and how easy she’s made it look. Read Lark and Termite and be enchanted – and be reminded of how the mysteries of the past hover below the surface of our present lives, touching us with light, ghostly fingers.

Amy Weldon, an Alabama native, teaches creative writing, literature, and Paideia at Luther College