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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
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Mary Gaitskill, “Don’t Cry”: Searching, gorgeous views of women’s lives
Nam Le, “The Boat”: Vietnamese-American: great writing, beyond the hyphen
Wells Tower, “Everything Ravaged”: Deceptively casual, funny, poignant
Antonya Nelson “Nothing Right”: Modern life, seen sideways
By Amy Weldon
Writer Charles d’Ambrosio says, “With a short story, from the first line you’re in the process of shutting it down. It’s got to be efficient – if it’s not efficient, it’s a novel.” A story is a challenge and opportunity in terms of craft – it has to work by sheer force of language, striking a note at the beginning and expanding its small world at the same time it’s shooting toward its conclusion. Writers love stories, citing the grand American tradition of John Cheever, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff. Readers seem doubtful, preferring the lose-yourself sprawl of a novel (at worst, the mass-market Grisham SparksKing McVampire genre). Any writer with a story collection to sell (including me) hears the same thing from editors and agents: “We can’t sell stories now… are you working on a novel?” Stories are in danger of becoming creatures of small literary journals and small presses, with the exception of those who can ride a “New Yorker” publication to a book contract and valiant websites like theshortreview.com.
But just when it seems like the whole world is down on stories, along comes a book – or better yet, four – to remind us why this form has persisted so long. Readers say they crave the immersion of a novel, as opposed to the quick dip into a story’s world (a false choice); publishers claim this consumer preference makes stories a bad risk. But in light of four stellar new collections – Mary Gaitskill’s “Don’t Cry,” Nam Le’s “The Boat,” Wells Tower’s “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned,” and Antonya Nelson’s “Nothing Right” – these attitudes aren’t just timid but willfully blind. Each collection immerses readers in a series of sharply etched, suggestive worlds, as immediate and refreshing as a dip into Decorah’s Dunning’s Spring on an August day. Take a break and go on a trip – fifteen minutes at a time.
These writers are celebrities even beyond the buzz these books have raised: Gaitskill famous for her dark, lovely tales of female psychology, Le a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, Nelson known for her witty, deliberately inconclusive tales of modern life, Tower famous for his immersion journalism (including undercover stints as a circus carnie and Bush/Cheney 2004 volunteer.) But the first thing you’ll notice is the writing. A story has to make its mark quickly and indelibly, bending language to defamiliarize the world and make us see it anew, and these books sing. Tower’s stories bristle with deft, offhand descriptions: “his face was nearly all cheek, with small crooked features that looked like they’d been stuck on in a hurry.” Le’s sinuous sentence mimics his character’s waking from a dream: “Like a shape in smoke, the poem blurred, then dissolved into this new, cold, strange reality: a windblown, rain-strafed parking lot; a dark room almost entirely taken up by my bed; the small body of my father dripping water onto hardwood floors.”
In contrast to the old cliché that art’s removed from the world, these stories are engaged with our lives, insightful about our realities. The narrator of Nelson’s “We and They” observes wryly, “Every four years a new Democratic candidate’s name would replace the faded name of the last loser we’d promoted on our vehicles and in our yard.” But in her title story, she finds the redemptive heart of a situation few parents would choose – Hannah’s surly fifteen-year-old son, Leo, becomes a father. “[W]hen Hannah dropped him off at the restaurant every afternoon,” she writes, “he never failed to lean through the back window and kiss his son on the forehead.” The baby himself is wonderfully rendered: “His nose was slender, his neck and elbows and hands refined, dexterous and bony as an older child’s, and he rarely smiled, as if the world had taught him to challenge its charms.” Gaitskill’s narrator has a similar moment of clarity when her friend adopts an Ethiopian child, Sonny, considering unseen ties between the Third World and the First: “who or what is the birth mother to him? Is she the earth of Sonny, the sky? The unseeable place the child walks when he sleeps?” Thinking of a girl she’s seen in a market, the narrator thinks of faith: “This word has meaning, I thought. Whatever it has faithlessly been made to mean, it has actual meaning. But it was very little to hold on to: the image of a graceful girl in a dirty store in a hungering, wounded country – so small, so light, so surrounded by darkness.”
These stories also bring the past into the present. Le’s “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice” traces a Vietnamese-American writer’s struggle to set down his immigrant father’s story, which the father refuses to yield. “‘They will read and clap their hands and forget,’” the father demurs. “For once, he was not smiling. ‘Sometimes it’s better to forget, no?’” Tower’s title story – rendered in the pitch-perfect speech of a 21st-century dude – follows a band of Viking raiders: “Just as we were all getting back into the mainland domestic groove, somebody started in with dragons and crop blights from across the North Sea… Some individuals three weeks’ boat ride off were messing up our summer and would probably need their asses whipped over it.” Despite its humor, the story is morally serious, fresh and compassionate. “I wished Gnut would go ahead and own up to the fact that his life out here was making him lonely and miserable instead of laying on with this warrior-man routine,” says the narrator, Harald. “I could tell just to look at him that most days he was thinking of walking into the water and not bothering to turn back.”
If you’re looking for a great read this summer, give these collections a try. Like novels, they’ll seep through your imagination and into your vision, coloring the way you see the world long after you put them down.
Amy Weldon, an Alabama native, teaches creative writing, literature, and Paideia at Luther College, as well as a class at Decorah’s ArtHaus this June and July entitled “Turning Life Into Fiction.”
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