The truth has to start somewhere

All my favorite stories are at least partly about a place. They all happen in a very specific location, so nuanced and unique that the story would not work if you moved it someplace else. Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow can only be about Port Royal, Kentucky. Olive Kitteridge doesn’t work anywhere but in Shirley Falls, Maine. Catcher in the Rye doesn’t get labeled a regional novel, but nothing about it makes sense if it’s not set in that particular New York/East Coast world. Andrea Levy’s Small Island is about London, yes, but a very specific world of London among the many that are always co-existing together.

I’m a sucker for a novel that takes me to a very specific place and helps me settle in there for a while. It is, of course, an amazing feat as a writer to capture a person so perfectly that people recognize themselves in those pages. But it’s also impressive to create a whole place that leaps off the page and takes up residence in the reader’s imagination, even if that skill doesn’t get as much recognition.

My latest addition to the list of great books about place is Niall Williams’ This Is Happiness. A friend (hey, Randy) has been urging me to read this book for a while, raving about it to everyone he knows. I picked it up last week and settled into Faha, Ireland, a small village where it always rains and that by the time the events of the novel take place—the 1950s—still doesn’t have electricity.

The coming of electricity is partly what the book is about. The narrator—Noe—is an old man, reflecting back on the events of his adolescence. The book is suffused with the knowledge Noe has now about how electricity will forever alter the world of Faha and the people who live there. Is that misguided nostalgia for a literally darker time? Maybe. But the novel will leave you thinking about how each successive wave of technology alters the lives we lead and perhaps not always for the better.

Clearly, Niall Williams has spent time in a small town or village. He understands the dynamics of a place that time seems to have forgotten. He gets the way in which eccentricities are tolerated because no one much cares or is aware of what the rest of the world might think is “normal.”

People assume small towns are all about conformity, but in so many ways, they can provide more freedom to follow your own path. There aren’t enough people in a small town to deal in types. Everyone is their own person, with all their idiosyncrasies. This is basically the subject of one of the short stories in my own collection—how protective people in a small town can be of their own weirdos.

Niall Williams understands what I’ve written enough times to become a bit repetitive—that living in a small place is an invitation to explore the depth of human experience rather than its breadth. There aren’t fewer stories to tell in a tiny village. The stories are all just a lot more complex and twisty and intertwined. “A hundred books could not capture a single village,” Williams writes. “That’s not a denigration, that’s a testament.” Amen.

This Is Happiness is a novel that sneaks up on you, seeming for a long time like mostly a sweet and beautiful memorial to a time long past. There were moments as I was reading it that I thought, “Take just the plot of this novel, minus the gorgeous writing, and it could be a Hallmark movie.” That’s not an insult. I love a good Hallmark movie. And This Is Happiness slowly, slowly lifts above the sort of shallow pools in which a Hallmark movie swims. It takes off. It soars.

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

The novel becomes that sort of art, as Williams himself describes, that “…has caused you to realise once again how astonishing life is, and you leave the book, gallery or concert hall with that illumination, which feels I’m going to say holy, by which I mean human raptness.” It isn’t real, a good work of art. It can’t totally capture the whole of our human experience, but it echoes enough to light up something holy inside us.

As I was lying on the couch, coming toward the end of the novel, and having to put it down every now and then because it was just so fucking good I didn’t want it to end, and also, it was just a lot. I was feeling a lot. I was all filled up with feelings the way good art should make you feel. As I was lying there, I had to turn to my husband and say, “Look, I’m about to finish this novel and I’m going to be sobbing. Just so you know.” I was not wrong.

This Is Happiness is not, of course, just about Faha and the arrival of electricity. It isn’t just about Noe and his adolescent confusion and grief. Its very specificity makes it about so much more. It’s about friendship and love and community and love and loss and love and love and love. I don’t know how that works.

I don’t know how it is that when we sit down to write a story that is about a very specific place and very specific people, somehow it swells up until it becomes big enough to contain everything. I could come up with an answer that has to do with how the specifics of the story show us how we’re not alone or how they add to some magical collection of human experience and by participating in that big, perpetual pile-on of stories, we become as big as the project itself.

I could say that, but I don’t want to. I’m okay with hanging out in the mystery and magic of it all. Start specific and it’s enough.

Start in a specific place. Somewhere you can see the sky and feel the ground beneath you. No, more than that. Start at a place where you know what the ground feels like under the grass or the weeds or the trees. Start with the feeling of the soil in your hand, gritty and sandy or fluffy and dark. Tell us what it smells like. Yeah, even how it tastes. You’ve never had the soil in your mouth? Are you even living? Tell us about the sound a shovel makes scraping into it. Tell us everything about it. Start there.

I don’t know why the truth starts with those specifics. I don’t know how it works. I just know it does. The truth doesn’t start somewhere. It starts right here.

---

So grateful as the year draws to a close for this amazing community of people. Thank you to all who subscribe and like and pay to subscribe and use the tip jar and comment and share and buy my books and restack and read and all the other ways in which you show up to convince me I’m not shouting into a void.

Sometimes I look at other people’s newsletter numbers and I think, wow, I really, really suck at this. Then I remember what I decided ages ago—to use this newsletter as a kind of writing lab. As an outlet to get out some of the thoughts that get extra bouncy inside my head out into the world. I think I’ve gotten better at writing personal essays in the time I’ve been doing this and that’s great. But mostly this newsletter keeps me sane and that’s no small feat. Thanks for coming along on this weird, twisted road with me.