Towards the beginning of Jules Vernes’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Professor Pierre Aronnax admires the library maintained by the misanthropic and mysterious Captain Nemo aboard his fantastical proto-submarine. “You must have six or seven thousand volumes here,” Aronnax says. Nemo corrects him: “Twelve thousand, M. Aronnax. These are the only ties which bind me to the world.”
The statement might seem a hyperbolic reflection of Nemo’s dark eccentricity, but serious readers will recognize themselves here. One such reader is Peter Orner, the acclaimed fiction writer and essayist. Unlike Captain Nemo, Orner is no misanthrope; his compassion for humanity, both despite and because of the cruelties and the griefs which we inflict and suffer, gleams unmistakably through his prose. But like Nemo – and like all of us for whom to read is to live and to live is to read, to paraphrase the subtitle of Orner’s 2016 essay collection Am I Alone Here? – Orner’s relationship to the world is mediated and made possible by his relationship to books.
Orner’s most recent collection, 2022’s Still No Word from You: Notes in the Margin, continues the genre-transcending work he began in Am I Alone Here? It is a book of memoir through criticism, and of criticism through memoir; for Orner, reading is so intertwined with living that the projects of criticism and of memoir can’t be distinguished at all. In that previous book, Orner described the experience of reading Chekhov’s late fiction as one in which “the pacing of the story has begun to match the cadence of your own breathing.” This is what reading means to Orner: a book’s form and content become assimilated into the most instinctive and life-sustaining mechanisms of the reader’s body, until the reader and the book attain a state of mutual recognition.
In Still No Word from You, Orner describes further what it means to read in this visceral and embodied way. Through 107 short chapters, he discusses dozens of writers – I count 64, both well-known and obscure, plus passing references to many more – alongside vignettes from his life and from his family’s history. Orner travels through time and space, from the Chicago of his childhood to Primo Levi’s Italy, from Vermont where he lives with his wife and children to Juan Rulfo’s ghostly Mexico to the Cincinnati where Orner lived with his first wife, decades ago.
But to describe something as taking place “decades ago,” Orner insists, is a misnomer, and this book is as much a meditation on time and memory as it is on literature. “The notion that the past can be separated from the present, as if by some impenetrable wall, is not only false, it’s blasphemous to existence,” he writes. “What’s happened has happened and yet, always, it will keep happening.” Or consider his recollection of the tense and silent family meals he endured in childhood, while his unhappy parents drifted towards divorce: even now, nearly half a century later, “[w]e’re still wedged in there because there’s no greater fantasy on the face of the earth than the linearity of time. Time only circles. We chew, we swallow, we try not to call attention. The house is gone, flattened, bulldozed, and we’re still trying to make it through dinner.”
Those meals were so miserable in large part because Orner’s father was a tyrant. But this is not exceptional. As Orner puts it, “[t]yrannical fathers are a dime a dozen in books and in neighborhoods.” Note the parallelism of books and neighborhoods, to which Orner calls little attention. For him it is axiomatic that the people in books and the people in tangible neighborhoods reflect each other, and cannot be told apart in obvious ways. He describes the hostess of parties which his parents once attended as a woman “slumped in a chair at the end of a night like some sad drunk in a John Cheever story.” Life does not so much imitate literature as life is literature; this woman remembered from Orner’s childhood belongs in a great short story just as a figure from a great short story belongs in the corporeal world.
To live through books in this way is not always easy, for Orner or for those around him. In another chapter, Orner meets a friend at a San Francisco diner. The friend tells the harrowing story of having witnessed a man being stomped to death outside his apartment. He is understandably disturbed, and tries to process the moral injury he feels, when Orner interrupts him: “I started to tell him about an Isaac Babel story, about this former serf who –”
“‘Do you ever stop? Don’t you get tired of yourself?’” the friend interrupts in turn.
Orner does not stop. He seems incapable of doing so, and he continues by summarizing a Babel story whose violence echoes the violence his friend has seen. The friend does not take comfort in this interweaving of life and literature. Neither does Orner – “God knows I do get so tired of myself …” he tells his friend – but that’s irrelevant. To call up Isaac Babel in such a moment is simply what it is for Orner to move through and to try to make sense of our often simultaneously beautiful and brutal existence.
If there is a flaw in Still No Word From You, it comes from the book’s structure of brief chapters, a few of which are just a paragraph long. They can feel jagged and jumpy, and some readers might wish that Orner would extend his shorter sections, or find more cohesive transitions between them, rather than seeming to accumulate fragments from his reading and his biographical life. But Orner’s description of the poet Terrence Hayes’s idiosyncratic biography of Etheridge Knight, To Float in the Space Between, provides a key to Orner’s own method, and redeems his occasional, apparent incohesion.
“His method,” Orner says of Hayes, “seems to me the only honest way of trying to construct an actual life on the page. A gathering of fragments. Of the stories that get told about us. Of the stories we told. Unordered, like our thoughts on any given day we lived.” Orner’s writing shares this approach, and through it he offers “the only honest” representation of what it actually feels like to have a reader’s consciousness, assembled from books and poems and stories and essays and personal memories, trying to make meaning from the jumbled moments that together constitute a life. What is a life, after all – for Orner and for all of us – but a bunch of fragmentary stories, veering in and out of coherence?
At one point in Still No Word From You, Orner describes violating a pandemic lockdown (essential workers only) in order to travel to his office, where his books are waiting. “I shouldn’t be here,” he says, with characteristic self-deprecation. “There’s never been anything essential about me.” Those of us who find our lives reflected in our books, and our books reflected in our lives, would disagree. If books are as important as Orner says they are, and as the power of his writing proves them to be, then few things are more essential than his ability to wrest clarity and beauty, through reading and writing, from the seeming muddle of the world.
[Published by Catapult Books on October 11, 2022, 320 pages, $26.00 hardcover]