An observant writer

Deborah Meyler

Deborah Meyler does more than tell a good story in her novel The Bookstore. (See "Irrational Choices," Aug. 22). She also fills it with a number of passages that reveal an observant writer at work. Some of these may be worth a comment.

But how can I make love with Mitchell, knowing that there is a baby there in the dark of me, in the death row of my womb?

At this point early in the story, Esme knows she is pregnant, hasn’t told her boyfriend and is planning to get an abortion. Yet her use of the words baby and death row of my womb already signal to the reader that her future is more likely to hold a maternity ward than an abortion clinic.

Phone conversations are especially difficult in America. If you don’t say what they expect, you may as well be jabbering at them in Esperanto.

I don’t know that it has to be a phone conversation or that it has to be in America, but I do know that conversation does become more difficult when either we or those we are talking with make assumptions about what’s coming next. Expecting to hear one thing, we can easily focus our minds on our reply without hearing what the other person actually says. Meyler reminds us how important it is in any conversation when it is our turn to listen to actually listen.

I don’t quite know what he is singing about — something about God — but I do know it is about being in all the dust and dirt and yet being given the grace to touch the eternal.

What she is listening to is “Negro folk music of Alabama,” but it could just as well be Handel’s Messiah, a good church choir or children singing “Jesus Loves Me.” This description of the power of music, why it has been at the center of worship from the beginning, is superb.

Bureaucracy needs simplicity, and the call for simplicity sometimes means you can’t tell the truth.

Easy answers tend to be incomplete answers. In the courtroom witnesses promise to tell the whole truth, but then lawyers try to force them to tell only part of the truth, that part which most benefits their client. Forms you must fill out demand simple replies, when the truth may not be so simple. In the novel, authorities want a simple cause of death for a homeless man when his death may have had many causes. A phrase like “heart failure” or, as in the story, “overdose,” doesn’t really tell very much.

This is also true in those forms businesses ask us to complete when reviewing their services. The question I hate most is the one asking how likely I am to recommend them to others. The truthful answer in my case is always "not very likely" simply because I am not the kind of person to make unsolicited recommendations no matter how much I like something. But, as Jack Nicholson might put it, they can't handle the truth.