Surrounded by Fiction

I spent last week back in Vermont (although I got there a couple of days late; all flights East were backed up something fierce by their recent blizzards) surrounded by books.

And not just books but fiction.

For when I drove across country a couple of years ago, I packed up everything I could into my car. I didn't leave in a hurry, but I did leave traveling light: just my books, tunes, clothes, and toys. Unfortunately the books I could fit into my VW were just those I needed for various grad school classes: tomes on organizational development, systems thinking, public policy, and various meditations on educational leadership.

I left my fiction back East.

And though I have been a regular haunt of the myriad thrift stores in the area, drifting along the awkwardly shelved used books (disregarding the mysteries, the romances, and the pop psychology) in search of fiction, there's nothing like coming home to my own library, those books that I have read, those that I have taught, or, most deliciously, those that I have yet to read.

So whenever I get back to Vermont, I spend as much time as I can reading and re-reading. Of course there's always lots else to do - fire up the snow blower to clear a path for the mailman, cut up the neighbor's tree where it fell across the stone wall, shovel off the roofs, bring in more wood - but I find some time when my partner is off at work and my kid is off at school, and it's just me in the quiet of the house, curled up in front of the glowing stove.

And then I can lose myself in my fiction.

Last week I revisited Roddy Doyle's rollicking Barrytown Trilogy. Set in Ireland, Doyle's novels - The Commitments, The Snapper, and The Van - all revolve around the Rabbitte family, a family as idiosyncratic and dysfunctional and funny as are all loving families. During the course of the trilogy (each of which is quite capable of standing on its own and two of which have been made into movies), various family members strive to make their respective best of the grimy suburbs of north Dublin by creating a band featuring "Irish soul," struggling with the impending birth of an illegitimate child, and starting a fish-and-chips business out of the back of an old van.

If these conceits don't sound particularly compelling or incisive, fiction rarely does when being described for you. It's the author who makes it all come alive, and Doyle is a master. Once you feel comfortable with his quick-cut dialogues and his lack of punctuation, you can begin to appreciate Doyle's brilliant pacing, his poignant humanity, and his wicked humor - sharp, profane, and ultimately triumphant.

And though, on one hand, the Rabbittes are unlike any family I know, on the other, they are more like my own families than I might care to admit; for despite the chaos of their lives, they are 100% committed to each other. Being eminently human, they fully embrace the vital, the sentimental, and the obscene. And coming to know them as they veer often uncontrollably between the mundane, the absurd, and the tragic, provides me with the odd glimpse into my own lives and into the human condition we share.

Fiction allows me an opportunity to lose myself in the lives of others, and I find it to be one of the civilized pleasures of having some discretionary time. Although I spend most of my professional life rooted in (theoretical and practical) non-fiction, I find redemption in fiction, for it is there that I am reminded not only of what it takes to be human but also of what is possible.

--Steve McKibben
2/25/07