#lee kennett

March/April 2017: "Someone for whom the examination of life still offers the promise of revelation or escape.” 

Books Bought

None

Books Borrowed (all @ Multnomah County Library) 

What Belongs To You by Garth Greenwell 

The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New by Annie Dillard 

You’ll Grow Out Of It by Jessi Klein 

Elephant Complex: Travels in Sri Lanka by John Gimlette 

Day Trips from Portland, Oregon: Getaway Ideas for the Local Traveler by Kim Cooper Fielding

Books Read

What Belongs To You by Garth Greenwell

Euphoria by Lily King

Sherman: A Soldier’s Life by Lee Kennett

What Belongs To You is certainly beautiful, with workshop-tight prose and smart provocative plotting; but reading it requires a certain amount of heavy emotional lifting. My time with the slim novel was peppered with gloomy sighs after devastating paragraphs like this one where the narrator talks to his younger sister about her difficult relationship with their father:

“There was a note of defiance in how she drank, an assertion of adulthood, but also something desperate, I thought, an escape either from or to. Her estrangement from my father was recent enough that the loss still held a kind of electric charge for her, so that at times as we spoke I thought I could see her jerk with the pang of it. All my life, she told me in those first nights we spent together, speaking with the wonder of someone for whom the examination of life still offers the promise of revelation or escape; all my life I’ve lived to please him, she said, every choice I’ve made has been his choice, it’s like nothing I’ve ever wanted has been my own.” (pg 66)

Reading What Belongs To You means taking breaks from it on the Portland Tri-Met train to stare off into the middle distance while shaking your head to marvel at what insights are achieved in so small a space. Consider this one about coming of age sexually:

“I grew up at the height of the AIDS panic, when desire and disease seemed essentially bound together, the relationship between them not something that could be managed but absolute and unchangeable, a consequence and its cause. Disease was the only story anyone ever told about men like me where I was from, and it flattened my life to a morality tale, in which I could either be chaste or condemned. Maybe that’s why, when I finally did have sex, it wasn’t so much pleasure I sought as the exhilaration of setting aside restraint, of pretending not to be afraid, a thrill of release so intense it was almost suicidal.” (pg. 122)

Rereading this passage, I’m stunned by how clever “flattened” is in a sentence about sex, and those poetic turns of phrase dot nearly every page. If you can bear the weight, Greenwell rewards you deeply.

I also took breaks while reading Sherman: A Soldier’s Life, but for entirely different reasons. This time it was to consider fate and luck and life-defining moments and the patience to wait for them. I must share that part of my fascination with the man comes from the fact that it’s well established (but dubiously sourced) family lore that I’m related to William Tecuseh Sherman, whose infamous March to the Sea in the Civil War brought about the frightful enactment of “total war,” where general destruction of military enemies and civilians was either encouraged or allowed. But the most amazing thing about the man that emerges from Kennett’s fascinating account in Sherman: A Soldier’s Life is that mere months before he was to become one of the most famous people in the country for his military exploits (and set up for life as a result), he was perilously close to financially ruin, and being unable to support his family. Sherman, as he had done so many times in his life, was living far away from his large family to work, and during this spell was having a particularly rough go of it. 

“Sherman’s diary in those spring months of 1859 tells just how far the officer and banker had fallen. He laid out building lots and fixed up his one-room dwelling: most of April he worked on a barn and a corn crib; on May 3 he planted sweet potatoes and tomatoes and on the fifth “went to buy a cow.” He spend whole days hauling and plowing, days that started early: “6AM- Yoked up” ran one entry.” (pg 84)

  Lee Kennett