By the late chapters, Daphne and her contemporaries, now old, seem to remember less about those days with Cecil than does the reader, who came through them recently—an inspired way of calling forth the novel-ness of the novel without breaking the realist’s line. Life, and then death, got in the way of that plan, but the week before he passed he gave me a copy of the book he’d planned for us to read together: the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr’s “Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life.” I started the book that very night, making it through Brené Brown’s foreword and then stopping in my tracks when I got to one of my favorite poems, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” by Gerard Manley Hopkins. The novel that I started with, after finally pulling it out of the shelf at one of those stores some months ago, is “Brief Lives” (1990), which centers on the difficult relationship between a pair of what we might nowadays call frenemies—the domineering Julia and the unassuming Fay.
Author: The New Yorker
Published at: 2025-12-31 21:00:00
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