JR: For some reason Ms. Adams first novel, Harbor, slipped under my radar, and upon discovering The Room and the Chair, (thanks DH) I realized that it was impossible not to revisit her debut novel. I’m half way through The Room and the Chair right now, and I feel ashamed that it’s taken me this long to discover Ms. Adams and her quicksilver prose. She flirts with the thriller genre, while keeping the narrative grounded in Washington, DC, and doesn’t insult us with dyed in the wool characters we’ve seen before. I especially like Mabel, a central figure in this story, and her interactions with the men she stalks, Mabel is funny and sharp, painfully observant, and it’s this kind of writing that grabs me with an acute ferociousness, by reminding me that the literary novel is alive and well.
When We Fell In Love – Lorraine Adams
I was a strange little girl. Nuns handled my education at a place called Gate of Heaven School in Back Mountain,Pennsylvania, a locale firmly fixed in the middle of nowhere. I attended daily morning mass and afternoon classes in all things Catholic. Every Friday we had weekly confession. My reading centered around sacred texts supplemented by trips with my mother to the Hoyt Public Library. I said the rosary every night. I loved litanies. I was crazy about prayers.
None of the library books remain with me. But because of my mother’s cousin, whose name was Abby Wallace, another book did. Abby lived alone in Philadelphia and she was skinny and spinstery. Whenever she needed to clean out her closets she would bring a shopping bag of “gifts” to me. Sometimes they were broken pieces of costume jewelry, or faded fabric flowers in bent boxes. But one day she came with a bagful of paperback poetry anthologies. There were about six of them. The one I loved and still have is Master Poems of the English Language. It was published in 1968, and had “texts of over one hundred classic poems…from Sir Thomas Wyatt to the works of Dylan Thomas.” They were accompanied by essays by critics like Lionel Trilling, William Empson etc.
I was captivated by so many of the poems and essays but the one that made me a reader was John Donne’s “The Extasie.” For a girl familiar with religious diction, it felt like home. But for a girl who was already deep into fantasies about boys, it had lines like “Our hands were ?rmly cimented/With a fast balme, which thence did spring,/Our eye-beames twisted, and did thred/Our eyes, upon a double string.” I was hooked on language and reading every since.
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