JR: I loved Ms. Crane’s novel, We Only Know So Much, and she jumped at the chance to write our favorite essay.
When We Fell In Love by Elizabeth Crane
The Hundred Brothers by Donald Antrim
Okay, so I read this book for the first time last summer and as often happens with books I fall in love with, I want to be the person who wrote them. I have, at times, wanted to be: Louise Fitzhugh, Lydia Davis, Edward Gorey, and David Foster Wallace. (That’s the short list.) It can absolutely be agreed that it is a fine thing that this has not yet happened, and that it is very unlikely to happen with my newest literary romance with The Hundred Brothers, and I am sure my husband prefers me in my present state anyway.
But it is a book that knocked me out when I read it and one I haven’t stopped thinking about and/or mentioning to everyone I know, and I can’t remember the last time I’ve been quite so stuck on a book. I remember that as I was reading, when I wasn’t laughing hysterically, that every couple of pages I would say something out loud along the lines of “Oh my god!” usually followed by “That’s insane!” or “That’s so true!” or “That sentence!” or “That word!” I should say that generally speaking, on first read of any book, I do my very best to read as a reader, but invariably sentences and words will jump out as being so exceptional that I tend to go back and forth between simply experiencing the story and noticing the writing. So I am currently rereading, with a pencil and a pink highlighter, in an effort to absorb whatever I might that will help me write another novel. (This last/first one was a bit of a fluke, and entirely unplanned.)
Here is a quote from page 3:
Virgil often felt, or he seemed to feel, or to have felt, since his childhood, frightened and oppressed. It was impossible to say or do anything to make life less unpleasant for him. Nevertheless, we tried. “Lighten up,” I told him.
I mean, right??? Do I need to sell this any harder? To tell you he uses words like ‘berserker’ and ‘dervishing’ and ‘clamorousness’?
Here’s why this book kills me. This is the premise: a guy has ninety-nine brothers, and they all gather at their father’s house for a dinner. The first person narrator briefly seems affable and reliable, but a few pages in there are clues otherwise. The story takes place in just one twenty-four hour period and builds to a rather dramatic climax. I don’t want to say too much more if you haven’t read it. But it’s not a long book at all, and in the space of less than two hundred pages, basically Antrim covers like, um, everything important that matters. Brotherhood, of course, but also culture, philosophy, religion and more; a bizarro microcosm of who we are, in a very over the top but almost not kind of way. And he does it in a sustained first-person narration which is, I personally think, about as big a challenge as you can set for yourself and yet here I am, wanting to do just that.
But you know, nobody ever said love was easy. Well, okay, I have been known to say that. Why does everyone always say it’s so hard? Should it really be hard? Doesn’t seem like it to me. I find it easy. That’s what’s hard, being the one who says it’s easy when everyone else says it’s hard, because you start to question yourself, and wonder whether you’re maybe in denial. I don’t think so, though. I think I know what love is just fine. Okay then. I suppose I’ve gotten very away from the subject at hand, now. So, nevermind.
