When a Bookstore Becomes a Magical Palace
Picture the writer of a brand new novel walking down the sidewalk toward her book launch. Say it’s her first book–a slim novel she worked on for years–and tonight is when she’ll share it with the world for the first time. All afternoon she has practiced the sections she’ll read out loud, pondered what she’ll say in response to certain questions, and selected her clothes with care. Can you see her there, her hand on the door of the bookstore, on the cusp of stepping in?
There is nothing in bookstore world quite like this moment of celebration that is a book launch event. Fairy dust seems to radiate throughout the space, over the writer, the audience members, and the shelves of other people’s books, which I imagine silently welcoming the newly published one into their ranks.
Book launches are when bookstores most closely resemble magical palaces.
Photo Credit: Sarah Mohtes-Chan
Last week, I was in conversation with Philadelphia novelist J.B. Hwang about her beautiful, funny, poignant new book, Mendell Station, at Head House Books in Philly. The novel is about a young woman named Miriam who takes a job at the US Postal Service in San Francisco after the sudden death of her best friend. Miriam has lost her faith as well as her friend, and she hopes the solitary work of delivering mail will give her space to grieve. What she does not anticipate is the way the community of other postal workers will bring her solace and comfort.
Photo Credit: David Cohen
The Mendell Station book launch was the first time I was ever the person asking questions of a writer at a public event. It was a new kind of delight to think about how to probe the issues that interested me the most, and to figure out how to help the audience feel how special the novel is. Some of my favorite things J.B.–who worked for the Postal Service herself during covid–talked about:
The part of the book that compares postal workers delivering junk mail to monks making sand mandalas that get blown away by the wind–and how, if you think about it, all of life is like that.
Wanting to bring attention to the unseen labor performed by people like mail carriers every day.
The particular brand of humor J.B. found among her Postal Service colleagues: dark, self-deprecating, and corny.
For the book launch, Head House was full of J.B.’s friends and family, of other writers, and of new fans. As she stood up with the brand new hardcover in her hands to read excerpts, her voice brought Miriam’s shifting moods and thoughts into the room so intimately and joyfully. The audience laughed, then fell silent, then laughed again. Applauded loudly.
Photo Credit: Channa Lenoff
Recommendations
Mendell Station
By J.B. Hwang
“Miriam, why do you want to work for the postal service?”
“I want a career change.” I quoted the informational video they’d shown me ten minutes before the interview. It was hard to focus, but I registered an affinity for my interviewer. Her dark lip liner, shimmery eye shadow, and curls with a wet look from gel or mousse hinted at a combination of fun and no-nonsense.
A long time ago, when I was in graduate school for creative writing, a famous writer talked memorably about how work is an underutilized and important subject for fiction. I thought about this years later when I read the glove-factory scene in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, and I thought about it even more when I read Mendell Station, Philadelphia writer J.B. Hwang’s matter-of-fact yet haunting debut novel about a young woman who turns to mail delivery as a way of coping with loss. There’s lots of fascinating behind-the-scenes detail about working for the postal service (Hwang has first-hand experience)—the tedium, the dangers, and the consolations—but primarily the novel is about the trajectory of a friendship between girls (later young women) as they come together and grow apart, losing and finding each other. For me, friendship is an even more neglected and important subject for fiction than work.
Hwang’s opening lines give a sense of her novelistic approach: direct, honest, attentive to detail. With short sentences and graceful but matter-of-fact language, she gives us direct and immediate access to Miriam’s feelings, her struggles with the question of Hell, and her determination to find her way—both literally around her San Francisco mail routes and emotionally in the wake of loss.
Heartwood
By Amity Gaige
Dear Mother,
You used to call me Sparrow.
Why Sparrow? Well, because the woods are full of sparrows, and you loved everything outdoors. Songbirds, wildflowers, wind. You could read the weather like a poem.
Mothers and daughters, the woods, and love. Right at the beginning of this woman-goes-missing story set in Maine, Amity Gaige plants the seeds of the novel’s major preoccupations.
The book draws us in with lost Valerie’s personal voice, which often feels as though it’s speaking directly to us, even though we know it’s her mother that she’s writing to. I love Valerie’s assertion that her mother could “read the weather like a poem,” which, while it doesn’t make literal sense to me, is a beautiful expression of love.
The narrative drama of Heartwood is how Valerie got lost and whether she’ll be found in time. But there are two other narrators as well, interesting women with complicated stories of their own: the tall, diligent warden in charge of the search, and an older, eccentric, wheelchair-bound resident of a retirement community who once lost a daughter Valerie’s age. A fourth voice comes from Santo, the fat Black novice hiker from the Bronx who was Valerie’s trail partner through several states. The interweaving stories and the distinctive voices matter more here than the actual search–though that’s certainly fun (especially when the sniffer dog gets in on the act). Or rather, the searching that really matters here is the internal, personal, potentially transformational kind.
The Emperor of Gladness
By Ocean Vuong
The hardest thing in the world is to live only once.
But it’s beautiful here, even the ghosts agree. Mornings, when the light rinses this place the shade of oatmeal, they rise as mist over the rye across the tracks and stumble toward the black-spired pines searching for their names, names that no longer live in any living thing’s mouth. Our town is raised up from a scab of land along a river in New England.
When the prehistoric glaciers melted, the valley became a world-sized lake, and when that dried up it left a silvery trickle along the basin called the Connecticut: Algonquin for “long tidal river.” The sediment here is rich with every particle welcoming to life.
There is so much poetry in the first lines of Ocean Vuong’s remarkable, gorgeous, generous, sad, hopeful novel about a Vietnamese-American young man in rural Connecticut, the old Lithuanian woman with whom he finds refuge, and the family of low-wage workers at a fast food restaurant called–aspirationally, but also truly–Home Market. The fact that Vuong’s first published book was a poetry collection comes as no surprise.
The beauty and fleetingness of life is Vuong’s ultimate subject here, as he state right up front: “The hardest thing in the world is to live only once.”
It’s fun–and also revealing–to scan through the nouns and adjectives Vuong offers us in his opening lines, many of which give hints of what he has in store for us: ghosts, names, scabs, richness, and the rare and remarkable quality of being welcoming.
Emperor of Gladness is a book you want to savor, but it’s hard not to read it fast. I cared so deeply about the people here–so broken, and so loving–that I wanted to fly through the pages to find out what happened to them.
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