Pinewoods 2: perfect book success

[jere7my]

I achieved Perfect Book Success again this year. I managed it two years ago, with American Gods, which was ideal for reading during the cross-country trip to Pinewoods, and then ideal again for sitting on a dock overlooking an unruffled pond while thunderheads crowded in overhead. Some years prior to that I achieved it with A Deepness in the Sky, which was deep and heavy enough to absorb me into itself wherever I was. Most years, I stand for an hour or more in Borders, gazing with despair at the spines of imperfect summer books.

My book for Pinewoods 2004 was Perfect Circle by Sean Stewart. It's about William "Dead" Kennedy, who sees ghosts, who wears fishhooks inside his jacket lapel to tear the fingers of anyone he gets into a bar fight with, whose ex-wife is building a new life with a man who's exactly unlike him.

The night stretched on forever. I put on some CDs and listened to old bands, the Stranglers and Shriekback and Exene Cervenka, lying on my mattress in the sweltering dark, thinking about family, and the dead.

Ghosts are like the homeless. We learn to ignore them, we have to. You can't deal with all that need, all that grief. Because if you start noticing, where does it stop? There's rivers of grief out there, floods of it. You'd drown. Anybody would.

But I think once the first ghost catches you, others can feel it.

Dead Kennedy has his own ghosts, and he sees the ghosts of others. Each one is a two-dimensional slice of a character, drawn so deftly that we can deduce the third dimension of their former lives. Stewart uses them as perfect punctuation, highlighting the lives of his living characters, drawing attention to what's important and hiding what's really important. It's a sad, hard book, which makes it seem strange for a summer choice, but it was a sweltering hot and hopeful book as well, written with Stewart's typical poetry—and perfect for j7y this summer. This was a vacation, in part, about letting go of ghosts, wasn't it?

I finished it in Mechanicsburg, lying on the guest bed at Kendra's parents' house with R.E.M. playing on my iPod, remembering Pinewoods. I set it down not knowing how it could have been better.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/_swallow/]

You know, I deeply enjoy reading your journal.

[jere7my.livejournal.com]

Thank you. That's nearly the nicest thing you could have said.

The same, of course, is true in reverse. (Though happier swallow-stories might be preferred, on balance.)

[ursula]

Have you read other books by Sean Stewart? I, too, read Perfect Circle recently (some impressions here) but found myself ultimately a little dissatisfied.

[jere7my.livejournal.com]

Have you read other books by Sean Stewart?

I have: Resurrection Man, Night Watch, Galveston, maybe one or two others. My first exposure to him came through the online game for A.I., which was brilliantly and beautifully written. I spoke to him on the phone, when he was pretending to be a security guard from the future and we (the players) were trying to convince him to intervene in a murder.

[ursula]

Wow, that sounds like a really cool game!

Night Watch is thus far my favorite (haven't read Galveston, did read a novel in a different universe whose title I've forgotten sometime early-highschool-ish), though since I haven't read it for four years or so I can't defend that opinion very intelligently.