Phil Miller

Nearly 25 years ago, I enjoyed Jean Edward Smith's engaging biography of Grant, which led me to read this e-book. While the style feels like a term paper, I value the review of Grant’s achievements and legacy.

The stories I enjoyed focused on human relationships, ethics, and compassion. For example, “Paradise,” by Hannah Lillith Assadi, is a story about a Syrian refugee girl faced with the challenges of the health bureaucracy in Arizona. “Reclamation,” by David A. Robertson, shows the impact of intergenerational trauma with the spotlight on a Dakota Indian boy. “The Masculine and the Dead,” by Frank Bill, features a widowed Marine veteran dealing with an abused neighbor boy and in the process, finding reconciliation with his young adult son.

The stories using fantasy and technology to imagine how health and wellness might be managed in the distant future were less interesting to me. Although “Star Trek” and “Star Wars” have enormous popular appeal, I never acquired a taste for science fiction. Nonetheless, hats off to those futurists who accepted the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s challenge to explore how healthcare issues might evolve decades from now.

The strength of Take Us to a Better Place is the high-level commentary in the foreword, introduction, and afterword, where the stories are analyzed within the framework of the overall project. In addition to the stories, the book has illustrations by artists commissioned for the project. I like the idea of addressing public issues such as health and wellness with art and stories. Essays on such subjects will come alive as I mentally recall these stories.

After I finished the book, my thoughts returned to the words in Romans 8:24-25. “Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.” As we seek to move to a better place with greater equity and quality of health and wellness, we do so without a clear blueprint. Yet waiting for it with patience does not mean passive inaction. We should stay alert to possibilities, not merely in technology, but in compassion.

It’s bleak. Everything is cold and wet. Winds blow thick layers of ashes. Glass drips down the sides of buildings where it melted and then froze. Ruins and filth circle around endlessly like the spiral wire binding a notebook. Scarcely ever is there any color but gray.

As the man says, “There is no prophet in the earth’s long chronicle who’s not honored here today.” (p. 277) This statement assumes the prophets were all prophets of doom.

A man and his boy have sheltered in a cave, from which they emerge as the story begins. The cosmic cataclysm remains up to the reader to guess. Nuclear? Asteroid? Uncontrolled wildfires from climate warming? Whatever, it happened years before the man and boy leave their cave to seek a more secure place.

Despite feeling overwhelmed and exhausted by repeated cycles of fear, hardship, and danger, the reader feels occasional relief as the father and son just in time find resources to survive a few days longer. The man observes, “All things of grace and beauty have a common provenance in pain. Their birth is in grief and ashes.” (p. 54) So, he and the boy can sometimes experience gratitude and joy.

On its most obvious level, this is a survival tale. “A lot of bad things have happened but we’re still here,” the man says. (p. 269) For over-against the crushing weight of ruin and tragedy, there can be luck, goodness, light, and warmth.

Moreover, the man teaches his son that there are good guys and bad guys. At a distance, it’s hard to tell the difference, so every encounter begins with fear and distrust. The son trusts his father’s saying that the two of them “carry the fire.” The father says, “It’s inside you. It was always there. I can see it.” To trust another person, you must make sure they carry the fire, the light and warmth of goodness.

I’m glad The Road exposed me to pensive post-apocalyptic literature. I’m glad to know what it’s about in case I meet someone else who has read it and is willing to discuss it. I will not tell you that it will brighten your day.

The central character, Clementine, is a young adult under family and social pressure to marry a man against her will. Instead, she is drawn to James, who is mutually drawn to her against his father’s will. Each is expected to marry someone else. The family tensions, as well as the suspense of this taboo relationship, hold the reader’s attention.

Rather than giving away the story, let me note three features of Broussard’s idiosyncratic style. She says in an introductory note, “I wrote it this way because life rarely hands us clarity; it hands us moments. And in the spaces between them, we make meaning.” (p. 5)

Silence. I annotated half of the 140 occurrences of the word “silence.” How many ways does silence affect a mood, a relationship, or the timing of events? How much can silence weigh? In the prologue, Broussard says “the shape of the silence might speak louder than the ink.” (p. 17) The silence about the life of her great-great grandmother moves the author like a detective to infer the story from the bits and pieces of a nearly unremembered life. “Silence,” writes Broussard, “was something [Clementine had] been taught to wield.” (p. 50) Again, “She’d learned to wield silence like a blade.” (p. 95) Her lover says, “I used to think silence was what ruined us . . . Now I wonder if it’s the only thing that ever made us real.” (p. 128) This story is a lyrical poem of silence.

Name. What’s in a name? I annotated twenty-six of the 240 instances of this word because the more I read, the I realized how important the concept of a name was in the culture and in the plot. It factored in the expectations with which families and the community pressured the young adults about whom they should marry. The culture says a man gives his wife his name, which carries down through their children and successive generations. Patriarchy is taken for granted. Clementine, on the other hand, passes down her maiden name, Broussard, to her son, the narrator’s great-grandfather. It’s counter-cultural, scandalous. In the Epilogue, we read the author’s remembrance of “a woman who refused to be named by anyone else’s silence.” (p. 224)

Negative Space. Nowhere does this phrase appear in the story, but everywhere the technique gives sharp definition to events. In an artistic composition, negative space clarifies the subject. In photography, it’s the out-of-focus parts of the picture, which is why depth-of-field affects the emphasis of the composition. It’s the difference between detecting a bird camouflaged in tree branches and seeing the bird surrounded by a blurred background, or by solid black or white, which is negative space. Broussard uses negative space all through her writing. Watch for sentences starting with “he didn’t,” series of sentences like this:

We didn’t say thank you. We didn’t say what came next. We just sat there—in the space between leaving and gone. The earth didn’t shift. The sun didn’t break through all at once. Nothing grand announced itself. (p. 112)

In the Epilogue, Broussard writes, “Sometimes the shape of absence is enough.” (p. 222) She has mastered the shape of absence and the use of silence in her eloquence.

One drawback with this unique style is the lack of differentiation in voice among the characters. Sentence fragments and negative space in one also appear in the other's interior monologues. So, the dominant voice for all of them seems to be the voice of the narrator.

A language arts teacher would do well to let students study Broussard’s lyrical style, full of metaphors, rich with similes by someone who describes “quiet as a breath not taken” (p. 48) or says, “Broke the quiet like a bone snapping clean.” (p. 78) Silence is “like a field left fallow too long.” (p. 85) This won’t be a style everyone should imitate. But it’s a style that makes you sit up and notice. And it’s stimulating to read a story where heavy things, things of great import, move forward with quiet depth, like a catfish at the bottom of the river; when they get where they’re going, you realize it’s time to come up for air.