The Miracle of Writing
It feels like there isn't a whole lot to say about The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint. I took a long time reading it--no page turner, this. Instead, a layering up of the confusion and violence and searching that make up the truth of childhood, keenly wrought, with a restraint rare and beautiful to find in a writer.
Brady Udall has a way with the everyday--the quiet, behind-the-scenes horrors that are the stunning landscape of life--bullies, family disfunction, sexual angst, mis-socialization, death, addiction, betrayal. I'm tempted to say that a major ingredient of his effectiveness is this fairly flat, undramatic delivery of pretty high octane scenes. But really that would be wrong. Instead, maybe what we feel in this clean, strong prose is the balance of a narrator whose humanity holds steady in test after test. It's not that Edgar is heroic, not in the sense of invincible. For he flounders and fails in the maelstrom of life as much as anyone. I kept wondering as I read this story how people like Edgar have such an unerring moral compass when all around them are the hideous wrecks of humanity that perpetrate little more than evil upon evil. And maybe it has to do with Edgar's writing--the honest witnessing of everything that unfolds, an integrity that becomes his survival. Not allegiance to a particular code or dictum, not a faith. Just unflinching observation of what is. Which turns out to be not just hideous.
There is something about this character, this narrator, this prose that embodies a restraint that emerges as beauty and human dignity. The days that build up a life, like pages of a book, turning and turning, seemingly incomplete in their isolation, becoming meaningful in their telling, are what Udall shows us here so masterfully. I didn't laugh out loud. I didn't cry. I didn't stay up to all hours, unable to put it down. Instead, I came to the last page of this story with a feeling of gratefulness that, in the midst of this flailing, stumbling gambol down the midway, I had just witnessed a little miracle.
The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint
Brady Udall has a way with the everyday--the quiet, behind-the-scenes horrors that are the stunning landscape of life--bullies, family disfunction, sexual angst, mis-socialization, death, addiction, betrayal. I'm tempted to say that a major ingredient of his effectiveness is this fairly flat, undramatic delivery of pretty high octane scenes. But really that would be wrong. Instead, maybe what we feel in this clean, strong prose is the balance of a narrator whose humanity holds steady in test after test. It's not that Edgar is heroic, not in the sense of invincible. For he flounders and fails in the maelstrom of life as much as anyone. I kept wondering as I read this story how people like Edgar have such an unerring moral compass when all around them are the hideous wrecks of humanity that perpetrate little more than evil upon evil. And maybe it has to do with Edgar's writing--the honest witnessing of everything that unfolds, an integrity that becomes his survival. Not allegiance to a particular code or dictum, not a faith. Just unflinching observation of what is. Which turns out to be not just hideous.
There is something about this character, this narrator, this prose that embodies a restraint that emerges as beauty and human dignity. The days that build up a life, like pages of a book, turning and turning, seemingly incomplete in their isolation, becoming meaningful in their telling, are what Udall shows us here so masterfully. I didn't laugh out loud. I didn't cry. I didn't stay up to all hours, unable to put it down. Instead, I came to the last page of this story with a feeling of gratefulness that, in the midst of this flailing, stumbling gambol down the midway, I had just witnessed a little miracle.
The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint
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