Light While There is Light: An American History

by Keith Waldrop, Ben Lerner (Introduction)

A moving, poetic memoir about a family on the fringes of religion and society, this unforgettable story about a mother's destructive search daliance with Christian fundamentalism pulls the curtain back on the darker side of American religious experience.

This brilliant fictional memoir of an American family begins with the moans of the author’s mother. And indeed, Waldrop’s ghostly portrait of his mother and other family members is, in part, a kind of American haunting, a haunting of the mind, of dreams, of aspirations, and, most of all, of the spirit.

Born into a deeply religious family, the author and his siblings are taken by their mother across the Midwest and South as she searches for the “right” religious sect and educates them in various forms of fundamentalism, a trip that ends with the mother speaking in tongues and eventually in her total isolation.

It is not only his mother, however, but the author’s brothers who are utterly transformed by her spiritual thirst. Unable to cope properly with a world of little moral values, the brothers themselves become involved in shady business operations and sham religious institutions.

In Light While There Is Light, Waldrop follows a tradition that stretches back to Hawthorne, Poe, Faulkner, and O’Connor as he illuminates, in plain, poetic prose, the fear, madness, and destruction lurking beneath the polished surfaces of the American experience.

Genres: Fiction, Poetry, American, Novels

208 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1993

About the author

American poet and academic, author of numerous books of poetry and prose, translator of the works of Claude Royet-Journoud, Anne-Marie Albiach, Edmond Jabès, Charles Baudelaire, and others.

Reviews

[Jeff Jackson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A novel that feels closely related to Marilyn Robinson's luminous HOUSEKEEPING. Both stories of midwestern mysticism and life outside middle-class norms, their extremism cloaked in a mild tone and domestic details. Both books written with sturdy and sometimes startling lyricism, prose crafted at a perfect pitch.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

I remember, now, how when we went to church, my mother and I, back in Emporia -- when I was a child -- we caught the bus on the other side of Sixth Avenue, which was also a state highway and, so, relatively busy. But if we were late and the bus was to a point where the driver might well pass on without seeing us, my mother's practice was to grip my hand, close her eyes, lower her head, and charge across the street, traffic or no. I thought about this, at the time, a great deal, and came to the conclusion that under certain conditions of emergency, ordinary physical laws do not hold and ordinary precautions may be suspended.
I do not think this anymore. At the same time, I may note that we never came to harm -- not then, not in that way.

As for me, what I would like, I think, is to live a while longer. But not again.

[Peter Landau · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a ghost story. Poet Keith Waldrop says so right on the first page, but he notes that his ghosts are defined by their absence not presence. LIGHT WHILE THERE IS LIGHT: AN AMERICAN HISTORY is his autobiographical novel, the center of which is held by the author's mother, a spirited and spiritual seeker. There is much love and humor and oddity in this book, as any tale about family told truthfully must contain, but for me it was the writing that, at least at first, captured me in its spell. The prose isn't showy, unless it needs to be, it is almost biblical in its certitude of choice, like plainsong. Each word, every sentence and the building paragraphs have a heft that comes from service to craft and an opening to the gifts of language. It produced a river that carried me away for most of the book. Then something strange happened. I found myself sharing the writer's familiarity, literally his relations, so when I came to the end of the book, and the end of many of those depicted within it, I too was haunted by their absence.

[Patrick King · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I have always wondered what worlds are possible. Others have asked, of course, but I mean it, not as a logical, but as a practical question. People around me seem always to believe—more fervently the more desperate they are—that there is some means, plain or occult, by which to get whatever is most precious in life. The idea fascinates me, since it suggests a path from what is to what might be, but it requires, I think—in the believer—an image of those might-be’s.”

Belatedly writing my impressions of this marvelous book—it is less a novel than a coming-of-age/how-I -became-a-writer kind of memoir. That being said, it’s very focused on Waldrop’s upbringing in a family full of searchers: his mother constantly searching for the brand of Christianity stringent enough to make sense of the world, his brothers searching for money and fame, and young Keith merely searching for his direction. These believers stumble, by the grace of something, through their lives trying to construct a new world in which their place is defined. I picked this up because another writer said it was something of a companion to Marilynne Robinson’s “Housekeeping” and I see the translucent threads connecting them. Ultimately I find Robinson’s Midwest family chronicle of belief more directed than Waldrop’s but still found a lot to connect to here, especially the connection to Christianity despite entrenched agnosticism.

[Roxane · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very strange book but really readable, the chronicle of a man's odd family, very much a Midwest novel, lots to think about here.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is outstanding.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is outstanding.

[Zach · Rating 3 out of 5]

A beautiful book that ends up leaving a lack.