Light While There Is Light: An American History

by Keith Waldrop

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 shade business operations and sham religious institutions. One brother is imprisoned for his activities.
Yet the author neither psychologizes nor preaches, nor does he judge his family. Rather, his plain, poetic prose searches out events, actions, and results as clues of their desperate quests for meaning. As American authors from Hawthorne and Poe to Faulkner and O'Connor have understood, the American experience is anything but nice and sweet. Below the surface of American family life are spooky tales of fear, madness, and destruction. In Light While There Is Light, Waldrop explores these tales through the memories of his own life with love, understanding, and all the horror they evoke. This is a true American family classic.

Genres: Fiction, Poetry, Literature, American, Novels, Historical Fiction, The United States Of America

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.

[Kyle C · Rating 5 out of 5]

Keith Waldrop's memoir is an incredible account of a childhood surrounded by fanatics: choir singers speaking in tongues, preachers foretelling the apocalypse to men in prison, neighbors hoping to be healed by visiting charlatans, his brother Julian painstakingly copying out messages from a Ouija board purchased at a toy store, Julian's girlfriend proclaiming herself a prophetess, his other brother Charles getting caught up in one business scheme after another—and most of all, his mother, a twice-divorced born-again-Christian terrified of witches, debilitated by persistent migraines, and devoted to the doctrine of premillennianism. After separating from her second husband, shopping between different sects, she eventually brings her children to an unaccredited college in Sharon, South Carolina, mostly in the hopes of finding a preacher to marry her daughter. It is a riveting tale of crackpot holy-rollers.

Yet Waldrop writes with remarkable restraint. For me, one of the most shocking moments in the memoir is when Waldrop recounts how his brother Julian, after failing to kickstart his harebrained plans for a poultry business, resold hundreds of his chicks to the son of the college president who

got a whipping for buying them and, in revenge, murdered the chicks one by one on the front porch of the president's house, smearing their blood along the threshold, where suddenly stricken with guilt he threw himself down, howling for punishment. Elaine mopped up the remains of uneaten grain and chicken turds and there was nothing to indicate we had even been involved with fowl.

It's by the far the most graphic and viscerally repellant tale in Waldrop's "history" and yet even here it is as elliptical as it is evocative. Waldrop hides the traumatic images of childhood in a terse narration that compresses the full horror: the blood smeared on the porch, the boy throwing himself down, and yet in the end, the muck all cleared up and the consequences never spelled out. The dramatic moments of Waldrop's life are similarly related with a disturbing succinctness:

In one quarrel, when I was twelve, my father broke her glasses and she sued for divorce, getting an injunction that forced him to leave the premises.

So much violence and grief is buried inside the sentence: the prepositional "in one quarrel" (telescoping assault into a distant singularity), the short sentence "my father broke her glasses" (pointedly concealing how he broke her glasses), the hollow conjunction "and she sued for divorce" (omitting everything between her glasses and her divorce), and the lame participial phrase "getting an injunction" (relegating his estrangement from his father to an adverbial addendum). Waldrop manages to tell the shocking story of his life in the most unsensational way.

Toward the end of the memoir, Waldrop reflects on how he never felt a strong sense of reality and therefore thought that "the sum of things being obviously unreal, I should cling to what is at hand, the minute particulars of my immediate experience." And that is the ethic of his writing: lucidly describing without embellishment, without judgment, without sermonizing, a childhood and adolescence roiled by religious mania. The more crazy his life becomes, the more restrained he becomes. He treats his family's eccentricities with unwavering detachment, recording them as though mundane as a grocery list: "That summer, I tried to take stock: Clyde had dropped out of the ministry; Julian was in prison; Charles was in love; Mother was speaking in tongues." It's captivating to read.

[Caleb Succo]

“Some people start reading-reading seriously-when they have religious doubts, and from that day on, they reject what they read as heresy or take it as gospel and swallow it whole.”

[Grace Gillam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really beautifully written book, and devastating even though it’s not written in a way that directs you to feel one way or the other.

Shoutout Roanoke, VA!

[Tosh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here is my review of "Light While There is Light" by Keith Waldrop. Read it here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/tosh/p/...

[Remi Chevalier]

Will circle back to this one!

[carl · Rating 4 out of 5]

unexpectedly entertaining

[Derek Driggs · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fictional memoir about the protagonist’s mother and her relationship to religion? Nothing sounds more appealing to my strange taste in books. I love autofiction and works on memory and religion.

The odd thing is, for a fictional memoir, this stays quite mundane compared to various directions it seemed poised to take.

I’m not sure I got out of this what its author intended, and would be very open to a reread.

[Caelan Roberts · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wish this connected with me more. Undeniably fantastic, restrained writing and Waldrop has an insane ability to capture the beautifully mundane but ultimately I don’t know if I will be taking that much away from this memoir. I think if I was more familiar with his work this one would have had a bigger impact

[death spiral · Rating 5 out of 5]

At times it almost reads like a 20th c follow up to The Stammering Century

[Daniel Grey · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are some beautiful lines in this fairly bland fictional memoir about religion, a topic I don’t particularly care to read.

[Geoffrey Hagberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

What is it: memoir of a family's faiths and fantasies.
----
Why 5 stars: in film, there's an aesthetic mode coined by Paul Schrader as the "transcendental style," by which a filmmaker brings the audience to experience the seeking, searching, tension of faith by showing them imagery that is caught seeking, searching, in tension rather than resolved on the screen. This might be a shot that doesn't cut when the action ends but lingers a little too long, inviting the viewer to expect some additional action even if nothing happens before the eventual cut. It might be a sound edit where the imagery of a scene has cut but the sound from a prior scene has not yet, or the sound of the next scene has begun while the imagery waits, leaving the audience interpreting an overlap of realities unsure which should be given priority. It might be performances understated almost to the point of non-acting, but delivered to a rapt camera that refuses to look away, leaving the audience to investigate in the canvas of the actor's blankness some signs of an interior experience not yet externalized. There's many tools to accomplish the style, and many filmmakers who've leveraged the style, but the result is that tension, the viewer caught between the immanent and the transcendent. What is filmed is literally always the immanent, the visible, the present at the time and place it was captured on film. But what is seen is not what is filmed; what is seen is what is desired, anticipated, expected, wondered, hoped for, and it is encouraged by certain forms and patterns.

When I read Schrader's Transcendental Style in Film, I didn't think I'd encountered written literature that was aiming at that same style, at that same tension in its reader.

With Waldrop's Light While There is Light, maybe I now have.

It is memoir, but clearly not held to strict factuality, permitted a looseness and ornament of memory or dream. It is organized by times and places, but here too not confined by them, certainly not told linearly, nor ever framed by imposed thematic structures. There are character arcs and minor plots, but there is certainly no narrative artifice. But more striking to me is that Waldrop's prose is, itself, as elusive as his subject. His syntax is almost always simple, direct, immanent, but in between each clause seems an invitation to see complexity that Waldrop never explicitly includes in his grammar. His diction is intentionally ambiguous, so that a sentence that has an obvious meaning in the telling of some small narrative or relation of some strange character will catch the reader with one or three possible other implications as might relate to a prior paragraph, prior page, other time or person entirely. The most meaningful fragments of this text are meaningful precisely because they fall into these gaps, these invitations to seek a meaning that's not in the ink on the page but in, instead, the blankness between the lines.

Don't misunderstand me, or Schrader, though: leveraging transcendental style is not inherently positioning the work of art in a Christian worldview. Here, Waldrop is very clear that he intends this memoir to reckon with the ways each of his family members' lives were shaped by their particular understandings of faith, but that he himself writes from an absence of that faith. It is Waldrop's work to show the reader the reasons his family members all wanted to believe their idiosyncratic beliefs, but equally to hold the reader in tension between that desired belief and Waldrop's own refusal. Transcendental style, here, might be a tool to catch the reader in a seeking for belief that the author is unwilling to share.

A sentence in this style might begin with a declaration that his mother would agree with and end with a clause that evidences to the reader the futility of that affirmation, as: "But healing was always still to come--meanwhile, she sat on the right side of the church, because her left eye was the stronger." Or a sentence might establish a simple fact and then proceed to elaborate a brother's unwarranted reaction, as: "Charles had seen nothing, but was equally shaken." Or a sentence might describe revelation in the midst of self-imposed blindness and invite the reader to the symbolism of the blindness and the seeing both, as: "--only when she opened her eyes I realized she had all this time had them shut." Or a sentence might in one, unbroken gesture sculpt a heroic visage and mockery of it at once, as: "I saw in my mind's eye the whole bright circle of an afternoon sky descend to a meager runway traced across an ill-marked patch of ground--Julian, blood and bone of the Body of Christ, gazing tranquilly out of the snack bar window at a returning Piper Cub, or perhaps a scheduled flight from Peoria."

Waldrop begins this memoir telling the reader: "my ghosts merely disappear. I never see them. They haunt me by not being there, by the table where no one eats, the empty window that lets the sun in without a shadow." And he ends the memoir by reminding the reader again: "my ghosts are as before: neither soul nor body, but the lack of obstacle to sunbeams coming in the window or light from a lightbulb or any everyday reflection." There are, though, many presences casting long shadows in this memoir. Waldrop's mother, certainly, an unshakeable presence even when the family seems to try to flee from her weaponized ethics; his brothers, chasing their tails and tales across the entire geography of the States through any sort of grift and salvation they can cling to; strange acquaintances that recur in various episodes, spouses and children of the family, even pets like a certain three-legged cat. Presences all, immanent on the page.

But less present on the page is Waldrop himself. I would be reluctant to call this "Waldrop's memoir" at all. It is a memoir of his family, but he acknowledges his own place in that family just a few times over the course of the whole text. Only a couple times does he invite the reader to some interior experience of his own. And even in the photographs that are provided throughout the text, he is rarely included. I think maybe this is the most meaningful tension of all: that to us, reading this text, Waldrop is the ghost that haunts, the absence casting no shadow as the light falls on all the bizarre and fascinating persons around his place and time.

When Waldrop writes "Ghosts gather in such lines" of hymns sung by his mother and "all we remember, finally, is words," or later "then I drew up lists and catalogues in a dream of order, but the only order was in the dream," and in the end "if I dream the events this account describes, they are not usually changed, but in what should be a world nearer to the heart's desire, they play again, just as I tell them here, exactly as already experienced. It is as if despairing, even of imaginary improvement, I contrive instead to set my affections on the damned world, this very world, as it was and as it is"--in these, I see Waldrop confessing the work of writing this text is a work of keeping present people and places, encounters and experiences, that he intends the light to illuminate still. But to keep himself just outside of that light, just beyond the page's edge, Waldrop refuses himself that same meaning that might come from description and ordering. Waldrop refuses himself the memorial of words. I see that in his final words: "As for me, what I would like, I think, is to live a while longer. But not again." The present may linger, but the presence should not.

The reader is caught now in a tension not only of belief and unbelief but of searching for the breath behind the words, a tension because that searching is not resolved by the ink after all.
----
You might also like: Schrader's films, Malick's films, Kentucky Route Zero comes to mind, maybe something like As I Lay Dying too. And I think Border Districts by Gerald Murnane is doing something very different, but maybe has a similar reading experience. And I bet Waldrop would vibe with the documentary Salesman.

[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.

[Ian · Rating 3 out of 5]

A weird association, but kind of reminds me of the tone and feel of A Scanner Darkly at times -- a book of loose, anachronistic anecdotes about the author's family, sometimes sweet and funny, almost always a little (or a lot) sad, sometimes outright disturbing, but almost always treated with a level of respect and a lack of judgment. I guess this is really not too strange a structure -- The Lives of the Saints could be described similarly.

Waldrop plays a lot with light -- what he chooses to illuminate in his 'fictional memoir' (sort of reminiscent of Sebald), what he chooses to obscure, and what that light may signify. Divine presence and testament? Or just natural phenomena, beauty, pain? Lerner includes a Wittgenstein quote in the introduction that he thinks represents Waldrop's approach to his memoir and thus his life: "It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists."

Waldrop recognizes the ethos and pain behind his mother's increasingly fundamentalist, millenarian, pentecostal beliefs:

"The history of my mother's religious opinions should be told as the record of a pilgrimage. As I imagine most pilgrimages, it was less the struggle toward a given end than a continual flight from disappointment and unhappiness. Neither the joys of heaven nor hell's worst prospects provide as forceful a motive as the mere emptiness of the world." (16)

Waldrop was a beloved poet, educator, editor, and general creative mind, but we see very little of his creative life and development in this book -- he's a witness, an unjudgmental and dutiful son and brother to his family of generally well-intentioned, perpetually broke fraudsters, deserters, shirkers, etc. His pathos towards life is not a rebellion or a clean break -- and if it's driven by pity, he's careful not to let that show to his mother and siblings. As he writes in the final line:

"As for me, what I would like, I think, is to live a while longer. But not again." (201)

The title feels like a sort of answer to his mother's religious fervor, but it's an approach that Waldrop quietly came to with sympathy and respect, even reverence.

Notes and other quotes:

-- "Her first husband had been a deception. Her second she treated frankly as an enemy." (24)
-- "'I had three sons -- two of them married witches, and one married a Catholic.'" (40)
-- "Her students loved her, and some of them even learned to play." (60) I like this quote a good deal -- a very simple way to explain what it means to teach, something Waldrop was no stranger to
-- "The foothills visible to the north suggested an invitation, though I knew they were, at best, another Carolina." (89) Hey!
-- "'Bob Jones University is already accredited -- by a Higher Authority.'" (108) Harrison's dad's alma mater!
-- "I used to wonder why, no matter what we've done or not done, we are always, all of us, so dead set on feeling guilty. Until it occurred to me that guilt is another word for potentiality: to sin is to cast a shadow. Lord, be merciful." (194)

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

I got this book in the mail as part of a New York Review Books book-of-the-month club offering which I received as a very thoughtful Christmas present.

"Light" was published in the early '90s and I couldn't help but think about Tom Waits's output from Swordfishtrombones through Bone Machine. Also Jim Jarmusch movies and the TV show Twin Peaks. And to expand the timeline, Tobias Wolff, Frank Conroy, "Elmer Gantry," and here and there, vignettes from Nathaniel West, Raymond Chandler, and Ross MacDonald. Can't have light without noir.

What I really like about "Light" is how believable it is. I knew plenty of kids growing up who were in weird religions. Even then, I had a keen sense of positive thinking cults, schismatic oddball religions, and the intersection of religion and crime. Miracle Valley, in Arizona? I'd never heard of it prior to reading "Light," but it's a crazy story.

Occasionally, I couldn't quite understand what Waldrop was saying in spite of numerous re-readings of the paragraphs in question - I would be open to a reread at some point, in hope of understanding his more delicate shadings.

The part about the death of Charles senior's wife Bessie suggests whole new directions. The author's willingness to touch on this bizarre episode in an elliptical, unresolved few pages is typical of his singular vision.

[Shane · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those books I have always meant to read but for whatever reason have never read. I often coddle up close to these kinds of books. I feel like there's something special about them... they've transfixed me but not so enough to make me dive fully in right away. Almost every time I finally do dive in and read them, they are unmistakable masterpieces of fiction (i.e. The Remains of the Day, A Month In The Country, etc.). On the other side, there are books that I'm very excited to dive right into (and do) but find lackluster and unable to live up to the hype. I feel like this is a more contemporary problem. Has writing, overall, gotten worse? Or has the praise just become too bloated and/or easy? Eh I don't know. Maybe it's just time. A book deserves time to settle into the world, perhaps. To haunt it. Be haunted by it. Find its readers. After all, that's what we all do, go around in the nights and mornings saying, Please, please, for the love of god, find me, haunt me, do it.

[Will Quabbit · Rating 5 out of 5]

Waldrop is a poet, and it shows in how satisfying this book was to read word by word. Not that the writing is particularly lyrical: it's restrained, compassionate, straightforward and yet elliptical. Nevertheless, there were moments when I sighed in satisfaction at the arrangement of a scene or a chapter. American strains of Christianity play a large role in the book, and the pervasive Biblical (or quasi-Biblical) language gives it a quietly transcendental texture.

That said, I was glad when I'd turned to the last page. Waldrop's portrait of Americans consumed by emptiness (why do Americans expect to be fulfilled?) and, in turn, ossifying into eccentricity, belief in snake oil salesmen, and extreme religious fervor is depressingly contemporary. No wonder we have the administration we have.

[Matthew Olsson · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first lines of the memoir tell of a ghost story. One we cannot see, that haunts without being present. It’s a ghost of emptiness and absence. It is the ghost of his now absent family. A family that comprises the bulk of this fictional memoir. One in which Waldrop fades to the background and hides in plain sight, while his bombastic family takes center stage.

His mother was pious and Christian. Obsessed with theology she would debate and judge others based on obscure beliefs surrounding predestination, the afterlife, and other topics that separate the many Protestant denominations. She would lead Waldrop across the country and back again joining churches and colleges that fit her current version of beliefs.
https://theculturalreview.co/p/light-...

[Moira Cassidy · Rating 4 out of 5]

An account of the author's bizarre peripatetic childhood, led around by his holy roller mother and scheming older brothers. Waldrop's experiences are generally trying and a little tragic but treated with reverence and something like nostalgia. He neither complains nor sugar coats. His flawed relations are people... they study, they suffer, they take in stray cats. Oddly kind of a page turner considering it's basically about nothing. The characters are weird, sad & funny (the Judge, Kate the Prophetess) and I especially liked the occasional trippy passages about religious visions--seeing the kingdom of heaven surround you like a glowing sphere etc.

[Lila · Rating 4 out of 5]

Down into the depths of American Christianity we go. Religion can console, but it can also screw-up families. This memoir sketches out the dark underside of Midwest Protestantism.

Waldrop's mother's focus on interpreting Revelations and her commitment to fundamentalism makes the family downwardly mobile. This is not just the Midwest. Some elements remind me of West Coast families I have known where dogma overpowers any understanding of reality.

This book is the June 2026 NYRB Classics selection.

[Henry Barrett · Rating 3 out of 5]

June selection for the NYRB book of the month club

I don’t think this one was for me, or maybe I need to return to it in a few years and I’ll get something more out of it. For now though, while I loved the stark simplicity of the prose and a lot of the episodes were great (especially the stuff about the narrator’s dad and the later bits with the ouija board), I think I was looking for them to connect a little more than they did.

[mark foster · Rating 4 out of 5]

Waldrop's style is really good. I like when the bible-thumping quirky americana is presented in an even hand, not satirized, not glorified, not pathologized, it just is. The lack of structure to the plot could be a benefit to some. I found myself drifting through the pages slightly etherized, occasionally cooing at the passing poetry. Not the finest of NYRB's offerings but not middling fare either.

[Aidan · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 from me.

Some beautiful passages, especially when Keith Waldrop talks about how he experiences daily life. It was also wild to look at a family that has had such a complicated relationship with religion.

I didn’t like how he jumped around and it was difficult for me to enjoy the memoir or be entertained.

[Griffin Mendel · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are some really sharp, moving moments in Waldrop’s semi-memoir and overall it is an interesting portrait of a certain version of America. I did notice that almost all the highlights were pointed out in Ben Lerner’s introduction, leaving a whole lot of space that isn’t really all that compelling.

[M Swage · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Neither the joys of heaven nor hell's worst prospects provide as forceful a motive as the mere emptiness of the world". An account of his family without judgment. A dark tale (to me) yet he often focuses on light. Found it to be haunting but beautiful.

[Margaret Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

I forgot I had read this already but I enjoyed it both times

[Luca Antonio · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful work by Keith.

[Christine · Rating 1 out of 5]

This type of book isn't for me. It's too much weaving reality and fiction. Where does the speaker end and Waldrop bring? Writing in terms of style and imagery outside of that is good.

[Barbara T. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Possibly the strangest book I have ever read