Writer Envy
Every once in a while you come across a line that you wish you wrote. This happened last night while reading Matt Bell’s In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods. The line I fell in love with:
…and all this upon that other sunnier shore, where it was not always summer but where often it was summer enough.
The way lament and contentment tug at each within this phrase in such an emotionally precise way left me in total awe.
As for the novel as a whole, it is quite possibly the strangest novel I’ve ever read. The beautiful language and sheer oddness of it is pretty compelling though. And the unflinching look at an unraveling marriage is in many ways enhanced by the mythic world the author has created. It’s a book worth checking out even if just to study the language.