Close Read - Mary Lawson's The Other Side of the Bridge

Emotional vs Sentimental

From Mary Lawson’s website:

Crow Lake, her first novel, published when Lawson was 55, sold in 28 countries. It spent 75 weeks on the bestseller list in Canada, won the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, was a New York Times bestseller and was chosen as a Book of the Year by the New York Times, The Sunday Times, The Washington Post and The Globe and Mail. The Other Side of the Bridge, her second novel, was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and was a Richard and Judy Summer Read in the UK.

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Recently, I found Lawson’s latest, A Town Called Solace, (thank you, Amy!) and read and had to read more, so picked up this, her second book.

NOTEWORTHY: she did not begin to publish until age 55.

The process of taking another’s work and reading closely is key to learning to write well. I’ll be posting “close reading” pieces, starting with this one.

What most struck me about this excerpt is its cleanness, its genuine emotion.

This will not be the first time I write a post about writing with “emotion” rather than being “sentimental.” This is usually a question that arises when talking about works for young children (for whom being sentimental or nostalgic isn’t even really possible!) but Lawson’s work is beautifully straight ahead… I’m going to share a passage from a chapter that I had to re-read as I was appreciating this book.

It’s so rare that I enjoy a book as a reader, without thinking about what went into it (ah, to be a reader who can simply read! I’m a little envious. Makes me—because I’m old and capable of being—nostalgic for those childhood summer hours, reading until the sun went down… )

Here’s the passage, which occurs after the main character has lost his father in a horrible tractor accident. They have farmed together for years. A neighbour loaned them the tractor; the son is now back to using horses and plow, and will never use a tractor again. The evocation of grief is powerful. And deceptively simple. I’ve emboldened bits that stand out for me. (What details would you make bold?)

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from page 232-233

Had they spoken, that last time? He couldn’t remember. Probably not. They didn’t speak much. There was no need. One of them might say, “Soil’s heavy,” or “Lookin’ pretty good,” and the other might nod. Or they might just finish their tea in silence and heave themselves to their feet and go back to the teams.

Now he found he couldn’t sit down for his break. He drank his tea standing up, beside whichever team he was using. His father’s horses were gentle with him. He’d expected them to play up, unsettled by a strange hand on the plow, but they did not. It seemed to him that they understood. They were the only comfort he had, out there alone in the fields all day.

At dinnertime and again in the evening he’d walk back to the house long the track and for the first couple of weeks the prints of his father’s boots were still there, like his signature written on the land. Then it rained and they were gone. That had seemed a treachery, that his footsteps could be erased so easily. How many thousands of times had he walked along that track? All his life. His own father, Arthur’s grandfather, had brought the track into being, had cleared the land and plowed the very first furrow behind the broad swaying back of an ox. Their footsteps should have stayed forever.

Last thing at night he went out to the barns for a final look around before bed, as he and his father had always done, just to check that everything was okay. They used to stand for a minute or two in the farmyard afterwards, studying the sky, and Arthur did it still, couldn’t break the habit, though of all the moments of his day it caused the greatest pain. He stood alone in the silence of the night, remembering. In his mind’s eye he saw the two of them—always saw them the same, standing together, faces turned upwards. Clouds pale against the blue-black of the night. Stars cold and bright. The moon hanging there, pale and brilliant, clouds drifting across it like smoke. The sky and the silent land beneath it stretching on, and on, and on, so that he and his father were shrunk to almost nothing by the vastness of it. Two tiny insignificant specks, side by side, faces upturned, staring at the sky.

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Notice the word “seemed.” It’s a piece of English subjunctive-wanna-be, and it’s magic in how it allows you to get around and at creating the maybe-s of a world. How else can he get inside the head of a horse?

In the opening paragraph, the sentence lengths reflect how they have always spoken with each other—as he shares the same with us.

Note the repetition. Often we are told to vary our vocabulary… but repetition has a place in building a story, a character. This character repeats the ‘alone,’ ‘silence/silent,’ ‘faces turned upwards/faces upturned,’ ‘studying/staring.’ It serves to reinforce. (Do you notice this? Did it niggle at you? Did these choices make sense? Would you do this in your work… or would you hear some workshop voice say that “vary your vocab…”?)

Notice the length of paragraphs—each builds a bit longer than what went before. It has the sense of heavy and heavier blankets being pulled over, the weightiness of grief… to the point where the only way to have any relief from it is to see one’s self as small, to see the so-called big picture. Render the self insignificant so the grief seems (!) less so, and the pile of quilts can be turned back, and the self lightened. Or it’s a way of working one’s way into the depths. (How is this working for you?)

Yes, in the final paragraph, it’s as if the camera is being pulled away… “he saw the two of them”… and as if he is also trying to get perspective, as well as holding on to memory. Finding the distance to see clearly.

Grief is a shared experience—all of us go through it at some point. But each in our own ways. The universals of feeling betrayed by loss is here in the disappearance of those footsteps. Our existence is—ultimately—so fleeting. Yet how can we feel the pain that we do… if we are so “insignificant”? Yet allowing ourselves to experience the insignificance somehow has a role in righting the fine balance of the opposites.

He “drank his tea standing up” really resonates with me; my mother-in-law, always an adventurous cook who loved to see her family enjoy her creations, would stand over her kitchen sink, eating crumbly crackers with cheese after my father-in-law passed. It made my heart ache to see this. I’d always thought she cooked for herself, too, but maybe not—or had she hit some new miserable level of self-denial on top of all else she was going through?

Such a detail might pass unnoticed, but another will work in the same way, with another reader. This passage is filled with details that come across as lived life. And “lived life” and sorrow in this particular character’s life. To fully inhabit your character, to absorb the world through their eyes, makes the work ring with truth. Their truth.

Ha… every writer has a moment of finding just a perfect detail, or beautiful-sounding string of syllables, but then there can be that moment of recognition—that the piece is reflective of the writer and not the character—and must be jettisoned. Ouch. Ego trips off to back seat…

Final note:

Read aloud. I say this about your own work, but reading others’—read aloud.

And it is so useful to type out passages you want to learn from. It is not rote exercise. Not if you do it with focus on the words at hand. Clear away sound and any form of distraction—as much as possible, outer and inner—and focus.

Try it. I always advise this when writers are working with picturebooks and early readers. But it’s every bit as useful with novel writing and all forms for adults.

Any other observations about this passage? Please share in the comment box below —