The World The Book Can Build
I HAVE a sign hanging on my office wall that reads Demented Whimsy. I take this as a daily challenge, a reminder, a mission statement—a way to calibrate my imagination before I’ve begun the day’s writing. Demented whimsy is the fuel authors use to tell stories in nuanced and evocative ways, a celebration of the magic thrumming in our hearts.
Anthony Doerr has that magic in droves. He possesses a singular gift for the alchemy of the cerebral and the emotional on the page. Plenty of writers can nimbly toggle between these two human hemispheres—the head and the heart—and yet very few of us possess the talent to approach these thrilling commodities simultaneously. In two previous novels, including All the Light We Cannot See (Scribner, 2014), which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction; two story collections, Memory Wall (Scribner, 2010) and The Shell Collector (Scribner, 2002); as well as the memoir Four Seasons in Rome (Scribner, 2007), Doerr has alerted us to his unique capacity to excel at such arcane practices. But that’s not even what impresses me most: The attribute of his work I admire more than anything is that while accomplishing this high-wire act, his books remain so much damn fun to read.
After all, we can gussy up narrative construction and talk about it in the most highfalutin and pretentious ways. At the end of the day, however, it’s deceptively, sometimes even depressingly, simple: The second page has to make our audiences want to read the third page, page 108 must create an appetite for page 109, and so on. Doerr does this to great effect because of the intimacy he establishes with his audience.
In his latest feat the work feels so embodied, told from an ensemble of diverse players who all have vibrant and complicated inner lives. He gives every single. It is an ethos, a literary responsibility. There can’t be a caricature in sight in our work. We must burrow deep into our players’ hearts, and if we need glimmering examples of exactly how to pull off such exquisite tricks, we have Doerr’s new novel: , published in late September by Scribner. Everyone is authentically inhabited and brought to real-deal life.
