Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog

On the long list of Books I Wish I Had Written, Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog has just leapt to Number One. SBBD is not, as it sounds, a pet story; it is a paean to the art of diagramming sentences and the beauty of well-constructed prose.

Kitty Burns Florey learned to diagram in Sister Bernadette's sixth grade classroom many years ago, and she loved it. She describes the process fondly: "You took up a sentence, threw it against the wall, picked up the pieces, and put them together again, slotting each word into its pigeonhole. When you got it right, you made order and sense out of what we used all the time and took for granted: sentences." It's not surprising that she grew up to be a copy editor and a writer whose prose is colorful, elegant, graceful, and funny.

SBBD does not actually teach the reader how to diagram, but it provides enough examples that someone who already knows grammar can figure out the process. (As Florey points out, diagramming doesn't teach grammar; you have to know grammar to do it right.) She does provide an entertaining history of the educational use of the practice sprinkled with humorous stories about her own diagramming days. Her pleasure in the work is described so beautifully that I almost put down the book to try to diagram sentences like these: "I remember loving the look of the sentences, short or long, once they were tidied into diagrams—the curious geometric shapes they made, their maplike tentacles, the way the words settled primly along their horizontals like houses on a road, the way some roads were culs de sac and some were long meandering interstates with many exit ramps and scenic lookouts. And the perfection of it all, the ease with which—once they were laid open, all their secrets exposed—those sentences could be comprehended."

The book is full of gorgeous sentences by other writers too, diagrammed for us in the imperfect printing of a human hand on beautifully uneven lines--a surprising visual pleasure in this era of computerized perfection. Trying to read a sentence from its diagram is an interesting exercise, like re-doing a jigsaw puzzle that was complete until someone walked by and bumped the table.

From the specifics of diagramming Florey moves to broader ideas about language and writing. I appreciated her balanced attitude toward correctness: while extolling clarity, precision, and consistency and working "to keep English accurate and well-scrubbed," she recognizes the ever-changing nature of our language and loves its endless variations and idiosyncrasies. She shows the silliness of many of the rules still championed by certain grammar police. Her own rules, she says, would boil down to these: "Communicate. Communicate elegantly. When elegance is beside the point, fuhgeddaboutit."

In her last chapter Florey takes us to a classroom where, absent any nuns and barking dogs, we find middle schoolers happily diagramming. Though she questions whether the practice actually improves writing--she swears it did hers no good--she points out why it can nonetheless be good for adolescents. Unlike writing itself, diagramming "was a game; it wasn't about you. There was no room for opinion. You weren't being judged on the content of your soul or the quality of your imagination.... Brilliant diagramming, unlike brilliant writing, was something that could be learned."

If you are a survivor of Catholic school in the fifties, you will love the afterword, where we learn what happened to Sister Bernadette after that crucial year of diagramming. But you don't have to be Catholic to appreciate this book. You just have to love writing and the struggle to do it well.

You can learn more about the author and her work at http://kittyburnsflorey.com/.

Amy Bloom Sweeps Us Away

Ever since I read Amy Bloom's heart-changing short story "Even a Blind Man Knows How Much I Love You" a few years ago, I've kept her name in the back of my mind. So when I read a number of good reviews of her new novel Away, and then spotted a virgin copy of it at the library, I grabbed it, hurried home, and sat down to read by the fire, where it grabbed me.

Away is the story of Lillian Leyb, a Russian peasant when we first meet her in 1924. When anti-Semitic neighbors rise up in a night of butchery, her parents and husband are slaughtered in front of her eyes. She manages to slip her daughter Sophie out the window and orders her to hide in the henhouse, then saves herself by feigning death. When the pogrom is over, Sophie has disappeared, and a neighbor tells Lillian that her daughter's hair ribbons were found floating in the river. The child is not seen again.

Lillian makes her way to New York to start life over. She is taken in by a cousin and finds work as a seamstress, an actress, and eventually the mistress of a Broadway producer (who also happens to be the father of her husband, who is gay). Adaptable, resourceful, and open to any experience, Lillian quickly assimilates to America’s language and ways. But the memory of her daughter burns in her, and when she learns that Sophie did not die in the pogrom, but was taken by a village family to Siberia, she knows she must go and claim her. With few resources but without second thought she sets out for the steppes of eastern Russia.

Along the way Lillian’s life (and that of the reader) is enriched by dozens of characters whose lives intersect with hers. The Jewish immigrants who struggle in the theatres and tailor shops of lower Manhattan; the producers who have achieved precarious success; the transcontinental train porters who will hide a desperate traveller in a train closet for twenty-two hours; the prostitute and the constable who save Lillian’s life; the grifter named Chinky Chang who gives her joy; the telegraph line builder who loves her—-we meet each for only a few pages, but each is memorable enough to generate another novel. Bloom seems to love them too, often turning off the main path of Lillian’s journey to follow them down their own roads. The John Irving-like previews of their futures are little gifts Bloom gives the reader, as are her playful yet strangely moving chapter titles: “And Lost There, a Golden Feather in a Foreign, Foreign Land,” “I’ve Lost My Youth, Like a Gambler with Bad Cards,” “Ain’t It Fierce to Be So Beautiful, Beautiful?”

Bloom overflows with words, and she often uses parentheses to bring a measure of control to wandering, exuberant sentences. While Lillian is learning English, she pores over a thesaurus, and Bloom frequently treats us parenthetically to the synonyms that parade through Lillian’s mind, rather like Quoyle’s mental headlines in The Shipping News. As she crosses the Yukon wilderness alone trying to get to Siberia, “Lillian tells herself to be calm and to be confident (bold, fearless, having no misgivings, she says to herself, and says next, doubtful, uncertain, dubious, and it is a little reassuring, as she walks down to the gray, windowless house in the middle of a brown valley in a wide white sea, expecting to be killed or raped or left as food for the bears, to know at least three good English words for what she is feeling).”

As Lillian slogs alone across the world, her feet mired in mud and reality, her single-minded hope and determination keep us tethered to her. “Lillian does not believe in anything like God. She’s petitioned particular gods lately (the god of edible red berries, the god of slow-moving streams), but she doesn’t address or hope to be heard by the Creator of the Universe. Lillian believes in luck and hunger (and greed, which is really just the rich man’s hunger—she doesn’t even mind anymore; that people are ruled by their wants seems a reliable truth). She believes in fear as a motivator and she believes in curiosity (hers should have shrunk to nothing by now but feeds on something Lillian cannot make sense of) and she believes in will. It is so frail and delicate at night that she can’t even imagine the next morning, but it is so wide and blinding by the middle of the next day that she cannot even remember the terrible night. It is as if she gives birth every day.”

Like every great literary odyssey, Lillian’s story strengthens us for our own dark journeys.