I'm reading Barn Blind, by Jane Smiley, at the moment. I loved her book, A Thousand Acres. In contrast, this one is kind of a slow burner. I'm not quite sure what direction we're taking the story, but feel like I'm in a Faulkner novel, one of those point-of-view novels where the family lives too close together, and everyone is caught up in their own story, missing everyone else's. Like the drama is happening elsewhere, or in retrospect, and we're only getting bits and pieces.
But this wasn't really meant to be a review. The point is, this book has some really outstanding quotes, and I wanted to write them down or pass them on, before I forgot them.
The first is from the point of view of a father who is trying to connect with his eldest daughter, who has just dropped out of college and is kind of at a loose end:
"He thought that the trouble with having a problem child was that the child thought you always wanted to talk about the problem, so that every mention of the weather became an evasion, and every word of praise became an introduction to the child's potential. Axel didn't know what Margaret's potential was. She seemed to him what she always had - a lovely, healthy, laughing girl who looked pretty when she smiled and still hadn't quite grown into her features. He thought she was a late bloomer and was not anxious to force her. It was she, he thought, who met his most conventional greetings with the demand that he not worry about her so that, in spite of himself, he had begun to."
The scene continues with another moment I've definitely experienced, a thought that is hard to put into words, and is summed up here very nicely: "When she said, 'Well, I'm going to bed,' and got up gracelessly from her chair, and stepped gracelessly past him into the house, he wanted to impart something to her about her nature, about how he had seen her every day since the day she was born, and yet she was still a surprise to him; he wanted to say something about the human mystery of not adding up, something not about what he had learned, but about what there was to learn. He could not. He said, 'Good night.'"
