I am totally obsessed with Tiffanie DeBartolo's novel God-Shaped Hole. It makes me laugh, it makes me cry, and it inspires me to believe in love. DeBartolo has a way with words. I'm not saying that she's the next Kazuo Ishiguro or Jane Austen or Marcel Proust or William Faulkner (or whoever you might believe to write beautifully), but there are times when a sentence she's written will move me to tears. Not because of the subject matter, but because of the way she has written it.
I'll try not to spoil you too much, but consider yourself warned.
If I could, I would write exactly like Tiffanie DeBartolo.
I didn't know anything about Jeff Buckley the first time I read God-Shaped Hole, but after discovering his music and learning a bit about his life, the allusions to Buckley obviously permeate the novel. Jacob's last name is Grace, his novel is entitled "Hallelujah," he yearns to live in Memphis...The novel begins with a fortune-teller predicting great tragedy for our heroine, Trixie. Instead of this being cheesy, DeBartolo sets a haunting tone:
When I was twelve, a fortune-teller told me that my one true love would die young and leave me all alone.
Everyone said she was a fraud, that she was just making it up.
I'd really like to know why the hell a person would make up something like that.
...
Back at our table, my family was reeling from my predicted future. They had petty lives and thus found my fated misforture hilarious. I was greatly distressed. It was 1984. That year, my true love was John Taylor from Duran Duran. He played bass and wore eyeliner. I was sure he'd be dead by morning.In addition to using the fortune-teller's prediction to set the stage for her novel, DeBartolo also uses another (modern) romance classic: the personal ad. However, Jacob's is unlike any other personal ad, and this novel is unlike any other romance.
He survived.
Trixie, now 27 (incidentally, my age now), meets Jacob and is instantly attracted. Not only because he is in fact attractive, but because his eyes tell her that he gets it. That he is also an outsider looking in on life but has found a certain contentment in being on the outside. He stares at her, tells her she's beautiful, then says, "You kind of have, I don't know, the face of a Henry James heroine." He isn't trying to be flattering, he's just telling her what he genuinely sees. Can you imagine someone actually saying something like that? I can't, but I would die on the spot if it ever happened to me. Then Trixie blushes, just as I would have.
The love story that follows is perfect in its complexity, its problems, its EPICness. I'm not sure whether it's a good thing that I'm given hope of a person out there who might really get me, or whether it will just add to my unrealistic expectations and make it harder to let someone in. I don't know.
"I suddenly thought my life was perfect. Or, at least, more perfect than it had ever been. It was as if all the melancholy I'd ever known, all the nights I sat alone thinking life sucked, had added up to our place in the world - finally a good place - and the spirit of that rightness was meant to echo on until the end of time. In one fleeting moment I believed, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Jacob was going to sell his book someday, and that we were going to break free from whatever it really was that held us back. It had to happen. It was part of the order of things. It was the way the universe was supposed to work."
I asked Jacob if he believed in God. ...
"Not in the traditional sense," he said. "I was raised with a belief in God. My mother's Catholic. But I saw through the billshit of organized religion by the time I was old enough to piss standing up. I think we are God. We all have that inside of us. And I believe we go on after we've turned to dusts. Our souls, I mean."
"I wish I believed that. To me, it's highly improbable. In my soul, there's just a big hold where God's supposed to be."
"That has nothing to do with God. The hole, that is. Everyone feels that void. Everyone who has the balls to look inside themselves, anyway. It's what life's all about."
"What?"
"A search. We're all searching for something to fill up what I like to call that big, God-shaped hold in our souls. Some people use alcohol, or sex, or their children, or food, or money, or heroin. A lot of people even use the concept of God itself. I could go on and on. I used to know a girl who used shoes. She had over two-hundred pairs. But it's all the same thing, really. People, for some stupid reason, think they can escape their sorrows."
When Jacob tells Trixie why he loves her, my heart melts. Completely melts.
He shook his head. "You underestimate yourself. I know you think you hide so much, but I can see right through you."
He could. He was the only one.
"That's why I love you," he said. "You try and act so though, you think you're so damn hopeless and godless and faithless, but you don't fool me. People without hope aren't tormented by the world the way you are. People without hope don't give a shit. But I see it in you, in the way you look at things, even in the way you look at me sometimes, like I'm the coolest fucking guy in the universe, and I know it's in there. Reverence. Belief. Something. You have a lot more faith than you own up to. You just don't want to be let down. But I'm not going to let you down again. Not if I can help it."
I don't think I can really say anything more about it.
If your intentions are pureI'm seeking a friendfor the endof the world.
Thoughts are king.
Music admired in God-Shaped Hole:
Chris Cornell, "Preaching the End of the World"
Bob Dylan, Blood on the Tracks
The Rolling Stones, Exile on Main StreetPrince
Nick Drake, Five Leaves Left
Miles Davis, Seven Steps to Heaven
Pete Townsend ("No one respects the flame quite like the fool who's badly burned.")
Harry Chapin's "Cat's in the Cradle"
No comments:
Post a Comment