Roger Rosenblatt
authored one of my favorite “academic setting” novels, Beet. His latest novel, Thomas Murphy, is an entirely different
sort of story. Roger was born in
1940. He was a long-time essayist for Time and the PBS News Hour. He has held
several teaching positions at Harvard, but he is currently the Distinguished
Professor of English and Writing at Stony Brook University. He has also received seven honorary
doctorates.
Thomas Murphy is the story of a respected but aging poet dealing
with a cancer diagnosis. He also
recently suffered the loss of his wife, Oona.
Murphy was born in Ireland, and lived mostly in a seaside town of
Inishmaan. He now lives in the US. His daughter Máire believes he is losing his
memory. This fear of the loss of memory
is the thread that runs through the novel.
Ironically, the cancer diagnosis is mentioned early on, and forgotten
until near the end of the novel. But the
really interesting parts focus on his poetry.
Rosenblatt writes,
“They really aren’t difficult, my poems, no matter what the good Dr. Spector
says. Greenberg got ‘em readily
enough. Oh, I’ll toss in a wild word
from time to time, to keep the reader on his toes, the way Heaney does, and
Paul Muldoon. But neither of those great
fellas is hard to understand, and I’m not either. Most of the poets of my race are not hard to
understand. We just play hard to get”
(37). Spector is his surgeon and
Greenberg is an old friend. These
patches of memory are sprinkled throughout the novel, and make me wonder about
the loss of memory. When given a quiz by
the doctor, he makes every answer a barb with his caustic wit.
Murphy also writes
about writing poetry. “The whole process
of writing a poem is mystical, to me at least, mystical and beyond my
reach. Have I told you about this? I begin a poem with an image out of nowhere
(where did that come from?), and at once suspect I am part of a plan, and the
poem I’ve begun is part of a plan. The
process of writing then, is the progression toward someone else’s design”
(156). This closely parallels what
happens to me when I have a spark of inspiration.
An interesting episode
occurs when Thomas is alone in a bar. A
stranger recognizes him, and they strike up a conversation. Eventually, the stranger admits he wants
Thomas to tell his wife he is dying. He
reluctantly agrees, and the results are comedy and tragedy mixed together. Thomas befriends the man’s wife, and when her
husband leaves her, Thomas begins to date her.
The story itself is
rather poetic. Thomas recalls an event
in his childhood, “How slick the petals of the ocean as they bloom again. How fierce, how businesslike the term in its
hieroglyphics. The Earth grinds on its
axis, the strident wind goes slack, and the stars are steady as my gaze. I would travel now if I could. I would walk across the ocean, past the
startled fish and dreaming whales until I reached some shore of thought and
language. Not this night, though. On this night I am content with a ripple of
warm air and the horizon’s ambiguity” (155).
I found myself a bit
confused at first. The writing seemed
something akin to stream of consciousness, but I think Murphy was obsessing
over his loss of memory, which loss is never apparent in the story. But, overall, a pleasant little novel of a
shade over 200 pages satisfied me well enough.
5 stars
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