books
The Sound of Silence: Review of All the Living by C.E. Morgan
It was in a review of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth that the critic James Wood first brought our attention to a certain flaw typical of the big contemporary novel: the pursuit of “vitality at all costs.” The big contemporary novel, Wood wrote, “seems to want to abolish stillness, as if ashamed of silence.” It is a symptom, I think, of modern life; we either pursue vitality at all costs or we are pursued by vitality at all costs; Ian McEwan fittingly called it the ‘I-pod generation’: what else does that ever-shrinking gadget symbolize if not our fear of silence?
The good news about C.E. Morgan’s debut novel is that it is not a big, noisy novel where information and sub-plots sprout like weeds on every page. In fact, rather than suffer from an excess of vitality, it might be argued that All the Living suffers from a vitality deficiency; there are moments when the reader feels impatience looming, and this is no doubt because this is essentially a novel about what doesn’t happen (and more specifically: what isn’t said), dealing as it does in hypothetical scenarios that are never fully realized. Morgan is a writer confident and wise enough to foresee the dangers of this approach -- ours is, after all, a generation that likes its noise, preferably blaring all hours of the day -- and thus we encounter, thirty-odd pages in, something of a belated thesis statement:
"She said music was found in the silence as much as sound. The pauses birthed the phrase and funeraled it too, the only thing that gave the intervening life of rising and falling pitch any meaning. Without silence there was no respite from the cacophony, the endless chatter and knocking, the clattering pitches."
It is a beautiful paragraph, strengthened further by the novel’s adherence to the notion that “music is found in the silence as much as sound.”
The plot is rather straightforward: lonesome, orphaned pianist Aloma comes to live with her boyfriend Orren (Orpheus) on the Kentucky tobacco farm he inherited after the untimely death of his mother and brother in a car crash (“He was a family cut down to one”). The farm is problematic, stubborn, and in the firm grip of a drought that doesn’t seem to want to loosen up. It’s a fitting mirror image of Aloma and Orren’s relationship; distanced from one another by grief and longing, the couple do a fair amount of bickering and shouting. Orren spends most of his day tending to the farm, while Aloma lingers about the house, cooking and cleaning, desperate to play her music.
Enter Bell Johnson, the local priest with whom Aloma begins a friendship after she is hired as the new church organist. Invigorated by her musical vocation and the interest Bell takes in her, Aloma gradually becomes aware of a certain attraction to the priest. The only problem with this would-be-affair with is that it is not quite convincing. Bell as a character is fatally vague and uninteresting; he spends most of the novel lingering in a door frame observing Aloma, or sitting in his office being kind and Christian. His sudden accusations of betrayal and deception are contrived partly because nothing that has transpired between he and Aloma warrants this overreaction. A little more vitality couldn’t have hurt.
Be that as it may, the blossoming friendship leads Aloma to the realization that she has put herself in a tricky position. She knows she must make a choice between the sappy comfort of Bell and his church or the more difficult but honorable task of building a stable life with Orren. Choosing the latter is not easy, and even as the couple is united by the birth of a calf we are not fully reassured that they have what it takes to make it work. Part of the issue is the claustrophobic presence of the dead; early in the novel, standing before a wall of family portraits, Aloma muses: “He [Orren] was bound in perpetual motion to all of them. She watched their pitiless eyes and her mouth twisted. She wanted to say, I’m defenseless before you, even if you are dead. And they wanted to say back, Yes, yes, yes you are.” I thought of James Fenton when I read this. Fenton in his poem “For Andrew Wood” raises the question: “what would the dead want from us?” This is a question Morgan also raises – and tackles – from both Orren and Aloma’s perspectives.
There are occasions throughout the novel when the silence gets the better of Morgan; Aloma’s wanderings around the house and the property border on the repetitive, and the assiduous lack of action makes you question whether All the Living might have worked better as a short story or a novella. But on the whole C.E. Morgan has written a deft and serious work of literature, and no review of this novel is just without emphasizing the brilliance of her prose. During a storm, the wind is described as having a “soprano scream” and Aloma observes a funnel that “swung out to the side like the trunk of an elephant, and then spitting out the grass and branches it had drawn into it, swirled wanly up into the clouds.” During the unforgettable calving scene, the calf’s head “swelled out suddenly like a bloodied balloon from the birth canal.” Every now and then observant readers might pick up the influence of a writer such as Carson McCullers -- or even Ernest Hemingway -- but Morgan’s voice is (astonishingly) already her own, emerging confidently through the silence.
