From Our House: A Memoir (review)

Book Reviews195 the correlations, a friend's coma to his mother's death and another friend's depression to his own father's alcohofism. As if sensing this disjunction between present and past, Eggers returns to his hometown, where his parents are and are not, their bodies having been left to science, leaving him without specific knowledge of their whereabouts . In a turn that seems too astounding not to be true, Eggers discovers his mother's cremains in a funeral parlor in Lake Forest. Her remains are unceremoniously handed to him, ten pounds of grit and bone and ash in a cardboard box, and in a scene that can only be described as a tour de force, Eggers imperfectly sprinkles what is left ofhis mother into Lake Michigan, aU the while tossed forward and back by his own swirling, tormenting thoughts. Without a doubt, Eggers is prodigiously gifted, and this debut is, in actual fact, both a heartbreaking and a staggering one. This memoir's angry, rhapsodic , almostWhitmanian conclusion is proofthat we are in the presence of a writer who has fuUy earned the attention that this past year has brought him. For the constant reader, this book is a godsend, weU worth the night that wiU likely be spent tearing through to the end of it. Reviewed by Mark Steinwachs From Our House: A Memoir by Lee Martin Dutton, 2000 193 pages, cloth, $21.95 There is a moment two-thirds into Lee Martin's affecting From Our House when the author is shooting basketbaU, and the old tensions between "truth" and "Uterary truth" resurface. The events surrounding this pure moment seem, in a way, too crowded to be plausible: I let go with a jump shot. . . . Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my father's truck pull to the curb. The baU reached its apex and began its descent toward the basket. My father honked his horn. I stood there watching the ball, my arm still uplifted from the motion of the shot, my wrist bent in a perfect follow -through. . . . My father had got out of his truck and was caUing my name. I walked toward him, hearing, finally, the ball zipping through the net and bouncing, once, twice, on the asphalt before someone grabbed it. 196Fourth Genre This is a relatively smaU moment in the book, yet crafted with the utmost care. Did it happen as accurately as Martin remembers it? Possibly. But more likely this is a composite of two recoUections occurring very close in time that Martin felt compelled to fuse. The effect is powerful, but the anecdote feels staged. With the unreal, telescoped time, it feels like the clash of two different memories. Perhaps Martin consciously manipulates his recaU here for dramatic effect. Once again I encounter the uneasy ifvital problem arising so often in memoir: to what degree do we create or conform our memories to serve a purpose? From Our House is an exquisitely written memoir, lovingly shaped into a chronological narrative by Martin's skilled, writerly hands. Lorrie Moore has described the subject ofMartin's previous award-winning coUection ofstories as "violence, father and sons, and the large and small improvisations that make up American Ufe." Such an overarching depiction might have glossed From Our House, and whüe reading the book's immaculately-shaped prose I wondered on the tendency of memoirs to be assembled in a noveUstic manner, with beginnings, middles, and ends, a grace of coherence rarely bestowed upon us in "real Ufe." In her smart Context is Everything: The Nature ofMemory, Susan Engel reminds us that to write about the self"is to engage in a self-conscious and deUberate process that draws not only on vast amounts ofpersonal memory but research into one's Ufe, mastery ofnarrative skills, and an eagerness to communicate a carefuUy crafted version of oneself to strangers." Elsewhere she writes succinctly: "By crafting the past, we alter it." To what degree Martin alters his past is unknown, but the degree to which he crafts it is pleasurably felt. Martin creates an elegant memoir obsessed with how memory leaks into the present, and he seems as concerned with how...