Leaping: Revelations and Epiphanies, and: Spirited Men: Story, Soul, and Substance, and: The Wet Engine: Exploring the Mad Wild Miracle of the Heart (review)
Brian Doyle has a storyteller's blood, which came to him from his Irish forebears, so he calls himself a storyteller, which is true, since he tells stories, and most of them true, so you can call him a nonfiction storyteller. But he doesn't stop at the stories. He allows himself the meditative space to think on the stories he tells, whether they happened to him or to interesting others, and that makes him an essayist after the order of Montaigne, who once prescribed a formula for writing thusly:
These are my . . . true stories, which I find as entertaining and as tragic as those that we make up at will in order to give pleasure. . . . And if anyone should wish to build up an entire and connected body of them, he would need to furnish only the connecting links, . . . and by this means he could amass a great many true events of all sorts, arranging and diversifying them as the beauty of the work should require.
— "Of Three Good Women" [End Page 183]
That's what Brian Doyle does, amasses a great many true events, arranges them, makes them beautiful on their own and in harmony with the others. For his efforts, he's been chosen four times for the Best American Essays (1998, 1999, 2003, 2005) and four times for the Best [American] Spiritual Writing (1999, 2001, 2002, 2005). He's published seven books of nonfiction, four of them in the past three years, all strikingly good, wonderful, fantastic, inspirational. Here are three:
This is Brian Doyle's best book; so if you buy only one, buy this one. (But go ahead and read about the other two, too, since they're still excellent.) Leaping is a greatest hits collection, divided into six sections of grouped essays that vary in length from 2 to 20 pages. Their subjects range from visiting with the Dalai Lama to action figures' lost limbs to crushing a car to the Catholic Mass to teaching Sunday School to migrating geese to Jesus to the secret sensory organs of anchovies. This collection contains three Best American Essays: "Altar Boy," "The Meteorites," and "Yes," and three from the Best Spiritual Writing (which added "American" in 2004): "Eating Dirt," "Grace Notes," and "Leap," all of which have repeatedly knocked my socks off. This last, "Leap," surmounts the insurmountable task of writing deeply and unmaudlinly about the September 11th attacks. After initially refusing the request, feeling himself unable or unworthy, Doyle produced the most moving essay on that subject I have yet read. It begins—
A couple leaped from the south tower, hand in hand. They reached for each other and their hands met and they jumped.
Jennifer Brickhouse saw them falling, hand in hand.
—and continues with its matter-of-fact, reportorial, repeatorial tone, a litany of simple sentences with subjects before verbs and objects trailing, revealing a mind numbed by reality, seemingly unable to do more than retell, from multiple perspectives, the happening. But he does snap out of it, through some lines from the Apocalypsis, to a sort of understanding:
Their hands reaching and joining is the most powerful prayer I can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It is everything that we are capable of against horror and loss and death. [End Page 184]
This is a weirder book, a collection of biographical essays about 11 mostly dead white men. There is William Blake, Plutarch, Robert Louis Stevenson, Graham Greene, James Joyce, and (not dead) Van Morrison, along...
