A Certain Arc

But I wanted to describe the trajectory of a baseball, the air, the rustling air, the space—the hole the ball makes against the background, its shape and how it has warped by the time it reaches me.

—Mickey Mantle, as rendered by Nathalie Léger

Over the last year my wife and I reread Moby-Dick, which led her to Omoo, Typee, Redfern, and Pierre, which, by the way, she recommends unequally. It led also to her observing, shortly before Christmas, how she thought she needed a few books by women. I took the hint and came up with four with which I stuffed her stocking. That's all we do any more, stockings, ours being ample, bulky knits. And so, about a month later, she read the passage above aloud, over coffee, at our kitchen table. It's from the third of the four books she received. By that time I'd heard fragmentary reports on each of the first two. But this was different. The passage comes about halfway through a late section of the book, which she read with rising fervor. By the time she hit the arc of a baseball, I knew I too would be reading Nathalie Léger's Suite for Barbara Loden (France 2012; Dorothy Project 2016 in the English translation of Natasha Lehrer and Cécile Menon). Nor would I have to wait long, for it comes quite near the end of the book, a small book, barely 123 pages, which Rebecca passed on to me within the hour.

Assigned an entry on Loden for a French encyclopedia of film, Léger saw Loden's Wanda and soon found herself immersed in a story beyond her grasp, a story of Wanda, of Loden, of the woman whose story Wanda had been based upon, of Léger's mother, and of Léger herself. Eventually she traveled to the States to meet Loden's sons and Elia Kazan, Loden's husband at the time of her death in 1980, to travel around Connecticut and northeastern Pennsylvania where Wanda was shot; read Kate Chopin's The Awakening, which was to be Loden's next project; and interview several other people, including Frederick Wiseman, who tipped her off to Mantle. Mantle, he said, knew Loden when she was a Copacabana dancer.

The image of the ball in flight, of the "hole" it makes in air, turns out to be a purposeful replay of the image with which Suite for Barbara Loden, called a novel but inexactly that, begins: "a woman etched against the darkness. . . . a tiny white figure, barely more than a dot against the dark expanse," and so a hole in air, a striking image of both presence and absence, an image touched on several times later. Wiseman's tip not only encourages Léger to touch all the bases she can, but gives her, or secures for her, or amplifies an image she may already have had. Wiseman offers another tip as well. Loden has proved elusive, leaving Léger with numerous questions unlikely to be resolved. "What do you do when you can't find answers?" she asks Wiseman, an as-far-as-we-know scrupulous documentarian. "Make it up," he replied; "all you have to do is make it up." Here was a more elegant way with that question than the labored, unsmiling, defensive ones I have had occasion to read and overhear. I smiled, read on, and imagined Léger connecting with her image and knocking it right out of the park. Nor was I surprised to find, a little farther on, baseball playing on a telly in a tavern and Léger asking a companion, "how long do you have to train to be able to hit such a small ball with a stick?"

Léger's term is "autofiction," a blend no longer unfamiliar, if it ever was, of fact, personal history, memory, and story, her version in Suite composed of 115 (unnumbered) paragraphs, some long, some short, separated by white space. To read Suite is to read a flow, or to read the steppingstones across a larger...