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  • The Art of Living
  • Marc C. Conner (bio)
Grand: A Grandparent’s Wisdom for a Happy Life
Charles Johnson
Hanover Square Press
www.harlequintradepublishing.com/shop/books/9781335015860_grand.html
160 Pages; Cloth, $19.99

There is a rich tradition in Zen writing of the “art of” narrative. Eugen Harrigel inaugurated the form with his classic Zen in the Art of Archery in 1948; Robert Persig contributed his brilliantly idiosyncratic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in 1974. These are books that take a trade or practice and use it to convey the fundamental truths of the life well lived. Charles Johnson, who has forged a remarkable artist’s life in over twenty-five books ranging from novels to works of philosophy to cultural essays to short stories to children’s tales, has created a similar sort of book in Grand: A Grandparent’s Wisdom for a Happy Life. Johnson does not choose a trade or craft for the vehicle of his wisdom, however. He goes right to the source and produces a book that could offers “fertile and essential ideas for the art of living.”

The book does have its own conceit that enables the transmission of wisdom. It is constructed as a series of ten chapters, each of which offers advice to Johnson’s eight-year-old grandson, Emery Charles Spearman, and guide the young boy to help him navigate the tempestuous waters of life as he grows into adulthood. Within these ten chapters, Johnson characteristically explores a diverse range of writing styles — first-person confession, philosophical argument, speculative essay, short story, epistle (indeed the entire work can be understood as a letter to his “Dear Son,” not unlike Benjamin Franklin’s classic Autobiography [1791]), historical reflection, and more. This is paradigmatic of much of Johnson’s work, such as his short-story collections Soulcatcher (2000) and Nighthawks (2018), which similarly employ a wide variety of genres and styles. For Johnson proudly inhabits a wide range of writing modes, constructing what he has called a house of fiction that it offers its visitors many rooms.

Thinking about the book as a house or home is a helpful way to approach Grand. For this book begins with a meditation on place: “Once upon a time,” it opens, in classic storytelling fashion, “the cluttered study where I’ve written books of all kinds for twenty-six years, and drawn all manner of cartoons and illustrations, was all my own.” This is Johnson’s sanctum sanctorum, his office/study that was specially designed by architects, where he has created over the decades in his Seattle home. But every good story turns on the moment when a new character enters, and so eight years ago Johnson’s grandson Emery was born and “apparently this room inspires him, too, because he now calls it his office. I watch in wonder as he, a beautiful and brilliant boy who feels at home in a room of books and artistic tools, takes over my workspace for his projects.” Emery’s presence in Johnson’s life is an irruption, a happy invasion, and a transformation of Johnson’s relations to both time and space. The resulting book is, like all works of art, an offering or gift not just to Emery but to the generations of the future that he embodies. It is truly wisdom for living a fulfilled life for a world that is desperately in need of such guidance.

Hence Johnson’s first exploration takes us, not into Emery’s future, but into Johnson’s (and by extension Emery’s own past), specifically the past of Johnson’s own father and the patriarchs who preceded and continue to influence Johnson’s life and work. Johnson has written at length about his own father in multiple formats, from several seminal essays to the great Evanston chapter in his 1998 novel Dreamer. In Grand, he returns to the central themes he has adumbrated in those other writings: his father’s work ethic, his pious Christianity, his endurance, his attitude towards race and racism, and his ability to build. Like the great Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who in his early poem “Digging...

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