Shya Scanlon
In One Note, Gabriel Blackwell asks writers to talk about the book they are currently reading, and why. One Note 002: Shya Scanlon, Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping.
In One Note, I ask writers for just that: one note, a single paragraph, on what they’re reading right now.
Today’s note comes courtesy of Shya Scanlon.
I’m reading Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson. I picked it up because Opium Editor Todd Zuniga, who stayed with me one night while breezing through town on a Literary Death Match tour, had just finished it, and I swapped him for Gilead, which is one of my favorite books. I’ve been cutting back on Facebook, and networking, and selling myself, and “being there,” and shit like that, and Robinson’s work is a good antidote for all the buzzy bullshit that exists outside the text. Her pace is glacial, and though she situates her fiction in a distinct time and place, it has the feeling of something that’s been waiting eons to emerge, and could patiently wait eons more to be read, or discovered. Of course, it’s already been discovered. So whatever. I think some readers might dismiss her as a sort of nostalgic Luddite, but I don’t think she’s after something that’s ever really been the case. More an idea of what could be, or what perhaps is, despite all our attempts to forget. A kind of presence that’s so big it’s easy to miss. Something sounding quiet just because you’re half-deaf.
Shya Scanlon is the author of Forecast and In This Alone Impulse.
