Yonder: Essays

Yonder

1

My father once asked me if I knew where yonder was. I said I thought yonder was another word for there. He smiled and said, “No, yonder is between here and there.” This little story has stayed with me for years as an example of linguistic magic: it identified a new space — a middle region that was neither here nor there — a place that simply didn’t exist for me until it was given a name. During my father’s brief explanation of the meaning of yonder, and every time I’ve thought of it since, a landscape appears in my mind: I am standing at the crest of a small hill looking down into an open valley where there is a single tree, and beyond it lies the horizon defined by a series of low mountains or hills. This dull but serviceable image returns every time I think of yonder, one of those wonderful words I later discovered linguists call “shifters”—words distinct from others because they are animated by the speaker and move accordingly. In linguistic terms this means that you can never really find yourself yonder. Once you arrive at yonder tree, it becomes here and recedes forever into that imaginary horizon. Words that wobble attract me. The fact that here and there slide and slip depending on where I am is somehow poignant to me, revealing both the tenuous relation between words and things and the miraculous flexibility of language.

The truth is that what fascinates me is not so much being in a place as not being there: how places live in the mind once you have left them, how they are imagined before you arrive, or how they are seemingly called out of nothing to illustrate a thought or story like my tree down yonder. These mental spaces map our inner lives more fully than any “real” map, delineating the borders of here and there that also shape what we see in the present. My private geography, like most peoples’, excludes huge portions of the world. I have my own version of the famous Saul Steinberg map of the United States that shows a towering Manhattan; a shrunken, nearly invisible Midwest, South, and West; and ends in a more prominent California featuring Los Angeles. There have been only three important places in my life: Northfield, Minnesota, where I was born and grew up with my parents and three younger sisters; Norway, birthplace of my mother and my father’s grandparents; and New York City, where I have now lived for the past seventeen years.

When I was a child, the map consisted of two regions only: Minnesota and Norway, my here and my there. And although each remained distinct from the other — Norway was far away across the ocean and Minnesota was immediate, visible, and articulated into the thousands of subdivisions that make up everyday geography — the two places intermingled in language. I spoke Norwegian before I spoke English. Literally my mother’s tongue, Norwegian remains for me a language of childhood, of affection, of food, and of songs. I often feel its rhythms beneath my English thoughts and prose, and sometimes its vocabulary invades both. I spoke Norwegian first, because my maternal grandmother came to stay in Northfield before I had my first birthday and lived with us for nine months; but after she returned home, I began learning English and forgot Norwegian. It came back to me when I traveled with my mother and sister to Norway in 1959. During those months in Norway, when I was four years old and my sister Liv was only two and a half, we forgot English. When we found ourselves back in Minnesota, we remembered English and promptly forgot Norwegian again. Although the language went dormant for us, it lived on in our house. My parents often spoke Norwegian to each other, and there were words Liv and I and Astrid and Ingrid used habitually and supposed were English words but were not. For example, the Norwegian words for bib, sausage, peeing, and butt all submerged their English equivalents. Liv and I remember using these words with friends and how surprised we were to see their befuddled faces. The paraphernalia of infancy, of food, and inevitably the language of the toilet were so connected to our mother that they existed only in Norwegian. When I was twelve, my father, a professor of Norwegian language and literature, took a sabbatical year in Bergen, and Norwegian came back to me in a kind of flash. After that, it stuck. The speed with which we four sisters transferred our lives into Norwegian is nothing short of remarkable. During that year we played, thought, and dreamed in Norwegian.

I returned to Norway in 1972 and attended gymnasium in Bergen for a year. That time my family was not with me. I lived with my aunt and uncle outside the city and took the bus to school. Sometime during the initial weeks of my stay, I had a dream. I cannot remember its content, but the dream took place in Norwegian with English subtitles. I will always think of that dream as limbo. Its cinematic code expressed precisely my place between two cultures and two languages. But soon the metaphorical subtitles of my life disappeared, and I immersed myself in the dream’s “original” language. It has now been twenty-three years since I really lived in Norwegian. It surprises even me that less than three of my forty years were actually spent in Norway and that nearly every minute of that time was lived in Bergen. I speak Norwegian with such a broad Bergen dialect that my parents find it comical. That dialect is the real legacy of my years in Bergen, the imprint of an experience that will not leave me. Chances are even senility won’t rob me of it, since the old and feebleminded often return to the language of early childhood. And yet Norwegian survives in me not only as a sign of Bergen but as a sign of my parents’ house in Minnesota. It is not for nothing, after all, that when my stepson, Daniel, was a very little boy and he looked forward to going home to Minnesota with me and his father for Christmas, he would ask, “When are we going to Norway?”

If language is the most profound feature of any place, and I think it is, then perhaps my childhood history of forgetting and remembering enacts in miniature the dialectic of all immigrant experience: here and there are in a relation of constant strain that is chiefly determined by memory. My father, who is a third-generation Norwegian, speaks English with a Norwegian accent, testament to an American childhood that was lived largely in Norwegian. Although separated by an ocean, my mother and father grew up speaking the same language.

My mother was thirty years old when she came to the United States to live for good. She is now an American citizen and claims she is glad of this every time she votes. My mother’s threat to take the first plane back to Norway if Goldwater was elected remains strong in my memory, however. Norway was always there, and it was always calling. A Fulbright scholarship brought my father to the University of Oslo, where he met my mother. The details of how the two met are unknown to me. What is mythologized in some families was private in ours. My mother’s sister once used the English expression “love at first sight” to describe that encounter, but I have never felt any reason to poke my nose into what is clearly their business. Oslo may not be Paris, but it’s a lot bigger than Northfield and a lot less provincial, and when my mother traveled from one place to the other to marry my father, whose family she had never laid eyes on, she must have imagined the place that lay ahead. She must have seen in her mind a world my father had described at least in part to her, but whether that world tallied with what she actually found is another question altogether. What is certain is that she left a world behind her. As a child she lived in Mandal, the most southern city in Norway, and those years were by every account (not only my mother’s) idyllic. Her memories from the first ten years of her life, with her parents, two brothers, and a sister in a beautiful house above the city where her father was postmaster, are ones of such aching happiness that she says she sometimes kept her memories from me and my three sisters in fear that we might feel deprived in comparison. When she was ten years old, her father lost his money and his land. He had undersigned a business deal for a relative that went sour. Although he might have saved himself from ruin, my grandfather kept his word of honor and paid on that debt, which wasn’t really his, for the rest of his life. I think this event forms the greatest divide in my mother’s life. Suddenly and irrevocably, it cut her off from the home she loved and threw her into another as surely as if the earth had opened up and formed an impassable chasm between the two. The family moved to Askim, outside of Oslo, and this is why my mother’s voice carries traces of both a southern accent and an eastern one: the mingled sounds from either side of the chasm. I have never doubted the happiness of my mother’s first ten years, in Mandal. She had parents who loved her, rocks and mountains and ocean just beyond her doorstep. There were maids to lighten housework, siblings and family close by, and Christmases celebrated hard and long at home and in the house of tante Andora and onkel Andreas, people I have imagined repeatedly but seen only in photographs taken when they were too young to have been the aunt and uncle my mother knew. But it seems to me that losing paradise makes it all the more radiant, not only for my mother but, strangely enough, for me. It is an odd but emotionally resonant coincidence that every time I have been in Mandal, it doesn’t rain. Rain is the torment of all Norwegians, who seek the sun with a fervor that might look a little desperate to, say, a person from California. The truth is it rains a lot in Norway. But when my mother took us there in 1959, it was a summer of legendary sunshine, and when I was last in Mandal, for a family reunion in 1991 with my mother and sisters and my own daughter, the sun shone for days on end, and the city gleamed in the clear, perfect light of heaven.

I never knew my grandfather. He died when my mother was nineteen. There are photographs of him, one in which he stands facing a white horse with three young children on its back. He is wearing a straw hat that shades his eyes, and between his lips is a cigarette. What is most striking in the picture is his posture, proud and erect, but with another quality that is almost but not quite jaunty. It is somehow obvious that he didn’t strike a pose. He had intelligent features — his eyes especially give the impression of thought. My grandmother said he read (almost to the exclusion of anything else) church history and Kierkegaard. She adored him and never married again. I’m sure it never entered her mind to do so. When I think of my mother’s mother, I think of her voice, her gestures, and her touch. They were all soft, all refined; and, at the same time, she was freely and passionately affectionate. For some reason, I remember with tremendous clarity walking through her door, when I was twelve, with my sisters and my mother and father. It was winter and my mother had knit me a new white hat and scarf to go with my brown coat. When my grandmother greeted me, she put her hands on either side of my face and said, “You’re so beautiful in white, my darling.”

The last time I lived in Norway, I visited my grandmother every day after school. She lived in a tiny apartment that rose above a small, old graveyard in the city. She was always happy to see me. I’m afraid I was a morbidly serious adolescent that year, a girl who read Faulkner and Baldwin, Keats and Marx with equal reverence, and I must have been somewhat humorless company. But there was no one I liked being with more than her, and this may have made me livelier. We drank coffee. We talked. She loved Dickens, whom she read in Norwegian. Years after she was dead, I wrote a dissertation on Charles Dickens, and though my study of the great man would no doubt have alarmed her, I had a funny feeling that by taking on the English novelist, I was returning to my Norwegian roots.

My mormor (in Norwegian maternal and paternal lines are distinguished: mormor literally means “mother-mother”) is at the center of my real experiences of Norway, Norway as particular and daily, as one home. She was a lady in the old sense of the word, the word that corresponds to gentleman—a person who never shed her nineteenth-century heritage of gentility. I was deep in my self-righteous socialist phase, and I’ll never forget her saying to me in her soft voice, “You must be the first person in the family to march in a May Day parade.” She wore a hat and gloves every time she went out, dusted her impeccable apartment daily, including each and every picture frame that hung on the wall, and was shocked when her cleaning lady used the familiar form du when she spoke to her. I can recall her small apartment very well — the elegant blue sofa — the pictures on the wall — the shining table — the birdcage that held her parakeet Bitte Liten, a name I would translate as “the tiny one.” And I remember every object with fierce affection. Had I not loved my grandmother, and had she not loved my mother very well and loved me, those things would just be things. After Mormor died, I walked with my own mother outside our house in Minnesota, and she said to me that the strangest part of her mother’s death was that a person who had only wanted the best for her wasn’t there anymore. I recall exactly where the two of us were standing in the yard when she said it. I remember the summer weather, the slight browning of the grass from the heat, the woods at our left. It’s as if I inscribed her words into that particular landscape, and the funny thing is that they are still written there for me. Not long after that conversation, I dreamed that my grandmother was alive and spoke to me. I don’t remember what she said in the dream, but it was one of those dreams in which you are conscious that the person is dead but is suddenly alive and with you again. Although all other architectural detail is lost, I know I was sitting in a room and my grandmother walked through a door toward me. It was a threshold dream, a spatial reversal of my memory of walking through her door and her telling me I was beautiful in white. I remember how intensely happy I was to see her.

My daughter, Sophie, has always called my mother “Mormor,” and no name could be more evocative of the maternal line. Mother-mother is for me an incantation of pregnancy and birth itself, of one person coming from another, and then its repetition in time. When I was pregnant with Sophie, I felt it was the only time I had been physically plural — two in one. But of course it had happened before, when I was the one inside that first place. Uterine space is mysterious. We can’t remember its liquid reality, but we know now that the fetus hears voices. After the violence of birth (all the classes, breathing, and birth-cult nonsense in the world do not make the event nonviolent), the newborn’s recognition of his or her mother’s voice forms a bridge across that first, brutal separation.

2

By its very nature, original space, maternal space, is nonsense; human experience there is undifferentiated and so can’t be put into words. It lives on in our bodies, however, when we curl up to sleep, when we eat, when some of us bathe or swim. And surely it leaves its traces in our physical desire for another. Paternal space in an ideal sense is different. Although we are “of” our fathers, just as we are “of” our mothers, we were never “in” our fathers. Their separateness is obvious. In the real lives of real people, this distance may be exaggerated or diminished. A lot of children of my generation grew up with more or less absent fathers. I didn’t. My father was very much there in my life and in the lives of my sisters, and like my mother, he was fundamentally shaped by the place where he grew up.

He was born in a log house in 1922, not far from Cannon Falls, Minnesota. That house burned and the family moved close by, to the house where my grandparents lived throughout my childhood. That house never had plumbing, but there was a pump in the front yard. My sisters and I loved that rusty pump. I remember being so small I had to reach for the handle and then, using both hands and all my weight, I would pull down several times and wait for the gush of water. My father remembers a world of barn raisings, quilting bees, traveling peddlers, square dances, and sleighs pulled by horses. He attended a one-room schoolhouse, all grades together, and he was confirmed in Norwegian at Urland Church — a white wooden church with a steeple that stands at the top of a hill. For me, that church is a sign of proximity. When we reached the church in the family car, it meant we could spot my grandparents’ house. The church was the last landmark in a series of landmarks, to which my sisters and I gave such inventive names as “the big hill.” Every landmark was accompanied by an equally inventive song: “We are going down the big hill. We are going down the big hill.” My parents were subjected to this for years. The trip was about seventeen miles and took about half an hour on the small roads. My sisters and I, like most children, were creatures of repetition and ritual. Places revisited were given a sacred and enchanted quality. I use those words carefully, because there was something liturgical about going over the same ground so many times. The products of both Lutheran Sunday school and fairy tales, we infused the places where we grew up with what we knew best.

Despite the fact that my parents shared a language, the worlds in which each of them grew up were very different. The Norwegian American immigrant communities formed in the Midwest in the nineteenth century and the country left behind were separated not only by miles but by culture. Those “little Norways” developed very differently from the motherland, even linguistically. The dialects people brought with them took another course on the prairie. English words with no Norwegian equivalents were brought into spoken Norwegian and given gender. Norwegians who visited relations who had lived in America for several generations were surprised by their antiquated diction and grammar. The legacy of homesteading, of primitive life on the prairie, along with the real distance from the country of origin, kept the nineteenth century alive longer in America than in many parts of Norway.

My grandparents’ small farm, reduced to twenty acres in my lifetime, was our playground, but even as a child I sensed the weight of the past, not only on that property, which was no longer farmed, but in the community as a whole. I lived to see it vanish. The old people are dead. Many of the little farms have been sold and bought up by agribusinesses, and when you walk into a store or visit a neighbor, people don’t speak Norwegian anymore. When my grandmother died, at ninety-eight, my father spoke at her funeral. He called her “the last pioneer.” My father shuns all forms of cliché and false sentiment. He meant it. She was among the very last of the people who remembered life on the prairie. My paternal grandmother, a feisty, outspoken, not entirely rational woman, especially when it came to politics, banks, and social issues, could tell a good story. She had a swift and lean approach to narrative that nevertheless included the apt, particular detail. I often wish now I had recorded these stories on tape. When she was six years old, Matilda Underdahl lost her mother. The story, which became myth in our family, is this: When the local pastor told Tilly her mother’s death was “God’s will,” she stamped her foot and screamed, “No, it’s not!” My grandmother retained a suspicion of religious pieties all her life. She remembered the polio epidemic that killed many people she knew, and in a brief but vivid story, she made it real for me. She was sitting with her father at a window, watching two coffins being carried out of a neighboring house — one large and one small. As they watched, her father spoke to her in a low voice. “We must pray,” he said, “and eat onions.” She remembered a total eclipse of the sun, and she said she was told that the world was going to end. They dressed themselves in their Sunday clothes, sat down in the house, folded their hands, and waited. She remembered being told about the nokken in the well, a water monster that pulled little children down to the depths where it lived and probably ate them. Clearly meant to scare children from getting too close to the well and drowning, the story lured little Matilda straight to it. And there she tempted fate. She laid her head on the well’s edge and let her long red curls dangle far down inside as she waited in stubborn, silent horror for the nokken to come.

But there is another small story I heard only once that has lasted in my mind. When she was a child, she lived near a lake in Minnesota in Ottertail County; and during the winter, when that lake froze, she and the other children would take their sleds onto the lake and fit them out with sails. I can’t remember what they used for sails, but when the wind was up, the sails would fill with air and propel the sleds across the ice, sometimes at great speed. When she told me this, her voice communicated her pleasure in this memory, and I saw those sleds from a distance, three or four on the wide expanse of a frozen lake gliding noiselessly across it. That is how I still imagine it. I don’t see or hear the children. What she remembered is undoubtedly something so radically different from the image I gave to her memory that the two may be incompatible. My great-grandfather on my mother’s side was a sea captain. There is a painting of his ship that my uncle has now. She was called Mars. It may be that I have linked that painting of a great sailing ship on the ocean with the tiny ships on the ice in landlocked Minnesota, but I’m not sure. Tilly’s family came from Underdahl in the Sogn Fjord. She never went there, but I saw Underdahl with my parents and sisters as we traveled by boat down the fjord where the mountainsides are so steep that farmers have traditionally used ladders to descend into the towns below. Underdahl has a tiny church. From the boat, the white structure looked almost doll-like, and the name for me has come to mean not only my grandmother but that miniature building.

The Depression hit my paternal grandparents hard. They weren’t alone, of course, but my father’s life was and is shaped by that hardship — of this I am certain. He has many stories about the people he grew up with, but his inner life and the pictures he carries with him, in particular the most painful ones, are hidden to me. I know that my father began working on other farms when he was ten years old. I know that my grandmother made and sold lefse, a flat potato cake, to bring in money. I know that there was a 1,200-dollar debt on the farm that couldn’t be paid once the Depression hit. Forty acres of the sixty-acre farm were lost. I know that after the United States entered the war, my grandfather, like so many others, found work in a local defense plant. He was transferred to a town in Washington State and had to leave the family. He worked building the defense plant where the atomic bomb would later be manufactured. But he didn’t know this until years later. Many people in that community worked themselves sick and silly, and their labor didn’t prevent catastrophes of weather or economy, and people died of them — physically and spiritually. It has become a truism to say that there was much that was unforgiving and brutal about that life, but it is nevertheless a fact, and by the time I saw the world where my father had lived as a child, a kind of stasis had set in. I remember how still my grandparents’ farm was. The enormous sky and the flat fields and the absence of traffic on the road that ran past that place were only part of it. There was an inner stillness, too.

High in the mountains above the town of Voss, in western Norway, lies the farm that gave me my name: Hustveit. At some point, the tveit became tvedt, a different spelling for the same word, which means an opening or a clearing. I have been there. The place is now owned and cared for by the Norwegian government. You have to climb a mountain to reach Hustveit, and a landscape more different from the Minnesota prairie could hardly be imagined. I wondered what my great-grandfather saw when he imagined “Amerika.” Could he have seen in his mind a landscape as open and flat as what he actually came to? Immigration inevitably involves error and revision. What I imagined it would be, it’s not. For better or worse, some mistake is unavoidable.

My sisters and I loved to listen to a simple story about an immigrant’s mistake in our own family. My grandfather’s first cousin, whom my sisters and I called Uncle David, left Hustveit when he was twenty-two years old to make his way in America alone. He arrived at Ellis Island in August 1902. He spent his first day in New York City and was flabbergasted by the chaos, color, and crowds. Somewhere in the city, he saw a man selling apples, the most gorgeous, red, perfect apples he had ever seen. He had almost no money, but he lusted after one of those apples, and, overcome by desire, he splurged and bought one. The story goes that he lifted the apple to his mouth, bit into it, and spat it out in disgust. It was a tomato. Uncle David had never seen or heard of a tomato. My sisters and I roared with laughter at this story. It encapsulates so neatly the lesson of expectation and reality that it could serve as a parable. The fact that tomatoes are good is beside the point. If you think you’re getting an apple, a tomato will revolt you. That New York should be nicknamed the Big Apple, that an apple is the fruit of humankind’s first error and the expulsion from paradise, that America and paradise have been linked and confused ever since Europeans first hit its shores, makes the story reverberate as myth.

On the other hand, if not violently overthrown, expectation can have a power in itself, can invest a place with what literally isn’t there. When I saw Hustveit, I felt the same reverence I felt the last time I was in Mandal. They are both beautiful places, it is true, the stuff of postcards and nineteenth-century landscape painting, but no doubt I would have felt reverent in less lovely places, because I imagined a past I connected to myself. Walking beside my mother up toward the house where she lived with her parents and siblings, I imagined what she must have felt walking over that ground where she walked as a child, remembering people now dead, especially her father and her mother, and that empathy provoked in me deep feeling. My father never lived at Hustveit, nor did his father, but it was a strong presence in both their lives. In 1961, out of the blue, my grandfather Lars Hustvedt inherited 5,850 crowns, about 850 dollars, from a Norwegian relative, Anna Hustveit. He used the money to travel to Norway for the first and last time, visiting Voss and Hustveit during the trip. He was seventy-four years old. My grandfather’s sojourn in Norway was a great success. According to my father, he impressed his relatives with his intimate knowledge of Hustveit. He knew exactly where every building on the property lay and what it looked like from his father, who had described his birthplace in detail to his son. Hustveit was and is a real place, but it is also a sign of origin. I don’t doubt that there were times when that sign alone, carried from one generation to another in a name, accompanied by a mental image, anchored the people who had left it and anchored their children and grandchildren as well in another place, crushed by the vicissitudes of nature and politics.

My grandfather remembered what he had never seen. He remembered it through someone else. It is no doubt a tribute to his character and to his father’s that the image handed down from one to the other seems to have been remarkably accurate. Every story is given some kind of mental ground. The expression “I see” in English for “I understand” is hardly haphazard. We are always providing pictures for what we hear. My mother and father both lived through World War II, my mother in occupied Norway and my father as a soldier in New Guinea, the Philippines, and finally in Japan during the occupation. They were both inside that immense historical cataclysm. Each has a story of how it began, and I like both of them, because they are oddly parallel. In the middle of the first semester of his freshman year at St. Olaf College (the college where he would later become a professor and where three of his four daughters would be students), he was sitting at a table covered with index cards, on which he had tirelessly recorded the needed information for a term paper he was struggling to write, when his draft notice arrived in the mail. My father told me his first response was “Great! Now I don’t have to finish this damned paper.” Reading his draft notice, my father didn’t look mortality in the face. That would come later. My mother told me that the morning after the Nazi invasion of Norway, April 9, 1940, my grandmother woke up her children by saying, “Get up. It’s war.” Rather than fear, my mother felt only intense excitement. I have given both of these stories settings in my mind. When I think of my father and his index cards, I see him in a college house where a friend of mine lived when I was a student. It’s a false setting. My father didn’t live there. I needed a place and I plopped him down in that house unconsciously. I never saw where my mother lived during the war either, but I see my grandmother waking her children in rooms I’ve cooked up to fill the emptiness. I see morning light through the windows and a white bed where my mother opens her eyes to discover that the German army is on Norwegian soil.

Both of my mother’s brothers were in the Norwegian Underground, and I have given their stories settings, too. Neither one of them ever said a word about their involvement, but my mother told me that one day she saw her brother Sverre talking to the schoolteacher in town, and she knew. I see my uncle near a brick building speaking to a short, balding man. My mother never provided these details. They’re my own, and I’m sure they’re wrong, but the image persists. I have never changed or embellished it in any way. Later in the war, my uncle Sverre got word that the Nazis had been informed of his Underground involvement, and he skied to Sweden to escape. He spent the remaining years of the war there. My mother and her sister took him into the woods and waved good-bye. Again, not a word about where he was going was ever spoken. I see the three of them in the snow among bare trees, a few brown stalks protruding from the snow. My uncle has a backpack and he skis off, propelling himself forward briskly with his poles. Often the origins of such images are untraceable, but sometimes the associative logic at work announces itself after a moment’s thought. The chances that the building near which my mother’s brother stood was brick is unlikely. The red brick in my mind is conjured from the word schoolteacher. All my schools were brick.

And sometimes a detail provided by the teller grows in the mind of the listener, as is the case with potatoes in a story my mother told me. She was jailed by the Germans in Norway for nine days in February after the April invasion. She and a number of other students had protested the occupation in December. Nazi officers came to her school and arrested her. Rather than pay a fine, she chose jail. As my mother has often said, had it been later, the protesters would have been sent to Germany and would probably never have returned; but as she also always adds, had it been later, nobody would have dared protest openly. When I was a child, the idea of my dear, pretty mother in jail filled me with both indignation and pride. My sisters and I were the only children we knew of in Northfield who could boast of having a mother who had been in “jail.” She was in a tiny cell with a single, high-barred window, a cot, and a pail for urine and feces — just like in the movies. The food was bad. She told me the potatoes were green through and through. Those potatoes loom in my mind as the signifier of that jail. When I imagine it, everything is in black and white like a photograph, except the potatoes, which glow green in the dim light. After only nine days, she left jail with a bloated stomach.

My father has talked very little about the war. He once said to me that he kept himself sane by telling himself over and over that the whole thing was insane. One story he told me left a deep impression. While he was a soldier in the Philippines, he became ill, so ill that he was finally moved to a collecting station. His memory of those days is vague, because his fever was high, and he passed in and out of consciousness. At the station, however, he woke up and noticed a tag on his chest that said YELLOW FEVER. He had been misdiagnosed. I have always imagined this memory of my father’s as if I were my father. I open my eyes and try to orient myself. I am lying on a cot in a makeshift hospital outside, along with other maimed and sick soldiers on stretchers. The tag is yellow. This ludicrous transfer of the name of the illness onto the tag is, I’m sure, nonsense; but my brain is obviously in the business of bald simplification, and that’s how I see it. This scene takes place in color. I have certainly borrowed its details from war movies and from what I have seen of Asia, not where my father found himself but farther north, in Thailand and China.

Why I imagine myself inside my father’s body in this story and not inside my mother’s body when she was jailed is not, I think, accidental. It corresponds to the distinct levels of consciousness in each story — that is, in order to understand what happened to my mother, it is enough to move myself into that jail and see her there. In order to understand what happened to my father, I must imagine waking in a fever and making out the letters that spell out imminent death. I rechecked this story with my father, and he says there was no yellow fever in the Philippines then, and he really doesn’t know who made the diagnosis. In reality, he, not the tag, was yellow. He suffered from severe jaundice, a result of having both malaria and hepatitis. Because my father has never shared the other stories, the horrors of combat itself, this experience became for me the quintessential moment of war, a tale of looking at one’s own death. It can be argued that accuracy isn’t always crucial to understanding. I have never been in jail, and I have never been a soldier, but I imagined these events and places to the extent that it is possible for me, and that imagining has brought me closer to my parents.

After the war, my father finished St. Olaf College on the GI bill, with a lot of other vets who are now legend in the history of the school. A college started by Norwegian immigrants and affiliated with the American Lutheran Church, St. Olaf attracts the mostly well behaved offspring of white middle-class midwesterners, many of them with Norwegian roots. It is not a wild place. Dancing was forbidden until the 1950s. I went to college there, had some wonderful teachers, but the students were by and large a sleepy, complacent lot, more conservative than their professors and easily “managed” by them. My father and his veteran cohorts were not. He tells a story about a man I knew as somebody’s highly respectable “dad” literally swinging from the rafters in one of the dormitories. I see him flying above a crowd of heads with a bottle of whiskey. The bottle, however, may well be my embellishment. Four years at war had turned them into men, as the saying goes, and they took the place by storm, not only with their poker games and Tarzan antics but with their intellectual hunger. All this is true, and yet it has taken on the quality of fiction. I read the stories I’ve been told in my own way and make a narrative of them. Narrative is a chain of links, and I link furiously, merrily hurdling over holes, gaps, and secrets. Nevertheless, I try to remind myself that the holes are there. They are always there, not only in the lives of others but in my own life as well.

The stories and pictures I make for the lives of the people closest to me are the form my empathy takes. My father took the place he knew best and transfigured it, but he has never left it behind. He received his Ph.D. in Scandinavian studies from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His dissertation, which became a book and was awarded the McKnight Prize for literature, is a biography of Rasmus Bjorn Andersen — an influential figure in the Norwegian American immigrant community. The book is not only the biography of a man but the story of a time and place. My father has used his gifts to understand and preserve “home,” not in the narrow sense of that single house with those particular people but in its larger sense of subculture. I think it is fair to argue that his “place”—the world of his childhood, the world I glimpsed in the old people I knew as a child — is now paper. My father has been the secretary of the Norwegian American Historical Association for over thirty years. The association publishes books about immigrant history, but it is also an archive. Over the years, my father has devoted countless hours to organizing what was once unsorted mountains of paper in innumerable boxes and is now an annotated archive of letters, newspapers, diaries, journals, and more. These are facts. What is more interesting is his will to do it, his tireless commitment to the work of piecing together a past. Simple nationalism or chauvinism for a “people” is beside the point. The archive provides information on fools as well as on heroes; it documents both hardy pioneers and those who died or went mad from homesickness. There is a story of a farmer who thought the flatness of the Minnesota land would kill him if he looked at it any longer; unearthing rock after rock, he built his own mountain in memory of the home he had left. My mother felt a natural sympathy for this man, and when a huge rock was dug out of her own yard in Minnesota, she kept it. It’s still there — her “Norwegian mountain.” When I worked with my father on the annotated bibliography of that archive, I began to understand that his life’s work has been the recovery of a place through the cataloging of its particularity — a job that resembles, at least in spirit, the Encyclopedists of the eighteenth century. By its very nature, the catalog dignifies every entry, be it a political tract, a letter, or a cake recipe. Though not necessarily equal in importance, each is part of the story, and there’s a democracy to the telling. I think, too, although my father has never told me this, that his work has been for his own father, an act of love through the recovery of place and story.

I remember my grandfather as soft-spoken and, as with my grandmother on my mother’s side, I remember his touch. It struck me, even as a child, as unusually tender. There was no brusqueness in him, and I remember that when I showed him my drawings, his sober, quiet face would come alive. He chewed tobacco, and he offered us ribbon candy as a special treat. He lost four fingers to an axe chopping wood, and I recall that the stubs on his hand fascinated but didn’t scare me. When I think of him, I remember him in a particular chair in the small living room of his house. He died of a stroke the year I was in Norway: 1973. I was too far away to attend the funeral. We were not a long-distance-telephone family. They wrote me the news. I spoke to my parents once that year on the phone.

3

My first real memory takes place in a bathroom. I remember the tile floor, which is pale, but I can’t give it a color. I am walking through the door toward my mother, who is in the bath. I can see the bubbles. I know it’s a real memory and not a false one taken from photographs or stories because there are no pictures of that bathroom and because the proportions of the bathtub and toilet correspond to the height of a small person. The bubbles fascinate me, and the presence of my mother fills me with strong, simple pleasure. My mother, who hasn’t spent much time in bubble baths during the course of her life, has always been somewhat dubious about this memory. But within this isolated fragment I see the path of my walk — the hallway, small living area, the door to the kitchen; and when I described the walk to my mother, she confirmed that the rooms correspond to the graduate-student barracks near the University of Wisconsin at Madison. I was three.

I have memories of that first trip to Norway, too. The most striking is one of light and color. I am sitting outside at a table with my sister and my mother and my aunt. My cousins were probably there as well, but I have no memory of them. The sunshine is so brilliant I have to squint. We are close to water. I have no idea whether it was a fjord near Bergen or the ocean off Mandal. It’s water and it’s blue. It’s probably the fjord, because I do not remember vastness or a beach but trees and rocks. The table is white, and on the table are glasses of shining soda pop — yellow and red. Those glasses of brus (the Norwegian word for soda pop, a word I never forgot) delight and fascinate me. I am quite sure that I’d never seen red soda before, and the memory is so powerful, I must have felt I was in the presence of a Norwegian miracle. That bottle of red brus on a white table gleamed throughout the remaining years of my childhood as the sign of what was possible there. It may have been in part responsible for the question I asked my mother when I was five or six: “Why is everything better in Norway?” I don’t remember asking the question, but my mother assures me I was tactless enough to ask it. My poor mother decided that she had framed her emigration in the wrong light and vowed to be more careful about her comparisons between the two countries in the future.

Early memories are isolated bits of experience remembered for reasons that are often difficult to articulate; and because they have no greater narrative in which they can be framed, they float. At the same time, they may have more purity than later memories, for that very reason. When dailiness enters memory, repetition fixes places in the mind, but it also burdens them with a wealth of experience that is often difficult to untangle. For example, I remember Longfellow School, where I attended grade school, very well. I can see its hallways and connect one to another. I can even see the bathroom outside my third-grade class. I remember it as gray. It may have been gray, but it could be that I colored it in memory. I have given the interior of that building a single color that is also emotional: gray. Although I was always excited to begin school in the fall (a season separated from the spring before by years of summer), and although I loved walking out to the school-bus with my three sisters, wearing the identical new dresses my mother had sewn for us, my memory of the school building itself, its rooms and lockers, blackboards, and hallways, brings on a heavy, oppressive feeling. Whether I was more unhappy in school than any of my friends, I don’t know. I never would have said I didn’t like school, and there are moments I distinctly remember enjoying, but these truths don’t alter my memory of that place. There’s something unpleasant about saying that a gut response can be a lie, but I think it’s possible. Unlike the intricacy of the physical world, feelings are generally more crude than language — guilt, shame, being hurt by another person feel remarkably alike in the body. Reason tells me that my early experiences in that school were a complex mixture of pain, pleasure, and boredom, but whenever I drive past it or think about it, the building itself is wrapped in gloom.

Many years later, I had a similar experience but in reverse. From 1978 through 1986, I was a graduate student at Columbia, but by 1981 I had met my future husband and moved first to SoHo, in downtown Manhattan, and then to Brooklyn. It is true that those first couple of years, when I was living near Columbia, I was very poor. It is true that I suffered in a difficult and stupid love affair, and that I worked in one bad job after another to try to keep myself going. Nevertheless, I remember that time as extraordinary, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I don’t even wish now that I had had more money. And had I been asked if I was suffering at the time, I would have said a defiant no. After I left that neighborhood, however, I rarely returned to it. I saw my dissertation adviser three times in three years and then defended on a clear spring day in 1986. After that, I disappeared for good. Several years later, I returned, because my husband, Paul Auster, had been asked to give a talk at the Maison Française. Walking across campus made me feel sad, and I thought to myself, I wasn’t happy here. Then after the reading, we walked past Butler Library. It was dark, but the light inside illuminated the windows. Students were reading and working, and those lit windows gave me a wonderful, weightless feeling. I understood for the first time how happy I had been there — in the library. Butler is a good library, one of the best. It has some handsome rooms, but its stacks are inhospitable and dark. One spring while I was a student, all the women were given whistles before they entered the stacks, because an exhibitionist had been prowling the badly lit corridors, and we were told to pucker up and blow if there was any trouble. Again, I don’t fully understand my emotional response to that library or trust it. It was the site of a series of intellectual revelations that were crucial to me, not just as a student but as a human being. I read Sigmund Freud in that library and Emile Benveniste and Roman Jakobson and Mikhail Bakhtin and was forever changed by them, but I also sweated out bad papers and was bored and troubled and irritated there. My mind wandered from the work at hand and strayed to food or clothes I couldn’t afford or to the attractive arms and shoulders of some young man sitting at the far end of the table. So what does it mean that the sight of Butler Library turned me into a quivering heap of sentimental mush? It can only be that places left behind often become emotionally simplified — that they sound a single note of pain or pleasure, which means that they are never what they were.

At the same time, I’m fully aware that libraries occupy a particular place in my life, and my sudden burst of feeling for Butler isn’t related only to my life as a graduate student. My father took me and my sisters into the dim, dusty stacks on the seventh floor of Rolvaag Library at St. Olaf, where he worked for the historical association. To get there, we walked into an old elevator with a bright red door and a grate that folded and unfolded with lots of creaking and banging. I was already a heroine then, Alice or Pollyanna or a generic princess from a fairy tale — and the trip into that landscape of book spines and bad light made me feel like a person in a story on some curious adventure. It may be that I link every library to that first one — to my early childhood experience of drawing on the floor near my father’s desk. A library is of course a real place, but it is also an unreal one. What happens there is mostly silent. I think I’ve always liked the whispering aspect of libraries, the hushing librarians and my feeling of solitude among many. When her children were older, my mother worked part-time in the St. Olaf library, too. She was employed there when I was a student. I didn’t sleep in Rolvaag Library, but most of my waking hours were spent in a carrel there, and sometimes she would come to see me. I would feel her hands on my shoulders and turn my head, knowing I was going to see my mother. Years before she found herself filing periodicals in that library, she found books for me. It was my Norwegian mother, not my American father, who introduced me to the English poems and novels that affected me most when I was young. She gave me Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience when I was eleven. I didn’t understand those poems, but they fascinated me as much as Alice in Wonderland had, and I read them again and again with mingled horror and pleasure. She gave me Emily Dickinson, too, around the same time, a tiny green edition of famous poems, and I would repeat those poems to myself in a trance. They were secrets to me, strange and private. I think it was the sound of those poems that I loved. I chewed on Blake’s and Dickinson’s words like food. I ate them, even when their meanings eluded me.

It was my mother who sent me off to the library for David Copperfield and Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights when I was thirteen, and it’s fair to say that to this day I have not recovered from a single one of those novels. That was the summer of 1968, and my family was in Iceland. I cannot think of Reykjavik without the thought that I was David and Jane and Catherine there in that house, where I found it hard to sleep, because the sun never set. I would go to the window and lift the shade in the bedroom and look out into the eerie light that fell over the roofs, not daylight at all, some other light I had never seen before and have never seen since. The otherworldly landscape of Iceland has come to mean story for me. My father took us out into the countryside to the places where the sagas are said to have taken place. The sagas are fiction, but their settings are geographically exact. I will never forget my father stopping the Volkswagen bug we had rented; and after all six of us had piled out of that tiny car, and we stood on that treeless ground with its black lava rock and smoking geisers and green lichen, my father showed us where Snorre died. “The axe fell on him here!” And when my father said it, I saw the blood running on the ground. When he wasn’t finding the sites where the heroes had wandered, my father was in the library reading about them. The very idea of a library for me is bound to my mother and father and includes the history of my own metamorphoses through books, fictions that are no less part of me than much of my own history.

4

Seventy-six years after Uncle David walked off the ship at Ellis Island, I arrived at the airport in New York City. It was early September 1978. I didn’t know a living soul in the place. My suitcase was heavy, and nobody helped me carry it, something unheard of in Minneapolis. But frankly, even this indifference from New Yorkers didn’t bother me. I had left small-town, rural life for good, and I had no intention of ever returning, not because I didn’t like my home but because I had always known that I would leave. Leaving was part of my life romance, part of an idea I had about myself as a person destined for adventure; and as far as I could tell, adventure lay in the urban wilds of Manhattan, not in the farmland of Minnesota. This was my guiding fiction, and I was determined to make good on it. I had a tiny room in International House, on West 123rd Street at Harlem’s border. My first three days were spent rereading Crime and Punishment in a state that closely resembled fever. I couldn’t sleep, because the noise from traffic, sirens, garbage trucks, and exuberant pedestrians outside my window kept me wide awake all night. I had no friends. Was I happy? I was wildly happy. Sitting on my bed, which took up most of the space in that narrow room, I whispered prayers of thanks that I was really and truly here in New York, beginning another life. I worshiped the place. I feasted on every beautiful inch of it — the crowds, the fruit and vegetable stands, the miles of pavement, the graffiti, even the garbage. All of it sent me into paroxysms of joy. Needless to say, my elation had an irrational cast to it. Had I not arrived laden with ideas of urban paradise, I might have felt bad losing sleep, might have felt lonely and disoriented, but instead I walked around town like a love-struck idiot, inhaling the difference between there and here. I had never seen anything like New York, and its newness held the promise of my future: dense with the experience I craved — romantic, urbane, intellectual. Looking back on that moment, I believe I was saved from disappointment by the nature of my “great expectations.” I honestly wasn’t burdened with conventional notions of finding security or happiness. At that time of my life, even when I was “happy,” it wasn’t because I expected it. That was for characters less romantic than myself. I didn’t expect to be rich, well fed, and kindly treated by all. I wanted to live deeply and fully, to embrace whatever the city held for me, and if this meant a few emotional bruises, even a couple of shocks, if it meant not eating too well or too often, if it meant a whole slew of awful jobs, so be it.

It appears that time has turned that young woman, who imagined herself a romantic heroine, into something of a comic character, but I remain fond of her. We are relatives, after all. Like all the places where I’ve actually lived, New York City is much more than a “context” or “setting” for me. Within weeks of my arrival in New York, I was someone else, not because there had been a revolution in my psychological makeup or any trauma. It was simply this: people saw me in a light in which I had never been seen before. Although I had always felt at home with my parents and sisters, I was never really comfortable with my peers. By the time I found myself in college, my feeling that I was not inside but outside had intensified. There’s no question that I cultivated this to some degree, that I prided myself on my difference, but I confess it hurt and surprised me to be regarded as “strange.” I had friends I loved and teachers I loved, but rumors in which I was variously characterized as wild, monkishly studious, or just plain weird haunted my career as a college student. I recall my father telling me with a smile that one of his students had described me as “very unique.” In New York, this all but ended. Whatever exoticism I may have possessed came from my midwestern sincerity and lack of worldly sophistication. Transformations of the self are related to where you are, and identity is dependent on others. In Minnesota, I felt embattled. I rebelled against a culture that touted “niceness” above truth, that wallowed in an idea of “equality” that had come to mean “sameness” and “intolerance”—not of the sick, dying, ugly, or handicapped but of those who distinguished themselves by talent or beauty or intelligence. The “hoity-toity” were really batted around out there. Pretension wasn’t suffered for an instant, and for a girl who walked around dreaming she was a combination of George Eliot and Nora Charles in The Thin Man, life could be hard. In Minnesota, I lusted after every quality that was in short supply — artifice, irony, flamboyant theatricality, fierce intellectual debate, and brilliantly painted lips. (I went for the lips.)

In New York, “niceness” wasn’t an overriding value, but then neither was “goodness,” a value I frankly and unashamedly clung to for dear life. I had to reorient myself to accommodate a new world. For example, I naively assumed that most people had had some kind of religious education, that religion remained a fact of most people’s lives and provided the ground for moral life. I was startled to discover, however, when we were assigned the first book of the Bible for a literature class, that a majority of my fellow students had never read Genesis. Nevertheless, I wasn’t an “odd duck” in New York, the city that accommodates or ignores all ducks. And despite the harshness of everyday life — the raw, cold, scraping sensation of never leaving the street, because my apartment felt as if it were in the street — I was at home in New York. This feeling of being “home at last” corresponds to my idea about the city, an idea shaped by books, movies, and plays, an idea of infinite possibility.

There is an incident, however, that made me understand what New York is for the people who come here to stay. I had been living in Manhattan for two years. I had met my future husband, and we were invited to a dinner at Westbeth — the housing project in the West Village for artists. It was a lovely dinner, and I was delighted to be there in that company. I was in love. I was happy without having sought happiness. I vaguely remember wearing something silly, but no one minded. Everyone at the table looked like a marvel to me, but there was one man in particular who shone that night. It seemed to me that he had stepped right out of a Noël Coward play. His jokes were witty, his repartee sharp, and his manner nonchalant. He had written a book on Andy Warhol — no surprise. He was the most urbane creature I had ever laid eyes on. And I laughed and smiled and felt like Miranda: “How beauteous mankind is. O brave new world that has such people in’t.” The conversation wandered, as conversations do, and people began to talk about where they had grown up. Nobody, if I remember correctly, had been born and raised in New York City, and where had my idol sprung from, this divinity of culture and wit? Where had he spent his entire childhood and youth? In Northfield, Minnesota. I hadn’t known him, because he is several years older than I am, but there it was: he and I had grown up in the same small town. New York City is the place where people come to invent, reinvent, or find the room they need to be who they wish to be. It’s a place where fictions run freely and plentifully, where people are allowed a certain pretense about themselves, where cultivating a persona or an idea of how to live is permitted, even encouraged. This is the glory of urban freedom and indifference. It has its drawbacks, of course. One summer I was alone in New York. All my friends had fled the city heat, and I remember thinking, If I died right now in my apartment, how long would it take before anybody noticed?

I now live in Brooklyn, the place that nobody visits but where lots of people live. It is more ethnically diverse than Manhattan. The buildings are lower. We have more trees. I have zealously attached myself to my neighborhood, Park Slope, and defend it loyally. But all the time I’ve lived in Brooklyn, I’ve been writing about other places. I wrote a book called The Blindfold here, about a young graduate student who lives near Columbia and has a number of peculiar adventures. She and I aren’t the same person, but she’s close to me. And I put her in my old apartment, the one I rented on West 109th Street. When I wrote her stories, I saw her in my apartment and on the streets I knew so well. What she did wasn’t what I had done, but I don’t think I could have written that book had I not put her there, and I couldn’t have written it had I still been living in that building.

5

Long before I had heard about the New Critics or structuralism or deconstruction, teachers liked to talk about “setting” as one of the elements of fiction. It went along with “theme” and “character.” I can’t remember how Paul and I started our discussion of place in fiction or how we arrived at his startling comment about Pride and Prejudice. But I clearly remember him saying that Austen’s novel had taken place in his parents’ living room in New Jersey. Although any self-respecting junior high school teacher would have scoffed at such a remark about “setting,” I realized I had done the same thing while reading Céline’s novel Death on the Installment Plan. When Ferdinand finally takes refuge in his uncle’s house, I imagined him in my paternal grandparents’ little white house outside of Cannon Falls. Ferdinand says, “Yes Uncle,” in the small bedroom on the ground floor off the living room. The disparities between a gentry drawing room in England in the late eighteenth century and a suburban living room in New Jersey in the middle of the twentieth, or the ones between the French countryside in the early part of this century and the rural Midwest, are obvious. What is remarkable to me is that I had to think about it to know what I had done. When you read, you see. The images aren’t manufactured with effort. They simply appear to you through the experience of the text and are rarely questioned. The pictures conjured are enough to push you forward and are to a large extent, I think, like my image of the word yonder. They serve a function. And like the picture I carry with me of my uncle talking to his colleague in the Underground, they are not fully fleshed out. Although I can imagine my uncle’s face because I knew him when he was alive, the schoolteacher is a blur except for his bald head.

Fictional characters are not constantly trampling over home territory in my mind, however. Often the source of the image is less clear. Middlemarch is a book I’ve read several times, and when Dorothea is in Rome with Casaubon, I always have the same picture of it. This is significant, because I read the book both before and after I actually visited Rome, and the real city didn’t disturb in any way the imaginary one I had provided for Dorothea. Eliot’s Rome in Middlemarch is for me essentially a stage set. The walls of the empty and dead city are built of cardboard that has been painted to look like stone. While the image is wrongheaded in some way, what I see is architecture as metaphor. Dorothea’s terrible mistake is that she sees truth and power in what is false and impotent, and my artificial Rome extends the discovery of her wedding trip to the city where it occurs. Every time I read anything, I loot the world with luxurious abandon, robbing from real places and unreal ones, snatching images from movies, from postcards and paintings and even cartoons. And when I think of a book, especially one that is dear to me, I see those stolen places again, and they move me. There is a reason, after all, why Paul imagined the elaborate social intercourse and moral drama of Austen in his parents’ living room. It was clearly the site for him of similar exchanges. Things happened in that living room. As for why Ferdinand’s final refuge in the country belongs to my grandparents’ house, it is for me the place of my father, and after that poor boy’s ridiculous and heartbreaking adventures, he finds comfort at last from a paternal figure — his uncle.

The place of reading is a kind of yonder world, a place that is neither here nor there but made up of the bits and pieces of experience in every sense, both real and fictional, two categories that become harder to separate the more you think about them. When I was doing research for a professor as a graduate student, a job that paid my tuition and fees, I read excerpts from diaries recorded during Captain Cook’s legendary voyages. On the expedition, both captain and crew saw a volcano. This volcano was described separately by Cook himself and by a young man aboard ship. The difference between those descriptions astonished me. Cook reports on the volcano in the cool, scientific prose of the Enlightenment, but the young man describes the same sight in rapturous tones already coded by Romanticism. The two looked in the same direction, but they didn’t see the same event. Each had his own language for seeing, and that language created his vision. We all inherit vision just as they did — two men who stood side by side but were nevertheless separated by an intellectual chasm. It is almost impossible for us as residents of the Western world to imagine a pre-Romantic view of nature. My feeling for mountainous western Norway, undoubtedly shaped by the history of my family there, is also influenced by Romanticism. People simply don’t see mountains as annoying impasses anymore. They breathe in the air and beat their breasts and drink in the beauty of the rugged landscape, but where does this come from, if not from the Romantics, who took up crags and cliffs as the shape of the sublime? No place is naked. It may be that in infancy we experience the nakedness of place, but without memory it remains inaccessible.

After my daughter was born, I flew around the apartment where I lived, in the grip of a new mother’s euphoria. I couldn’t look at my darling’s tiny face enough, couldn’t see it enough, and I had to creep into her room when she napped just to stare down at her in stupefied awe. But when I looked at her, I often wondered what the world was like from her point of view. She didn’t know where she began or ended, didn’t know that the toes she found so entertaining belonged to her. But connections come fast for babies. Meanings are made early through the presence and absence of the mother, through the cry answered, the smile answered, through sounds that are not language but like language, and then words themselves appear as a response to what is missing. Now that she’s eight, Sophie lives in a world so dense with shaping fictions that her father and I are continually amused. She’s a poor woman with a scarf around her head and a begging cup. She’s a country-and-western singer, drawling out lyrics about lost love. She’s Judy Garland in an obscure musical called Summer Stock. She’s Pippi. She’s Anne of Green Gables. She’s a mother with a vengeance, changing, burping, waking the angel from naps, cooing and singing and patting and strolling her. The “baby” is life-size, plastic, and made in France.

For all the radical persona experimentation we call “play,” children are placemongers. More than adults, they like to stay put, and they like order in the form of repetition. They attach themselves fiercely to houses, rooms, and familiar objects, and change is frowned upon. The son of a close friend of Paul’s and mine is a case in point. For years he lived with his painter father in a loft in downtown Manhattan. The bathroom in their loft was a sad affair with broken flooring. When the father started earning more money from his work, he renovated the bathroom. His son mourned. “That old bathroom floor was my friend.” Parents often discover that their redecorating schemes are anathema to their children. My daughter has moved just once in her eight years, from a small apartment in Brooklyn to a large brownstone a block and a half away. When we showed her the new house, she didn’t like it. She worried about the strange furniture in it. I think she imagined that the people from whom we bought the house would leave their things, and all those unfamiliar objects made her uncomfortable. Then she had to survive the painting of the house, including her room, which took a couple of weeks, and she didn’t like that either. But once she had settled herself there, and had arranged her toys, she glued herself to that place and has invested it with all the affection she felt for her old room. The power of forms — spatial and verbal — as needed orientation in life can hardly be overestimated.

And every night I read to her. We have made our way through innumerable books, all fourteen Oz books, five Anne books, the Narnia series, all the Moomintroll books, E. Nesbitt and Lloyd Alexander and fairy tales from all over the world. Reading is a ritual which is itself associated with place, an event that happens after her teeth have been brushed and before she sleeps. No matter how harrowing the tales or how deep the identification (Sophie gasps, shudders, and, on occasion, sobs loudly during our reading), her body at least is securely in its bed. It may be that the singularity of place within the ritual is exactly what makes the sadness, fear, and excitement of these stories not only bearable but pleasurable. Repetition within ritual creates order through time, and repeating the form brings stability. As children my sisters and I cultivated the holiday rituals in our house to a degree that bordered on the fanatical. We still do. Every year, we — and that now includes three Jewish husbands and a lone Protestant, as well as five offspring — reenact the Christmas ritual at my parents’ house in Minnesota. The sequence of celebration is written in stone and has never altered. From the bringing in of the Jul log to the food, to dancing and singing around the Christmas tree, the event unfolds as it always has. Age may have made us more flexible in theory, but in practice our Christmas is as predictable as the sunrise, and we love it wholeheartedly. My parents moved to that house outside Northfield when I was in the third grade, and they have lived there ever since. The clothes my sisters and I wore for “dress-up” can still be found in the same box. Many people move from place to place, but my parents didn’t. That house holds my childhood with them and with Liv and Astrid and Ingrid, and I think the very idea of that place has given us a sense of ground, order, and continuity that is more rare than common. And that indisputable firmness of place is what allowed us all to go far away. For several years, Liv lived in Hong Kong, Astrid in Paris, and Ingrid and I were in New York.

The desire for coherence and order is human. Nonsense and chaos wreck people as surely as a terrible beating. And nonsense and chaos are everywhere. The self exists in time and space: the narrative of the self in memory and a continuity of place in “home.” My stepson, Daniel, who is now eighteen, does not remember living in one place with both of his parents. That is a paradise lost. Although one might imagine “two homes” as a doubling of the comforts of home, real experience doesn’t bear this out. The old expression, now out of fashion, “a broken home” comes closer to the truth. Children, especially, long for wholeness, for unity, perhaps because they are closer to that early, fragmentary state before any “self” is formed, or perhaps because they are truly not the masters of their destinies. And although divorce is commonplace enough and often benign — without open rancor between parents — going from here to there can become a form of being nowhere. The child finds himself yonder in a land between father and mother. Because “home” is more than a place to park the body, because it is necessarily a symbolic landscape, what can it mean to have two of them? Two homes inevitably contradict each other, always in small ways, sometimes in big ones. What happens if the words spoken in one place contradict the words in the other? Where does the child reside then? And what does it mean for that child’s relations to the symbolic world in general — to language itself as the expression of truth, of all meaning? When Daniel was in the second grade, he invented a place he called the “Half-World.” I think it was in outer space, and all the people who lived in it were literally cut in two. He wasn’t old enough to know why he had concocted this place, but when he told me about it, I suffered a sharp, terrible pang of recognition. I asked him if those people could ever be put back together again. He said yes. And I think he was right. There are ways to sew the Half-World together again, even though it is impossible to change its torn history. Daniel takes photographs, and some of them are remarkable. Many of them are images of places he has isolated in ways I would never have imagined. When I look at his shadows cast on sidewalks, his mirror images in windows, the cracks and ruined lines on his doors of abandoned houses, or the invasive vines that blur the architecture of a small building, I know that these pictures are threads of himself. He sews with his camera and in the darkroom. And no matter how derelict his subjects are, there is radiant order to each and every picture. They are precisely framed. Every line, every shadow is exactly where he wants it to be.

A photograph of a place is not a real place any more than a book is, but we inhabit photographs nevertheless as spectator or as identifying actor. Words are more abstract than images, but images are inevitably born of them. The pictorial drama of reading corresponds to the one of writing. You cannot have one without the other. Reading is active, but writing is more active. Making fiction is making a place for the reader in the text, and this brings up the eternal question of making a book: what to put in and what to leave out. One can argue that there are two kinds of writers in the world: the ones who put it all in and the ones who leave a lot of it out. Sweeping claims can be made about history and these impulses. Inclusion and volume can be understood as a literary idea that was begun in the eighteenth century, developed in the nineteenth, and lasted through Joyce. (He may have turned literature on its head but he kept a lot in.) Exclusion, too, can be seen as essential to late modernism, most notably Kafka and Beckett. But these are not useful categories “here.” (The reader is “here” with me if he or she has come so far.) There are times when a detailed description of a living room and all its furnishings is annoying, when it gets in the way of reading, and then there are times when it does not. Austen is spare in description. Had she described every object in the Bennet parlor, Paul never would have squeezed in his New Jersey living room among all that clutter, and it seems to me the moral resonance of that book would have been partly lost. On the other hand, I cannot imagine Dickens without his full descriptions of places — the stinking Thames and Mr. Venus’s ghastly workshop in Our Mutual Friend, for example; but these descriptions, like Sterne’s clock in Tristram Shandy, are always to a purpose. They accelerate the book. They don’t bog it down in pointless novelistic gab. Good books usually say enough about where they happen, but not too much. Enough can be more or less, but it’s bad books that treat the reader to his expectations about what a novel or a story or a poem is or where it is. There is something comforting about bad books, which is why people read them. Surprise can be a wonderful thing, but, on the whole, people don’t want it, any more than most children want their rooms changed. They want what they already know to be confirmed, and they have been richly supplied with these fictional comforts since the late eighteenth century, when the novel became popular with the rise in mass literacy. But the good reader (a quality not at all determined by literary sophistication) wants room to fill in the blanks. Every reader writes the book he or she reads, supplying what isn’t there, and that creative invention becomes the book.

For the past four years I’ve been writing a novel set in my hometown, or rather in a fictional version of Northfield. The town in the book is not the real town, but it resembles it strongly. It has another name, Webster, and although it resembles the real town, its geography is askew. I have taken real places — the Ideal Cafe, the Stuart Hotel, Tiny’s Smoke Shop, the Cannon River, and Heath Creek, with their names intact — but I relocated some of these places and gave them new inhabitants. Oddly enough, these changes weren’t made for my convenience, and I didn’t make them without seeing them in my mind first. The collapsing and shifting of that known landscape came about because it “felt right.” The map of fictional Webster isn’t identical to the map of Northfield, because the one departs emotionally from the other. Since I began writing the book, I have been back to Northfield several times, every Christmas and once during the summer. When I walk past the Ideal Cafe, where Lily Dahl, the heroine of my book, works, I don’t feel much. I find myself looking closely at it, examining the windows on the second floor, behind which is Lily’s imaginary apartment, but it just isn’t the place I made for myself in fiction. That place exists in memory, but it isn’t “real” memory. My best friend, Heather Clark, and my sisters Liv and Astrid all worked in the Ideal Cafe in the 1970s, when it was in its heyday, and they told me stories about their customers that I have never forgotten. I stole some of them. I have eaten breakfast and lunch and wolfed down pieces of pie in the Ideal Cafe, and I think I remember pretty well what it looked like when I was in high school, but the imaginary cafe where Lily works has supplanted the one I remember and become more “real” to me. Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened. It mimics memory without being memory. Images appear as textual ground, because this is how the brain works. Ignorant as I am of the science of memory and the brain, I am convinced that the processes of memory and invention are linked in the mind. Homer evokes the muse of memory before beginning his tale. And the ancient memory systems developed to enhance recollection were always rooted to places. The speaker wandered through houses in his mind, either real or invented, and located words in its various rooms and objects. Cicero articulated an architecture of memory dependent on spaces that were well lit. Murky, cramped little hovels wouldn’t do as spatial tools for recollection. Every new draft of a book is the work not only of shrinking and expanding and shrinking again but of finding the book’s truth, which means throwing out the lies that tempt me. This work is like dredging up a memory that’s been obscured by some comfortable delusion and forcing it “to light,” a process that can be excruciating. Fiction exists in the borderland of dream and memory. Like dreams, it distorts for its own purpose, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, and, like memory, fiction requires an effort of concentration to recall how it really was. There have been a few extraordinary books written in the present tense, but by and large it’s an awkward form. Fiction usually takes place in the past. Somehow that’s its natural place.

Paul often says that it’s a strange business, this sitting alone in a room making up people and places, and that in the long run, nobody does it unless he has to. Years ago, he translated a French writer, Joseph Joubert, whose brief but startling journal entries have become part of our ongoing dialogue about art. Joubert wrote: “Those for whom the world is not enough: poets, philosophers and all lovers of books.” When I read Death on the Installment Plan in my early thirties, the book in which I imagined the hero in my grandparents’ house, I loved it so much I was sorry to finish it. I closed the book and shocked myself by thinking, “This is better than life.” I didn’t mean or want to think this, but I’m afraid I did. Certainly this feeling about a book is the one that makes people want to write. I don’t know why I feel more alive when I write, but I do. Maybe I imagine that if I scratch hard enough into the paper, I will last. Maybe the world isn’t enough, or maybe the distinction between the world and fiction is not so clear. Fiction is made from the stuff of the world, after all, which includes dreams and wishes and fantasies and memory. And it is never really made alone, but from the material between and among us: language. When Mikhail Bakhtin argues that the novel is dialogical — multivoiced, conflicted, in constant dialogue within itself — he is identifying all those jabbering voices every fiction writer hears in his or her head. Writing novels is a solitary act that is also plural, and its many voices are forever placing us somewhere — here or there or yonder. At the same time, writing collapses these spatial categories. Like a heartbeat or a breath, it marks the time of a living consciousness on the page, a consciousness that is present and here, but also absent. The page can resurrect what’s lost and what’s dead, what’s not there anymore and what was never there. Fiction is like the ghost twin of memory that moves through the myriad cities, landscapes, houses, and rooms of the mind.