Still Life With Insects - Hardcover
Following a nervous breakdown, Elwyn Farmer finds stability and broad insight by keeping a journal of his insect sightings--an endeavor that also reveals a great deal about his family and himself
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About the Author:
Brian Kiteley is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Denver, and the author of the novels Still Life With Insects, I Know Many Songs, But I Cannot Sing and The River Gods and two fiction writing guides, The 3 A.M. Epiphany, and The 4 A.M. Breakthrough. The recipient of Guggenheim, Whiting, and NEA fellowships, Brian has also had residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Millay, Yaddo, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. His fiction has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Four-Way Reader.
Leah Hager Cohen is the author of five works of nonfiction, including Train Go Sorry> and I Don’t Know: In Praise of Admitting Ignorance (Except When You Shouldn’t), and five novels, including The Grief of Others, which was longlisted for the Orange Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and No Book But the World. She is Distinguished Writer in Residence at the College of the Holy Cross and teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lesley University.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Leah Hager Cohen is the author of five works of nonfiction, including Train Go Sorry> and I Don’t Know: In Praise of Admitting Ignorance (Except When You Shouldn’t), and five novels, including The Grief of Others, which was longlisted for the Orange Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and No Book But the World. She is Distinguished Writer in Residence at the College of the Holy Cross and teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lesley University.
INTRODUCTION
by Leah Hager Cohen
Introductions to novels always run the risk of gilding the lily, never more than when the novel in question is such a paragon of brevity. Any reader who chooses to skip this bit cannot be faulted, but for those who pause to read these words, I will try to be guided by the spirit of the novel’s epigraph:
The world is never the less beautiful
though viewed through a chink or knot-hole.
- THOREAU
A knot-hole-sized introduction, then, to the deceptively diminutive work that is Brian Kiteley’s Still Life with Insects.
CONTRARINESS
First of all: insects. Insects! Hardly everyone’s cup of tea. Then there’s the matter of still life, still as in stasis, as in the opposite of action, the antithesis of plot.
To select for one’s main character an amateur entomologist; to scaffold one’s novel upon a smattering of entries recorded in insect logs kept across five decades of the twentieth century; to populate these entries with descriptions not of grand dramas but of ostensibly quotidian events all these are contrarian moves. But even the word contrarian is misleading here, for it suggests friction and rebelliousness, when in fact Brian Kiteley has made his protagonist, Elwyn Farmer, a man of unremarkable accomplishments whose emotional reserve is matched only by his narrative restraint.
Ho hum, one might think. How milquetoast.
On the contrary.
This is a book of breathtaking confidence; also of layered and luminous confidences. The former is Kiteley’s; the latter are Farmer’s, and they combine with utmost felicity to create something altogether rare.
CONFIDENCE
Writing spare requires more courage and craft than writing long. To convey a full life in little more than a hundred pages, to limit our glimpses to fewer than two dozen journal entries: these are feats of derring-do. Furthermore to select for those journal entries not red-letter days, not the events that conventional histories teach us to cherish, moments that merit notches on time lines and mentions in obituaries, but rather to purposefully elide the weddings and births, the hirings and firings, the catastrophes and deaths this takes serious guts. And faith. Faith in one’s skill as a writer to fashion a complex portrait using the merest scintilla of brushstrokes; faith in the capacity of readers to co-create that portrait by investing their own perceptive and sympathetic imaginations; and faith in synecdoche, the literary trope in which a part is understood to represent the whole. In this novel, synecdoche transcends mere figures of speech (wherein, for example, workers may be referred to as hands,” or a car as wheels”) to become the very mode of storytelling.
The whole, in this case, is the life of Elwyn Farmer a life, like any, comprising hope, fear, disappointment, irritation, adoration, reflection, boredom, humor, suffering, beauty and astonishment. In other words, the whole in Still Life with Insects is the experience of every man, or Everyman, as given shape by the life of one particular, and not particularly remarkable, man.
And the parts by which we come to apprehend the whole? The knot-hole glimpses, a scant seventeen of them, spread out over forty years.
Seventeen. To capture a life in all its messy, cumbersome, majestic entirety while restricting oneself formally to seventeen journal entries, none of them overlong nor overly eventful. Make no mistake: this takes mettle.
CONFIDENCES
But what makes it all succeed with brilliant aplomb are the confidences, that is, Farmer’s confidences as recorded in his presumably private insect log, in a style at once direct and oblique.
A trained scientist, a cereal chemist” working for a grain company, forty three years old when we meet him in the summer of1945, Elwyn Farmer is governed by dry fidelity to facts. He writes in an objective, nearly flat tone possibly exacerbated by his need to regain equilibrium after a recent event he refers to only as my breakdown” and tends to afford each tidbit of information more or less equal weight and equal lack of inflection. Thus in the first entry, a single long paragraph, we learn that The war’s been over four weeks,” The doctor asked if I had any hobbies,” and the bug called Kirby’s Backswimmer, or Notonecta kirbyi, can stop still under water for hours at any depth, patiently awaiting gnats and flies that land on the surface.”
But we are treated also to this image of Farmer looking for samples of Kirby’s Backswimmer in a dry riverbed:
I imitated its above-water stance: knees in the mud, bottom in the air, hands hugging earth, my eyes almost level with the filmy pool.
and to this:
four teenagers in a farmer’s truck hooted, Going for a swim, old man?”
And it dawns on us: he has his wits about him, this Farmer does. We feel his quiet relishing of the absurd figure he cuts (bottom in the air, indeed!). We feel his rueful appreciation of the teenagers’ jibe, their understandable misunderstanding of his intention. We learn, via these observations he has not simply registered mentally but elected to set in ink in other words, those by which he chooses to know himself, deems important in the construction of his own self-portrait that Elwyn Farmer, notwithstanding some lingering uncertainty (his as well as our own) about his mental and emotional stability, is self-aware, capable of self-mockery and also, crucially, of self-affection.
Could we trust him if he didn’t laugh at himself? Could we love him if he didn’t love himself?
The prose never crescendos, never capitulates to a rote idea of climax or denouement. It remains steadfast, true to itself. It acclimates us to its rhythms, teaches us how to discern its nuances, always by the quietest of clues, so that gradually we learn to pick up micro-glimmers of recognition, like the veils of heat that shimmer above a blacktop road, until a word here, a phrase there begin to signify, and we come to know Elwyn Farmer beyond his tamped-down, rather ascetic exterior; we come to know his rippling sense of humor and also his piercing doubt and his terrible, aching tenderness for life.
We glimpse it in the keenness with which he perceives a kangaroo mouse cleaning itself, looking like a little boy I know after he’s been caught in mischief.” We glimpse it in the kaleidoscopic swiftness with which his annoyance at his wife is supplanted by desire, desire by amusement, amusement by besotted esteem. We glimpse it in the dispassion with which he articulates the arithmetic of aging, observing of a visit to his grown son’s home:
My wife was asleep in her granddaughter’s room. Our granddaughter slept in the study. We were an inconvenience to this family now. Once we had been almost indispensable.
Items like these, under usual circumstances too minor and mildly put to exert much emotional gravity, accrue here in such a way as to create intimacy. They allow us access to the workings of Farmer’s mind. The workings of his heart, too. And oh, how fully engaged is his heart!
More than this I will not say. The novel itself lies just beyond this page, and I would not keep you from it longer.
by Leah Hager Cohen
Introductions to novels always run the risk of gilding the lily, never more than when the novel in question is such a paragon of brevity. Any reader who chooses to skip this bit cannot be faulted, but for those who pause to read these words, I will try to be guided by the spirit of the novel’s epigraph:
The world is never the less beautiful
though viewed through a chink or knot-hole.
- THOREAU
A knot-hole-sized introduction, then, to the deceptively diminutive work that is Brian Kiteley’s Still Life with Insects.
CONTRARINESS
First of all: insects. Insects! Hardly everyone’s cup of tea. Then there’s the matter of still life, still as in stasis, as in the opposite of action, the antithesis of plot.
To select for one’s main character an amateur entomologist; to scaffold one’s novel upon a smattering of entries recorded in insect logs kept across five decades of the twentieth century; to populate these entries with descriptions not of grand dramas but of ostensibly quotidian events all these are contrarian moves. But even the word contrarian is misleading here, for it suggests friction and rebelliousness, when in fact Brian Kiteley has made his protagonist, Elwyn Farmer, a man of unremarkable accomplishments whose emotional reserve is matched only by his narrative restraint.
Ho hum, one might think. How milquetoast.
On the contrary.
This is a book of breathtaking confidence; also of layered and luminous confidences. The former is Kiteley’s; the latter are Farmer’s, and they combine with utmost felicity to create something altogether rare.
CONFIDENCE
Writing spare requires more courage and craft than writing long. To convey a full life in little more than a hundred pages, to limit our glimpses to fewer than two dozen journal entries: these are feats of derring-do. Furthermore to select for those journal entries not red-letter days, not the events that conventional histories teach us to cherish, moments that merit notches on time lines and mentions in obituaries, but rather to purposefully elide the weddings and births, the hirings and firings, the catastrophes and deaths this takes serious guts. And faith. Faith in one’s skill as a writer to fashion a complex portrait using the merest scintilla of brushstrokes; faith in the capacity of readers to co-create that portrait by investing their own perceptive and sympathetic imaginations; and faith in synecdoche, the literary trope in which a part is understood to represent the whole. In this novel, synecdoche transcends mere figures of speech (wherein, for example, workers may be referred to as hands,” or a car as wheels”) to become the very mode of storytelling.
The whole, in this case, is the life of Elwyn Farmer a life, like any, comprising hope, fear, disappointment, irritation, adoration, reflection, boredom, humor, suffering, beauty and astonishment. In other words, the whole in Still Life with Insects is the experience of every man, or Everyman, as given shape by the life of one particular, and not particularly remarkable, man.
And the parts by which we come to apprehend the whole? The knot-hole glimpses, a scant seventeen of them, spread out over forty years.
Seventeen. To capture a life in all its messy, cumbersome, majestic entirety while restricting oneself formally to seventeen journal entries, none of them overlong nor overly eventful. Make no mistake: this takes mettle.
CONFIDENCES
But what makes it all succeed with brilliant aplomb are the confidences, that is, Farmer’s confidences as recorded in his presumably private insect log, in a style at once direct and oblique.
A trained scientist, a cereal chemist” working for a grain company, forty three years old when we meet him in the summer of1945, Elwyn Farmer is governed by dry fidelity to facts. He writes in an objective, nearly flat tone possibly exacerbated by his need to regain equilibrium after a recent event he refers to only as my breakdown” and tends to afford each tidbit of information more or less equal weight and equal lack of inflection. Thus in the first entry, a single long paragraph, we learn that The war’s been over four weeks,” The doctor asked if I had any hobbies,” and the bug called Kirby’s Backswimmer, or Notonecta kirbyi, can stop still under water for hours at any depth, patiently awaiting gnats and flies that land on the surface.”
But we are treated also to this image of Farmer looking for samples of Kirby’s Backswimmer in a dry riverbed:
I imitated its above-water stance: knees in the mud, bottom in the air, hands hugging earth, my eyes almost level with the filmy pool.
and to this:
four teenagers in a farmer’s truck hooted, Going for a swim, old man?”
And it dawns on us: he has his wits about him, this Farmer does. We feel his quiet relishing of the absurd figure he cuts (bottom in the air, indeed!). We feel his rueful appreciation of the teenagers’ jibe, their understandable misunderstanding of his intention. We learn, via these observations he has not simply registered mentally but elected to set in ink in other words, those by which he chooses to know himself, deems important in the construction of his own self-portrait that Elwyn Farmer, notwithstanding some lingering uncertainty (his as well as our own) about his mental and emotional stability, is self-aware, capable of self-mockery and also, crucially, of self-affection.
Could we trust him if he didn’t laugh at himself? Could we love him if he didn’t love himself?
The prose never crescendos, never capitulates to a rote idea of climax or denouement. It remains steadfast, true to itself. It acclimates us to its rhythms, teaches us how to discern its nuances, always by the quietest of clues, so that gradually we learn to pick up micro-glimmers of recognition, like the veils of heat that shimmer above a blacktop road, until a word here, a phrase there begin to signify, and we come to know Elwyn Farmer beyond his tamped-down, rather ascetic exterior; we come to know his rippling sense of humor and also his piercing doubt and his terrible, aching tenderness for life.
We glimpse it in the keenness with which he perceives a kangaroo mouse cleaning itself, looking like a little boy I know after he’s been caught in mischief.” We glimpse it in the kaleidoscopic swiftness with which his annoyance at his wife is supplanted by desire, desire by amusement, amusement by besotted esteem. We glimpse it in the dispassion with which he articulates the arithmetic of aging, observing of a visit to his grown son’s home:
My wife was asleep in her granddaughter’s room. Our granddaughter slept in the study. We were an inconvenience to this family now. Once we had been almost indispensable.
Items like these, under usual circumstances too minor and mildly put to exert much emotional gravity, accrue here in such a way as to create intimacy. They allow us access to the workings of Farmer’s mind. The workings of his heart, too. And oh, how fully engaged is his heart!
More than this I will not say. The novel itself lies just beyond this page, and I would not keep you from it longer.
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- PublisherTicknor & Fields
- Publication date1989
- ISBN 10 0899198988
- ISBN 13 9780899198989
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
- Number of pages114
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Ticknor & Fields
(1989)
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ISBN 13: 9780899198989
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