It's one of two novellas in Harrison's The River Swimmer (the other novella being the title track). I first read it probably four years ago, shortly after it was published, I think? A lot of things were different then.
At the end of the year, I like to reread books. Revisit things. Revisit perceptions. It's a good way to keep up my reading habit while also tending to the calendric spiral of December.
I reread Don DeLillo's White Noise recently. It's incredible.
But the Harrison novella—and I'm only 20 pages in or so—is fascinating already in how different I feel about it. The protagonist is 60, weighed down by failed dreams and abandoned bonds, and he's returning home to the rural stretches of Michigan's lower peninsula. Now, I don't feel the haunting specter so much these days, but, having emerged from a hazy decade of glimmer and grim, I carry a renewed zeal for things like dreams and bonds. I see it all from a new vantage point. I see the fragility of the gambit, the assertion, the leap of actual and unspoken integrity.
It's a very important thing, and I lose sight often enough. Reading refocuses the lens. Frames the picture once again.
What a weird decade that was! What a blob of triumph and error! I drank cocktails at a westside bar the other night with my dad, and he pointed out: Whatever happened, it got me to the present moment. It brought me to my fiancée. It brought me to a rising line of self-actualization. Everything that rises must converge.