Almost Heaven
Marianne Wiggins, 1998
Simon & Schuster
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 978067103860
Summary
Before his thirtieth birthday Holden Garfield has already burned out as a journalist in war-torn Bosnia. Returning to the United States, he hopes the familiar sunshine and rolling hills of Virginia will help him put aside the horrors he reported. Instead he finds Melanie, his mentor's sister, who is institutionalized with a mysterious amnesia after her husband and son were killed five weeks earlier by a freak force of nature.
Struck as if by lightning by her beauty, Holden sets out to help her reconstruct her past, and the pair is swept up in a passionate love affair — one fighting to remember, the other struggling to forget.
With this breakneck story of love and loss, Marianne Wiggins delivers a compelling novel that is a series of powerful metaphors for the curative forces of love as well as her own personal love letter to the American South. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—September 8, 1947
• Where—Lancaster, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—Manheim Township High School, Lancaster
• Awards—Whiting Award, 1989; Janet Heidiger Kafka Prize
for best novel written by an American woman, 1990
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California
Marianne Wiggins was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and has lived in Brussels, Rome, Paris, and London. She is the author of ten books of fiction, including John Dollar and Evidence of Things Unseen, for which she was a National Book Award finalist in fiction, as well as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won an NEA grant, the Whiting Writers' Award, and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. She is Professor of English at the University of Southern California. (From the publisher.)
More
From a 2005 Barnes & Noble interview:
Q: What was the book that most influenced your life or your career as a writer—and why?
A: Hands down, this was Tillie Olsen's Silences. It was published soon after I turned 30, when I had one book in print and had not really found my canvas nor my voice. I was at a turning point in my life, not knowing if I could make a "career" of writing and having a young daughter to support on my own. Olsen's masterpiece is not so much "written" as gasped — her passionate engagement with the subject of women writers grips you physically like a madwoman on a bus demanding your participation in her cause. I read it in the kitchen, I read it in bed — I still read parts of it at least once every month.
Q: What are your favorite books, and what makes them special to you?
A: When I moved back to the United States after living 16 years in London, I had to ship all my possessions to California through the Panama Canal. I'll always remember the look on that Allied Movers agent's face when he saw my shelves of books: over 300 cartons' worth, and that was after I weeded out the out-of-date travel books to places like Burma and Romania that I had bought for research for my novels. I'm going to have to sidestep this question, adapting my sister's line. She has five children and frequently, sincerely, says, "I love ‘em all." (Bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
The real main character in Marianne Wiggins' apocalyptic new novel, Almost Heaven, is neither Holden Garfield, the burned-out, bummed-out foreign correspondent who is ostensibly the story's protagonist, nor Melanie John, the fragile amnesiac with whom Garfield falls hopelessly and disastrously in love, but rather, as it happens, the weather. As in meteorology. In her earlier novels, the beautiful John Dollar and the lesser-known Eveless Eden Wiggins wrestled with the horrors of colonialism and the evils of post-Communist Romania, respectively. Here she's back on American soil in a story about Memory. Passion. Loss. —and lightning bolts. Almost Heaven springs fully armed from Wiggins' often portentous sensibility, and what better way to show it than through massing thunderclouds, drenching rain, pounding hail and a final, climactic tornado?
"A hailstorm strikes the way a plague of locusts does in the Bible," Wiggins writes, "like a tornado does—in a band. You can be standing over there on the eighth hole halfway around the course, about to swing onto the ninth, and a light rain might start to fall where you are while over at the next hole a shaft of graupel will be rattling, rat-a-tatting turf with icy grapeshot." Thematically, the ever-menacing skies perfectly suit Wiggins' broody purpose and what appears to be her absolute despair at the state of the world. "All you can expect from life is the unexpected," she remarks. "The only thing you get with any luck is a chance to wrestle with it and pray it doesn't kill you first."
As to plot, Almost Heaven is part love story, part psychodrama and part balderdash, in no particular order. Holden Garfield—why does Wiggins call him that?—has just returned to the United States after eight years as a reporter for Newsweek in Eastern Europe, most recently in Srebrenica, where he's seen a Bosnian child nailed to a tree and heard the cries of mothers in his sleep. Already struggling with a soul-killing gloom, he is drawn unexpectedly to Richmond, Va., and the beautiful, tragic Melanie, the sister of his friend and mentor Noah John—the hero of Eveless Eden—who has seen her husband and four sons killed in an auto accident and suffers from "hysterical amnesia" as a result. Melanie is unable to remember anything that's happened to her since 1975, not that the date matters, since "the truth" doesn't become clear to anyone until a tornado strikes (significantly, at a monument to Jefferson Davis in Kentucky).
"A little late in piecing it together," Wiggins observes, "as soon as Holden sees the cloud he makes the silent prayer, '—oh god, just let it thunder—let it just be lightning, lord.'" You can't escape the feeling—speaking of weather—that Almost Heaven is itself a blast of hot air, but Wiggins writes so richly, so atmospherically, that you're willing to forgive her fancier flights. "Where do dreams go when they die?" she asks. Don't let sentences like that distract you. Just experience the book like a sudden squall and you'll be fine.
Peter Kurth - Salon
Heavy-handed symbolism and cryptic plot elements undermine Wiggins's otherwise provocative novel about two people stunned by grief. Burned-out, Harvard-educated foreign correspondent Holden Garfield wishes he could erase his memories of the war in Bosnia, especially that of a crucified baby nailed to a tree. Melanie Page has also suffered trauma, but hers is so severe—she witnessed the death of her husband and four sons in a tornado—that her memory has vanished. Ironically, Holden may hold the key to her recovery, since his mentor and old friend was Melanie's brother, Noah Johns, who has gone underground for mysterious reasons. Holden decides to take Melanie (who now calls herself Johnnie) from the psychiatric wing of a Virginia hospital to South Dakota, where Noah is hiding. The journey becomes a quest for both of them and is complicated by sexual passion and Melanie's age: she is old enough to be Holden's mother. Holden is a puzzling figure: he calls his mother Kanga and his father Pooh; he has two college friends named Syd, who are marrying each other. He talks in insistently idiomatic dialogue, and Wiggins describes his thoughts in abrupt fragments meant to demonstrate his wired mental state. Wiggins's writing is intelligent, yet her manipulation of characters and themes is blatant. In addition to the repetitive connection between weather and human relationships, she offers interesting meditations on guilt; the mechanism and gestalt of memory and its "dark twin," amnesia; psychoanalytic theory; and the culture of the South. Her premise is promising: "If she could help him to forget [the horrors of war], he could help her to remember... they could learn to face their grief together." But the novel's abrupt and melodramatic conclusion (that we never learn why Noah is hiding is only one of the loose ends) leaves too many issues and relationships unresolved.
Publishers Weekly
Holden Garfield is only in his thirties, but as a correpondent in war-ravaged Bosnia, he has already hit burnout. Yet when he returns home he encounters a tragedy that dwarfs his own pain even as it personalizes all the violence he has witnessed: the sister of a good friend has lost her entire family--husband and four sons—in a freak accident and is hospitalized with amnesia. Only the brother can help restore her, but he's in hiding because of a delicate personal situation, so Holden determines to bring Melanie to her brother—and in the process falls in love. Wiggins writes stunningly polished prose that is both quirky and urgent, letting slip clues to both Holden's and Melanie's situations as the plot builds with a roar to the final blowout. A real tour de force on the immensity of human loss; highly recommended.
Library Journal
Wiggins's latest has its moments of strong pull but suffers badly from the strains of a cripplingly jejune star and an authorial craving for Big Significance. Holden Garfield is eight years out of Harvard and in the US again after having spent those years in Bosnia reporting for Newsweek. The atrocities he saw, especially in the killing field of Srebrenica, have plunged him into a career-crisis of perfervid self-doubt ("Something must have happened./He'd remember in a minute./Where do dreams go when they die?"). In Europe, he knew the journalist nonpareil Noah John, who, it happens, has a sister in Richmond, Virginia, in hysterical amnesia from the unspeakable experience of seeing her husband and four sons all killed. Named Melanie, she can now remember the distant past and the present but nothing in the middle, including her own identity, and the doctor thinks that Noah could help, being trusted brother and able to fill her in gently about who she is and what's happened. Trouble is, Noah's all tied up, by international intrigue, you might guess if you'd read Wiggins's previous book, and can't make it to Virginia. Enter Holden, who goes to see what he can do, falls in love with Melanie at first sight (in the hospital ward), finds out that Noah is in South Dakota and can't budge, and then, against doctor's advice, pops Melanie into a van and heads west. On the road, things deteriorate appallingly as Holden makes love like crazy (against more doctor's advice) with Melanie, reveals himself to have about as much depth or sensitivity as a spoiled teenager, and clumsily brings about tale's end. Best sections are those about Melanie's clinical diagnosis; worst those when dim Holden ("'No', he finally has the balls to tell her.") takes absurd charge (he's in waaaay over his head with this one. )Ambitious enough, but every seam shows and the frame is wrenched.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Who is on Holden's list of "the ten men who have shaped his life"? What does the fact that he keeps a list like this tell us about Holden's character? What is he looking for, what does he value, and what about his current situation compels him to return to this list, searching for "grace, trust, and humility"? Why is his own father not on the list? Is Noah John his surrogate father?
2. Sleep-deprived in the Frankfurt airport, traumatized by his experiences, and possibly in the midst of a nervous breakdown, Holden contends with his memory's "flashbulb effect." What is the "flashbulb effect"? What is Holden remembering?
3. While Holden is lost in memories of his grandfather, Padge, his plane to Richmond is struck by lightning with the abruptness and mystery of a symphonic explosion, "like Beethoven composing." At this point, before any of the central plot of the novel has unfolded, Wiggins has already established two central themes, memory and weather. What connections exist between the two? How do these early scenes foreshadow how the story will unfold and eventually climax?
4. Consider the stark, almost poetic nature of the fragmented phrases and words at the top of each page of the novel. How do they add to the tone and themes of Almost Heaven? Which ones strike you the most? Why?
5. At one pointHolden reflects on the way his own voice sounds, describing it as "willful" and "strident." Would you agree? Although Wiggins writes Almost Heaven in the third person, it is a third-person narrative that is filtered thoroughly and solely through Holden's perspective, and his voice seeps through every line of the novel. What narrative techniques and idiomatic structures does the author employ to portray Holden's often flip personality and ragged state of mind?
6. Is Holden's decision to take Melanie out of the hospital—ignoring Alex's advice and knowingly flirting with disaster—a selfish one? Is it noble? Why? What exactly are his motives? Why is the pursuit of a love that grows out of the absence of history and memory, a love that is utterly without baggage, so appealing to someone like Holden?
7. Is it possible that Holden's drive to shelter and preserve a woman's innocence—even a false and precarious innocence that hinges upon tragedy and amnesia—might be a doomed attempt to find an antidote to his haunted memories of the war in Bosnia? Explain. What other things might be motivating his actions?
8. Why do you suppose Wiggins chose the name Holden Garfield, with its strong echo of Holden Caulfield, the iconic protector of lost innocence in Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye? How are these two characters alike?
9. What happens to Melanie and Holden after the novel ends? In your reading group, construct a hypothetical extra chapter.
10. What is the significance of the title? Reread the single-page chapter that begins with "Somewhere there's a monument to the love that you haven't found yet." Why isn't the novel simply called Heaven?
11. In a novel concerned chiefly with the nature of memory and loss in the 1990s, what is Wiggins doing by punctuating Holden's journey with a relentless string of Civil War monuments and museums? Toward the end of Almost Heaven, Holden finally recognizes the utter emptiness in Melanie's eyes —"the Vacancy of meaning in a life whose history's been erased." At this point, what do we and Holden realize about the essence of the countless memorials that dot our landscape? Why is the presence of history, and of memory, so important?
12. In a powerhouse climax, Melanie's memory returns with the force of a tornado. Why is it so fitting that this happens— Melanie recovers her own personal tragedy, just as Holden loses sight of his own personal heaven—at the Jefferson Davis monument in Kentucky, the infamous site of The Lost Cause?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
top of page (summary)