Introducing Kendall Delcambre

Literary Review, Fall, 1999 by Burton Raffel

Good writing is very different from "fine" writing. Fine writing lights up the sky, shooting Roman candles and particolored pinwheels in all directions; its basic purpose, whether acknowledged or not, is to call attention to itself. Good writing may offer every bit as intense a surface, but need not automatically (or always) do so: its central purpose is to shed light on its subject matter and away from itself. Not only is fine writing essentially indifferent to its subject, there may in fact be no particular importance to whatever it purports to be about:

   To me, dental school seemed more like a very large meal that I had to eat
   all by myself. The dishes were arrayed before me, and so I took my spoon
   and went at it as deliberately as possible, chewing up biochemistry and
   physiology, then fixed prosthodontics and operative dentistry, then
   periodontics and anesthesia and pain control. (Jane Smiley, The Age of
   Grief, 1987, p. 122)

It is impossible to take this seriously. Who goes at "a very large meal" that requires much "chewing" armed with a spoon? Why on earth are the dishes "arrayed"? The laundry list of dental-school courses, obviously culled from a university catalogue, may be designed to impress, but such a wholesale broadside cannot possibly inform--or satisfy.

Good writing, on the other hand, which is what makes Mr. Delcambre's novel not simply memorable, but also satisfying and at the same time deeply pleasurable, focuses on its subject with passionate seriousness (and in Mr. Delcambre's work, with sensitive, sharp-edged WIT):

   Unwilling or unable to go off and find my future or to make it, I waited
   for one to fall into my lap, and until it did I could count on the faithful
   company of a cherry vanilla cone. I suppose I was tired of trying to hold
   the reins. It was God's turn. If I held really still, She should be able to
   find me. I would wait with threadbare optimism for the answers to drop from
   Heaven.

There are a vast number of things revealed and commented upon in these brief, beautifully turned sentences. And all of them are totally relevant as well as delicately narrative-focused. The narrator's future is indeed about to "fall" into her lap, "dropping" from Heaven. How much we learn from the ascription of "faithful company" status to "a cherry vanilla waffle cone"! The assignment of femaleness to God is handled with wonderful, apt lightness; so, too, is the subtle description of the narrator s optimism as "threadbare." The immensely careful use of the conditional "should" rather than the decisive "would," for the likelihood of God's finding her, is typically exact without needing to be insistent. Seasoned with wit, rather than with relentless, ultimately empty bravura, Mr. Delcambre's writing crackles with delight, energy, and--most important of all--with truth.

For The Trick Is Not to Mind is tautly constructed, emphatically fashioned to tell the kind of large, complex story that the best novels necessarily narrate. Plot threads are woven ever tighter, and to some extent ever darker and more urgently. (The book reminds me, in these matters, of Rachel Ingalls' splendid 1984 novel, Binstead's Safari: both novels carefully, patiently accelerate, until they fairly explode into their denouement.) There are incredibly funny scenes, deftly balanced against passionately moving ones. This is good fiction writing at its best. Mr. Delcambre and The Trick Is Not to Mind ought to be widely (as they will surely be appreciatively) read, once some publisher's editor realizes the waiting opportunity. Thereafter, book and author should both enjoy long, productive lives.

Burton Raffel is an internationally known writer and translator of works in a variety of languages. His many books include translations of Cervantes, Rabelais, and Beowulf, works on Eliot and Pound, and studies of the art of translation, notably, The Art of Translating Prose; The Forked Tongue: A Study of the Translation Process; and the Art of Poetry. His most recent volume of poetry, Beethoven in Denver and Other Poems, will be published by Conundrum Press.3