Re-reading this (for book club), I was struck by the prominence of the theme of trauma within it, which led to the realisation of how elegantly it - trauma - and possibly the other key thing that The Sorrows of an American is about, absence, are entwined and related in this still remarkable novel, namely the notion that trauma, whether experienced personally or as a reverberation from the past or from society at large, is the foundation - the precondition - of everything that is apparently whole for its characters, not least the narratives through which they make sense of their lives and selves, which of course maps precisely on to the manner in which that which is present is always enabled only by what is absent, lacking, unspoken.
This book is so good that it takes my breath away a little. Comparing it to The Echo Maker, say, with which it has more than a bit in common (it even mention's Capgras syndrome and Libet's readiness potential experiment, the latter of which has been weirdly recurrent in my reading lately, having also been central to the Dennett extract we did for philo reading group a while back), I'm reminded again of how ineffable and how clear is the whatever-it-is that separates the really good stuff from all the rest.
(Last time.)
