"Light While There Is Light" by Keith Waldrop

Published by NYRB (ISBN: 979-8-89623-036-6)

It is not a mystery, at least to me, that I’m attracted to narrations that deal with one’s odd or eccentric families, and poet Keith Waldrop has written a quiet masterpiece of what is called a fictional memoir regarding his family. Driven by his overly Christian religious mother and his two hustling brothers, it is billed in the subtitle as “an American History.” Light While There Is Light is a journey told. It is a painful journey, but Waldrop manages to reveal its unexpected charm through his nonjudgmental manner.

The book unfolds like a classic American Gothic tale, driven by Waldrop's mother, who leads her family from town to town as she develops a taste for religious fanaticism. On the other end, Keith’s brother opens a used-car business that, in the American sense, mirrors the Mother’s obsession. Whether it is true or not, it seems Keith is the normal one in the family, but he penetrates the family’s attempt to exist in a harsh world. Waldrop's patient observations and understated prose transform memory into something dreamlike, where the Midwest feels less like a geographical place than a state of mind. It is an American story of those who, in some fashion, failed, but that is very much part of the underbelly of American experience.

I’m touched when I read that Keith’s father took him to see a low-budget version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and although it wasn't technically the best performance, for Waldrop it was the moment that changed his life and led him to become a writer/poet. His background was not one of reading or owning books, except being introduced to Christian literature supplied by, or left over when she passed. That Waldrop became a translator of Charles Baudelaire’s poetry must have been a strange journey from Point A to B.

The majority of my writing has been, and still is, from my childhood, so I’m naturally attuned to this type of literature, and Waldrop’s book is a seed thrown into the landscape to help others become aware of their own family mysteries or oddness. A slow burner of a book, but it sticks with the reader long after reading it.