To the Lighthouse, again

a tribute to my favorite novel

The first time I read Virginia Woolf’s luminous novel TO THE LIGHTHOUSE, I was 22 and in my first year of an MFA program at UC Irvine. It was on the list of books we were required to read in order to pass our exam, alongside about 20 other titles including Madame Bovary, War and Peace, The Red and the Black, and so on, books I’d managed to “miss” as an undergraduate majoring in International Relations at Stanford (as opposed to, say, Literature). Although I had already read Woolf’s essay “A Room of One’s Own,” which certainly left an impression on my budding aspirations to write, I hadn’t yet found my way to her novels. But reading this one fully changed my life. I can’t imagine what kind of writer I would be now if I hadn’t found its beacon.

Back then, I had completed a few short stories, a handful really. When I applied to UC Irvine, submitting two very short pieces, the program directors asked to see at least one more before deciding whether or not to admit me; I had to scramble to finish something – a story built of fragments that I hoped would connect. My own lyrical prose was nerve-wracking; I worried about a lack of structure, not to mention narrative arc and plot. Somehow that worry seemed to fall away when I read TO THE LIGHTHOUSE. As Eudora Welty describes her own discovery, in a Foreword to a later edition: “Blessed with luck and innocence, I fell upon the novel that once and forever opened the door of imaginative fiction for me, and read it cold, in all its wonder and magnitude.”

I was mesmerized not only by the gorgeousness of Woolf’s prose, but by the fluidity of the narration’s movement, the seamless way my attention was carried from one consciousness to another, the elegant subjectivity of the content. Images accumulated alongside emotional weather; patterns of thought and action and dialogue blended and blurred. I felt stunned by the way time moved in this novel, unlike anything I’d read before. After elongating a single day in 121 pages, a section called “Time Passes” offered 10 years in 20 pages --- encompassing a World War, countless deaths, specific deaths, irreparable losses. Woolf managed to paint the existential void in all its excruciating beauty.

I named my computer Virginia, and wrote my first novel THE SPEED OF LIGHT, struggling to retain faith in juggling simultaneous points of view. With three alternating first-person voices, my characters told their interwoven stories in non-linear time. In my second novel BLUE NUDE, I borrowed from Woolf’s thematic and chronological structure, framing my book in sections called The Present (one day), The Past (60 years), and The Present (one day a few weeks past the beginning). Whether or not my readers recognized this implicit honoring of TO THE LIGHTHOUSE, I believed that my novel’s full message of hope against darkness couldn’t be offered in any other way.

Like Eudora Welty, who re-reads TO THE LIGHTHOUSE and says, “my awe and my delight remain forever cloudless,” I find the novel astonishing again and again. Now, in addition to revisiting the glorious wholeness of the book, the rapture it produces in me from start to finish, I also try to study it carefully. I savor the language and marvel at its perfection; I look for the places inside the sentences where the point of view shifts, the focus adjusts, the characters reveal themselves to one another, to me. Sometimes reading this book is like watching time-lapse photography; it’s also like standing in front of a piece of abstract art or listening to a composition by John Cage, where time stops altogether. I find myself holding my breath or catching my breath. All these decades of writing, and I still see myself mirrored in painter Lily Briscoe as she grapples with her demons. I’m older than Mrs. Ramsay (who is 50!), and I’m reassured that her eternal beauty can still make her admirers almost swoon. Even though I know that this family is poised, like the world itself, on the edge of devastation, I want their perfect day to remain with me a while longer. I’m “in love with all of it,” the way Lily is.

Maybe I understand now what my own readers mean when they tell me about their shock at the unexpected death of one of my characters in ELECTRIC CITY, when they ask me why he had to die. It’s all that temporary beauty, I want to tell them. It’s life imitating art. No one escapes its passing.