Butler’s next visiting writer is author Mary Kay Zuravleff. She’ll be giving a reading Wednesday, October 23 at 7:30 PM in the Eidson-Duckwall recital hall. Zuravleff has taught at Johns Hopkins, George Mason, and American University, and serves on the PEN/Faulkner Foundation board. She has been nominated for an Orange Prize, received the American Academy’s Rosenthal Award, and won the James Jones First Novel Award for The Frequency of Souls.
Yeah, that’s all impressive, but I’m really here to tell you about how awesome Zuravleff’s new novel Man Alive! is. Ready for it? It’s a novel about a struggling family. Are you sold?
Of course you aren’t! But why is the family struggling? Because the head of their family, pediatric psychiatrist Dr. Owen Lerner, is struck by lightning while feeding a quarter into a parking meter, and during his out-of-body, near-death-experience, just before he is resuscitated, Owen gets a whiff of something most heavenly: “It is bliss, pure bliss, and though he’s aware that he isn’t breathing, he has the scent of barbecue in his nostrils–hickory-smoked, well-marbled meat with bourbon-and-mango-spiked sauce caramelized by intense heat.” When he is shuffled back into this mortal coil, all he wants to do is barbeque. Forget his patients, forget his family. Smoke, sugar, meat.
Not like you expected otherwise, but Zuravleff has a definite way with words. Her prose is vividly detailed–word scrimshaw, but never feels burdened by its own careful crafting. Have some more prose, this paragraph coming directly after the fateful lightning strike:
Water magnifies, lubricates, cleanses, and conducts, all of which is the case here. Water flows, and Owen rides the torrent everywhere at once, having been granted infinite perspective: he is looking down at his body, which isn’t actually in water but is writhing on the sidewalk, his shirt ripped open and his white underbelly jiggling away; then he is eye to eye with his remaining quarters, which are suspended midair in the unlikely shape of a bell curve until one is picked off by a pair of sunglasses flying or flung through space; then he is somehow staring at his wife’s new tooth, her square jaw unhinged to reveal her crown. Next, he is looking to the horizon, across the parking lot, over the boardwalk to the beach, all the way to the surf, which has picked up height and mass since they broke camp an hour ago, lugging their umbrella and beach chairs as well as all the sodden, gritty towels back to the house, where he took his last outdoor shower of the season; then he is staring straight up into the sky from somewhere up in the sky, shimmering with the crackling clouds and bright static that have knocked him off his feet.
The event promises to be shocking, but is free of charge. So conduct yourself over to Eidson-Duckwall, 7:30 PM on Wednesday – perhaps bring someone with whom you share a spark – and hang out with Zuravleff for a couple hours. Lightning pun.