IN AN OCEAN OF TEARS, READING OR WRITING CAN BE A LIFESAVER

Author: By Ann Harleman

Date: SUNDAY, October 5, 1997

Page: C4

Section: Books

But why fiction? Wouldn't a self-help book or (more elegant) a memoir have been a more fitting vessel? No. To my mind, only fiction can make a story so acute and immediate and singular that it draws you right inside. Nonfiction offers an account of experience; fiction is experience. (The harder I tried to render my sense of loss by telling what happened, the more I questioned the extent to which truth resides in facts. In the book I finally wrote, no one's sister dies.)

Alice Munro's fiction takes us, again and again, inside the experience of loss. In her stories -- among six collections, my favorite is ``Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You'' -- characters manage (or not) the day-to-day erosion, the accumulation of ordinary losses until, as the cartoonist B. Kliban put it, ``the wagon of love breaks down under the baggage of life.'' One narrator whose mother has begun a slow death from Parkinson's disease recalls a trip they shared in her girlhood; a woman whose lover has suddenly died contrives to meet his widow and learns that she was not his only dalliance; a girl receives from her father the beating she has invited by tormenting her stepmother. Like other writers with both an unblinking eye and a generous heart -- John Berger, V. S. Pritchett, Roddy Doyle -- Munro makes us feel her characters' suffering, their often peculiar passions, their confusion. At the same time, we are always aware of a larger view, a kind of envelope around their (now our) experience that makes it unbearable. Munro's stories offer the consolation, not of philosophy but of fiction.

What are we looking for when we read fiction, those of us who have the habit? There's the oft-cited pursuit of the question ``What is it like to be you, to be there?'' But hard on its heels, I believe, comes the converse: ``Does anyone know what it's like to be me, to be here?'' Wisdom, yes, we'd like that; but even more, we long for company. We need to tell ourselves our own stories, and we learn how by reading. Otherwise we're like feral children who, never having heard the sound of human language, never acquire it.

``Now practice losing farther, losing faster.'' Lately, on several all-night trips to the emergency room with my husband, who has multiple sclerosis, I've found myself re-reading Rosellen Brown's ``Tender Mercies.'' In this remarkable and audacious novel, Brown sets herself the task of telling a love story in which one of the lovers is paralyzed from the chest down. The novel begins when Laura Couser -- crippled in a swimming accident by the propeller of a boat because her husband, Dan, was fooling around at the wheel -- comes home from the hospital. Last week I was comforted to read (the light in emergency rooms is excellent for reading): ``The doctor told him he was her lifeline . . . even anger will do her good, even hate, recrimination, blame. They'll get her circulation up. So he was the sacrifice. (How could that be, when so was she?)'' Brown understands that Laura's loss and Dan's loss are not the same loss, that they do not share an experience; like my husband and me, they are living out separate story lines that can only intersect at love. This beautiful book is not what television would call ``fact-based''; Brown says that she writes not her experiences but her nightmares. Like David Malouf, Sue Miller, Jayne Anne Phillips, she is interested less in ordinary losses than in people at extremes.

Then there are the unspeakable losses inflicted on those trapped in history. Ilona Karmel's ``An Estate of Memory,'' set in a Nazi concentration camp in Poland, follows four women who struggle to survive through their friendship and their memories. Like other writers whose characters have been snatched up in the jaws of our century -- Pat Barker, J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer -- Karmel distills events that are impersonal and incomprehensibly huge into the day-to-day lives of individuals whom we can know and feel with. ``Her hands could still move. Slowly, with effort, they groped on, touched something damp, something crumbly and cold. And whatever the hands touched were syllables which she made out and put together into words: grass was her first word, then earth, then stone. . . .'' Karmel's warts-and-all characters are, to put it simply, real; she opens their experience to me more than I would have thought possible. But Karmel's special gift is to show her characters' suffering, their stuggles, in a way that does not render the reader's sorrows small. No costive putting of things in perspective here. Her characters join you in grief. All grief, all loss, are one.

I'm off to the hospital now, where my husband sits unhappily but, we hope, temporarily in a wheelchair. I don't know which of these books will accompany me; but when I'm not reading, I'll be making notes. For the consolation of fiction works both ways: You've probably heard more than one writer in extremis cry, ``It's all material!'' The other evening (I swear this really happened) a green-garbed young man approached my husband's bed with the words, ``Hi! I'm David. I'll be your nurse tonight.''