What a wonderful novel James Michener's Recessional is--

What an unusual novel James Michener's Recessional is:

Among the stories intertwining each other are two wives with Alzheimers, a young black athlete dying of AIDS in a ghetto, a mercy killing.

But what I like best about Michener's skills as a writer are not only his third person limited omniscient points of view, but also when he gets into the heads of birds and mammals and even reptiles in Chesapeake, as well as in Recessional.

In Chesapeake he speaks from "inside the head" of a grey goose.

In Recessional he starts one chapter with the word "Rattler"--so you think, who is this new inhabitant of the retirement center that he is introducing so late in the story?

And then he goes on to describe how a rattlesnake slithers and its body mechanisms and its perilous journey from its abused swamp where the ground has been torn up by a new housing project, to get a meal of baby heron.

These are some of the most refreshing chapters in these two novels.

It gives a sense of not only the world and us as humans being under threat, but also of the natural world and all the living beings in it.

Super, I say.

It proves that writing does not come from "research" or knowledge as much as it does from empathy.

Journalists and non-fiction writers especially suffer from a paucity of imagination and often don't take flight because they are fact bound--tethered too often by tired old cliches such as "but at that time the laws of nature had not yet been abused and the young did not die before the old."

I was aghast when a former colleague said this at work when her younger sister died.

I think it denotes a true lack of feeling if you have to fall back on a cliche to describe a truly tragic event like a death in the family.

Copyright Kyi May Kaung.
www.kmkaung.com