Fiction: Glow of grief

The everyday world is interrupted in Kevin Brockmeier's The Illumination by light: Suddenly, pain — human pain —begins to glow. It begins while Carol Ann Page is partially anaesthetised after she has cut her thumb so badly that she goes to the hospital. "[W]hen she saw the light shining out of her incision, she thought she was hallucinating. ... Through the haze of drugs, it seemed to be that the light was not falling over her wound or even infusing it from the inside but radiating through it from another world. She thought that she could live there and be happy."

Happiness is a far-off state for Page. She is divorced, disappointed. Her roommate during her recovery at the hospital is a woman who is just the opposite — her marriage is so in sync that her husband writes her love notes each morning and she copies them all down in a notebook. But they have been in a terrible car accident and the woman tells Page she couldn't bear to ever read the notebook again and insists that she take it. Soon, the woman's light grows blindingly bright, and then she dies. Page keeps the notebook and eavesdrops on a more perfect life, reading intimacies never meant to be shared. This becomes clear when the husband surfaces — he is not dead, as Page assumed, and he is furious at her transgression. He misses his wife desperately and retrieves the notebook as a last memento.

The notebook and the light serve as counterpoints that propel the story, which moves from one character to the next as the notebook passes through their hands. Page is left behind as the second chapter focuses on Jason Williford, the angry widower. Later the notebook will pass into the possession of a boy, a missionary, an author and a homeless man.

In some parts of the novel, the notebook is the primary focus; in others, it is incidental and the light and pain take precedence. We intersect with the characters like the notebook does and see them in a time of discovery or change.

Williford is a photojournalist; in his grief he finds a group of punk high school students trying self-mutilation. Their cuts and burns shine beautifully for his camera. He sees a kind of beauty in the pain the teens indulge in and even enjoy. While the source of the light is physical pain, its rationale is not part of the novel. There are no scientists investigating the phenomenon. It is simply an occurrence — a miracle? a doctor asks — that changes our world.

The novel's light makes for a new beauty in being human. But since the light reveals hurts, the question arises of what it means to see it. Does the light demand a new kind of empathy? And if so, does this empathy have limits? That is a question the missionary, unable to get over the death of his sister, must face.

He is the picture of generosity, even as he questions whether he really believes. He spreads the word, pamphleting in poor neighbourhoods and eventually throughout the developing world. But how far can words reach? Can they help when someone is riddled with pain? As these well-rendered stories accrue, questions of words and language surface in patterns. Two characters are nearly mute and the author, on book tour, can barely read for the pain that shines from her injured mouth. One finds an unusual lifeline in books and the story the injured author reads is a hopeful fable that cribs from the love notes. The original notebook doesn't survive — each set of hands it passes through value it less and less — but the love it conveyed echoes again and again, a recurring refrain in counterpoint to the constant, shining pain.

The Illumination By Kevin Brockmeier, Pantheon, 264 pages, $24.95