Watermarked
Welcome to the February edition of my short story collection, Watermarked. This month’s story, “Webbed Feet,” is a tale of an endangered bird, the marbled murrelet and Claire and Michael’s threatened marriage. I hope you enjoy this installment. Please feel free to share it with anyone who might be interested.
Dickensian Echoes in Recent Reading
George Saunders’ Vigil
Many of you know that I’m a George Saunders fan, a member of his Substack Story Club and will tell anyone who will listen to read A Swim in the Pond in the Rain. Ezra Kline’s interview with Saunders discusses the moral dimensions, anger, ambition and sin in Vigil.
I tucked into a library copy of Vigil. At under two hundred pages, you could make the case that it’s more of a novella. Despite being number one on the New York Times best-seller list this week, it has received mixed reviews. If you enjoyed Lincoln in the Bardo, then Vigil may be your cup of tea.
Spoilers Follow
Vigil riffs on Charles Dickens novella, A Christmas Carol, which the Story Club did a close read of during Christmas 2024. The Ebenezer Scrooge character, an unlikeable protagonist, K.J. Boone,is a dying billionaire oil tycoon and climate denier. He is visited on his deathbed (not even in the best bedroom of his mansion) by spirits, including a repentant French inventor of the combustion engine who demands that Boone confront his past actions. In Vigil’s speculative world, guiding spirits function as a type of death doulas, returning to the earthly realm to comfort the dying as they transition, helping them acknowledge and repent for their sins. But despite a noisy cast of various spirits challenging the oil tycoon, there is little movement towards repentance.
The guiding spirit in Vigil is Jill “Doll” Blaine, a pro at the death-doula business, having guided over 300 souls to the other realm. How Victorian and a playfully Dickensian character name, invoking chillblains—the damp and cold and the sulfuric coal fires scorching the damp wool clothing and exposed skin placed before them.
The interesting part of the story for me was the backstory of Jill “Doll” Blaine, how and when she died. As she waits for her recalcitrant charge to die, she visits her old town and discovers some difficult-to-accept changes. She is tempted to punish the person responsible for her young adult death. These actions are prohibited in the speculative world’s rules for visiting spirits.
This is not a simple redemption, happily-ever-after story like A Christmas Carol, where, after the ghosts’ visitation, the transformed Ebenezer Scrooge makes amends. Can people be held responsible for their harmful actions if they believed they were right? How much compassion does an unrepentant person deserve? Give the book a try and see what you think.
John Irving’s Queen Esther
Before Vigil, I read John Irving’s sixteenth novel, Queen Esther. Irving, another Dickens admirer, crafts a complex family saga centred on the coming-of-age of Adam Brewster and the mystery of his biological mother, Queen Esther. Themes of adoption, identity, anti-Semitism, and family structure echo Dickens’ influence.
Adam and his grandfather read alternating chapters of Great Expectations as a moral guide. Adam is a seeker like Pip. Like the Great Expectations character, Joe Gargery, Esther lurks in the background, steadfast in her Zionist ideology, influencing Adam’s expectations and identity.
While the coming-of-age struggles, quirky characters, and atypical families are classic John Irving (including wrestlers and wrestling), I found some of the elements tiresome—cafe playlists, the dog, the thugs. The plot centres on Adam fathering a child to avoid the American draft of the Vietnam War. The themes of abandonment, poverty and benefaction are eternal.
Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead
Dickens most autobiographical book, David Copperfield, was revisited thematically in the coming-of-age journey of Damon Fields in Barbara Kingsolver’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Demon Copperhead. I’m sorry to say that I didn’t get past the oppressive hardships of the first one hundred pages. Perhaps I should try again?
But I was inspired to watch the 2020 film The Personal History of David Copperfield starring Dev Patel (as David Copperfield), Tilda Swinton (as Betsey Trotwood), and Hugh Laurie (as Mr Dick). Because who doesn’t love those actors?
A Quick Splash into the Dickens Pond (but not in the rain)
Dickens was a master of self-publishing and serialized storytelling. His journals Household Words and All the Year Round were hugely popular, becoming, in Dickens’s words, “a good property” that yielded “a good round profit.” Great Expectations, his thirteenth novel, was serialized in weekly installments in All the Year Round.
He published A Christmas Carol, one of his five Christmas novellas, in a range from a collector-worthy, leather-bound, gold-embossed limited edition to mass-market prints.
Like many creatives, Dickens’ personal life was tarnished. At age 45, he fell in love with an eighteen-year-old actress and tried (unsuccessfully) to have his wife, Catherine, the mother of his ten children, institutionalized for a mental disorder. Can this misdeed be countered by his innumerable acts of philanthropy and activism for the basic rights of the poor? Can one separate the art from the artist?
As in Shakespeare, the humanity of the characters and conflicts in Dickens works continue to influence culture and literature in the English-speaking world and are always worth revisiting.
Until Next Time
Happy reading and writing. I look forward to any comments. See you in March for the third installment of my colllection.