On my vacation this year along the shores of Lake Michigan, I was reading the last chapters of an advance reading copy of The Dogs of Babel on the day it appeared in bookstores across America.  Little, Brown and Company introduced the book at this year’s Book Expo America to stimulate interest among booksellers, and I’d packed the copy I picked up along with several other publisher’s newests, hoping for a week of refreshing summer reading.  And as I read Carolyn Parkhurst’s first novel, my wish was coming true.  Not only is her story and writing emotionally focused and resonant, through her narrator, she introduces a way of thinking through words that writers can use to advantage in developing their own work.

At the end of the first chapter, on the novel’s eighth page, Paul Iverson, the story’s narrator, addresses his readers.  It is a few days after the funeral of his wife, an artist who died in a fall from the couple’s apple tree:

…I am a grieving man, and I am trying very hard to find some sense in my wife’s death. But the evidence I have found is sufficiently strange to make me wonder what really happened on that day, whether it was really a desire for apples that led my sweet wife to climb to the top of that tree. Lorelei [a Rhodesian Ridgeback] is my witness, not just to Lexy’s death itself, but to all the events leading up to it.  She watched Lexy move through her days and her nights. She was there for the unfolding of our marriage from its first day to its last.  Simply put, she knows things I don’t.  I feel I must do whatever I can to unlock that knowledge.”

A mid-career professor of linguistics, Iverson turns to researching in the field of language acquisition in dogs.  The book’s back cover blurb makes much of this:

Reeling from grief, Paul abandons his everyday life to embark on a series of experiments intended to teach Lorelei to communicate…Is this the project of a madman? Or does Lorelei really have something to reveal about the last day in the life of the woman Paul only thought he knew?

 It is not giving away too much to say that although the project helps the author move Paul through a year that he takes off from working at his university and invites colleagues to enter the scene once in awhile as reality checks for the reader, this is not a story about researching language acquisition in dogs.  Neither is it a story really about “the woman Paul only thought he knew.”  It is the story of one man’s coming to peace with all that he knew through daily cohabitation with grief.

As Paul Iverson structures his research, he recalls more and more, mourns and gives in to impulses as only those in the depths of loss do, we learn, not about dog language but about words and their value in helping us come to see what our unconscious may already know.  In fact, Paul announces this early in the book.  Although he believes that he must clear his good name in the academic community by informing his fellow faculty members and researchers that there is a whole body of work out about the acquisition of language in dogs, he cries out to the reader:

If I could, though, I would begin the way poets used to do when they told their stories of love and war and troubles rained down from the heavens.  I would begin like this:

I sing of a woman with ink on her hands and pictures hidden beneath her hair.  I sing of a dog with a skin like velvet pushed the wrong way.  I sing of the shape of a fallen body makes in the dirt beneath a tree, and I sing of an ordinary man who wanted to know things no human being could tell him. This is the true beginning.

As he continues his research, his mourning, and his reconstruction of his wife’s life, Paul reveals a continuing reliance on anaphora, the repeating of phrases.  When he recounts his honeymoon aboard a cruise ship with his seasick new wife, he remembers:

I fed her with my fingers until she protested that she had better not overdo it.  Then I helped her dress and took her out to see what she had been missing.  Here is the sea and the bright hot day.  Here are the men playing cards.  Here I am with the woman I love, walking under the sun.

After a dream about Lexy to which he wishes to return but knows he cannot, Paul rises and goes to an all night supermarket.  He describes it this way:

…I see a woman in a black cocktail dress buying a pint of ice cream.  I see a homeless man with a basketful of groceries, holding up a jar of marinated artichoke hearts, examining it closely.  He reads the ingredients on the back with great interest and then gently places the jar in his cart.  I see that his cart is full of all kinds of luxurious food–cans of smoked oysters, a cake from the bakery, a family-size frozen lasagna.  I want to offer him some money–actually, I want to pay for the entire basket of food–but I have the sense that it would ruin the fantasy for him, the illusion that he’s just another customer wandering the bright aisles. I leave him in the condiment section, where he’s comparing two different brands of barbecue sauce.

This sort of repetition of opening phrases allows a speaker to let the world enter his or her consciousness despite any resistance.  It lulls and it allows the speaker to deliver despite emotional states that work to shut feelings down. It also helps revive feeling when a thinking, scientific approach threatens to overwhelm the unconscious.  In this book, the scientific process itself is founded on something so irrational as to immediately scream out to the reader:  feelings come first!

In addition to a reliance on anaphora, Paul Iverson also reveals a game important to him:

When I was a child, one of my favorite games on long car trips and rainy afternoons was to write a word, any word, the longer the better, at the top of a piece of paper and list beneath all the words that could be made from its letters.  The point wasn’t so much to count the number of words that I found; it was more to see what those words revealed about the word they came from.  It was like magic to me, like a secret code to crack. Break apart family and you find both yam, homey as Thanksgiving, and lam, the inevitable flight from the nest.  Is it any mistake that loser contains the letters to form sore?

About the dog’s name, Paul continues:

Look inside Lorelei and you find roll and lie, two very doggy verbs, two things she does very well.  But look further and you’ll see she carries within her a story to tell (see, there it is–lore) and a role she herself plays in that story.

He plays the game with his own name as he listens to a telephone psychic he has called and finds that the letters in Paul Iverson form words that, “disconcertingly have to do with the life of the body…veins, liver, pores, nape, penis, loins and pulse.  “But look again,” he enthuses:

and you’ll find soul and reason, prose and salve and lover.  I am nervous and son and naive. I’m as human as you can get.  I snore and I pine.  (One letter away from passion.  One letter away from reveal.)

And so Parkhurst’s character introduces the next round–words that are just one letter away from other words.

This word game can be an interesting way to keep yourself writing and searching for new information when you don’t know where a piece of writing is headed or even where it should be headed.  If you are writing fiction, you can create a worksheet where you play with words in your characters’ worlds.  Once you see what kinds of words are in your characters’ names, the names of others mentioned in the story, or even in phrases spoken in the story, you will have more to write about.  If you are working on personal essays, poems, or memoirs, you can stop and do this exercise using your name, the name of others who appear in the work or words from your text.  Once you have a list of words created by rearranging letters, choose several from among the list and do a freewrite concerned with how the words connect to your subject matter.   If I am writing about visiting Los Angeles for instance but don’t know where to start, I could break the word down:  sloe, angels, log, lane, less, loan, gas, leg, gale, gel, goes, eagle, sell, legal–and I haven’t even gotten to one-letter-away words!  I think I could divide my essay up into sections:  lanes, gas, gel, and angels, all of it with the kind of hidden slant of “sloe: a dark fruit” beneath the words.  I could write first about unexpected LA, the lanes rather than the wide traffic-ridden streets; then I could write about the traffic-ridden streets or at least the parts of LA only accessible by taking them; I could write abut the beautiful people and all of the beauty orientation in LA under the section called “gel.”  Finally, I could write about the angels:  depicted in the movies, placed around the city as a public art program, the ones doing humanitarian work, and the daily ones I meet of every color, faith, and background.  A surprising take on LA could surface from such an essay.

After introducing Parkhurst’s exercise at a recent writer’s workshop, I received the following message by email from a woman who works for a nonprofit organization:

I wrote a few paragraphs about the organization’s history, looked in there for a key word which turned out to be “education,” played around with different word combinations, picked out several (tend, data, time, untie) that caught my attention and used them to prompt some additional writing. The end result is a poem that expresses a redirected focus for the organization. Very cool!

Whether you write reports, fiction, personal essays, or memoir, stopping to play this game or having a character do it will yield new thoughts and direction for your work. When you set about writing in a way that allows you to utilize the meanings and connections you come up with between words that you conjure, you will see many opportunities to develop in your writing.

Remember that anaphora can be your friend during your freewrite.  Repeating a phrase like, “The letters in this word rearrange themselves and…” can help you keep going even when you don’t see apparent connections between words or are having trouble articulating what you feel.  You will find your heart opening to new material and your senses thriving on surprise, just as Paul Iverson finds in The Dogs of Babel.

In the end, with a little help from the log book of the telephone psychic (“Break down ‘Lady Arabelle’ and what do you find? Read and bleed. Lay bare.”) the poet in Paul is what intuits the truth about his wife’s death.  Taking the poetic journey with him is the real pleasure of this novel.