40
2015
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
number 24
COURTESY OF LEE ZACHARIAS
Zacharias’s essays do tend to build in this manner from judicious details to a didactic moral, and when she’s writing about experience in the world outside the mind, it works. But when she writes about writing (or her other art, photography), the essays too often seem pointless and forced, filled up with what seem to be randomly Googled facts. “Geography for Writers,” for instance, regales us with the daily writing habits of a seemingly endless list of famous American littérateurs, without shedding much light on either them or Zacharias herself. Writing about the “Morning Light” she loves to photograph on Ocracoke, she can turn a bit precious: “At the ocean, breakers will be spilling their thunderous white spume, but here at the harbor the water is glass, a bottomless sheen the color of jet” (138). She’s on much firmer ground when she turns to family, particularly her difficult and distant father, whose suicide she mulls in “A House in Florida.” Like the protagonist in Bergman’s “Housewifely Arts,” Zacharias recounts her pilgrimage to clean out and sell a dead parent’s house – a scenario so common these days that it deserves a generic designation of its own. Coming to terms with her father’s troubled life and violent end, her style achieves an unadorned strength: Donna didn’t want an obituary for fear of being robbed, and ivory hooks of their beaks. Though I confess to superstition,
though he would have liked one to appear in the Texaco bul-
they did not strike me as an omen. Despite the recentness of
letin, she was so adamant I allowed her to overrule me. And so
grief they did not remind me of death or its tedious business.
there was no death notice, no service. I cleaned out his closet.
They were simply there, as I was, in a kind of matter-of-factness
The crematorium lost his ashes, and in the five years that
so profound we can know it only in nature. It may have been a
passed before I sold his house, I misplaced my cache of death
minute or ten that we regarded one another. Then they waddled
certificates only to be told that the Hernando County Office of
to the side and let me pass. That evening, driving the back road,
Records had no record of his death. Still, I win. My father did
I came upon a vulture tree. It was dusk, and the hunkering
not disappear. This is his record. (66)
vultures and bare black bones of the branches were silhouetted against the faded dust-blue sky in a way that seemed incredibly beautiful to me. It is in such confrontations with the eternal shape of death that we know most fully we’re alive. (212)
ABOVE Lee Zacharias reading from her new
essay collection at Scuppernong Books, Greensboro, NC, 18 Apr. 2014
Zacharias gives the impression of a tremendously talented writer who needs a big subject to draw out her best. I hope we’ll see more of it. n