2014
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
number 23
Courtesy of USGS
86
Words, Water, Wonder a review by Brian Glover
—. The Patron Saint of Dreams and Other Essays. Spartanburg, SC: Hub City Press, 2012.
NCLR Editorial Board member Brian Glover earned his PhD at the University of Virginia. He teaches English at ECU, where he received the Bertie Fearing Teaching Award in 2013. Philip Gerard teaches in the Creative Writing Department at UNC-Wilmington. He is the author of seven books, including the historical novel Cape Fear Rising (John F. Blair, 1994), inspired by the 1898 coup d’état in Wilmington, NC. Read an excerpt from the novel in NCLR 1994, which featured “the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot.” For a sample of his short fiction, see NCLR 2005.
ABOVE Overwash from Hurricane Fran
at North Topsail Beach, NC, 1996 right More results of Hurricane Fran
The first essay in Philip Gerard’s 2012 collection The Patron Saint of Dreams starts from its very first line with the theme that obsesses Gerard throughout the book: “What they don’t tell you about hurricanes is the uncertainty” (1). Whether the topic be Ouija board divination, nineteenthcentury fraudsters, his mother’s death, his own nearly fatal heart attack, or an impressive range of manly outdoor pursuits (sailing, semi-pro baseball, camping with grizzlies), Gerard returns again and again to uncertainty, ambiguity, and mystery. At their best, his essays show us an endlessly inquisitive mind, hunting for the truth about experience, armed with an admirably precise style. In that first essay, for instance, Gerard sets out to show us not the destructive physical power of a hurricane on the North Carolina coast, but what it feels like to live through one. In those humid hours of dread before all hell breaks loose, familiar objects and landscapes take on an uncanny and threatening cast. Gerard finds just the right words for it: “The longleaf pines that ring our property stand sixty and seventy feet high, two feet
in diameter, precarious upright tons of wet wood, swaying already in the breeze. Their roots are soft in the spongy ground. We’ve been set up. It feels like there’s a bull’s-eye painted on the map next to the words ‘Cape Fear’” (2). “Precarious upright tons”: the quality, the location, and the potentially crushing quantity. The precision is terrifying, and it’s that specificity that keeps the bull’seye simile from feeling hackneyed. What will happen when the storm has its way with us? Gerard skillfully prolongs the suspense to the essay’s final line. I won’t spoil the surprise, but it’s heartbreaking. Gerard’s enthusiastic psychological realism recalls Jack London and Stephen Crane. At times, he follows his boyish nineteenth-century muse so far as to strain belief, as in “The Phantom Chessman,” which tells Courtesy of USGS
Philip Gerard. Down the Wild Cape Fear: A River Journey through the Heart of North Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013.