Avoiding the easy epiphany

"In fiction classes," writes Darin Strauss in Half A Life, "you find that epiphany has a pretty high rate of occurrence. It's a story, it's tidy. At the end, the hero finds himself standing under just the right tree, reaches up without quite meaning to, and plucks down just the right fruit."

And this, I tell myself, is a flaw I find in my own writing: the temptation to reach for the easy epiphany. Strauss explains why he forced himself to resist this temptation:

But when you tell your own story honestly, that epiphany thing is rare: there is no walk, there is no fated grab. You try every fruit, or forget there even are trees, and wander from forest to forest, losing sight of the destination. The only changes are emergencies or blessings: when you wake up, notice the surroundings, then fall back, and wander more. And if you're lucky you end up walking again through a life where you're never called on to do too much noticing.

Strauss is called on to do a great deal of noticing in Half A Life, a memoir of the author's attempt to come to terms with his youthful involvement in a car accident that killed a girl--but even that sounds like a thousand epiphany-filled stories, while Strauss's story resists and interrogates cliches of the suffering survivor. Fresh metaphors cast new light on experience, such as when the young Strauss returns to his high school for the first time after the accident and becomes the chief topic of conversation in the cafeteria: "I felt like a paper cutout, poised there, being snipped into conversations at every table." Memory plays tricks; major events resolve into a muted thud or a smear on a windshield while minor details accrete more meaning as time goes on, none so much as a simple glass of iced tea. Strauss's keen eye for detail is evident when he describes the random assemblage of people lining the halls of the courthouse:

Teenage housewives and their husband-tyrants; a napper hogging the whole bench outside a courtroom; pre-divorce couples irreconciling their differences publicly; facial bruises; some lawyer yelling drill-sergeantly loud commands at his client; a professional witness checking something in his briefcase, preparing to testify for show and profit; teary faces, tattooed faces; a weeping thug and his parents against a wall; crying millionaires; one defendant poking her court-appointed attorney in the lapel....And I was here, too, however I looked to these people, holding my plastic Coca-Cola bottle--a kind of affiliation with the bright and normal world--a few inches ahead of my body, like a lantern. All these people: all of our lives were in doubt.

Doubt is the dominant emotion in the book, doubt and fear seasoned with occasional flourishes of bravado. Epiphanies are few and fragile, as they tend to be in messy life. The adolescent freshly questioning his response to tragedy is simply not equipped for epiphany:

I didn't understand that everyone's tepid emotions were reasonable. The panicky little drum that kept me going required that this event, this death, be epochal. Of course, it was that: this was an incomprehensibly sad occurrence for our school, our town. But I didn't yet know that there are some truths--that even young people die occasionally; that there's only so much gnashing of teeth and weeping over another person's tragedy--there are some truths that only come to us softened by beautiful strategems of self-deception. Nobody wants to be reminded. Nobody wants to hear the sad song again.

In Half A Life, Darin Strauss sings the sad song again in order to lay bare his own self-deception. It's a brief but pithy book, beautifully written and leading to an ending that satisfies without being neat or tidy. It's unreasonable, after all, to expect half a life to conclude neatly when the other half is still out there running riot through the orchard and flinging rotten fruit in your face.