"The bus-driver was whistling, perhaps in anticipation..."

Dear Lori,

One of literature’s greatest works of fiction is that it’s a solitary activity. With that in mind, I’m glad your name precedes my thoughts here—or, rather, your name is my first thought. A letter, whether physical or electronic, plays in absence, invoking someone who isn’t there, first for its writer and later its reader. I was thrilled when after hearing my interview on Unburied Books, you reached out to ask whether I would like to collaborate on a project to bring Miss MacIntosh, My Darling to the attention of more readers. I already had tremendous respect for the work you do across multiple literary fronts. All I knew of Miss MacIntosh before I started reading was a vague sense of its quality and its size, and I’ve benefited when approaching books of such scope from not going it alone.

That would have been enough reason for me, but literature’s inherently communal nature has become a particular interest over the last several months. A number of recent and ongoing projects (books, magazines, podcasts, the endless waking nightmare of social media) that have embraced coauthorship highlight literature and reality’s dialogic essence. It doesn’t surprise me that this would be the case as people, especially the creative class, are more and more physically atomized and virtual interconnection accelerates.

One of the many pleasures I’m experiencing in my initial foray into Miss MacIntosh’s highway fog is the novel’s challenge to individualism in its almost sentence-to-sentence insistence on the hazy boundaries of self and identity. Here even the self is a group project. And this is a novel initially published in 1965!

What was the organization of illusion, of memory? Who knew even his own divided heart? Who knew all hearts as his own? Among beings strange to each other, those divided by the long roaring of time, of space, those who have never met or, when they meet, have not recognized as their own the other heart and that heart's weaknesses, have turned stonily away, would there not be, in the vision of some omniscient eye, a web of spidery logic establishing the most secret relationships, deep calling to deep, illuminations of the eternal darkness, recognitions in the night world of voyager dreams, all barriers dissolving, all souls as one and united? Every heart is the other heart. Every soul is the other soul. Every face is the other face. The individual is the one illusion. (7)

I could say a lot more, and I’m grateful for just such a chance, but before handing you the baton I wanted to say that an additional surprise I’ve had is, despite being made up of page long sentences and catalogs of hallucinations, how approachable and easy to understand the novel is. Every word is poetry and a fever dream, and yet I follow along.

I’m grateful for the way this book and your taking a chance to read it with a stranger has allowed me to see part of my heart in yours, and I’m optimistic about sharing that experience many times over with the fellow travelers who decide to take this bus ride with us. Though “dreams, visions, phantoms, some from the shore of Hades” (14), I see them here in the room with me now.

With “a happiness such as I could not imagine to be real,”

Anthony

---

Dear Anthony,

I am so excited to be reading Miss MacIntosh, My Darling alongside you, and it feels significant that you begin our correspondence with the idea that reading need not be a solitary activity, a notion that has special relevance given that this enormous, exuberant novel is indeed generous in its structure, style, and articulations of human perception.

Over the past year I have been thinking deeply about why abundance in literary fiction is especially compelling to me. In his wonderful book on aesthetics, Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art, the critic and scholar Alexander Nehamas writes that when a work of art beckons, it is because we do not fully understand it, but feel the strong desire to do so. Borrowing Nehamas’ parlance, I find abundance in literature beautiful because it holds the promise that I will, over time, come to understand it better. And it is this process of understanding why Miss MacIntosh is beautiful and extraordinary that I want to express, both for myself and to share with you and other readers.

The word “abundant” derives from the Latin word “unda,” meaning wave. And in Miss MacIntosh we find waves on every page—of memories, impressions, ideas, emotions, birds, excursions, and objects: so many objects! (Twelve grand pianos (p.19); five hundred saltshakers not one of which would work, (p.305)). These waves wash over me while I read. They have an innate, slow rhythm; never still. Yet, the profusion of these things allows me to sink into the text, to luxuriate in the prose. The “many-ness” gives a thickening or layering aspect to Young’s writing, and minimal white space on the page makes me feel submerged (another aquatic term!) inside it. Young’s inventories create a lyrical depth greater than the sum of their parts.

…we should find some other task to keep the cobwebs out of our brains, to keep the birds from nesting in our hair, much though she admired the leisurely pace of the slow-flying seagulls and the stilt cranes, the kingfishers flying over the golden discs in the evening clouds, the pearl-catchers diving over distant oyster beds, the fishing birds flapping their fish-silver wings when the grey sky was like a sea filled with fish-colored clouds and silver fins of light like the wings of moths and scarcely distinguishable from the darkening waters. (p.45)

I look forward to the abundant joys of this collective journey,

Lori

---

a note to  readers:

We’re grateful you’d traverse Miss MacIntosh, My Darling with us. Because of its scope, both in size and merit, we’ve decided to forego a reading schedule. We plan to progress through  the novel from beginning to end, and every Wednesday provide an exchange about our reading and the thoughts it inspires, for as long as this project lasts, which we anticipate will extend beyond the day  we read the last word on the last page. Our letters to each other will advance through the book from front to back. Sometimes we will cover more ground, and sometimes we will slow to consider a passage, a scene, an image, an idea at length. Please share thoughts and favorite passages from your own reading with us, both in the comments here on Substack and on social media. Most of all, have fun! That’s what we plan to do anyway. Happy reading!

P.S. All page numbers that we reference refer to the print edition of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling by Marguerite Young, Dalkey Archive Essentials edition, 2024.