“What the Forest Remembers”
by Jennifer Egan
from the January 3 & 10, 2022 issue of The New Yorker
For our first bit of fiction of 2022 (I know, when I post this it’s still 2021, but you know what I mean), we get “What the Forest Remembers” by Jennifer Egan. It was over a decade ago, in 2010, that I first read Egan in the pages of The New Yorker. They published a few stories that would become chapters in her not-yet-Pulitzer-winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad. Now, after all this time, we get, of all things, a sequel? That’s right, in April Egan will be publishing The Candy House, which is being called “a sibling novel” to Goon Squad.
I’m excited to see what she’s up to with this one, and for once I’m glad we get an excerpt here!
First, I’m always a sucker for stories that begin this way:
Once upon a time, in a faraway land, there was a forest. It’s gone now (burned), and the four men walking in it are gone, too, which is what makes it far away. Neither it nor they exist anymore.
The next paragraph gives us a bit more placement:
But in June, 1965, the redwoods have a velvety, primeval look that brings to mind leprechauns or djinns or fairies. Three of the four men have never been in these ancient woods before, and to them the forest looks otherworldly, so removed is it from their everyday vistas of wives and children and offices. The oldest, Lou Kline, is only thirty-one, but all were born in the nineteen-thirties and raised without antibiotics, their military service completed before they went to college. Men of their generation got started on adulthood right away.
I will definitely be reading this one this week. I have time off work, which means I can stay up late and get up early to read without feeling irresponsible!
Please let me know in the comments below what you think of
Please consider purchasing through Bookshop.org
Very much looking forward to this one as well. Jennifer Egan is one writer I use quite often in writing “classes”, different form “PowerPoint” or approaches always helps with classroom debate. Her story “To Do” a go to for me.. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jul/22/jennifer-egan-short-story
This may be off-topic (I didn’t care for Egan’s story, and have nothing of interest to say about it), but this issue of The New Yorker has a delightful and moving piece by Peter Hessler about the lives of his Peace Corps students (some now teachers, some entrepreneurs) from rural China. I like it better than any fiction I’ve seen recently in that magazine.
Healer’s China articles are always excellent. I didn’t read the Egan and this can’t comment on it. Just seconding the Hessler admiration.
Yes, this is an excerpt. But because of the structure of Egan’s “novels” (I am assuming the “The Candy House” will be not only a sequel to “Goon Squad” but similar in structure) an excerpt can be a true short story. It looks as though “Candy House” may be, at least in part, a prequel to “Goon Squad”. “What the Forest Remembers” has as its main character Lou Kline, who is also the main character in many of the “Goon Squad” chapters. It shows the crucial moment when Kline set out on his life journey to become a sleazoid music promoter and producer, a man who seduces underage girls and brutalizes his girlfriend and uses and spreads drugs.
In its greater dimension, “Forest” shows the way that many other people also made a major transition in that time and place – San Francisco in the late 1960s. Lou’s degeneration from that moment of illumination becomes not just one man’s story but an emblem of the way that other promising life transitions turned ugly. A decline that Joan Didion showed us early on.
Of the four men who partake in the forest that day one achieves his sexual desire, one becomes a running guru, but Lou – who has always felt a lack in his life — has a different outcome:
“For Lou, my father, the music and the dancing provoke a riot of alarmed awareness, as if he were remembering a flame left on, a door left open, a car left running beside a cliff. With a prescience that will distinguish him to the end of his life, Lou understands that the change he’s been awaiting is upon him now. He had reached its source, can feel it in the soles of his feet.”
Very nice description. Lou turns this awareness into fame and fortune.
Just as Lou’s life betrayed the promise of that momentous experience in the forest, the broader movement that was taking place in society at that time turned ugly and commercially driven to a point of increased inequality and political despoliation. Egan uses as the concrete images of this betrayal Lou and his wife’s hopeful saplings, a hope that we know is about to be blasted, and the wisdom and majesty of the redwoods destroyed by fires that in part resulted from a refusal to attend to nature in favor of increased material accumulation.
At the same time that Egan is telling the life story of Lou and others in his cohort and of the society that they created, she is also riffing on modes of storytelling:
“How can I possibly know all this? I was only six, and stuck at home. How can I presume to describe events that occurred in my absence in a forest that is now charred and exudes an odor like seared meat? How dare I invent across chasms of age, gender, and cultural context? Trust me, I would not dare. Every thought and twinge I record arises from concrete observation, although getting hold of that information was arguably more presumptuous than inventing it would have been. Pick your poison – if imagining isn’t allowed, then we have to resort to gray grabs.”
Egan’s narrator achieves her gray grabs though a process called “memory externalization” and a technological website called Collective Consciousness:
“I’m able to use date and time, latitude and longitude, to search the anonymous memories of others who were present in those woods, on that day in 1965, without having to invent a thing.”
Well, not quite: Egan has to invent a future where this electronic methodology exists. She started on this path in the final chapter of “Goon Squad” and she is now fully invested in it as a method of storytelling. Which is fine with me. Isn’t memory externalization simply the omniscient narrator in 21st century guise?
I’m looking forward to reading the whole novel when it comes out in April.
I am quite fond of Egan’s novels and also looking forward to the book but this, to me, didn’t work so well as an excerpt because the proportion of exposition on the first page was far beyond what works in a short story but might be fine in a novel. I enjoyed the writing itself, the characters, and the evocation of this time when people thought they might find utopia and which we now realize was itself the utopia which would soon tumble down. My other caveat–this memory device seems much like similar ideas in other stories (was it Saunders or T.C. Boyle who wrote about something like this?) or from the t.v. show Black Mirror.
Ken —
I reread the opening paragraphs of “Forest”, and I don’t see it the way that you do. The first paragraph tells us that we are in fairy tale land or myth country. The second gives us a bunch of relevant facts — where, when, what. In the third paragraph we get who and some why. Fast immersion, in my view.
I like your overall summary of the story — “an evocation of this time when people thought they might find utopia and which we now realize was itself the utopia which would soon tumble down.”
As for the memory device, I’m pretty familiar with Saunders, and I don’t recall it in any of his stories. I’m not so familiar with Boyle and I don’t even know what Black MIrror is, which is fine with me. Anyway, I’m not sure it matters — Egan doesn’t use it as a main point of the story but as a tool to get at her understanding of those times and people.