Running for Your Life: ‘Wish You Were Here’

Once long ago (I’ve been keeping this twice-weekly blog for two years now) I wrote here that this Web log would touch on three R’s – running, ’riting and reading. But for a good stretch of that time I’ve actually been fixated on a fourth: racing.

That is, when I was focused on running the Boston Marathon in a sub-3:30 in order to time-qualify for New York in November. That didn’t happen, 4:03:27 did in the sweltering April(?!) heat that would Boston 2012.

Now that I’m on an extended break from race-training, I’m turning to reading. And in the case of good reads, writing about them.

I read and loved Graham Swift’s “Waterland” http://bit.ly/LPIjuH, a sprawling wonder of a thing that merits being in the category of such set piece historical/mythological works as Ann-Marie MacDonald’s “Fall on Your Knees” or Rose Tremain’s “Sacred Country” or “Shadow on the Wind” by Carlos Ruiz Zafon or “World’s End” by T.C. Boyle.

“Wish You Were Here” is no less brilliant than “Waterland.” In contrast, though, the novel taps the blood of rawboned Jack Luxton, a farmer-turned-seaside caravan operator. Jack reminds of the rural stalwarts of my youth; the friends of my father – and my father himself – sitting stone-faced during my at-home reading from my memoir, Tip of the Iceberg http://amzn.to/NmujdH, in the Main Street bookstore.

Jack, or so he thinks, has only Ellie, his wife. Whose voice sears in a chapter that – very surprisingly – delivers on the significance of the title.

Secrets and pacts and what we can never know. Jack and Ellie. I feel that what Swift did with the fens in England he has done with the tortured love of Jack and Ellie. An equal wonder.

Next: Running for Your Life: Internet Addiction