The Illumination

The Illumination by Kevin Brockmeier sold itself to me based on this plot description: one evening, all over the world, pain begins to emit light. A flesh wound, a cold sore, a headache, cancer; all physical pain manifests itself with light which, in the language of the book jacket, glitters, fluoresces, blazes. I knew this would not be science fiction, for the rest of the plot description makes clear that the book will tell the stories of six people who all experience various kinds of pain and who all have contact with a notebook that is a collection of daily love notes left by a husband for his wife.

This book is really a loosely-knit short story cycle, the kinds of stories you'd find in the New Yorker--that's not mean to be a compliment or an insult, just a description. Ultimately, it struck me that both the "Illumination" and the notebook were gimmicks in order to have a framework for otherwise unconnected narratives. Most of the individual stories are interesting, but I wound up being disappointed that the gimmicks didn't amount to much. The plot point of pain emitting light is not crucial to any of the stories; it adds some nice grace notes here and there, but very little is done with it. Is it science or God or something else entirely? One story, about a missionary, seems about to touch on the spiritual nature of the Illumination, but it goes nowhere.

The notebook with its single sentence love notes ("I love how quietly you speak when you're catching a cold"; "I love how you fumble for words when you're angry"; "I love the joke you told an Eli and Abby's wedding reception") winds up being more important to the characters. Each of the six characters takes possession of the book, reads from it, and wonders about its origin; one of the stories is about the man who wrote the notes, which his wife, now deceased, kept in the notebook. One story is about a writer, suffering from terrible mouth pains (ulcers, cancre sores, etc.) who draws inspiration from the notebook for a story she writes.

Even though I felt tricked and let down by the book, I thought most of the stories were worth reading. One is a little creepy: a photojournalist takes a picture of a high school girl cutting herself in public (perhaps to see the Illumination, though her reasons are not clear), winds up taking her in when her parents throw her out, and by the end of the story has joined her in her flesh-cutting activities. The story about the writer is the most interesting one, and it has the added bonus of a story-within-the-story that she writes about communicating with the dead.

The overwhelming feeling I got from the book was sadness. Perhaps because recently I've had to deal in relatively minor ways with the aches and pains of aging, I was touched by the descriptions of physical suffering here, but each character is also going through incredible emotional pain as well. Sometimes, as in the story the husband with the notebook, the tone almost becomes too much to bear. At other times, as with the missionary, it's difficult to pin down what the suffering is about. But rarely have I had a book leave me in such strange, ambiguous moods each time I put it down. Recommended for readers of, well, The New Yorker.