Slip-sliding Away ... and Back with Heather Shaw

Last March, Heather Shaw became S&H’s book review editor. She works in Traverse City, Michigan. I work in New York City. So we didn’t really know each other when we converged for the Book Expo in Los Angeles this year. Big conventions are exhausting, and at some point we ended up slumped side-by-side on metal folding chairs blithering about this and that and finally sliding into conversation about what we did when we weren’t doing magazine stuff. It turns out we both write fiction, and we decided to swap novels.

I just finished reading Heather’s book, SmallFish Clover, and I suspect I now know her the way you might know somebody with whom you’ve shared a trance dream. The book is the haunting story of a boy from Chicago who loses his parents in South America and falls down a rabbit hole filled with street urchins, pirates, and terrorists. But of all the 368 pages of this epic dream (imagine a Peruvian Federico Fellini movie), I am still most haunted by the scene at the very beginning when Smallfish (you’ll have to read the book to understand how he acquires that name) loses his parents. And the reason I’m haunted is that there’s an often-denied truth to the scene. Smallfish chooses to lose his parents. It happens in a seemingly haphazard moment — but it is a moment of choice that, I believe, we all face in myriad ways all the time. And in some way it’s the next choice — whether we attribute the loss to accident or choice — that determines whether we expand or spend our precious lives as victims.

Smallfish is an unhappy, surly kid with distant parents. He is following his father through a marketplace, and, annoyed that he’s being ignored, he decides to teach his father a lesson, maybe give him a scare. And then — bing — he loses his father for real. And for the rest of the book, with choice after choice, he falls deeper and deeper into lostness. And lostness isn’t so bad. As a lost boy, he can make incomprehensible decisions because he’s not responsible.

When I was 25, my best friend, Roxy, was going through some hard times. In high school she’d been a cheerleader. She was popular, smart, and expected perfection of herself. So it had been devastating when she couldn’t make it through freshman year at an Ivy League college. When she dropped out, she began a descent that landed her in a mental institution. When we were 25, we talked about it. She explained, “There was a moment when I just let go.” She let go of sanity, let go of responsibility. “What was amazing,” she said, “was how easy it was to slip over the line.”

By the end of Smallfish Clover, time fractures. Present, past, future, and all the veils of reality in between take turns singing overlapping solos. Linear events and reality are no more. And just at the moment — the kind of moment when my friend Roxy decided to die about a year after our talk — just at that moment of one last chance at choice, Smallfish take responsibility.

The book is an epic, at times confusing, but if read with your “dream mind,” it may spark something — some place of honesty — that you’ve never dared to admit.

(For more on dream mind, sign up for Robert Moss’s S&H dream e-course.)