Nancy Willard’s Things Invisible to See

Nancy Willard

            I am the kind of reader who underlines.  I underline fine sentences, and  paragraphs that nudge my thoughts in new directions.  I am choosey about what I underline.  Usually I underline only one or two sentences in a book, but with Nancy Willard’s Things Invisible to See I had to give up underlining altogether.  There are so many sentences to savor in the novel that I would have had to underline eighty percent of every page. 

            This is not to say that the novel isn’t fast-paced.  It is, and the reader has such a vested interest in the characters and the predicament they’re in that he races to the end.  But I’m in my fifth reading now, and I linger over the deft and evocative passages.  One of my favorites is Willard’s description of a baseball glove. The “old Rawlings (was) made for a giant sloth; Ben could fit his whole face in the palm.  He loved the smell of leather and sweat and that other smell he could not name which made him feel sad and powerful at the same time, the smell of games played and won by his father long before he was born….”  Another favorite is Willard’s depiction of a house settled into mysterious night.  “The living room was dark, yet everything Clare saw wore a skin of light….  In the dining room, behind the glass doors of the three china cabinets, the rims of plates and cups and saucers shone like planets.  Everything was shining in its own radiance, humming in its own dance.”

            This is a writer who cherishes the things of this world, and who sees them as animate participants in its movements.  She reminds me a little of Jean Baptiste Camille Corot who hid magical beings in the background of his luminous landscapes.  Like Corot, Willard blends magic and the subtle beauty of every-day things within the tapestry of her novels.

            Though her story falls loosely into the category of magical realism, Willard has little in common with other heavy-handed practitioners of this genre such as Allende and Marquez.  Instead, she has a lyrical, light touch, reminding the reader, always, that there is more to this world than that which meets the senses.

            The novel begins just before World War Two during one of those endless summers that seem to promise eternity.  It ends with a high-stakes baseball game.  On one side are the mothers and sweethearts of the enlisted men, playing for the soldiers’ lives.  On the other side is Death, with his star-studded team of ghostly players — Lou Gehrig, Joe McGinnty, Christy Mathewson, Eddie Plank, Rube Waddell, Hughie Jennings and Moses Fleetwood Walker.  It would seem that the home team doesn’t have a chance, unless, maybe, they have some secret power that Death cannot reach….

            How Nancy Willard gets from the beginning pages of the novel to this charged denouement is a journey of sheer delight, involving a vacuum cleaner that sulks in the closet, a root doctor named Cold Friday, sisters who can hear snow falling and smell scents before they happen, an ancestress who can slip into the skin of others, a coin with a winged Mercury on one side and a skull on the other and, of course, baseball.  This is one of the best novels I’ve read (or reread) in twenty years.  I’d highly recommend it.