A Literary Luncheon

My friend Josie and I drove out to Shelton Laurel yesterday to have lunch with longtime friends, Drew and Louise Langsner. Louise's sister and niece were visiting and I was looking forward to seeing them again. Both are authors and I've blogged here about them before this.

I met  Ellen Graf and Eula Biss back in 1978 when John and I were attending a woodcarving class at Country Workshops, run by Drew and Louise.

Back in '78, Justin was about six months old and he attended the class in a Snugli on my back. Ellen was there too and Eula (not pictured below, alas) who was a little older than Justin, spent much of her time in a pack basket on Ellen's back.

Who knew that thirty some years later Eula would have an adorable year-old boy -- Juneau by name?

 Who knew that Ellen would have three more children and eventually a second marriage to a man she'd only just met -- in his native China? 

Who knew that she'd go on to write about this marriage in the critically acclaimed The Natural Laws of Good Luck?

  Who knew that the baby in the pack basket would become an noted essayist? Her first book -- The Balloonists

and her second,  Notes from No Man's Land (which I blogged about last year,) have won praise from some pretty high-faluting literary types . 

But here's the really neat thing, the REALLY AMAZINGLY COOL thing -- this book Notes just won the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award!!!

This is a major, major award and it feels kinda neat to say I knew Eula when.

We had an amazing lunch of winter squash soup, garnished with hot Indian pickles, and a savory Chinese dish that Ellen prepared, made of pork, leeks, celery, garlic, and lots of ginger, which we ate rolled up in lettuce leaves. (And I made the panna cotta I was going on about a while back.)

 What better way to spend a very beautiful day?

The Natural Laws of Good Luck

This is an amazing book.

Ellen is a poet and artist, a forty-six year old divorced woman who wishes she had someone to share the joys and beauties of her rural life -- someone with whom to watch the circling hawk, the setting sun. And if he could fix some of the broken things around her ramshackle farmhouse -- well that would be nice too.

She imagined a man with "a sweet and burly personality, and he came over after work in his tight, dirty blue jeans. He was wily and strong and always smiling. He would swing me up over his head, I would bubble with laughter, and then we would fix stuff."

This is the story of the man she got -- the man who, at the suggestion of a friend, Ellen went to China to meet and, after two weeks, marry. Zhong-hua is a stoic survivor of China's Cultural Revolution. When they met, he spoke almost no English and in the beginning he broke far more things than he fixed, but he was the man with whom she fell in love and with whom she began slowly to piece together a life.

Romantic, funny, sad, baffling, practical, and maddeningly impractical by turns -- the story of Ellen and Zhong-hua is, in the end, a love story and a lesson in acceptance -- in surrendering to the moment. I loved the poetic descriptions, the wry humor, the philosophical insights, and the down-the-rabbit-hole quality of the entire adventure that is the marriage of these two amazing people.

Full disclosure: I know Ellen slightly -- she's the sister of a good friend -- and I read bits of this book while it was being written. It's possible my view of the book isn't totally objective. But I really am enthusiastic about it -- read it in less than 24 hours. If I hadn't liked it, I just would have kept quiet. I do, however, love this book and think that many of you will too.