Steven Lewis’ new book is The Lights Around the Shore. Lewis writes with this surprising lack of pretension, immediately enveloping the reader in the story in a manner akin to a warm embrace. Most writers, even some of the best of the best, can suffer from a certain amount of flintiness and pretension. There’s a constant sense with most writers of seeing the seams, even if said seams are linguistically beautiful.
URL: https://www.stevenlewiswriter.com/
There are so many books coming to mind recommended to me that simultaneously lived up to their reputations, yet whose reading experiences were undermined by excess verbose language, dialogue lacking a real-world fluidity, and a plot that however immersive could feel shopworn or shoehorned in. What Lewis hits out of the park on those kind of specs is the sense not only of total, spontaneous immersion, but a sense of unpredictability. There’s no sense of excess anticipation of where the story will lead. You can’t put the book down, but while you’re reading it there’s a sense of genuinely spending time with the characters, the locales, and the events as they unfold within the continuity of the narrative.
Part of the immersion is likely due to the book’s deeply personal elements for Lewis, as he indicates in the opening statement. “The first time I tried to quantify things beyond quantification, I was a typical unfocused, unkempt, unshaven, underachieving, generally unrepentant sixth year undergraduate majoring in anti-war protest and existential angst at the University of Wisconsin. A month past the famous moonshot and sometime around the event of the century, Woodstock, I was pacing the messy living room of a drafty cottage on Lake Kegonsa with our month- old colicky baby boy howling into my shoulder, back and forth, back and forth like someone afflicted with OCD, desperately trying to figure out how many years, months, days I would have to wait until the tiny screamer would be eighteen and I’d again be my free and easy hipster self, going to concerts, writing the great American novel,” he writes. “…(now) (e) verything and nothing has changed.
AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/Lights-Around-Shore-Steven-Lewis/dp/1952439140
Time seems a frivolous notion. And waiting, which I had spent a lifetime perfecting, seems absurd. This all came to me one morning a few years ago while I was staring at a blank laptop screen, waiting for an idea, in effect pacing back and forth across a rug worn paper thin by more than a half century of waiting for the right words to begin something, anything, a poem, an essay, a story … when a grumpy old character named Charlie Messina appeared: Charlie Messina, seventy-five and sick and tired of it all, dropped a squishy handful of overripe blueberries into the bowl of Special K and, glancing beyond the jar of honey, reached for the sugar. From that first sentence on, Charlie took me quite literally by the fingers and led me through a novel which would eventually be titled The Lights Around the Shore, explaining, albeit gruffly and impatiently, that every moment we have lived is still alive within each of us.”
In other words – It’s never too late to be what you could have been. That is something to be commended as a precept, and it’s even more commendable Lewis is able to implement it into the text in a manner not preachy, nor shoehorned.
Garth Thomas