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<\/i>, something he had been working on for a couple of years. It was a novel about losing his father in a car crash at the age of 6 and what a formative event it was. If you haven’t read the book, all I can do is beg<\/i> you to pick it up. It is an American classic. His writing is so good it hurts. His insights into small moments, little teensy moments of revelation, epiphany … how emotions actually work … He was a psychologist of the highest order. And his prose!! I have a soft spot for Death in the Family<\/i> for many reasons (I go into it here<\/a>) – so I was VERY interested to read about this new edition. Basically, it is being touted as the “restored” edition – the TRUE reflection of James Agee’s intentions (kind of like the re-release of Ariel<\/i> recently, in the order that Sylvia Plath had said she wanted – not the chronological order imposed on it by Ted Hughes after her death) – Now I can’t speak to whether or not the new editor is onto something or just full of it – but it sounds to me like he is a scholar, a dogged investigator, and truly passionate about the work of Agee. That’s pretty damn cool. I will still keep my old dog-eared copy of the book, it is a book I treasure – I’ve had it for years, and it’s all marked up in pencil from the time I played Hannah in a production in Chicago – with particular attention paid to the Hannah sequences. I put little marks next to her internal monologues, or tiny exclamation points which show me I thought that might be important – and not just important but play<\/em>-able as an actress…. But I think I will pick up a copy of the new edition, which sounds like it has extensive changes, some restored text, some rearranging. I have my opinions about some of it (I happen to like the non-chronological set-up, and also the interspersing lyrical sections which have no plot, and an entirely different voice than the rest of the book) – but hey, they didn’t ask me my opinion and I didn’t spend years poring over James Agee’s personal notes on the manuscript trying to put it together. I’m very interested to see what the new edition is like – and I am especially interested to read some of the new<\/i> material that they have found and put back in. !!! I know each episode of the book very very well (the vigil, the visit to Grandma, the Charlie Chaplin movie, Mary laughing hysterically in the middle of her tragedy, the whiskey) – so it’ll be very cool, I think, to read more of it.<\/p>\nAnd this excerpt from the article could be true of the old version as well:<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u0080\u009cOne by one, million by million, in the prescience of dawn, every leaf in that part of the world was moved.\u00e2\u0080\u009d Why don\u00e2\u0080\u0099t our novelists write in Agee\u00e2\u0080\u0099s tender high style these days? Either something has gone out of the world, or something has gone out of them. His book reads like a prayer, an attempt to breathe life into the dead through mighty exertions of language. Everything is consecrated. Trees move in their sleep, stars tremble like lanterns, and a butterfly \u00e2\u0080\u0094 yes, a butterfly \u00e2\u0080\u0094 alights on a coffin.<\/p>\n
In the end, all that a writer has to pass on is not myth and anecdote, but scene and character, evoked in memorable prose. The beauty of \u00e2\u0080\u009cA Death in the Family\u00e2\u0080\u009d is that the child\u00e2\u0080\u0099s point of view that begins the book eventually widens until readers may feel they are seeing into the very heart of existence \u00e2\u0080\u0094 the utter strangeness of being alive in a particular family at a particular time and place. What more could James Agee leave behind?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
“readers may feel they are seeing into the very heart of existence” …<\/p>\n
That’s it, exactly.<\/p>\n