Staggerford Book

The worlds Jon Hassler paints are ugly. Something in me recoils from the unprettiness of the scenery - the messiness of the characters' lives. Jane Austen, on the other hand, enthralls me. Her worlds are succinct, neat, tidy orderly. Even the chaos in her novels is well-framed by virtue, and never becomes too unhinged. In contrast, Hassler plays with the dark side of each mind. You never are allowed fully to escape from the fact of chaos. The situations in this book are - messy. The main character, Miles, is in love with a married woman. His student, a high school girl, is in love with him, her teacher. The moralist inside of me wants to run from this - it's ugly, unprintable - at least, I don't really want to admit these things into my fictional backdrop, where everything can be ideal, or balanced, or orderly, the way it never is in real life.

Yet I continued to read, and then I stumbled onto this paragraph:
"'So what I was thinking, Miles, was that maybe there is a similar process going on in human affairs. If you let sunshine stand for goodness in the world and you let rain stand for evil, do goodness and evil mingle like sun and rain to produce something? TO bring something to maturity, like those ferns? Does God permit sin because it's an igredient in something he's concocting and we human beings aren't aware of what it is? Is there sprouting up somewhere a beautiful fern, as it were, composed of goodness and sin?'"

I underwent a transformation in the journey of this book. I found that my taste for Jane Austen and the orderly plot had somewhat limited me from the depths of richness that realism could show me. I found in Jon Hassler that I was running from the often erratic patterns of life itself, unable to see or appreciate that the world has patterns of its own outside of my narrow conception. What he showed me in Staggerford is that there can be poetry and beauty even in a messy world.