What’s the Job of an Author?

I’m reading a 720-page book by an author I didn’t know: Ann-Marie MacDonald. It’s one of the few books I saved from the large pile I gave away before moving, and I’m so glad I did. The book is called

The Way the Crow Flies

One of the things I love about this book is the way the author comes up with thoughts that make me think

Wow, I never thought of it that way before!

or

Wow, that’s so true!

So far, I’ve only read up to page 187 and this author has managed to do this to me several times. But this time, on page 187, I had to stop reading for some extra reflection.

It’s 1962 on an air force base in Canada, and Jack, one of the main characters has just realised that one of his neighbours, who comes from Germany, is Jewish. In fact, from his eight-year-old daughter, although he hasn’t revealed to her the meaning of the tattoo on his arm, he knows that the neighbour was in a concentration camp.

Jack finds himself replaying conversations with Henry Froelich. Einstein is a Jew. It had sounded anti-Semitic from Froelich’s lips last summer. Of course there is nothing wrong with the word “Jew” – especially if you are one – but there is something about the single syllable, it sounds less polite than “Jewish”. Perhaps the noun sounds anti-Semitic because Jack has rarely heard it pronounced by people other than anti-Semites.

It’s so true. It was true in 1962, and in 2003 when the book was first published, and it’s just as true now. But I’ve never thought about it before. It makes me think of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, but that was written a long time ago and many words have had their meanings changed since then:

I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?

Coming back to Ann-Marie MacDonald, I think this is an important job of authors: to point out truths that readers have glossed over and not considered properly before. Of course, not all novels do this, nor do they have to, but I love it when they do.

It’s taken me a long time to reach page 187. I hope I can find more time for this book and the rest goes more quickly. It’s so well-written.