I SING THE BUD Y EL 50 TRIO By Tim Miller A remarkable new novel has arrived on the scene with all the vitality of a jolt of a summer storm’s lightning. Lick Creek, by Vermont writer Brad Kessler, unfolds in the hardscrabble mining country of West Virginia in the late twenties. The novel tells the story of a fiercely independent young woman named Emily Jenkins, and what eventually happens when progress, and tragedy, comes to her family’s remote farm. . Brad Kessler has a gener- ous and keen eye for nature and how it shapes human life. In his profound, compelling first novel, he explores the complex intersections of sex- uality, chance, family, and the mysterious electricity that passes between human beings when they fall in love.’ Lick Creek is expansive, capacious even, in its deeply felt humanity and empathy. The sensibility Kessler con-I jures is intensely sensual, fateful, and wise ‘to the ways of the sparks that jump from the end s of our fingers when we desire and love. Kessler approaches the chaos of Emily’s world - replete with a mine explosion that kills her first love Gianni, her complex inner dream- scape, and the sexual vio- lence and redemption that is her lot — with an amazing sen- sitivity to the messy smells and tastes of bodies and the hopeful hearts that beat with- in. When Emily ventures away from Lick Creek and into the world, she falls under the sway of Daniels, an unscrupulous engineer who oversees the electrification of the region. His wooing of her - then intoxicating of her - almost imperceptibly trans- forms into his rape of her. The vividness of Kessler’s writing forces us to share the journey with Emily. “When she’d finished the drink she pushed the empty glass toward him and asked for more. He took it under the table and filled it again. The music was slow now, a song she faintly recognized. A man and a woman had got- brought light and thing sad about the music. It reminded her of Sunday after- noons and the Victrola at Gianni’s, and she closed her eyes a moment and seemed to ‘ feel each note in the small of her back, as if her vertebrae were being played, each bone a different ivory. A clavi- chord. The notes spiraled. up, a cadenza of keys. She felt it‘ rush up her spine to her head, and when she opened her eyes the room was spinning.” The ensuing sequence of the drunkenness and the rape is some of the most beautiful- ly written, full bodied and scary writing I have ever read. That image of the piano keys of her spine is so exact- ly right about what that kind of space really feels like - the joy and vertigo of desire and the feeling of something about to happen. Such rich metaphors of our bodies seduce the reader all through the book. Lick Creek gathers its cur- rents toward an ending that is almost like a Greek tragedy in its acknowledgment and sub- mission to the forces spinning around Emily. The arrival of Lick Creek gives us Brad Kessler, a major new American novelist of unusual soul with a storyteller’s craft that will keep you up all night reading to find out where Emily’s journey will take her. I recently had the pleas- ure to speak with this remark- able writer from his home in Southern Vermont. Q. What led you to write Lick Creek? I almost imag- ine a series of “struck by lightning” moments that got the work buzzing in you. A. The initial idea of writing a novel about — essentially - electricity, came from my grandfa- ther, who was an electri- cian. We’d be driving around the outer boroughs of Manhattan, and he’d look up and point to a transmission tower or a series of street lamps and say, “I put those up there.” So I had this overblown romantic idea about what he did. In my imagination, he was this guy who power to places. ‘ Q. Did he? A. No, not really. He wired buildings and worked for Otis Elevator, but everything else I made up. That’s the joy of fic- tion: You can make it all up. Q. But in Lick Creek you’re exploring the idea of electricity on many levels. On one hand, you’re writ- ing about the .real physical , electrical lines that spread across the country in the twenties, and on the other hand you’re using electrici- ty as a metaphor. A. Yes, the idea of elec- tricity is so rich in metaphor that I found myself almost drowning in the possibilities. On the lit- eral level, I was interested in what electricity is - this thing we can’t see but can move mountains, this thing we’re addicted to as a society and will probably destroy us in the end with our ever increasing appetite for more sources of nonrenewable power. So on that level, I was fasci- nated with how it‘ all began, not so very long ago, when the power lines began to spread over the face of the country and every little town and ham- let and house became, lit- erally, hooked on it. But of course, on the other level, there was this rich lode of metaphor about animal electricity and magnetism, and what makes two bod- ies attractive to each other, or repulse one another, positives and negatives, and the whole idea that electricity is all about transformation, and trans- forming raw material into power. Q. Though the central relationship in Lick Creek is between a man and woman, there’s an extraor- dinary kind of pan-sexuali- ty in the book. Your amaz- ing awareness of bodies, smells, tastes and desires in Lick Creek really struck me. How did you W . april 2001 OlTI‘1 - 21 manage to conjure such a sensual and specific uni- verse? - A A. Well, the kind of writ- ing I like best always involves the senses, touch, taste, and smell. As a writer you’re always trying to paint as real a world as possible,,and what makes the world real to us is our senses, the stuff we can eat, smell, and touch. _A book filled with the tactile, with the sense of taste, touch, and feel on every page is a book I'd love to "read. I think it was James Agee who wanted to put blood, sweat, and piss on the page and call it litera- ture, and that’s what you’re always trying to do as a writer. Q. What about this idea of pan-sexuality? A. I think any novelist worth his or her salt must put aside the idea of gen- der when they sit down at the desk to write. Lick Creek is told, by and large, from the point of view of a twenty-one year old‘ girl; and obviously théq estion Lick Creek A Novel by Brad Kessler ' Scribner 297 pages $24 arises as to who am I, a man, to write from her point of view. I would say" what gives me the right is that all of us have both genders inside of us and we need only tap into that place where they meet, that “pan sexuality” as"you call it, and never look back. It's- really a Wlnitmanesque idea, that we can tran- scend time and space and even our own bodies, and be all things. And that’s the place that any novelist longs to inhabit, that place where they can be a man one moment and a woman the next and feel all those yearnings of both genders. I would even argue that those novelists who can’t stomach the idea of cross- dressing in their fiction suf- fer in their work. Q. Can you think of any- one in particular? A. God, there’s plenty. But my favorite writer who fails at this is Faulkner. I love him, but he couldn't write a convincing woman, even though he tried. The almost ancient Greek feeling of fateful-. ness in the book BRAD KESSLER -' .r_ -‘v"",I ...,.