The Best Book You’re Not Reading

Pamela Ryder is a writer’s writer.

A quick Google blog search proves the point. Every writer-blogger has something good to say about Ryder.

Ryder’s story collection Correction of Drift also finds its place on many a young writer’s short list of recent and influential books. Lydia Peele, whose story collection is a similar tour de force, mentions Ryder’s book in a NYTimes interview and says the book “defies definition either as a story collection or a novel, but lies lyrically and refreshingly somewhere between the two.”

Correction of Drift is ostensibly “historical fiction.” Ryder retells the story of the kidnapping of Charles and Anne Marrow Lindbergh’s baby, the subsequent investigation, and trial.

Prior to reading, I did not know anything about the Lindbergh kidnapping other than that the kid got napped. There is, however, nothing pedantic in Ryder’s fictionalized interpretation of events. She is not writing a veiled history book. Instead, Ryder uses the Lindbergh kidnapping as a way of exposing this grand human comedy/tragedy.

This is, I suppose, what all writer’s seek to do: convey something of our human plight. Saying Ryder “exposes this grand human comedy/tragedy” now seems trite. So much Blah Blah Blah.

I cannot do Ryder justice. She’s good. Just good. She gets inside skulls. She disregards the maxim to “write what you know.” Instead she writes what she visualizes. Writes what she has only heard about, intuited. She takes a risk. A 189 page risk. And whether she succeeds or fails, depends on one’s definition of literary success.

Irony of ironies: I picked up John Grisham’s latest book, a collection of short stories titled Ford County. Grisham’s book will appear in every library in the country with multiple copies and a hold queue as big as it’s carbon footprint. Ryder’s book I struggled to find. She’s published by the University of Alabama Press. I finally got Correction via Inter-Library Loan. It came to me from the Austin Public Library in Texas (being a librarian has its advantages). Yet of the two story collection, Ryder’s is the more moving. Her’s is the one that attempts to grab the reader with the beauty of language.

But I’m rambling.

I’ll have more to say about Grisham’s Ford County after I’ve finished with it.