Book Review: Amy Falls Down by Jincy Willett

" ... she was, just for an instant, ... impressed by her own arcane powers ... "

Reading Jincy Willett's wincingly comic novel, Amy Falls Down, I couldn't help but think of that Springsteen classic, "Glory Days."  The gist of the song - and this book, in a way - is how strange we are to yearn for a past which we've painted gold, rather than engage with the present day.

Aren't we all, in the flush of some youthful success, impressed, just for an instant, by our own arcane powers?

Amy, the novel's main character, enjoyed a brief and minor celebrity - extremely brief and extremely minor - as a young writer, but has since slipped into a torpor where the closest she comes to writing is slowly filling a notebook with potential short story titles from snippets of phrases she catches in her dull days.  She fears failure, and so she dare not risk trying - not beyond titles, anyway, titles which stare vacuously at us atop empty pages.

Perhaps it's just me, but I suspect it's a facet of the human condition to savor a glorious moment from our early days, once to be impressed by our own arcane powers, and thereafter to live in fear that we will never again achieve such heights, molehills though they might have been.

Amy, however, falls down.  And bumps her head.  On a birdbath.

From this accident, she rediscovers writing and is rediscovered as a writer - she is born again, albeit accidentally.  She finds her voice, sings again, taking those infertile lists of story titles and opening them like umbrellas full of rain, pouring out words and ideas.

Can success then be a simple accident, a mishap, a misunderstanding?  We'd like to claim our brilliance and industriousness brought us to greatness (such as our greatness is), but secretly we know that we benefited from forces outside our control and design.  Maybe we should ban the concept of greatness from our vocabularies and philosophies, and just allow people to do what they do without being measured against some ridiculous list of eminent ones: Einstein, Picasso, et al.

What damage do we inflict upon our children by telling them "You can be the greatest, you can be the best," when we know that 99.99% of them will hover in the range of average accomplishments.

I read the obituaries every day, and even the most accomplished of our locally deceased will vanish to living memory once everyone who knew them passes on.  Yet we yearn for greatness as the path to immortality.  How silly.

No wonder this is a comic novel, for this is a comedic life.