July 2000

Katie Schneider's All We Know of Love

Every now and then, if we as readers are lucky, we come upon a book that reaches into us and touches something. Perhaps it is our heart, our soul, memories of who we once were and who we might long to be. We read with the speed and concentration of word junkies-- we must get the fix of the next page, the next chapter, the next magical story laid out by another mind we feel somehow we have connected with. Katie Schneider's new novel All We Know of Love is such a gift. The story sounds simple if I summarize it, à la book review-- a young woman artist struggles to come to terms with her life, her art, and her grandfather's death to cancer. But what does not get conveyed by the mere plot summary is the magic that the book manages to express.

The novel takes us from Joanna Sheperd's home in Washington state, to Florence, Italy, to New York's art world. We grieve with her as she loses her grandfather-- and rejoice when she finds him again through art, the fence line on their old farm, and the coffee mugs he leaves behind, and in an unexpected gift from a family friend. Schneider's writing seems straightforward, most of the time, (occasionally it surprises us by relating, encyclopdia-like, the story of the Virgin Mary at Fatima, or a Degas painting) but is packed with a lyrical music that makes us, as readers, think about our own stories, our own struggles to come to terms with life and pray for the music behind our life-tales. Schneider's story makes me want to write-- which is, for me, one of the highest compliments I can pay another writer.

One of the things I hate most about reading & writing book reviews is giving away too much of the story. The point of a review should be to tell others about a miracle of fiction that touches the part of us inside that makes us human. As a reviewer, I can tell you this is Schneider's first novel, that she and her husband divide their time between Providence, Rhode Island, and Portland, Oregon. I can mention that other reviewers have not been as touched as I was with the novel, calling it a moving but "awkward coming of age novel." Really, these things mean nothing outside of your own judgement and taste--but I will say that for me, there was no touch of "awkward" anywhere. I, the critic, can put the author into a place where the novel is containable, labeled, and dissected. But for this novel, this kind of description is a sort of blasphemy. It may not be cool and detached enough for the typical book review, but this is one of those novels that you will cherish, and buy for your close friends. If you love to read a story that can reshape your soul, this one is for you.

A review should make you as reader of the review want to go out and buy the novel for yourself, live the life that the author paints, as surely on the white paper canvas as Joanna Sheperd paints images of female Saints. So I struggle to do, on paper, what I would do in person-- hand you the book and say get yourself a cup of hot tea, maybe some shortbread cookies, curl up in your favorite reading spot and "plan on a late night."