Light While There Is Light - by Keith Waldrop (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A moving poetic memoir about a family on the fringes of religion and society, this unforgettable story about a mother's destructive involvement with Christian fundamentalism pulls the curtain back on the darker side of American religious experience.

Keith Waldrop's account of his mid-twentieth-century Midwestern upbringing opens a window on a uniquely American landscape of desolation and desire. Waldrop's mother, central to the book, was a devout Christian, consumed with the question of just what a Christian was. Divorced from his father--a railway man, a Mason, coming and going with the Santa Fe railroad, then gone--she moves from place to place and from sect to sect, suffering migraines and speaking in tongues, teaching piano, and sinking ever deeper into apocalyptic reveries about tribulations lying in store and the advent of Christ's return.

Then there are Waldrop's siblings: his sister on the hunt for a husband, and his loud, lounging, scapegrace older brothers in search of the next dollar and a good time, cooking up scams and leaving a mess behind. As for Waldrop, the narrator of what he describes as a fictional memoir, he looks back at those days with a peculiar detachment of his own, compassionate, quietly humorous at times, in light of which the simple facts assume a stark, near hallucinatory clarity, while scenes of life spool by like a home movie to no sound. "Neither the joys of heaven nor hell's worst prospects," Waldrop writes, "provide as forceful a motive as the mere emptiness of the world."

In Light While There Is Light, Waldrop writes in a tradition that extends back to Hawthorne, Poe, and Dreiser, as he reveals the fear, madness, and destruction lurking behind the makeshift and make-believe of American life.

Review Quotes

"Beautiful, funny, wise, sad . . . universally admired by that small percentage of the human race that has read it, Light While There is Light is an instant eccentric classic." --Jaimy Gordon

"Waldrop's remarkable patience with the unforgettable cast of characters in his 'fictional memoir' derives, I think, from how he understands their suffering and shenanigans and occasional cruelty as issuing from that fear of emptiness--a fear he takes seriously, shares. . . . Waldrop refuses to psychologize or allegorize, to excuse, pity, or condescend . . . it's his restraint that allows Waldrop to depict so powerfully the world 'as it was and as it is.'" --Ben Lerner, from his introduction

"Waldrop's Light While There Is Light An American History treats his family's errant religiosity, their constant seeking and sputtering, with the care of one unwrapping a delicate parcel. It's astonishing, given the intellectual poverty he was raised in, that Waldrop, who died in 2023, became an accomplished poet and a professor of English at Brown . . . Light While There Is Light describes that emptiness and all that follows from it unlike anything I've ever read. Where the book should crumble into nihilism, it builds instead to a plainspoken mercy."
--Dan Piepenbring, Harper's

"Light While There Is Light is quiet and understated, its tone even-keeled, unhurried and never judgmental. The lasting moments are the ones that seem at first the least significant." --Magnus Rena, Times Literary Supplement

"Waldrop, not as well known as he should be, is among the most important writers, translators and publishers of avant-garde literature in our time." --Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Keith Waldrop (1932-2023) was born in Emporia, Kansas. He published his first book of poetry, A Windmill Near Cavalry, in 1968, and won the National Book Award for Poetry for his 2009 collection Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy. In 1961, Waldrop and his wife, Rosmarie Waldrop, founded Burning Deck, an influential small press that specialized in the publication of experimental poetry and prose. He was a professor of English at Brown University for 43 years.

Ben Lerner is the author of nine books of poetry and prose as well as several collaborations with visual artists. He is the editor of Keeping / the window open: Interviews, Statements, Alarms, Excursions, a collection exploring the lives and work of Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop.