On subjects light and heavy, Le Guin is as erudite as ever
Old age, that strange thing: the state to which almost all of us desperately aspire, and also the one we want to know nothing about until we get there, please.
Ursula K. Le Guin is there for us now. It is not always the subject of her erudite, witty and (dread word) wise new collection of short essays, “No Time to Spare,” but it is always the context. She does often address age directly — bridling at the cliche that old age is not for sissies, she writes, “Old age is for anybody who gets there” — but even in pieces about her cat, or about answering fan mail, she makes the reader continually conscious of the ways that her age is a part of her life. That subtle coherence gives the book a special feeling, to borrow her words, in reference to Rebecca Skloot’s “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” a “steady, luminous ethical focus.”
Le Guin is 88. As she has for much of her life, she lives in Portland, Ore. She is a six-time winner of the Hugo Award, a National Book Award honoree, and more famous than nearly all of her male peers in a field, fantasy, not notable for either its inclusiveness or its feminism.
She is probably most famous for the novels and short stories of the “Earthsea” cycle. This is a work of high fantasy (that is, set in a wholly different universe than ours) about a world made up of hundreds of islands, surrounded by an unknown sea. They have a real tincture of magic in them, though for my own taste, at least, they grow rather ethereal and unsatisfying as they progress.
The author might welcome the criticism that her narratives don’t build to a satisfying, Tolkien-like climacteric. In one essay in this new book she writes about the beauty she finds in Homer’s impartiality: “It isn’t Satan vs. Angels. It isn’t Holy Warriors vs. Infidels. It isn’t hobbits vs. orcs. It’s just people vs. people.”
Many of the pieces in “No Time to Spare” are about writing or politics, and this is their dominant theme — fairness, evenness — which lets an interesting retrospective light in upon Le Guin’s fiction.
She is formidably well read, and discusses books and their construction with immense care. There are essential pieces here on the nature of fantasy and the genesis of the utopian and dystopian novels. I am in flat disagreement with a comparison she makes between Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust — but it seems doubtful that George R.R. Martin spends much time pondering those two. He has a lot of money to count, in fairness.
Mixed in with the serious moments are a lot of purely playful ones (all of these essays originated as blog posts, and have the fleet tone of that genre). There’s a meditation on the best way to eat a softboiled egg — tap it neatly, or decapitate it with a whack? — and a great many about Le Guin’s trouble-making cat, Pard. The combination of light and heavy subjects works just right.
In the last few years Le Guin has published little or no new fiction or poetry, but has put out a book of collected novellas, an updated edition of her admirable writing guide (“Steering the Craft”), and now two compendiums of shorter texts in as many years.
Is it sentimental to speculate that she is sweeping her little corner of life tidy? Odds, ends, floating thoughts on Steinbeck, curse words and cats — the larger forces within her spent, but her mind still alive with things to say? Maybe. Certainly I would love to read her rebuttal of the notion.
“Sometimes I notice a teenager in the family group,” she writes early in the book, “present in body — smiling, polite, apparently attentive — but absent. I think, I hope she has found an interstice, made herself some spare time, and is alone there, deep down there, thinking, feeling.” What a lovely moment of sympathy, of attention. Deep down there: that is where Le Guin has taken readers for decade after decade, and where, these essays show, she is capable of taking them still.