Brockmeier
constructed this novel as six individual stories. No overriding plot carries
across all the stories, and none of the individual stories has much of a plot
either. But, each is tangentially related to the subsequent story through a
journal comprising love notes written daily by a husband to his wife that
passes from one story to the next.
I love the ball you curl into when you wake up in the
morning but don’t want to get out from under the covers. I love the last
question you ask me before bedtime. I love the way you alphabetize the CDs, but
arrange the books by height. I love you in your blue winter coat that looks
like upholstery fabric. I love the scent of your hair just after you’ve taken a
shower… (p. 16)
The stories
share characters, but only insofar as they are involved in the transfer of the
journal.
Also connecting
the stories is a phenomenon in which visible light is produced from the location
of the body where there is pain, injury, or disease, and in one case an
inanimate object—the journal. It just started to happen.
The Illumination: who had coined the term, which pundit or editorial
writer, no one knew, but soon enough—within hours, it seemed—that was what
people were calling it. The same thing was happening all over the world. In
hospitals and prison yards, nursing home and battered women’s shelters,
wherever the sick and injured were found, a light could be seen flowing from
their bodies. Their wounds were filled with it, brimming. (p. 138)
The Illumination is part of every story, but never the main subject. It’s noticed, it’s
discussed, it’s contemplated, and eventually accommodated as part of daily
existence: “everyone began to
accept that pain now came coupled together with light.” (p. 139) The Illumination is always there, was always
there, and will always be there because “there is no such thing as photonic
degradation, that light was effectively immortal, or at least as immortal as
the universe itself.” (p. 256)
