About 10 years ago, I stopped reading an essay by the American author Jo Ann Beard because it was too good. It was about a man called Werner who woke to the sound of screaming one night and, after some delay, realised his apartment building was on fire. He was on the fifth floor. The way Beard described shock distorting his sense of time was so vivid I found it hard to breathe in the bookshop where I stood. I had no idea if Werner survived in real life, was disfigured or even died – it was possible Beard was entering the thoughts of a man in his last moments, or imagining them for us, and this seemed so unbearable I put the book down and walked away from one of the best writers at work today. (Werner survived; he dived head-first through the window of an apartment opposite and landed on a stranger’s bed. So phew.)
You can find Beard’s most famous essay, The Fourth State of Matter, online at the New Yorker. This memoir seems to be about Beard’s dog problem and also her divorce problem when she was working in an American university office. About halfway through, the details become so exhaustive, so saturated with a sense of imminence, that I couldn’t take it any longer and clicked away to find out what happened next. Warning: you will spoil your reading of Jo Ann Beard if you break the circumference of her prose. The essay relates facts so random and extreme it makes you query the process of reading itself. It also displays Beard’s talent for the incidental: the dying dog and the absent husband are not the main subjects here, but this small death and ordinary absence are given the proper weight of our regard.
