Review: An American Childhood

An American Childhood by Annie Dillard
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Wow! What a delight this memoir of growing up as a precocious, perspicacious young lady. The book is dream-like in its definite and affected retelling of moments and memories in short chapter vignettes. This includes family life with a father yearning for the raucous life of New Orleans and the tranquility of river travel and a cynical, wry mother that reminds me of the one in Once I was a Teenager: Growing up in the 50s and 60s in Australia and beyond. Annie recalls being snowed in for the Great Appalachian Storm of November 1950, discovering amateur microscopy, ominous Cold War fears, and more.

She has a charming, descriptive style. I never cared why buckeyes were named 'til I read here "Buckeyes were wealth. A ripe buckeye husk splits. It reveals the shining brown sphere inside only partially, as an eyelid only partially discloses an eye's sphere. The nut so revealed looks like the clam brown eye of a buck, apparently. It was odd to imagine the settlers who named it having seen more male deer's eyes in the forest than nuts on a lawn."

However, her real excitement and depth of feeling comes across in the lengthy two-thirds meet of the book given over as a paean to reading itself. It praises individual titles, whole subject areas, the Homewood branch of Pittsburgh's Carnegie Library: "I began reading books, reading to delirium. I began by vanishing from the known word into the passive abyss of reading, but soon found myself engaged with surprising vigor because of thing in the books, or even the things surrounding the books, roused me from my stupor." Never did an abyss sound so warm and inviting! I put up there on par with Thoreau's "Reading" chapter in Walden.

View all my reviews