Silkie by David Rothgery

Stephen Mollgaard has a somewhat normal life. As a college English professor he maintains his house, his divorce, his seizure medication, his bike. He lives his life inside the safety of the box, inside the safety of the lines, but also inside of a filing cabinet containing newspaper clippings, poetry, and past student files. In this filing cabinet Stephen recognizes the irregularities, the unfairness, the absurdity, the horror, and the other worldliness of…the world. In a way that Stephen cannot pinpoint, the moments contained in his filing cabinet connect him to something larger, something more meaningful than his drive to work, his lunchtime sandwich, and his time spent watching the news. When Silkie Sanders appears out of the rain, Stephen’s life is opened to new possibilities, new paths, and, perhaps, a re-invigoration– a reminder of what it means to be alive and human. Stephen comes to realize that there are two worlds. The first world is the one that we expect, the one that we see every day, the one that we grow up and are told to belong to. The second world is hidden a little farther under, a little deeper down. This second world can be ugly, awful, and hard, but it could also be the purpose for living, it could be where all beauty really comes from. Silkie, of this second world, will change Stephen’s life.

David Rothgery’s novel, Silkie, is one of the best pieces of contemporary writing that we have read in the past few years. From his superb writing, it is obvious that Rothgery is very well read and this narrative he has constructed is, quite simply, utterly captivating. Silkie does not shy away from the ugliness, cruelness, or confusion that our modern world breeds. Instead it seeks to remind us that all it takes is one thing, no matter how small, to completely transform us.

Red City Review [5 stars out of 5]

Silkie by David Rothgery

The story kept me going throughout. Is it madness or grief or loneliness? Such compassion spread throughout will surely trigger all three. The interweaving of news clippings, student and narrator journal vignettes, seems to me remarkably touching, effective, ingenious. I admire the writer’s ability to surprise, to come swiftly to an insight. I enjoy and am moved by the density of the prose, the way a paragraph gets pumped up –“have those people in your life that you say the real things to when you have to say them. Even when you’re not actually speaking aloud, you’re still saying it to them in your mind. They’re the ones you picture doing that with. Things inside your head you have to say. In life. The little sad things. The big ontological ones. Questions with answers that don’t come. So you throw them out there. To the one who might listen . . . “ So suggestive of a tapestry of suffering. Feels like all of life is being gathered in. I admired the rhythms and fluency and natural speech in the dialogue.

I was especially touched by the overall drive of the narration –the coming to grips with loneliness and whatever else might attack “normalcy.” The incipient madness –the narrator teetering throughout –offers the sense that a person’s secret inner pain can be acknowledged and grappled with even if lost to.

I am glad this novel has seen the light of day.
Ted

I am on my second reading of this book. I really love it and wanted to read it again. The tone of the narration makes me think of “The Stranger” and other novels by the French writer Albert Camus; the same well-kept and accessible writing style; the introspective voice of the first person narrator with similar existentialist concerns about life. Nevertheless, Rothgery’s book is very close to our modern times and society and very easy to relate to. It is about how a lonely English professor at a community college, who suffers from epilepsy, is bowled over by the sudden presence of Silkie, a mysterious and homeless young student who is the single mother of a six-year-old girl. While the professor is stuck in World One, as he calls the mundane life of responsibilities and comfort, Silkie lives alongside those of World Two, the world of darkness, cruelty and the unexplainable.
At the beginning I wanted to have more of the presence of Silkie’s character. Just as Professor Mollgaard is kind of obsessed with his student Silkie, I was getting the same way; very curious about her and wanted to know more. But because of the nature of the character, Silkie comes and goes, until little by little she takes over the whole story. Even when she is not present, everything is about Silkie. She is very memorable, one of my favorites characters of all time.
When I was progressing through the book, I started to feel sad, in part because I didn’t want it to finish, and at the end I must confess that I cried because the ending is amazing.
I was thinking that this story would be an excellent movie. The character of Silkie is really interesting, mysterious and real.
I also liked a lot the innovative structure of the novel, which is organized around a file cabinet and citations from other authors, novels and journals.

P.S. By the way, the picture on the cover is perfect to describe Silkie. I like it a lot.
Carmen May 26, 2014