Fan letter to Lisa Moore

I've just finished reading Alligator for the second time. I liked it the first go around, in June 2007, but this second reading has deeply affected me. So it's jumped up a tier, into the ranks of my all-time favourites. But why? Why did it take more than a year of incubation and then a second innoculation before that happened?

I hate to frame it this way, because I don't like snobbery and it's unfashionable to make these kinds of divisions, but it's the only frame I have. Alligator is a book for lovers of literature.

It doesn't just reward close, careful, conscious reading, it often demands it. It's a day-long Alpine hike and if a flight of stairs winds you you'll probably not enjoy yourself.

But for those with the lung capacity . . . what a sublime experience this book is. It's immersive, full of easy metaphor and long sentences with plenty of ands and buts. It's fluid and chaotic and graceful and energetic like water coming down a cliff face. Its sensual aspect (and it is so sensual, in all deno-and-conno-tations) might be all about it that's in step with current best-seller fashions, but I don't think that's enough to recommend it to people who might subsist primarily or exclusively on Dan Brown or Stephanie Meyer or Dean Koontz.

It requires limber thinkers.

But with all this said, it's more emotional than intellectual. It does this lovely thing that all my favourite books do. It makes me have this jangly feeling in the middle of my chest, something like anxiety but more pleasant. Like a rearranging of the parts of yourself that you're normally only half-aware you possess. Like Emily Bronte's thoughts that alter you as you think them, change the colour of your mind, like wine moving through water. Except these are feelings that alter the colour of your heart as you feel them.

Most of the characters are not especially likable (relatable, yes, but not necessarily likable). The emotional response isn't pathos or sympathy for their plight, it's pure surging sorrow and terror and joy. It's the overwhelming fact of our living and our dying, what George Eliot was talking about when she said:

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

Alligator strips away some of that stupidity for a time, lets the raw nerves breathe; it leaves a person unable to speak but compelled to express something. It makes everything wonderful and terrible.

Thank you for this book, Lisa Moore. I can't wait to see what you write next.