A Wild, Rank Place

Overview:

Cape Cod, that sandy, wind-swept enchantress, has captivated many writers, among them Henry David Thoreau, whose descriptions of that “wild, rank place” have fired the imaginations of not one but many generations. Among Thoreau’s literary progeny is David Gessner, but this book goes far beyond the naturalist’s focus on the transcendent beauty of the landscape. Rather, Gessner combines his deeply felt sense of place with observations of the Cape’s people and with insights about his family, himself, and his art. In a series of interconnected personal essays, he explores his response to his own recently cured cancer and to the lung cancer that is killing his father. Issues of life and death intertwine with images of a land that Gessner finds curiously healing: “Here thoughts are swamped by the smells, sounds, and sights of place. The gentle hypnotic lapping of waves. A prehistoric cormorant on a slick black rock. The delicate lacework of sea grass roots breaking down through a ledge of sand.”

Gessner’s introspection during a year spent writing in the family’s weathered cottage portrays another struggle, too. For a young writer just beginning his career, such mighty literary forebears as Thoreau can be imposing, if not paralyzing. Yet the process of sorting through and making peace with the memories of his genetic father gives Gessner the power to declare artistic independence from his literary one. Seeing “something tremendously heroic” about his father’s determination to perform mundane tasks in the face of imminent death brings Gessner to realize that “our minds have minds of their own. Reality is fabulous, yes, but we also crave something more. Symbol, perhaps. Meaning.” In the end, what Cape Cod comes to mean for Gessner is not just freedom from the past, but love and nobility in the face of death.

Book Reviews For A Wild, Rank Place

“A highly readable, disarmingly self-conscious meditation on life and nature, ancestry, and mortality…There are small surprises on every page of this touching, troubling memoir.” — The Boston Globe

“Gessner spent a year writing a book of essays in his family’s home on Cape Cod. The result is part natural history, part literary history, and part personal history. He reflects on his father’s death from cancer and his own recovery from the disease; he writes of his walks through the salt marshes, observing the grasses, flowers, birds, and trees. He fondly reviews such writers as Thoreau, Whitman, Melville, and Joseph Wood Krutch, and bemoans the existence of Dairy Queens and convenience stores. Reveling in the smells of the sea, freshly cut grass, honeysuckle, sawdust, and even dead kelp, Gessner quietly provokes us into a heightened understanding of both nature and ourselves.” — George Cohen, Booklist

“A highly readable, disarmingly self-conscious meditation on life and nature, ancestry, and mortality . . . There are small surprises on every page of this touching, troubling memoir.” — The Boston Globe

“Searingly honest, unabashedly groping, Gessner’s essays are articulations of recoveryfrom cancer, from life in land-locked Colorado, from a childhood with an alcoholic yet ‘heroic’ father, and from that father’s own recent death from cancer. Yet far from being rooted solely in his psyche, Gessner’s search for answers is also anchored in the geography and literature of the Cape, and in his faith in the healing power of the ocean water.” — Orion Magazine