I finished “Light While There is Light: an American History” by Keith Waldrop today. It is the RFB selection for September. It was my turn to choose. I am not sure what to think. I finished it mainly because it was my pick. It took longer than it should have being only 200 pages, but it certainly did not call to me to finish. Although one of our group said he read it in two days, and couldn’t put it down. Waldrop is a contemporary poet, winner of the National Book Award for Poetry, connected to the LANGUAGE poets. I have read more than a little of his poetry. So when I ran across this book, published by The New York Review of Books I thought it would be an easy pick. But I am not sure what to think. It reminds me of Educated (which I loved for its naive sense of self and modesty), and “Hillbilly Elegy” which I despised for its self serving propaganda. Waldrop’s book, like these two, is about growing up in a poor and religious fundamentalist family in modern America, and the difficulties of shaking off those aspects of American life in order to live your own life. While I found interesting ideas, and sentences throughout the entire book—“But I did not know, all the terms of my knowing in process of becoming meaningless.” and then when talking about speaking in tongues at church and revivals—“the only voices I ever found in me now were parodies” The part of the book I enjoyed the most were the last 50 or so pages when he talks about his family’s fascination with the Ouija board, and other aspects of spirituality each of the family members pursue as they moved into adulthood. Over all I think, I should have read the whole book as fast as I read the last 50 pages. It might have cohered better that way.
(September 6, 2026)
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