Light While There Is Light - by Keith Waldrop (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A moving, poetic memoir about a family on the fringes of religion and society, this unforgettable story about a mother's destructive search daliance with Christian fundamentalism pulls the curtain back on the darker side of American religious experience.

This brilliant fictional memoir of an American family begins with ghosts: the moans of the author's mother. And indeed, Waldrop's ghostly portrait of his mother and other family members is, in part, a kind of American haunting, a haunting of the mind, of dreams, of aspirations, and, most of all, of the spirit.

Born into a deeply religious family, the author and his siblings are taken by their mother across the Midwest and South as she searches for the "right" religious sect and educates them in various forms of fundamentalism, a trip that ends with the mother speaking in tongues and eventually in her total isolation.

It is not only his mother, however, but the author's brothers who are utterly transformed by her spiritual thirst. Unable to cope properly with a world of little moral values, the brothers themselves become involved in shady business operations and sham religious institutions.

In Light While There Is Light, Waldrop follows a tradition that stretches back to Hawthorne, Poe, Faulkner, and O'Connor as he illuminates, in plain, poetic prose, the fear, madness, and destruction lurking beneath the polished surfaces of the American experience.

Review Quotes

"Waldrop's remarkable patience with the unforgettable cast of characters in his 'fictional memoir' derives, I think, from how he understands their suffering and shenanigans and occasional cruelty as issuing from that fear of emptiness--a fear he takes seriously, shares... Waldrop refuses to psychologize or allegorize, to excuse, pity, or condescend...it's his restraint that allows Waldrop to depict so powerfully the world 'as it was and as it is.'" -- Ben Lerner, The New Yorker


"Waldrop, not as well known as he should be, is among the most important writers, translators and publishers of avant-garde literature in our time." -- Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Keith Waldrop (1932-2023) was born in Emporia, Kansas. He published his first book of poetry, A Windmill Near Cavalry, in 1968, and won the National Book Award for Poetry for his 2009 collection Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy. In 1961, Waldrop and his wife, Rosmarie Waldrop, founded Burning Deck, an influential small press that specialized in the publication of experimental poetry and prose. He was a professor of English at Brown University for 43 years.

Ben Lerner is the author of three novels and several collections of poetry, most recently The Lights. He has received fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, among other honors, and is a Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College.