What’s the Big Idea?

Anne Michaels and a voice small enough to be heard

“Hope Rises,” Beth Kephart collage of handprinted monoprints

A big idea is a provocation, a declaration, a universal summing up. It is a bright break from the past, a coalescing thesis, statement, choice. It’s Agnes Martin and the dazzling imperfection of her painted lines, or Mark Rothko and his feathered edges, or Anne Michaels, the once-poet-now-novelist, in her Booker Prize 2024 Longlisted Held. 

Let her explain: “Every day writing this book I asked myself: in these urgent times, what voice might be small enough to be heard; what do we need now?”* And: “Again and again, in different ways, Held asks what forces bring us to a present moment. These forces, from particle physics to evolution, to revolution, to hauntings, to hope, to a gesture, to an error, to empathy, to desire… this is Held’s investigation; and the ways we choose and all the ways beyond our choosing, and all the ways love continues its work long past the span of a life.”*

The big ideas of Held are the questions it asks, the assertions it makes, and the fluidity of its science into prose, not to mention the very shape of the book, built as it is of fragments, shifts, and the cast nets of geography and time. It is a book that teaches me to turn its pages slowly—sometimes reading forward and sometimes reading back. It is a puzzle to de-puzzle in deeply uncertain times, a two a.m. companion, not every person’s kind of book, but my kind of book, especially now. Anne Michaels is a human being searching. In the dark, I quell my terror as I search with her.

So that I am grateful for Held, just as I am grateful to the brilliant reader, writer, thinker, friend Kristina Sepetys, who has whispered me toward the books I’ve most needed just when I’ve most needed them. Knowing my mind, as she does, and what it seeks. Trusting me with the big ideas, not because I will ever master them, but because they keep me tethered.

I’ll be talking about all this and more in the upcoming October 19 Taking Flight writing workshop, “Big Ideas.” You are invited to join us. 

* Quoted from the Booker Prizes interview.