Still No Word from You: Notes in the Margin begins in the morning, in the same unassuming way we expect every day to start. The book is divided into six narrative essays, each paired with a different time of the day: morning, mid-morning, noon, 3pm, dusk, and night. As the book progresses, and the day grows longer, the reader is left with a comforting kind of exhaustion, something reminiscent of a day well spent. A moment wholly cherished. A life fully lived. Its author, Peter Orner, a Norwich firefighter and Dartmouth professor of English and Creative Writing, has a way with words that is incomparable.
The title, Still No Word from You, is derived from a quote found in the daily letters Seymour Orner would write to his wife during World War II while away in the Pacific Theater: “Another day and still no word from you.” Peter Orner, like his grandfather before him, is an avid writer.
Each chapter of his book presents a different short story, yet Orner’s familiar way of writing ensures that the reader is never lost amongst the plethora of locations, timelines, characters, and literature constantly referenced.
The first chapter describes Orner’s mother washing the dishes in the kitchen sink. Her hands are still in the water, her gaze fixed on something out in the backyard, but the young Orner knows his mother isn’t finished. On the black-and-white television in the kitchen, Nixon’s helicopter lifts off the White House lawn one last time, signaling his resignation. At this moment, Orner recognizes in his mother the same thing he’s just seen on TV. Although she would not leave Orner’s childhood home for many years, she was already gone.
Still No Word from You continues in this same intuitive and poetic manner for the next 105 chapters. If you find this number daunting, much like I did, don’t be alarmed. Some chapters contain only a single paragraph, and rarely does a chapter stretch beyond five pages. However, I can’t guarantee that you won’t take frequent breaks to jot down the title of one of the abundant literary references in the novel.
Orner’s incorporation of his expansive literary knowledge brings a profound humanity to his stories. “My eyes, so often as it happens, wander off. The grief that’s called to the surface by somebody else’s words,” he says, in reference to the emotions evoked by Tomas Tranströmer’s poem “Baltics.” Tranströmer wrote of his grandparents (“We’re walking together. She’s been dead for thirty years.”), and the poem spurs Orner’s memories of his grandmother and of their drives around Fall River, Massachusetts when he was a young adult. No matter the circumstances of his life, Orner consistently and poignantly parallels his situation to that of his current read.
Of the many appealing aspects of this book, the most notable, in my extremely biased opinion, is his mention of the Upper Valley. Though I can’t say that White River Junction will become a tourist destination anytime soon, there is a kind of giddiness at seeing a location so familiar on the page in front of you.
Orner uses the Upper Valley as the backdrop for his dreary, ever-present brooding. “Chekhov at the Dunkin’ Donuts in Grantham, New Hampshire,” Orner writes. At 7am in the midst of a pandemic, Orner sits in the drive-thru line in Grantham, roughly twenty five minutes away from our dear Hanover. He passes his free time by reading about the morning routine of Marya, a miserable village schoolteacher in Russia. The chapter, hardly three pages long, is entirely spent contemplating the “dreary struggle” of each day. The irony, I assure you, is not lost on Orner.
Later in the novel, Orner tells of a day spent in West Lebanon, a self-imposed exile following (what he alludes to as) a domestic falling-out. He sits in the Kilton Library on Main Street, the one across from the Advanced Auto Parts and a little up the road from the 4 Aces Diner, reading Bernadette Mayer’s epic poem Midwinter Day. “All the windows in Bernadette Mayer’s house are frozen shut. I’m still sitting here in West Lebanon. My own family is at home across the Connecticut River and everything I’ve squandered encloses me like a fist,” Orner writes. This relentless self-loathing is a common theme in Orner’s work; I find it at once heartbreaking and endlessly refreshing.
Rounding out the unique complexity of Still No Word from You is Orner’s employment of a dual narrative, though this might not be initially apparent. Orner has one foot in literature and one foot in the world around him. The literato in Orner serves as Still No Word from You’s narrator, deeply reflecting upon the moments in his life as they pass. The man in Orner does his duty well to experience and preserve these moments. There are times, to be certain, when the intellectual in Orner wins out over raw story-telling, and the reader is left to contemplate what really happened.
Still No Word from You is Orner’s filibuster against living life by simply going through the motions. I cannot, in good conscience, recommend this book to anyone disinterested in “living deeply and sucking out all the marrow of life,” to borrow from Thoreau. But if you find that you are indeed interested in this pursuit, by all means pick up Still No Word from You and get a truly powerful reminder of what it is to live. Every moment of life can be powerful and ought not to be wasted.
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