The Body Electric, Brent Terry
Note: Brent Terry and I overlapped at the Bennington Writing Seminars. We’re pals, enthusiasts of (different) outdoor sports, and we’ve known each other for nearly twenty years. He once dedicated a poem to me, along with writer and mutual mentor, Doug Bauer. So read this review with those considerations in mind! I’ll note, however, that if I didn’t like the book, I simply wouldn’t review it—my opinions here are the real McCoy.
I’ve developed something of a hate-hate relationship with runners in this time of COVID-19. In my crowded Chicago ’hood, compromised by a history of thoracic surgery and radiation to the chest, I venture to the park (AKA my pooch’s public lav...) several times daily, where I’m assaulted by a horde of maskless, mostly new runners, huffing and puffing and broadcasting virus-laden spittle for all to take in, seemingly determined to make the novel coronavirus a gift we can all enjoy. I might have accosted some of those runners. I might have been loud. And possibly profane.
So you wouldn’t think I’d much enjoy Brent Terry’s The Body Electric right at the mo’, it being a work in which running forms the glue that binds its characters to the world and each other, the armature on which their tragedies and triumphs hang. But you’d be wrong, there. Finn and Sophie and many among their cohort are not your hyperventilating corona-gaspers—they are the elite, the fittest of the fit, denizens of cardiovascular territories most of us will never visit. They are the one-percent of the one-percent of the one-percent, and Terry—himself a lifelong, competitive runner—lifts his readers high enough to afford a peek, however brief, at their particular terrain.
Terry has managed something that, to a reader of my bent, seems near miraculous. His, it appears, is a dizzyingly high anthropology and his cast is composed of improbably good human animals. Even Gizmo, the novel’s sole nod to human darkness is, in his truest self, a fast and dependable friend. The magic here lies in the way the reader’s heart cleaves to these characters. One knows that, were one actually to meet such beings, one would necessarily love them. And so one fears for them, dreads the injuries that life will certainly deal them.
And deal them, it does. Poet Finn’s and painter Sophie’s—runners have day jobs!—is a romance so ideal, so urgent, as to challenge (albeit gently!) the bounds of credulity. Yet that relationship is rendered with tenderness and empathy, never with crass sentimentality. This is no romance novel, and the reader believes. When one of the lovers is taken by lightening strike while training in the Colorado mountains, the survivor is left to struggle against the loss of the irreplaceable and to struggle as well against an affliction—the Glimpse—that seems in equal parts physical and metaphysical, an affliction that’s both isolating and related inextricably to that terrible, defining event.
Throughout, Terry channels the elite athlete’s spirit through the pen of a poet. Consider —
“...it hurts a little, though, doesn’t it, sport? Pushing every system nearly to failure: the rhythm section of the heart and lungs, concerto of viscera in your flashing legs this close to devolving into a cacophony of clashing muscles, tendons, and ligaments that will leave you collapsed and twitching on the dead grass like an exploded calliope. But you’ve got this, don’t you, Kemosabe? The din between your ears is old hat by now, the burning in your legs and chest almost like some shitty old song on the radio, one you used to hate with a fiery passion but is now merely background noise, elevator music serenading you in the calm, moving bubble you have created for yourself. Sure it hurts, the aging rubber bands in your calves and quads and hamstrings propelling you over the frozen ground at a little under thirteen miles per hour, your lungs wrenching every last molecule of oxygen from the freezing air, heart firing that sweet oh-two like a drug through veins and arteries and capillaries and out to the desperately elongating and contracting muscles. The truth though, is that you have been through this rigamarole more times than you can count. You know the drill, sport, you know the discomfort is mostly a hollow warning, that sooner or later the voice telling you to slow down will just shut the hell up. It’s not that the pain the voice keeps yammering on about isn’t real. It’s just that you don’t freakin’ care.”
If you love exquisite writing and itch, however hypothetically, for the feeling of wind across sweaty limbs, if you believe that human bonds stronger than bone and sinew are real, close this window and order yourself a copy of The Body Electric. I mean, do it right this minute.
(Get it, by the way, through bookshop.org—keep a few bucks out of Jeff Bezos’ pocket and benefit local bookstores in this time of hardship. They need you and, you know, you need them.)
