Finished: A Death in the Family (Agee). Very intense, sad book, but so so good. The untimely death of a young husband and father leaves a family reeling, and every single thought and emotion is put down in words. Much of the story is told from the 6 year old son's perspective...and to just read how his little mind works through things, and how he feels about his father and his mother is so moving. Every character in the book is like that...the reader is always seeing exactly what's going on in their minds. The time frame is only a few days long, yet it takes over 300 pages to describe from the day before the accident to the day of the funeral. Here I was wondering how Agee could have such vivid knowledge of what the son was feeling, and I went and read his bio on Wikipedia. He lost his own father to an automobile accident when he was 6, so he knows. These are his vivid memories. Then, Agee himself died at the age of 45 after completing the book, but before it was published. When it was published, he won the Pulitzer Prize for it posthumously.

Agee's description of the sounds that locusts make on a summer night, when it has turned dusk and you're still playing outside, getting that last bit of daylight in, is so perfectly on the money! We called them cicadas in Texas, though. :-)

The noise of the locust is dry, and it seems not to be rasped or vibrated but urged from him as if through a small orifice by a breath that can never give out. Also there is never one locust but an illusion of at least a thousand. The noise of each locust is pitched in some classic locust range out of which none of them varies more than two full tones: and yet you seem to hear each locust discrete from all the rest, and there is a long, slow, pulse in their noise, like the scarcely defined arch of a long and high set bridge. They are all around in every tree, so that the noise seems to come from nowhere and everywhere at once, from the whole shell heaven, shivering in your flesh and teasing your eardrums, the boldest of all the sounds of night.

Six year old Rufus describes his ritual with his father of walking home after a movie and sitting down in a little field for some solitude together before they get back home:

He felt that sitting out here, his father was not lonely; or if he was, that he felt on good terms with the loneliness: that he was a homesick man, and that here on the rock, though he might be more homesick than ever, he was well. He knew that a very important part of his well-being came of staying a few minutes away from home, very quietly, in the dark, listening to the leaves if they moved, and looking at the stars; and that his own, Rufus' own presence, was fully as indispensable to this well-being. He knew that each of them knew of the other's well-being, and of the reasons for it, and knew how each depended on the other, how each meant more to the other, in this most important of all ways, than anyone or anything else in the world; and that the best of this well-being lay in this mutual knowledge, which was neither concealed nor revealed. He knew these things very distinctly, but not, of course, in any such way as we have of suggesting them in words.

Rufus sees his father for the last time, in the coffin:

   It was very long and dark; smooth like a boat; with bright handles. Half the top was open. There was a strange, sweet smell, so faint that it could scarcely be realized.
   Rufus had never known such stillness. Their little sounds, as they approached his father, vanished upon it like the infinitesimal whisperings of snow, falling upon open water.
   There was his head, his arms; suit: there he was.
   Rufus had never seen him so indifferent; and the instance he saw him, he knew that he would never see him otherwise. He had his look of faint impatience, the chin strained a little upward, as if he were concealing his objection to a collar which was too tight and too formal. And in this slight urgency of the chin; in the small trendings of a frown which stayed in the skin; in the arch of the nose; and in the still, strong mouth, there was a look of pride. But most of all, there was indifference; and through this indifference which held him in every particle of his being---an indifference which would have rejected them; have sent them away, except that it was too indifferent even to care whether they went or stayed---in this self-completedness which nothing could touch, there was something else, some other feeling which he gave, which there was no identifying even by feeling, for Rufus had never experienced this feeling before; there was perfected beauty.