The Reader's Shelf—In the Spirit of Solitude: Singular Reads

For those who love solitude, the singular state is restorative. Whether in memoir or novel, writers who succeed at portraying solitude’s refreshment may deepen our own desire to make the best of time spent alone. Often linked to spirituality, creativity, or the love of nature, solitude’s tonic effects can be sampled vicariously through literature.

In A Year by the Sea: Thoughts of an Unfinished Woman (Broadway. 2000. ISBN 978-0-7679-0593-0. pap. $12.95), Joan Anderson takes a year off from her long marriage. Finding she has outgrown her need constantly to make life pleasant for others, she retreats to the family cabin on Cape Cod. It is time to wake up to just who she might be underneath all of life’s labels. Often alone, or with newfound friends, even working as a fishmonger, Anderson re-creates herself.

Karen Karper became a nun at the age of 17. Where God Begins to Be (Backinprint.com: iUniverse. 2004. ISBN 978-0-595-33321-9. pap. $12.95) picks up her story three decades later, when she moves to the Appalachian woodlands to become a hermit. Her new life revolves around carrying water, stacking firewood, and performing other tasks of survival. Karper’s perseverance is rewarded with increased creativity and spiritual wholeness.

Anita Brookner often writes about isolated characters. Leaving Home (Vintage. 2007. ISBN 978-1-4000-9565-0. pap. $13.95) introduces Emma Roberts, who longs to break the behavioral patterns she has inherited from her reclusive, often melancholy mother. Emma leaves London for scholarly pursuits in Paris. Will she be able to function on her own? Make friends or have romances? Like so many Brookner heroines, Emma spends a great deal of time on self-analysis. Whatever progress she makes in the greater world is offset by periods of solitude rendered with agonized clarity.

Surely no book is more associated with solitude than Henry David Thoreau’s Walden; Or, Life in the Woods (Oxford Univ. 1999. ISBN 978-0-19-283921-3. pap. $11.95). Thoreau, who valued voluntary simplicity as it afforded him time for study and contemplation, built a simple cabin on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s land and lived there experimentally from 1845 to 1847. Although he “never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude,” he was no hermit and by book’s end becomes a sojourner in civilization once again.

Sonny Brewer based his novel, The Poet of Tolstoy Park (Ballantine. 2006. ISBN 978-0-345-47632-6. pap. $13.95), on the true story of another man who took to the woods. In 1925, diagnosed with tuberculosis, retired professor Henry Stuart leaves his family in Idaho and moves to sunny Fairhope, AL, where he builds himself a small circular house, walks barefoot throughout the seasons, reads Tolstoy, and generally confounds his friends and family with his eccentricities. Like Thoreau, he becomes a keen observer of nature and wrestles with spiritual and philosophical issues.

Merilyn Simonds’s debut novel, The Holding (Norton. 2004. ISBN 978-0-393-06061-4. $23.95), takes place in the Canadian wilderness on a parcel of land that becomes home to Scottish immigrant Margaret MacBayne. Every fall when her brothers leave for loggers’ camp, Margaret revels in the deep solitude and eventually becomes a herbalist. More than a century later, Margaret’s diary is found by Alyson Thomson, a back-to-the-land gardener who has moved onto the MacBaynes’ land with her lover, Walker, a moody artist-potter. Alyson, too, experiences periods of solitude, both desired and unwanted.

Dog: a Short Novel (McAdam/Cage. 2006. ISBN 978-1-59692-178-8. pap. $10) by Michelle Herman features J.T. (Jill) Rosen, a college professor and poet who in midlife has given up all social contact. When J.T. adopts a dog she names Phil, she manages to avoid meeting other dog owners by walking the dog at midnight. Yes, J.T. is both cynical and neurotic, but her relationship with Phil reveals the deep love that even the most solitary soul can feel for another living creature.

The Trappist monk Thomas Merton examines the Christian contemplative life in Thoughts in Solitude (Farrar. 1999. ISBN 978-0-374-51325-2. pap. $13), identifying solitude not as a state of physical isolation but rather as a place of peace and prayer.

Alix Kates Shulman’s midlife memoir, Drinking the Rain (North Point: Farrar. 1995. ISBN 978-0-86547-697-4. pap. $13), delightfully traces her transformation from stressed-out city person to beachcomber/wild foods connoisseur. A prolific scribbler, she retreats to a small family cabin on the coast of Maine intending to write. There she begins to lose her desire for such busyness and re-creates herself over in rich, simple solitude.