“For ever! For all eternity! Not for a year or for an age but for ever. Try to imagine the awful meaning of this. You have often seen the sand on the seashore. How fine are its tiny grains! And how many of those tiny little grains go to make up the small handful which a child grasps in its play. Now imagine a mountain of that sand, a million miles high, reaching from the earth to the farthest heavens, and a million miles broad, extending to remotest space, and a million miles in thickness: and imagine such an enormous mass of countless particles of sand multiplied as often as there are leaves in the forest, drops of water in the mighty ocean, feathers on birds, scales on fish, hairs on animals, atoms in the vast expanse of the air: and imagine that at the end of every million years a little bird came to that mountain and carried away in its beak a tiny grain of that sand. How many millions upon millions of centuries would pass before that bird had carried away even a square foot of that mountain, how many eons upon eons of ages before it had carried away all? Yet at the end of that immense stretch of time not even one instant of eternity could be said to have ended. At the end of all those billions and trillions of years eternity would have scarcely begun. And if that mountain rose again after it had been all carried away, and if the bird came again and carried it all away again grain by grain: and if it so rose and sank as many times as there are stars in the sky, atoms in the air, drops of water in the sea, leaves on the trees, feathers upon birds, scales upon fish, hairs upon animals, at the end of all those innumerable risings and sinkings of that immeasurably vast mountain not one single instant of eternity could be said to have ended; even then, at the end of such a period, after that eon of time the mere thought of which makes our very brain reel dizzily, eternity would have scarcely begun.”

“His frame shuddered, —his lips grew white, —he spilt the untasted wine upon the carpet, —and rushed forth into the darkness.”

— Joyce, Hawthorne

I think it’s perfectly possible to write a nice book, well-turned, effective, competent, satisfying, even exciting, that does not have an ounce of emotional truth to it. It’s quite often a polished piece of fiction, but like polish everywhere, it shines on the surface only.

Well, that’s the marketplace. After you read such books, you are left pleased, perhaps, but unmoved, unfulfilled, unaltered. The fault is not in the books as themselves, it’s that they are often considered the equals of a different species of animal, altogether: stories so hard-won that their authors’ guts are right there on the page. Not in an ugly way, mind you, but in the most beautiful way possible. And the fact that those guts are there for younger readers, makes such a book both stirring and rare.

Nora Raleigh Baskin’s All We Know of Love is one of these rarer books. It is like many stories utterly competent, a novel by a writer who knows how to put words together, to plot efficiently, to create conversations of wit and poignancy, but it breathes on a deeper level that we recognize, but might not be able to name. I think this is, simply put, truth, with an undemanding, lowercase t.

It does, however, overpower the reader who connects with it, but it’s the power of quiet motion, like the blood running in you or the muscles contracting in your arm. It doesn’t so much sing — that would attract too much attention — but it hums with its emotional drive, and the sound stays close to you, like something almost private. I’ve always disliked the question: what is the story about? Of course, authors fall back on this all the time; you have to, even though it pigeonholes the work, just to be able to move on. We nickname our books like everyone else does.

“Which of your books are you talking about now?”

“The circus book.”

“Oh, yeah. Go on.”

Or the epilepsy book, the graveyard book, the bus trip book.

All We Know of Love is about Natalie Gordon’s bus trip to find the mother who left her four years ago; “four years, four months, and fifteen days to be exact.” The journey motif is common in books, as it is in life. Natalie eventually finds her mother living alone in another town. And after the shock of meeting, there’s the conversation. Here and on the trip itself, the writer moves us so supplely through each of Natalie’s moods — rejection, anger, love, humor, misunderstanding, recognition, a kind of acceptance — that you don’t see the words on the page, or the characters saying them, or even the people who the characters represent, but you feel their movement in the space you occupy.

Sorry, this is all poorly said. It’s a good story — a good story — and that’s probably enough to say. It’s one that, as small and quiet as it is, I wouldn’t like to be without. It’s one that, after reading it, you close the cover and say to yourself: yes. What a great and rare feeling that is.

. . . were the lovely and dismissive words spoken by Robert Mitchum to Jane Greer in Out of the Past, the 1947 film noir, and one of the best of the genre. Like bits from Seinfeld, Arrested Development, 30 Rock, and the final line from Chinatown, along with other masters of the craft, Mitchum’s line comes up a lot here at the ranch. It signifies much.

In talking about the Outsider (see below), I have been struck since I first read it by Denis Johnson’s brilliant interview with Bret Anthony Johnston on the occasion of his winning the National Book Award for his novel Tree of Smoke in 2007. (You can read the full interview somewhere at www.nationalbook.org). What I have loved and admired — and confess myself in awe of, in the same way I am of the simple brilliance of Mitchum’s line — is the writer’s response to this particular question:

Bret Anthony Johnston: Were there moments in your writing process where you worried the book wouldn’t work? If so, how did you press on?

Denis Johnson: Well, I’ve never thought about this before, but now that you ask, it occurs to me I don’t have much interest whether any of my books work or not.

I had occasion to quote this response to a group of children’s writers, some published, some not, as something we’d all, perhaps one day, like to be able to say.

Question: Does your story work?

Answer: Baby, I don’t care.

This is another little view of the Outsider. I have found myself wanting to say it relative to my own stories sometimes. And, in fact, should you worry if your story doesn’t work — in the sense of working for a particular reader or group of readers? Should you care whether your piece doesn’t fall within the bounds of what has been written before? This is the struggle between art and commerce. Between stories and, say, publishing. There shouldn’t be any rules, not even for children’s writing. If the story “works” is, in a way, a trivial attribute of the story. Maybe a story’s not “working” can sometimes be a sign that the reader is not trying hard enough, not that the writer has failed to write it properly. The idea that a certain set of rules defines a story’s success is similar to saying that a certain length of nose or plumpness of calf defines a person’s beauty. I don’t know. Maybe it does. But it seems it shouldn’t. You get the drift. Or maybe you don’t. Either way . . .