The ability to condense a mind into a couple hundred pages is a rare and beautiful gift that few are granted. You have the attempts of Faulkner, of Tolkien, of Plath, of countless poets and writers and playwrights and psychologists and doctors and lawyers and actors and artists and people, yet of those countless numbers, few manage to pull through. This isn’t to say that those countless didn’t put in the effort; no, their tears are clear in the tragedies and paramount victories that tie up a script or blog post. With Marina Keegan’s The Opposite of Loneliness, however, the tales seem to fall from key to laptop screen with ease. She questions humanity in a few thousand words, in a couple short stories pulled together. She is exposed, she is presented to the reader, but she remains human. I tend to try and rarely speak ill of the dead, but with Keegan, there is no ill to speak of, or at least not in her writing-- what she writes is written as a girl, as a college student, a human sitting down and putting her thoughts down into some tangible form for others to read. Her style isn’t gaudy; it doesn’t try and overwhelm the reader with any sort of inconsistencies or attempts at individuality. Keegan gives a story-- any story-- and manages to tie it up with a question; she begins with facts and ends up forcing whosoever chooses to read The Opposite of Loneliness to begin to question basic principles that may not have entered their curiosities (or, if those principles already were questioned, perhaps it simply reinforces those questions). Each tale is different, whether it be fiction or nonfiction, but the structure is still there; the question is still there. In fiction the scenarios are unique but not because they are fantastical; they are unique because they are alive. They tell the stories nobody would ever really tell: a contractor in Baghdad, an aged actress and a blind man, a family who has everything right yet everything is going wrong. The reader is faced with reality that they may not otherwise see, with questions that might seem terrifying but are posed in such a way that they may not seem like questions at all, but rather like short ramblings for a student at Yale. The nonfiction is just as real but comes paired with an uneasiness, a tension in one’s stomach as they read through the streams of thought from a girl now dead. It’s almost as if reading a diary of a loved one who is no longer with you; what if she had lived? What would she be doing now? Would the book have left such a great impact if I had gone in unknowing, unbiased, uncaring? You have these questions coinciding with the ethical ones posed by Keegan that follow that essential structure, and upon ending, you may want more, yet there’s nothing left. There is her poetry, yes, but in the end, The Opposite of Loneliness highlights what it is to be human. What it is to care. What it is to take the words of someone who is simply like all of us and try and transform it into a greater “What if?”.
The Opposite of Loneliness might not be gaudy. It might not be a book that sustains itself through decades of criticism or English Literature teachings. It might not make its way into a course curriculum. It might not be a book that bears its weight on the conscious for years to come, but that isn't to say that it isn't a beautiful book-- it most certainly is, and it is deserving of every last positive remark that it has managed to claim.
