Jayne
Anne Phillips Lark and Termite Alfred A. Knopf
Video from the 2009 National
Book Awards Finalist Reading
Photo credit: Elena
Seibert
CITATION
In language of remarkable precision,
this novel of devotion and symbiosis tells the parallel
stories of a displaced, preternaturally close brother
and sister living in 1959 West Virginia, and of the
boy’s father as he comes under fire in wartime
Korea in 1950. Elegantly, rigorously, and powerfully
written, Lark and Termite is a virtuosic and
compassionate gesture.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Jayne Anne Phillips’
first book in nine years, Lark and Termite
is set during the 1950s in West Virginia and Korea.
At its center, two children: Lark, on the verge of adulthood,
and her brother, Termite, a child unable to walk and
talk but filled with radiance. Around them, their mother,
Lola, a haunting but absent presence; their aunt Nonie,
a matronly, vibrant woman in her fifties, who raises
them; and Termite’s father, Corporal Robert Leavitt,
who finds himself caught up in the chaotic early months
of the Korean War. It is a story of the power of loss
and love, the echoing ramifications of war, family secrets,
dreams and ghosts, and the unseen, almost magical bonds
that unite and sustain us.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jayne Anne Phillips was born
in Buckhannon, West Virginia. She is the author of three
novels, MotherKind, Shelter, and Machine
Dreams, and two collections of widely anthologized
stories, Fast Lanes and Black Tickets.
She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two
National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and a Bunting
Fellowship. She has been awarded the Sue Kaufman Prize
for First Fiction and an Academy Award in Literature
by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work
has been translated into twelve languages, and has appeared
in Granta, Harper's, DoubleTake, and The
Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. She is
currently Professor of English and Director of the MFA
Program at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New
Jersey.
I move his chair into the
yard under the tree and then Nonie carries him out.
The tree is getting all full of seeds and the pods
hang down. Soon enough the seeds will fly through
the air and Nonie will have hay fever and want all
the windows shut to keep the white puffs out. Termite
will want to be outside in the chair all the time
then, and he’ll go on and on at me if I try
to keep him indoors so I can do the ironing or clean
up the dishes. Sun or rain, he wants to be out, early
mornings especially. "OK, you’re out,"
Nonie will say, and he starts his sounds, quiet and
satisfied, before she even puts him down. She has
on her white uniform to go to work at Charlie’s
and she holds Termite out from her a ways, not to
get her stockings run with his long toenails or her
skirt stained with his fingers because he always has
jam on them after breakfast.
"There’s Termite."
Nonie puts him in the chair with his legs under him
like he always sits. Anybody else’s legs would
go to sleep, all day like that. "You keep an
eye on him, Lark," Nonie tells me . . .
Termite was pretty when he
was a baby. People would coo over him when we walked
him in the big carriage. His forehead was real broad
and he had blond curls and those blue eyes that move
more than normal, like he’s watching something
we don’t see. He was so small for his age that
Nonie called him a mite, then Termite, because even
then he moved his fingers, feeling the air. I think
he’s in himself like a termite’s in a
wall.
I remember when Termite came.
Nonie is his guardian and his aunt, but I’m
his sister. In a way he’s more mine than anyone
else’s. He’ll be mine for longer, is what
Nonie says. Nonie isn’t old but she always says
to me about when she’ll be gone. She looks so
strong, like a block or a rectangle, strong in her
shoulders and her back and her wide hips, even in
her legs and their blue veins that she covers up with
her stockings. Your mother didn’t bring him,
is what Nonie told me, someone brought him for her.
Not his father. Nonie says Termite’s father
was only married to my mother for a year. He was a
baby, Nonie says, twenty-one when my mother was nearly
thirty, and those bastards left him over there in
Korea. No one even got his body back and they had
to have the service around a flag that was folded
up. Nonie says it was wrong and it will never be right.
But I don’t know how Termite got here because
Nonie sent me away that week to church camp. I was
nine and had my birthday at camp, and when I came
home Termite was here. He was nearly a year old but
he couldn’t sit up by himself, and Nonie had
him a baby bed and clothes and a high chair with cushions
and straps, and she had papers that were signed. She
never got a birth certificate though, so we count
the day he came his birthday, but I make him a birthday
whenever it suits me.
