The Table as Container

On books with incredible tables of contents.

I have been hosting many large meals lately, and so I have been thinking about what fits on a table. I am also working hard at finishing a book, and so I am noticing the many parallels between meals and books. Both are opportunities to invite people in for a conversation. And both require some decision-making, on what to cook and what to serve, and who to include. Sometimes, we decide to make a place for someone around the table, and sometimes, whether we admit it or not, we do not.

For a book, it might be which chapters or ideas belong. And with a book, it’s not always about love, but fit.

I often find myself cutting out a lot, rewriting sections, and moving things around in the final stages of a book. I sometimes discard the paragraphs or poems I once most loved. All of this has made me curious about how other writers do it, and so I always want to know how writers shape their books.

I have become far less embarrassed about asking.

A few weeks ago, I was fortunate to hear the wonderful essayist Sarah Viren, who is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine, talk about this. Zooming in from her own classroom in Arizona, Sarah told my students in Chicago, that at a crucial point, when she was putting together her prize-winning debut collection, MINE, the essayist Ryan Van Meter said that “a collection is like a table.”

Oooh, I thought.

All the essays are like people around a table, and they should be in conversation.

I think this table concept is true for nonfiction, and fiction, and poetry. While some readers skip over the table of contents—literally, table seating for a book—lately I have been savoring them. I’m thinking about them the way some hostesses think about the dishes, the glassware, the flowers, and of course, the food and the order in which it is served.

And because many of us need to think about something besides the news, and because in the days ahead we may need to strategize what we do and don’t want to talk about with folks around the table, this newsletter in the days ahead will look at “tables of contents” that do a beautiful job of creating a table to sit at, for all that follows in the book.

Here is the first installment. I offer it with the hope that we can find meaningful ways of sitting at tables together.

Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward

This beautiful memoir is the rare book that explains its own structure. I often reread these pages as I try and structure something of my own. In the prologue, Jesmyn explains how she had to go forward and backward in time in order to write it.

But before that incredible prologue, the epigraphs come, and the table of contents sets the stage—it creates a setting and reserves a spot for each of the five young black men who died in Mississippi between 2000 and 2004. Each young man was someone Ward knew and cared deeply about.

You’ll notice that the table of contents is in the “we” form—immediately including us. It’s a book about family, about community, about the collective. Each name, of each men who died far too young, is in bold capital letters. My students said it reminded them of the lettering on graves.

It’s hard to separate all the parts of this book that are working gorgeously—the epigraphs, the prologue, the structure—but I always come back to that prologue, and now, to that table of contents. You can read an excerpt from the prologue here: https://www.npr.org/2013/09/12/221810908/excerpt-men-we-reaped

And if you haven’t read this book, I truly recommend it.

Esther Stories by Peter Orner

This is the ultimate book to re-read. It is also, I would say, the ultimate book about family and community, and it meditates on who is at the table, and who is not.

Peter Orner is a writer’s writer, and it’s impossible to overstate how much I admire Peter’s work and how much I learn from him. Orner is a writer of moments—the initials scratched on a table, for instance, and how they illuminate a life. His characters include one-eyed pool players, beauties who married young and came home decades later, and grandfathers reliving their military exploits in World War II, again and again. He writes about everyone with love.

In Esther Stories, Peter’s first book, which is mostly very short stories, the structure is fascinating, and the table of contents hints at it. The book is in four parts.

The first section—”What Remains”—is about exactly that, like the initials in a table. The second—”The Famous”—spotlights people who are, well, “famous” in their small realms, like Tito, who wore a patch over his left eye but could really, really, play pool.

The third and fourth sections have repeating characters, all tied together by place. Fall River later appears in Peter’s essay collections, too. It’s lovely to see these characters, many with Jewish names from the first part of the 20th century—like Melba Kuperschmid, Arthur Mendlebaum, and Walt Kaplan. And “The Waters,” both the last section and the last story in the book, is about what people will do for love, what they will do to fight death.

I hope you’ll make the tme to read the book, which is a book to be savored, read slowly, perhaps, like the best meals of our lives.

The table of contents for Esther Stories, one of my favorite books.

And just to give you a sense of Orner’s ability to love characters, and to write unforgettably, here is the first page of one of my favorite stories, featuring Tito, the one-eyed master pool player, with the clean sheets, and the woman who fell for him.

I’m interested in hearing about your favorite tables of contents. I would say that the Torah always comes to mind in this regard—it’s hard to top the Five Books of Moses, and titles, in translation at least, of Genesis and Exodus, though of course the Hebrew titles are great too. But lately I have become a collector of interesting and newer tables of contents. I’ll write about a few more soon. And speaking of tables, there will be more salons soon, after this latest round of meals, and I hope to see you there.

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Hope you enjoyed this newsletter! Thank you for your support of writing with depth.