Book Report: London Street

Let me be honest. I have two significant problems talking about this book. The first is that it's a memoir. Memoirs aren't inherently problematic, but they do make us make judgments about people's lives, judgments that aren't always pleasant to make. "Here's what happened," they report, and then they expect us simply to believe it--or, more to the point, expect us not to guess that there isn't more to the events than we're being told. I kept wishing Jane Griffioen's London Street was a novel, not a memoir. If it were a novel, it would be easier to talk about because it's truth would have been fictional and not, as in the case, biography.

And then there's this. Jane Griffioen's London Street examines a life that is so close to mine, so exacting with respect to what it felt like to grow up within the powerful reach of a peculiar American religious community--mine too--at a particular time in that community's history, that at times throughout the book, I could not help feeling she was talking about me.

Frederick Manfred used to say that ethnic writers--and he considered himself one--had to be careful not to use to many "ins," too much ethnic minutiae, because readers who don't share heritage or background can quickly feel walled out. In the world of the old-line Dutch Reformed, a Sunday peppermint is as much as a sacrament as communion bread. 

Jane Griffioen is so precise, so exacting in the verities of a post-World War II Christian Reformed world that the exposition almost hurt. At one point in the memoir, she uses the lyrics from an old psalm no CRC ever sings anymore. I started reading those words without remembering, and suddenly the music returned, drawn eerily from memory's deep recesses. I loved all of that, and mostly I loved the fact that she played with the nuances of a theological history that tried so hard to keep us--Jane Griffioen and me--well away from "worldliness."

"Worldliness." I don't know that I've ever spoken to my children about the dangers of "worldliness." That word would likely have no psychic resonance with either of them. But darkness still arises in me when I see that word, because the evil that constitutes its horror is still resonant, even if its has lost its strength. "Worldliness" creates abundant darkness in the story Jane Griffioen tells of her life, as well it should, saith the old Calvinist. 

And now, since I'm telling you about Jane Griffioen's life, I am myself falling into sin because I can't help the feeling that I'm gossiping. The life she opens up on the pages of her memoir is so vivid to those of us who grew up as she did that simply telling you about it makes me feel I'm talking behind the back of a member of my own small community. And I am.

To me, that exactness is the memoir's great strength, and I loved reading it. London Street, the street in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on which Ms. Griffioen was raised, was in every way a small town, even though she grew up in a city. If you're Dutch Reformed and you don't like the title--too British, maybe--fine; just rename it Oostburg or Lynden or Zeeland or Whitinsville, all of which are cut from the same ethno-religious fabric. 

So one of the problems I have talking about the book is as perfectly obvious as it is an immense attribute: by talking about it, I can't help but feel as if I'm talking behind her back. She prompts guilt by evoking scenes so rich within my own memory that I know it all, chapter-and-verse. 

At the bottom of the story, two deep and difficult concerns eventually emerge. First, mental illness. Much of the memoir arises from a story Griffioen didn't grow up with, even though she did, a story of her mother's horror and humiliation, a story which happened long before Griffioen herself was born. 

But the shame her mother suffered, the humiliation at the hands of a family and a community that simply repressed the story, locked it up behind locked doors, acted as if it hadn't happened, is the real villainy. What happened to her mother put her mother, her sister, and herself into Pine Rest (and that too is an "in"--into a mental hospital) at different times in their individual lives.

But Griffioen doesn't stop there. Why are there stories that really can't be spoken of in this peculiar tightly-knit community? She wants to say--and she does--that we all would rather not mention them, given that we (of the old-line Dutch Reformed cultural and theological ethos) don't want to blame a sovereign God we extol as a great lover and Creator of Heaven and Earth. 

Some say Calvinism rests on two significant pillars--the sovereignty of God and the depravity of man, and that dynamic duo is at the heart of things in the life and the story of Jane Griffioen. 

Which is not to say, she rejects the doctrine. Her father, who, late in life, wanders back into the Protestant Reformed Church of his youth (that's an "in" too), is the source of that overpowering theology, the theology at times you think she would really like to blame for the tonnage of emotional problems of her own story.

But she can't. There's still something there in him she won't forsake--and, oddly enough, it's love. Speaking of her father, she says, "He might be a prisoner to his theology, but he hadn't locked his heart away." The source of terrifying dogma that threatens to lock up the family in its own theological icebox is her father, a man who has literally given his life--held down two jobs for as long as she can remember--for the sake of a family he has always loved hugely, and a wife who had a child before he married her.

It would be nice if we could nail down the true villainy in all of this, but Jane Griffioen can't do it and neither can we, not with the kind of exactness some readers might delight in discovering. Puzzle pieces are missing from this memoir, but then often enough they're missing from our own puzzles too.

That's life. Even for the Dutch Reformed.