READERS GUIDE: All the Living by C.E. Morgan 
Review: Strong sense
of place defines exquisite
'All the Living'
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Berea author's debut novel rewards the careful reader
By Amy Wilson awilson1@herald-leader.com
About the title
C.E. Morgan took the title of her novel, All the Living, from the Bible's Ecclesiastes 9:3-6:
"This is an evil among all things that are done under the sun, that there is one event unto all: yea, also the heart of the sons of men is full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live, and after that they go to the dead.
"For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion.
"For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten.
"Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in any thing that is done under the sun."
A novel's soundtrack
On a blog called LargeHearted Boy, C.E.Morgan provided a lengthy playlist for All the Living, with liner notes. For the complete unabridged version of the list, click here.
In Morgan's own, abbreviated, words:
A playlist for the novel might have provided a list of the best acts working in contemporary bluegrass, because the work is set in East-Central Kentucky, where bluegrass is ubiquitous (as well as old-time, gospel and country). Instead, I decided to do something more basic: classical.
What follows is not comprehensive and not programmatic (though it is roughly chronological); these pieces don't impress through virtuosity alone, and I make no claims for their supremacy within the genre. I just believe that the best place to start is with whatever moves you. I trust that the intellect rallies when the heart is stirred, and so what follow are some of the most stirring pieces I've encountered in a lifetime of listening. No previous experience or knowledge required.
Josquin's Ave Maria, Tallis Scholars: Josquin des Prez's Ave Maria is a fully realized example of a polyphony, a motet in which all voice parts enjoy a musical equality in ironic contradistinction to the larger religious and social world of the time. The Tallis Scholars excel at Josquin; his music requires an unobtrusive bass, moderate middle voices, and a soprano like a white ray of light — all blended together into a tone of bleached purity.
Bach's Prelude to the Cello Suite in G, No. 1, Yo-Yo Ma: Bach wrote six suites for cello (violoncello in the 17th century), which together constitute a kind of artistic apex for the instrument. This prelude — joyful, swiftly meandering, ordered yet improvisational-feeling — is a perfect two-minute illustration of why Bach endures.
Bach's Goldberg Variations, Glenn Gould: One of the most important variations of the Baroque era, the Goldberg Variations aren't as popular as the Well-Tempered Clavier, largely because of the virtuosic technique required. Gould recorded the first version in 1955 as his debut, and the second in 1981. The first version is vivid, declarative and fast (Gould would later dismiss it as "too fast"); the second is careful, sage, and more introspective (with slower tempi).
Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus: I pick a single Mozart piece with great fear and trembling. It's an almost impossible task. This motet may be the single most peaceful thing he ever wrote, a three-minute distillation of the all the longing and reverence at work in the human religious impulse. Designed for use during communion, this is as simple and beautiful as sacred music gets.
Billings' David's Lamentation: Born a poor man and largely self-taught in music, Billings was an idiosyncratic American composer (contemporaneous with Mozart), whose choral work was (and is) vital to shape-note singing, also known as Sacred Harp. Shape-note practice emphasizes participation and not performance, which results in a marvelously abrasive sound midway between hollering and singing.
Beethoven's Third Symphony (Eroica), von Karajan conducting: A signpost for the start of Romanticism, Beethoven's Third bursts with ferocious joy, plangent despair and ultimate triumph — basically, everything that made Beethoven Beethoven. There is more life force in a single hour of Beethoven than in some other composers' entire oeuvre. He seemed determined not to let a human emotion pass him by.
Schubert's Erlkonig, Jessye Norman: Told alternately from the perspective of the devil-like Elflking, and the father and son fleeing his grasp, the song is urged forward by a restless, churning piano accompaniment. Although the piece often is performed by men, Jessye Norman excels at the three different voices, grasping equally the high fright of the child, the soothing father, and the growling hell of death. Her enormous and demanding soprano makes this song not just moving in its depiction of mortality's approach, but terrifying.
Casta Diva from Bellini's Norma, Joan Sutherland: If you think you don't like opera, give this aria a try. If it doesn't do anything for you, there may be no hope. This piece has everything: high drama, a choral backdrop, heart-stopping melismas and top notes without handholds.
Donizetti's Una Furtiva Lagrima from L'Elisir d'Amore, Placido Domingo: There were never three tenors, only one: Placido Domingo. This is Domingo at his best, the kind of singing that scares away all pretenders.
Charles Ives' Concord Sonata, second and third movements: For my money, Ives is the most exciting figure in the American canon — perched precariously between the safe ground of traditional American song and hymnody, and the frontiers of 20th-century atonality. His approach feels empathetic; he's gentle on a listener afraid of losing the tonal center.
Henry Cowell's The Banshee: Scary, radical, important. If you ever meet a rabid, slavering bitch from hell, she'll probably sound like this. Redefining what it meant to "play" the piano, Cowell introduced indeterminacy (the ultimate freedom of artistic choice) into performance practice and paved the way for the "prepared piano" of artists like John Cage.
Strauss' Four Last Songs, Gundula Janowitz, von Karajan conducting: A work that demands the most extraordinary lyricism from the biggest soprano voices, The Four Last Songs is a meditation on death, but conceived without angst or morbidity. There's a pervading sense of calm and acceptance, of well-earned fatigue at the end of life's day.
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BEREA — Never once in C.E. Morgan's novel, All the Living, does she tell you that it's Kentucky where her characters are struggling for breath amidst grief. But you know it is Kentucky because we are so conversant with it.
But maybe that's just us. To those outside the Bluegrass, the bottomland might seem ubiquitous and the mountains anyone's problem.
That is, unless you are a careful reader and have heeded the signposts she has placed to guide you where she wants to go, to arrive where she has taken you.
"I think it's clear but the only other place it could possibly be confused with is Virginia," Morgan says. "But there are certain places in the book where you can tell you're facing east with the sun facing into the mountains so you know you're on this side of the mountains. You can determine from the text where it is."
The text. The text is everything.
Morgan, 32, had wanted to be a writer since she was 7 and learned to read. Of course, text is everything.
In All the Living (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $23), her debut novel, she has managed to get the attention of all the right people — the press, the independent bookstores and some adoring fans.
But unlike what you're supposed to do when you get all that sought-after attention, she is not anxious to tell you everything. She will tell you about that light that shone over her head at 7, when "that clear and direct sense of vocation" made itself known.
She'll tell you she has drunk no Coca-Cola since she was in third grade, but she can remember its taste. That the first thing she bought with her book advance was $50 worth of Pepsi.
And she will tell you that she loves Los Angeles for its transcendent beauty and "because it pulls all those dreamers."
But that about sums up the private stuff you're getting.
"My history is my private garden," she explains, apologizing without apologizing for her status as a difficult interview, "and I have the key. I feel like I give my life's energy away through my work. At the end of the day, the one story I do get to keep is the story of my own life. Each soul has to establish its own perimeters."
And these are within hers: She will talk about writing.
Disappointing, you think at first. No chance to learn whether she is her heroine, Aloma. Or if loneliness, grief, want and aching lack are stories from her life that she has made into her moving parable of resolution.
All the Living is all that. It is the story of Aloma, a woman who leaves the only life she's known, at a mission school in the mountains, to move away from the hills to be with her boyfriend, Orren, who has just suffered an irreparable family loss. Together, they must work to recover a tobacco crop, the vestiges of his boyhood farm and whatever they can salvage of a relationship that neither of them quite understood to begin with. And she must decide whether she will stay or go even farther away when the long, dry season of trying to help him is nearly done.
The richness of the story, the nearness of it to this place, pleads for parallels, for the better story Morgan could tell about her own experience, that from which you are sure she drew something of this.
It is not forthcoming. The clear-eyed beauty is emphatic. She is not Aloma. She is not talking about her life. But she is generous to overflowing in talking about writing. And to listen to her explain the process is akin to communion, with words as wine.
The book 'seized me'
What C.E. Morgan will say is that All the Living is not autobiographical, but when asked if she knows the story, she says she does.
"I am its creator so I do know the story. I've always hated prescriptive statements about writing, like when people say, 'Write what you know.' We are discretely embodied. We have no idea what each writer needs to accomplish their tasks."
What she needed was a two-week, mid-term break while at Harvard Divinity School, where she was pursuing her master's degree in theological studies. Click here for Page 2.
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