Review: Joel Peckham’s Gone the Sun
By: Mary B. Sellers
Peckham is frequently in dialogue with his own ghost throughout his collection of braided essays, Gone the Sun, brilliantly echoing one of the main tenants of the book: memory, how it’s stored and how it’s also lost. In many ways, Gone the Sun is a dual love letter to a sacred place from childhood and his profoundly special father; at the same time, it attempts to tie in careful research that delves into psychology and music theory. The collection’s brevity suits the nature of summertime: collapsible, compact, a seasonal, predetermined beginning that already reveals glimpses of the end in its fibers. “I was 12 years old and felt as if I’d just walked across my own grave. All things pass, for certain. But they also repeat, time looping back over itself.”
Childhood lives strongly, here, in both Peckham’s essays and his beloved summer camp. The majority of Peckham’s childhood was spent at Manitou—an elite summer camp with integral—and at this point, nearly in-grown—familial ties—was spent witnessing his famous father direct and perform his role that Peckham, as an adult, describes as nearly fated in how perfectly suited it was to his father’s renown stage presence and personal vigor. Peckham’s father’s character lives both on page and beyond it, thanks to the author’s manifold memory touchstones comprised of vivid details and episodic accounts prudently laced with dialogue that feels historical in nature.
Effervescent and vervy in a hyper-masculine sense, Manitou served as foundational requisite for his father’s ego, nursed in him a sense of identity so deeply rooted to the dusky campgrounds that the fissuring of the two seemed incomprehensible in the way a guitar functions as both universal totem and ineradicable mainstay to lead guitarists. Peckham’s heroic attempts to eruditely engage with the stout, pain-laden effects of Dementia on the individual as well as the family unit is noteworthy in and of itself. “What is left is as raw and fragile as an exposed nerve,” Peckham writes, when speaking of his father’s learned helplessness when, in old age, he is met with the reality of no longer being necessary to the camp.
Pain is evident throughout—I’d argue that pain is Gone the Sun’s third main character, after Setting and Mr. Peckham, Sr.—and, pressed like a bruise, fills the memoir with extant pathos that manages through the excellent clarity of writing to save itself from any real threat of self-pity. “Long before my father began showing signs of dementia, I had become fixated on the connection between memory and identity and, more generally, what makes a person”. Through smart and emotionally astute summation of a handful of great thinkers, Peckham attempts to rewire the reader’s notions about the palpability of memory. “Socrates, and Locke after him, comes very near to equating memory with consciousness and argues that our identity cannot be separated from our ability to process and retain ideas and experiences”.
Broad and breathing and full of intricate motions, our main sense of ourselves, or as any Jungian would call it—ego—rests dangerously near memory’s membrane. The porosity of this concept is frightening to consider when given the science behind memory. Its importance is laid out in philosophical terms, and the seriousness in which it’s discussed serves as establishing backbone for the memoir. We are vulnerable and malleable to the unconscious mechanisms of memory’s anatomy. We are, in many respects, its slaves.
The tragedy of Mr. Peckham’s abiding loss of self can be viewed through an exchange of lenses: the micro and confessionally personal, as well as the universal. Loss of self on a global stage speaks to the current political climate, the environmental, the psychological, en masse: what happens when a society loses touch with itself? Hysteria—similar to the kind of late-night ‘bad bouts’ that Peckham’s father suffers through—a toggling of identity, the chaos of survival against a backdrop of Big Pharma, misdiagnoses, lack of medical insurance, and lack of reliable resources to turn to when in a mental health crisis.
Purchase Gone the Sun here.
Mary Buchanan Sellers is an educator and writer from Mississippi. She received her MFA in Fiction from LSU, and BA in Literature from The University of Mississippi. Her writing has been published in Bending Genres, Serotonin, Hobart, Anti-Heroin Chic, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and Psychopomp. She edits Libre, and owns a cat named Gatsby Blue.IG | X | BlueSky