M&D Ch 20

[Joseph Tracy]

Ch 20
Mason has come home to find Bradley’s family doesn’t want him around as  the family processes Bradley’s death, despite their close friendship. He tells his own  family he is being considered for work in America. Most oppose the idea. M’s father has plans to put Mason’s 2 sons to work milling or baking. 
  The memory of bread making with his father and Mason’s divergent interest in the stars is moving and an odd mix of  the senior’s domineering emotional blackmail and fatherly love,   all mediated by a contemplation on bread-making which touches on science, the cycle of life and death, class, christianity, and the likeness of bread/dough to flesh, all of which which enters Mason’s dreams. 
   There is  a passage about the holes  in bread and the spaces inside the spaces, leading to the conclusion that the whole is mostly space. But bread, like his family is full of human drama, farmed in soil light and air , cut down with steel sickles, ground to powder, wetted and oiled and yeasted, moist, hot, sticky, crusty, chewy and finally excremental. Mason seems to long for spaces and boundaries more geometric, less entangled with flesh,  points luminous and measurable in their relationships. -
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