Relationality, Generativity, and Wool

  Wool is my favorite book, which is amusing, because I called its writing style abhorrent at my most pretentious and put it down after half a minute of examination.

Months later, a very different person for a bevy of reasons, I picked it up again, and saw a very different story. Wool spans three separate protagonists and five separate, smaller stories. In the first forty pages, it kills the first, and at that time the only, of its heroes.

The effect is striking. I’d never seen another book do something so audacious and so significant. It immediately shifted my perspective: Wool would not be about a person and their incredible feats. It would center on the building—a stationary symbol—to give a sense of timelessness.

A year later, on my second reread, I decided I was wrong again, this time about the theme that Holston’s unprecedented death instates rather than the quality of the book (I knew it was very good by then). Wool is certainly not about one person, but it’s also not about the building the society of the book lives in. It’s about the impact of humans on other humans—of relationships—and of the generativity of beliefs. Wool focuses on the extraordinary importance and power of relationships.

The deaths that string the first part of the book along (and there are multiple) are something of a repeated integration of the second self. The first hero dies, prompting the second to reflect and integrate, prompting that second hero to take righteous actions that unfortunately lead to their death. Again there is an attempt at integration from a character who would have been a hero had they successfully integrated. Instead they too pass on, leading to a final integration into the final hero—an infusion of the wisdom of three separate predecessors that allows this final hero to do the impossible and survive an otherwise unfathomable journey to the toxic outer world.

I saw the value of relationships unfold before my eyes. And years again later, I got to listen to Dr. Ritchie espouse the same reverence for relationships Wool taught me.