In March 2012, the final pieces of concrete and steel of the Elwha River Dam were removed. For one hundred years, man tried to harness the power of th...moreIn March 2012, the final pieces of concrete and steel of the Elwha River Dam were removed. For one hundred years, man tried to harness the power of this river that flows through the haunting green and glacial interior of the Olympic Peninsula. Before it was dammed (damned), it hosted annual runs of fish, which numbered in the millions - sockeye, Coho, Chinook, cutthroat trout, steelhead, char, among many; it gave life to black bear, cougar, madrona and red cedar. It flowed through the ancestral home of the Klallam people. Removal of the Elwha Dam last year and the Glines Dam this summer mean the renewal and restoration of one of America’s most priceless national treasures: the Olympic National Park.
But at the time Washington was granted statehood (1889), the western Olympic Peninsula – crowded with sharp peaks like a mouth with too many teeth and a vast rain forest where ferns and fungi grow to fairy tale proportions – was the last frontier of the American West. Its natural resources were too great not to be consumed by the appetites of entrepreneurs. And so the flow of progress stopped the flow of the Elwha. For eight decades, its power was channeled to fuel the grind and stench of the Port Angeles paper mill and the mammoth timber industry that reigned over the western-most reaches of the United States.
Jonathan Evison’s messy and beautiful West of Here was published in 2011 just as the Elwha Dam removal project got underway. It is situated in Port Bonita, a thinly-disguised Port Angeles, in the early days of its modern development (circa 1890) and the end days of its reliance on the Elwha for it economy (2006). His cast of characters is large and they are but appendages to the beating heart of the novel’s central character: the Olympic Peninsula.
As a reader and writer for whom “Place” is core to my intellectual and emotional orientation, I have a tender spot for stories which ground themselves so firmly into their setting. Evison does this to spectacular effect – giving the same profound sense of place as Ivan Doig’s Montana, Edna O’Brien’s Ireland, Mark Helprin’s New York City (full disclosure: I grew up in Sequim, fifteen miles east of “Port Bonita” and I now reside on the eastern edge of the Olympic Peninsula. This land is in my blood).
This is not clean and tidy historical fiction that follows the strictures of fact. Evison himself states in the author notes “I set out to write…not a historical novel but a mythical novel about history.” He anchors the plot in fact – basing James Mather’s quixotic winter expedition to plot a route across the Olympic Mountains to the Pacific Ocean on James Christie’s Press Expedition of 1888-1889; nearly all place names are real; snippets of Washington state history – Seattle’s great fire of 1889 and Port Townsend’s subsequent quest to become Washington’s most important city (which failed, thank goodness – I love my beautiful, peaceful small town, where those homes and edifices built in its Victorian heyday still offer as much wonder as they do shelter). The novel’s backbone is this region’s history and it reveals Evison’s extensive research.
Evison presents many themes: the degradation to environment and indigenous peoples by the mindless pursuit of progress and development; the burgeoning women’s movement of the late nineteenth century; tribal politics and the plight of Native Americans who stumble between a lost past and an uncertain future; post-partum-depression; the throwaway life of the modern American. Evison has been criticized for presenting this jumble of themes without following them all to their conclusion. I counter by asking when in life do we really have closure? How often are we able to tidy up our moral dilemmas, our own pasts, and march on, certain of our path? Umm…never? Right. Not even with the hindsight of history do we ever achieve certainty.
Greater than his themes, in terms of quantity and quality, are Evison’s characters: we live 1890’s Port Bonita through the adventures of feminist Eva, explorer Mather, entrepreneurs Ethan and Jacob, civil servant Adam, prostitute Gertie, healer Haw, and Klallam mother Hoko and her troubled son Thomas; Port Bonita of 2006 offers up aging high school athlete and Sasquatch hunter Krig and his hapless boss Jared; Franklin, one of the Peninsula’s few black men; ex-con Tillman; Forest Service Hillary; healer Lew; Klallam mother Rita and her troubled son Curtis. And those are just the characters I can remember as I type. But each is rendered with affection – an affection I find striking, because not all these characters are sympathetic. Fairness and empathy are this writer’s imprimatur, I believe.
The cast of characters and the shifting progression of the plot in West of Here– from one era and storyline to the next and back again – made me think of hanging wet clothes on our backyard laundry rack in New Zealand, where the wind blew ceaselessly. I’d bend down to pull out the next shirt or bath towel and the rack would whip around, presenting me with an empty line or an already-crowded patch. But I stayed in place and kept hanging, knowing in the end it would all get sorted.
I faltered a bit mid-way through (and don’t let the 486 pages of text daunt you. Evison’s prose nips at your heels – forward motion is easy) because of the bleakness of modern-day Port Bonita. I remember the Port Angeles of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, when the timber and paper industries stalled. In contrast to my rain-shadowed, blue-skied Sequim flush with retiree and dairy cash, Port Angeles was a gray and lifeless place. Heavy with damp lichen and lost dreams, it wasn’t a place to linger. Evison’s reimaging of Port Bonita twenty years later brought back that sense of listlessness.
But just when you think these lives are going nowhere, the author tosses you a laugh-aloud lifeline and a tenderness that promises redemption.
Rather than comparison to today’s Lit It Boys and Girls - the other Jonathans (Franzen, Safran-Foer) Dan Chaon, Zadie Smith - whose works have left me out in the cold, I hope I have found a writer with more classic sensibilities and a deeper appreciation for storytelling. I’ll keep reading Jonathan Evison to find out.
In the meantime, follow with me the progression of life returning to the Elwha. Return of the River (less)
In 1987 I went on a two-book true crime reading spree. Ann Rule had just published Small Sacrifices about Oregon mother Diane Downs, who murdered her...moreIn 1987 I went on a two-book true crime reading spree. Ann Rule had just published Small Sacrifices about Oregon mother Diane Downs, who murdered her three children in 1983. From there, I went to Ann's first blockbuster thriller The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy - The Shocking Inside Story (a triple threat title, that). Having sated my morbid curiosity about sociopaths and psychopaths (particularly those bred and raised in the Pacific Northwest), I left behind the world of true crime.
Until last week.
But here's the quirky thing: A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion (and that's the first and last time I'm typing out THAT title) is a true crime narrative written as fiction. So, how do you know what's fact and what Hansen has liberated from the headlines to craft his novel?
Weeelll, I suppose you could plow through the primary sources as Hansen did. Or scroll through the Wikipedia entries (you know you will...). Or just let go, have fun and rent Double Indemnity when you've finished ...Guilty Passion (I told you I was over that title).
What you can be certain of is the 1927 murder trial of blonde bombshell Ruth Snyder and her hapless bra-and-panty-salesman lover, Judd Gray. It was the scandal of the decade, Jazz Age Lovers Gone Wild, the story that put the noir into film noir, crime noir.
The crime is preposterous, the investigation textbook, the public fascination lurid and epic. And not to be a spoiler, especially if you haven't yet visited Wikipedia, but the murder victim (Ruth's husband, natch) isn't the only one who meets with a bad end. It's all very electrifying. So to speak. Hee.
I can't help but be silly about this, because there's such an element of slapstick to Hansen's treatment. Our star-crossed lovers are idiots, really. Hansen sends us gaily through the story as Ruth and Judd meet cute. Things get rather maudlin as guilt and manipulation and booze dampen the lovers' passions, but it's still pretty funny. Until it isn't. Because the cuckold, no matter that he is a cold-hearted bastard, really does get his head bashed in.
The other quirky thing is that A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion (copy and paste, people, copy and paste) reads like a true crime book. Hansen riffs a bit on Raymond Carver with his just-the-facts-ma'am style, particularly in the book's final third when the suspects are apprehended and trial unfolds. It's a highly stylized rendering, so much so that you shake the book upside-down, waiting for the Cracker Jack toy to tumble out. Hansen provides irresistible entertainment you cannot put down, even though you know it's probably not that good for you.
And now, for a little late night Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck. Yoo Hoo! Netflix!
There’s an element that bugged the heck out of me all the way through this novel, so let me just get it out of the way and move on, since this was a r...moreThere’s an element that bugged the heck out of me all the way through this novel, so let me just get it out of the way and move on, since this was a read I really enjoyed.
Despite the abundance of ideas in Live By Night, ideas which relate to the story’s era and setting: the futility of Prohibition, Jazz Age excess, bootlegging and gangland violence, racism, the Cuban émigré community in Florida - the main character, Joe Coughlin, isn’t given any real purpose or object to pursue. What are the motivating factors in Joe’s life that take him from Boston Irish middle-class comfort and respectability to sitting on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico, tied to a chair, his feet incased in a block of cement? Live By Night is more a series of events in a gangster’s life without the structure of what Robert McKee calls a “controlling idea.”
Readers of The Given Day will know Joe’s family history. The youngest son of a celebrated Boston police captain, he turns his back on a life of fighting crime to become a criminal himself. This father-son conflict theme is the focus of Joe’s internal story, but is not strong evidence as the cause of his behavior. It’s not necessary to have read The Given Day to get deliciously caught up in Live By Night, but the forces that motivate Joe are implied by the events of the previous novel (which is fantastic, by the way) and are left to take root in the overworked symbolism of a Philippe Patek watch.
Okay, okay, that’s just me. You can forget all the story structure stuff and jump on the running board of your 1929 Studebaker Dictator 6 and enjoy the ride. Dennis Lehane, who has an amazing ability to adapt his tone to fit the era of which he writes, works crime noir magic in Live By Night. This is a story of moods, settings and characters rendered in period details so exact you sweat and cower in a Boston prison cell, or sweat and drink in a Florida speakeasy, or sweat and yearn watching a beautiful woman’s hips sway underneath a threadbare skirt as if you were Joe’s shadow.
You can feel the author’s giddiness in his own story, the breathless ride he can’t wait for you to experience. He works in a bit of ruminative social psychology, really wanting you to root for the good guy gone bad who never loses his good heart. It’s an homage to the Humphrey Bogart anti-hero that makes the reader yearn for the putt-putt of a Tommy gun and a smartly –turned Fedora, while wriggling uncomfortably with the incongruous romance of the gangster’s life.
Lehane writes female characters particularly well. Live By Night offers a triangle of remarkable women, each of whom leaves indelible imprints of lust, compassion and tragedy at significant stages of Joe’s coming-of-outlaw.
Get lost in the gorgeous details and the nail-biting moments and never mind the incomplete redemption. Or that dire cement block. I don’t think we’ve seen the last of Joe Coughlin.
I spent five weeks with In Sunlight and In Shadow. Five monogamous weeks, which is quite a committed literary relationship for this fast-in, fast-out...moreI spent five weeks with In Sunlight and In Shadow. Five monogamous weeks, which is quite a committed literary relationship for this fast-in, fast-out reader. Yes, life circumstances wore me out and distracted me, so that some days the amount of pages read would be imperceptible as measured on a standard ruler, but never once did I contemplate setting Helprin aside for a less complicated time or supplementing my evening reading with a less demanding literary companion.
I was enthralled by this lush, resplendent novel. Each and every one of its 705 pages.
The story itself is quite simple. In fact, the old-fashioned romance and adventure style makes this a curl-up-on-the-sofa read. But the beauty of Helprin’s prose, its rococo grandeur and meandering lyricism, make it worthy of lingering. Take your time to reread certain passages and be astonished anew by Helprin’s particular magic.
Harry Copeland is in his early 30s and recently returned to Manhattan from the European Theatre of WWII. Harry is alone in the world, an only child, his parents deceased, and he is taking his time to heal from the emotional wounds and physical trauma sustained as a special ops paratrooper. What can’t wait, however, is the luxury leather goods business he inherited from his father.
The business is being newly bilked by the Mafia. Not the perfunctorily threatening Jewish Mafia to which Copeland Leather and every other manufacturing business in the building has been accustomed to paying off. This is the deeply serious and deadly Mob. Which has singled out Copeland Leather for extortion.
One day, while traveling on the Staten Island ferry, Harry spies a beautiful woman in white and falls immediately and hopelessly in love. She is Catherine Thomas Hale, of the Manhattan and Hamptons Hales, an heiress and Broadway ingénue. Catherine is strong, moral and wise. She meets Harry’s love and passion measure for measure. They are not really star-crossed lovers: Harry is a Harvard man, after all. But he is a Jew and he is broke - facts he and Catherine cannot long hide from her family.
But this is more than a love story. It is a tale of a city at a golden moment in time, when the memories of two wars and the Depression remain vivid enough to fuse gratitude and caution, yet cannot stop the momentum of power and wealth that rocket New York inexorably forward as the steward of all things modern.
It is a thriller, where thugs with Thompsons are pitted against combat heroes with iron nerves; it is a war set piece, where a band of brothers plummet into the mists and mud of western France; it is a window into a world of grand society, where money can buy everything but peace of mind and integrity.
It is true, Helprin uses six words when two would suffice, but never once does the sprawl, the grandiloquence, feel like an attempt to dazzle or distract. The gorgeous language wraps, not traps, the reader; the descriptions of characters and settings put the reader fully inside a moment, most of which you want never to end.
In Sunlight and In Shadow is romanticism at its soft-focus, golden-hued, unapologetic best. Characters are a little more beautiful, dangerous, erudite and talented than real life could afford; food is more delicious, sunsets more vivid, memories more precise and comforting, It is a novel for pleasure-seekers, for readers ready to sink into a web spun by a story-teller. Logic and relativism need not apply; only good guys, bad guys, truth and beauty allowed. (less)
It is a rare read that cuts through the surface noise of daily life and becomes the one sound you can hear clearly, like a church bell on a still wint...moreIt is a rare read that cuts through the surface noise of daily life and becomes the one sound you can hear clearly, like a church bell on a still winter morning. It commands your full attention and you willingly shut out the world and surrender to the power of its images, characters and the force of its story. Amanda Coplin’s debut novel, The Orchardist, is one such book.
Set in the early years of the 20th century in the golden valleys and granite hills of Chelan county in north-central Washington state, The Orchardist is a fierce and poetic story of the Northwest frontier.
William Talmadge, the orchardist, has led a secluded, solitary life since he was a young man. Orphaned in early adolescence, he and his younger sister Elsbeth, worked on their own to build and maintain acres of apple and apricot orchards in the Wenatchee Valley. When she turns sixteen, Elsbeth vanishes. Whether she is taken or disappears of her own volition is a question that will haunt Talmadge as the century turns and he enters the later years of his life.
Talmadge provides refuge to two young women who appear in his orchard one day, filthy, starving and pregnant. By inviting them into his home, he opens the door to great tragedy and profound love. Talmadge is a nurturer – it is an undeniable facet of his character that he seeks to repair what has been damaged by neglect or abuse, whether it is sapling or a human heart.
But, as Talmadge learns, even the most tender care, the strongest scion of love and compassion, cannot heal all wounds.
Coplin’s prose is exhilarating. She composes with quiet confidence, her narrative rich in period detail. And although she describes ugly circumstances– the suffering of women trapped in desperate conditions, a time when deprivation and disease swept through communities with shocking regularity – she writes with such empathy and beauty that the heart is reminded to hope. And the heart is rewarded. And it is shattered.
Coplin’s writing is uniquely and brilliantly her own, but a few favorite authors came to my mind while reading The Orchardist: Toni Morrison, for her evocative and dark period pieces and haunted women; Ivan Doig for the warmth of his characters and his passion for the West; Kent Haruf for his restraint and gentleness; Tim Winton for his truth-telling about the complicated nature of family.
I always hold my breath when encountering a familiar setting or terrain in a book: will the author have a feel for the place, its light and colors, its scents and temperatures? Will she follow the undulations of its land and the shapes in its cities? Coplin, a native of the Wenatchee Valley, not only conveys the beauty of the sage-steppe of the Cascade mountain foothills, the gold of its valleys, the shimmering glory of its aspen forests and glacial lakes, she erases the damage wrought by the past one hundred years of development. You are taken to a time when the air and water were so pure, the land so unscathed, that you cry in homesickness for a place you never really knew. The names from my home, Wenatchee, Cashmere, Ellensburg, Methow, Walla Walla, Chelan, Okanogan, Stehekin, Dungeness, are renewed and flow through this novel like poetry.
This is one of those novels I want to carry around to show everyone, to bring up in every conversation even tangentially related to reading or the Northwest. I cried when I turned its final page. I wept for the characters, for the past, for the gift of reading sentences so beautifully and thoughtfully constructed. I reckon this will be my top read of 2012. Brava, Amanda. Thank you.
They passed through a highland meadow carpeted with wildflowers, acres of golden groundsel and zinnia and deep purple gentian and wild vines of blue morninglory and a vast plain of varied small blooms reaching onward like a gingham print to the farthest serried rimlands blue with haze and the adamantine ranges rising of out nothing like the backs of seabeasts in a Devonian dawn.
I read this and I marvel. How does one writer, equipped with the same words, the same semantic possibilities as any, know to string these particular words together in just this way, paragraph after paragraph, page after page? My copy of Cormac McCarthy's 1985 classic Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West is mauled by dog-eared pages and inked underlines as I seek to capture and remember his revelatory images of the borderlands of the Southwest and the astonishing employ of English that feels primordial under his pen.
Once again, Cormac McCarthy tears me apart, digs at the darkest corners of despair and depravity in my mind, poking and prodding with a sharp stick as I wince and try to turn away. Yet unlike The Road, a black and white dystopian nightmare which offers redemption through the steadfast love of its principal characters, Blood Meridian is merciless Technicolor nihilism. Each character explores the vast possibilities of evil as McCarthy pulls the reader through the reeking entrails of history.
They found the lost scouts hanging head downward from the limbs of a fireblacked paloverde tree. They were skewered through the cords of their heels with sharpened shuttles of green wood and they hung gray and naked above the dead ashes of the coals where they’d been roasted until their heads had charred and the brains bubbled in the skulls and steam sang from their noseholes. Their tongues were drawn out and held with sharpened sticks thrust through them and they had been docked of their ears and their torsos were sliced open with flints until the entrails hung down their chests.
Blood Meridian is based on historical accounts of the Glanton Gang, a band of mercenaries that roamed the Texas-Mexico borderland in the mid-19th century, trading scalps for gold. Their initial objective was to pursue hostile Indian warriors who reigned by terror throughout the Borderlands. Eventually the crew of ex-soldiers, escaped slaves, convicts, marginalized immigrants, disenfranchised Indians and plain old thugs extended their quest for carnage to peaceful, agrarian Mexicans and Native Americans on both sides of the still-disputed border.
To read three hundred and fifty pages of unrelenting brutality, I have to give myself up to the prose, which is beautiful and original beyond compare, and to what I think the author sought to accomplish with his symphony of violence. I believe McCarthy offers the absolute opposite of the glorification of violence – he depicts horror to force the acknowledgment of it. His stories are blood-curdling pleas to recognize that we – as a nation, as a measure of humanity - are built on the back of history’s corpses. He decries the chest-thumping patriotism that is endemic to nations which claim moral superiority, generally by citing some sort of divine right. Scholar Sara Spurgeon in a critical essay of Blood Meridian (“The Sacred Hunter and the Eucharist of the Wilderness: Mythic Reconstructions in Blood Meridian”) declares the novel a “a sort of antimyth of the West.” There are no good guys in McCarthy’s depiction of the American West: there are only amoral murderers and the victims of their bloodlust. “Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn.” Cunning words, spoken by a character who is the book’s Satan incarnate, its maniacal resident philosopher.
The danger of a book like this is that the reader must detach to make it through the gore. In comparison to The Road, where humility and love are present on every page and you have a sense the writer is suffering and weeping with you, the substance of Blood Meridian risks being subsumed by its intense and unrelenting style.
But without question Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West is yet another McCarthy entry in the canon of Great North American Literature. (less)
Toni Morrison never takes the easy way out. She rarely offers closure, she never spares the reader the pain, violence and disappointment that have sha...moreToni Morrison never takes the easy way out. She rarely offers closure, she never spares the reader the pain, violence and disappointment that have shaped the black experience in America. Yet her books are never without slices of redemption, compassion and even moments of joy that make the intolerable somehow bearable.
Home, barely weighing in as a novel at 145 pages, packs every one of Morrison's literary themes into its compact format: Jim Crow, sharecropping, strong, independent female characters making their way and weaker women exploited by white and black men alike, eugenics, even slavery, if we consider what young Cee suffers. Morrison also confronts us with post-traumatic stress disorder, as the main character, Frank Money, returns the U.S. shattered by the Korean War. And there is a touch of magical surrealism, a technique that Morrison often employs to weave allegory into her brutal realism.
What makes such fullness of content possible in this slim volume is a departure from Morrison's Gothic, rich, lyrical style. Home is restrained, the sentences are often brief and declarative, the scenes are short; though she does use characters' remembrances of times past to show significant amounts of backstory. But her writing is as powerful as has ever been. I love this sentence, for its imagery, its rhythm, the way the beat of it perfectly mirrors its action. The "girl" in this sentence refers to a honeydew melon:
Sarah slid a long, sharp knife from a drawer and, with intense anticipation of the pleasure to come, cut the girl in two.
Two long, slow phrases - drawing out the knife, drawing out the anticipation - then smack! She cuts the girl in two.
This is what it's like reading Toni Morrison - every word, every phrase contribute to what she wants the reader to experience and how she wants the experience to feel. Of course, this is every writer's aim. Few succeed like Toni Morrison.
I didn't find this story transformative, perhaps because it is so relentlessly bleak, until the very end. But I find so much in the writing to admire. (less)
The dank and dangerous cylinder of a new well, where the walls could collapse at any moment, crushing the digger in a muddy grave; a valley so overwhe...moreThe dank and dangerous cylinder of a new well, where the walls could collapse at any moment, crushing the digger in a muddy grave; a valley so overwhelmed by a cliff of granite that light shudders and dies in its wet shadow; a voice choked from sound, leaving a man trapped in silence; a young woman isolated by fear and suspicion in a remote mountain cabin: these are the acedian images Ron Rash writes to sobering effect in The Cove.
This is a novel of a place seemingly suspended in time, a forgotten hollow in the Blue Ridge mountains of western North Carolina, where venomous snakes slither, wild parakeets flit like flocks of bright green faeries and where residents still believe in witches' curses. But the modern world invades this isolated land with the wounded and dead from European trenches. As their broken bodies are returned home, fear of the enemy Hun incites public hysteria.
Rash weaves a story with themes that ring loudly to the present-day: how patriotism can be a mask for prejudice and a justification for violence, how war robs us of our sensibilities as well as our citizens.Yet instead of stating the obvious, he shows us with an atmospheric mystery that runs languid on the surface, but races with an unstoppable current in depths you cannot fathom.
The Cove is written in an opalescent and mannered style that is reminiscent of a 19th century Gothic romance. It abounds with literary archetypes: a persecuted young woman dreaming of escape and the love of a strong man; a mysterious stranger who speaks with music rather than words; a wealthy young villain with delusions of grandeur; a Greek chorus of simple country folk; a gruff but well-meaning brother. We know these characters because they have been with us from our earliest memories of faerie tales and mythology. We sense that our star-crossed lovers will fare no better than Romeo and Juliet; we are wiser than to hope for a hero. Whether or not a hero appears is for you to discover.
The novel's flaws can be found in Rash's over-simplification of the pretentious and cowardly Army recruiter, Chauncey Feith, and the backward suspicions of the townsfolk. He also dwells overlong on Laurel's isolation and loneliness and treats her response to romance with little-girl wonder, which nearly degrades her character rather than invoking the reader's empathy.
Despite some of the weaker character development, this reader is delighted to have discovered a writer who can craft a powerful story with captivating language. (less)
Read most of this during a four hour bus ride from Cannes to Montpellier. Passed it on to a wine importer from Toronto. Great read, but since I'm the...moreRead most of this during a four hour bus ride from Cannes to Montpellier. Passed it on to a wine importer from Toronto. Great read, but since I'm the last person I know to have read this, I won't bore you all with a review. (less)
First-rate historical thriller. I can't recommend this highly enough. Slows down a wee bit about 2/3 in, hence the less-than-five-stars- but perhaps t...moreFirst-rate historical thriller. I can't recommend this highly enough. Slows down a wee bit about 2/3 in, hence the less-than-five-stars- but perhaps that's only because I had little time to devote to reading this week- the slow-down could have been me! Excellent. (less)
A lovely poemovella. Or novellem? How would one categorize this hybrid poem-novella? Whatever its genre, it is without a doubt eloquent and unforgetta...moreA lovely poemovella. Or novellem? How would one categorize this hybrid poem-novella? Whatever its genre, it is without a doubt eloquent and unforgettable. Within this slim volume the history of 20th century Issei and Nisei - first and second generation Japanese immigrants to the western hemisphere - is told by Japanese women, who must "blend into a room", who must "be present without appearing to exist." Otsuka gives these women fearless, tender, angry, sorrowful voices and dares you to not hear.
Countless ships of "picture brides" arrived at docks in California from Japan not long after the end of World War I. These young girls clutched photographs of handsome young men they would meet for the first time. The mail-order brides were terrified by the uncertainties of living in America, of becoming wives and lovers to strangers. They were ill from the long voyage at sea and desperately homesick - although most had been sent to America to relieve their families of financial burden; they knew their only future is before them, their only home the one they would build with their stranger-husbands. "Deep down, though, most of us were really very happy, for soon we would be in America with our new husbands, who had written to us many times over the months." Their men had written of good jobs, large homes and shiny cars.
Of course, with very few exceptions, these promises were lies. These women left lives as laborers in Yamaguchi rice paddies or Osaka brothels to become laborers in California fields or maids in mansions. But they survived, creating homes and businesses with their husbands and children, most keeping to the shelter of the local Japanese community - either by choice or by expectation - until the onset of Word War II. And then they, along with their families, neighborhoods and communities, disappeared.
The story is familiar; it is Otsuka's style that makes this work revelatory. It is told in an incantatory fashion, by a chorus of a thousand unified voices. Rather than relying on the traditional arc of plot and character development, Otsuka reveals the experience of a generation of immigrants through the poetic sweep of images and emotions. It is a song of oral history tamed by a pen, but only just so. (less)
Florida Keys. 1937. Harry Morgan, husband to a former prostitute, disappointed father, erstwhile deep sea fishing guide. Broke. Desperate. Surrounded...moreFlorida Keys. 1937. Harry Morgan, husband to a former prostitute, disappointed father, erstwhile deep sea fishing guide. Broke. Desperate. Surrounded by wasted, depressed, angry, hopeless characters. Welcome to Hemingway.
How can a protagonist who refers to blacks as "niggers", who writes his own moral code with little regard for law or ethics, who regrets his daughters, and who has a dismal outlook on life even on his best days get under your skin? How can a writer, whose phrases are bleak, whose characters are mean, and who has a dismal outlook on life even on his best days make you tremble? Welcome to Hemingway.
When I turned the final page, I couldn't decide if this was one of the most awful stories I'd read or one of the most brilliant. So, I settled on both as true. The story is dark, wet, brutal, discombobulating. The writing is dark, wet, brutal and freaking amazing. The narrative shifts from Harry as first person narrator, allowing the reader to become intimately connected to the "have-nots"- Harry, his wife and family, his hired-as-needed crew- to the third person omniscient, forcing us to observe at a distance the "haves"- the idle rich and educated who moor their yachts and slum at the bars with the locals. In between is Harry's story told in third-person narrative. This manipulation of style breaks the reader from being within the story to observing it, as if to say we're no longer a part of what Harry is doing, we're just watching him from a seat off-stage...
Fortunately, the writing is classic Hemingway- spare and powerful and so, so sad. The scene between Harry and his wife, Marie, is tender and tragic, juxtaposing a black-hearted opportunist with a flawed but loving man. Unfortunately, the writing is classic Hemingway: every character sounds exactly alike, the flow, regardless of point of view, does not change. Although the causes of misery vary between characters, their responses are identical: caustic and wretched. Only Marie Morgan shows spirit and vulnerability. And lest we think Hemingway is getting soft, he cleaves away her dignity in one short scene. At least he leaves her ignorant of the insult.
The disjointed narrative reads like two novellas joined by loosely-intersecting characters and the story suffers from the relentless grind of depravity. There is no redemption, no growth, no character transformation. In the bleak era during which this was written- the Depression- perhaps the tone fit the times.
This was Hemingway's first long work after an eight-year hiatus. It feels like a giant fuck-you by Hemingway to the literary establishment and to his readers. Although Harry Morgan declares "A man.. one man alone ain't got...No man alone now... No matter how a man alone ain't got no bloody--chance." To Have and Have Not reads very much like a man who has declared himself to be alone, and not giving a damn. (less)
This jarring, sad book confused me. Amor Towles brings it all: satire, poignancy, whimsy, wit, irony, tragedy, charm. He creates iconic characters tha...moreThis jarring, sad book confused me. Amor Towles brings it all: satire, poignancy, whimsy, wit, irony, tragedy, charm. He creates iconic characters that pulse with whatever Jazz Age fire the Depression didn't extinguish. He dusts off overwrought cliches of New York and reworks them in the best tradition of Woody Allen. The result is a city as full realized as any human character. Towles polishes the story until it glows in a patina of history, and wraps it in a package of beautiful writing. It is an original narrative that I fairly ached to fall in love with.
But I couldn't.
It is the story of New York City in 1938, a transformative year for the book's narrator, Katey Kontent, who tells us her story from the vantage point of middle age. A photograph at an art exhibit in 1966 takes her back to the year that changed the course of her life.
Katey is a Brooklyn native, street-wise and class savvy. She is single girl, living at Mrs. Martingale's boardinghouse and working as typist in the secretarial pool of Quiggin and Hale. Her roommate, Eve, is recently arrived from the golden cornfields of one of those Midwestern states that begin with the letter "I". She is as blonde and poised as a cornstalk in May, but nowhere near as wholesome or green. And she has no intention of wasting the best years of her life as a nobody-marketing assistant at Pembroke Press. Into their lives, on New Year's Eve 1937, walks cashmere-coated Tinker Grey, oozing WASP cool charm.
See, I'm still loving it at this point, aren't you?
But all too soon, we leave Daisy and Jay -er- Eve and Tinker- in their Manhattan penthouse and we crowd into Katey's Eleventh Street walkup that smells of the next-door bride's attempts at cooking and Katey's stale cigarettes.
And here's where it goes sour for me.
I don't care for Katey. Or rather, I don't care for Amor Towles's interpretation of his female protagonist. She is not believable as a woman. Towles struggles to fix her on the continuum between plucky and seductive, so he makes her both, much to her discredit. It feels like every female character on Mad Men rolled into one woman- a woman whom I could never quite get a picture of nor develop much empathy for. And there is the other great irritant: Katey does not feel of her time. She reads like a 1990's collegiate slacker dropped into 1930's New York.
I think the problem lies with Towles's choice in perspective. Had the author related the story in third-person narrative, the contradictions of character might have been reconciled. But I just don't buy the Park Avenue-to-Hamptons set wholesale embrace of Katey. She's erudite to be sure, but for a blue collar girl from Brooklyn to be regarded as anything more than a passing curiosity by the blue bloods doesn't ring true. I can't make sense of her- she is all at once a depressed, borderline alcoholic, a go-getter who would put Mary Richard's Minnesotan work ethic to shame, a party girl and a loner. Not that she can't be all of those things in any given day. But she is put through the motions, she doesn't seem to really experience them. There is zero chemistry between Tinker and Katey- again, I attribute this to Towles's inability to turn Katey from font to female flesh.
The Epilogue was the final death knell for me. This angular, whirlwind narrative that relies so much on style ends with a series of looking-back-on-my-life platitudes delivered by the now-presumeably content Katey Kontent in a bid for philosophical substance: "It is a bit of a cliche to characterize life as a rambling journey on which we can alter our course at any given time" and "In that sense life is less like a journey than a game of honeymoon bridge." and "...life's distractions and enticements...commands our undivided attention, reshaping the ethereal into the tangible, and commitments into compromises." GAH. Did Paulo Coelho take over on page 321?
I was so certain I'd be swept away by the smoky clubs and shiny penthouses of a city rising to the siren's call of war's fortune. Towles's writing is so swift and crackling, with echoes of Mamet and Stillman - the scratchy Technicolor reels spilled out vivid images at every turn. But instead I felt hollowed out by a character who was a ghost of what she could have been.
Working on a review. I find that writing it out, forcing myself to confront and articulate what does and does not work for me, gives such a different perspective- enriches the reading experience even if it wasn't a positive one. This is a tough one.
What a strange, sad book. It left me feeling very hollow. I'll try to fill the empty space with a review in the coming days. (less)
The Warmth of Other Suns is a transformative book, one that can profoundly change and shape the way we view American history. The list of awards and a...moreThe Warmth of Other Suns is a transformative book, one that can profoundly change and shape the way we view American history. The list of awards and accolades is so long the book does not need my imprimateur, but I will echo each and every one by saying, "Read this."
From 1915 to 1970, thousands of black Americans undertook a pilgrimage of hope and determination that led them from cotton fields, rice and tobacco plantations, from villages and towns in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia to a new world in the north. They followed the trails and tracks of the Underground Railroad laid down by generations of escaped slaves and abolitionists before them, settling primarily in Chicago, Milwaukee, Gary, IN, New York, Newark and Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Oakland. It was, as the author states, "...the first mass act of independence by a people who were in bondage in the country far longer than they have been free." (p. 10) It was an act of individuals and families - breaking free of the cruel grip of Jim Crow - that grew into an extended social revolution. It was perhaps the most significant event of 20th century America and few of us know anything about it.
That Isabel Wilkerson is an award-winning journalist is evident in her intense, encompassing and rigorous research. She conducted over twelve hundred interviews and spent several years examining primary source documents, scholarly and literary works that witness, analyze and recount the beginnings of Jim Crow South in the 1880's, through the end of the Great Migration in the 1970's.
But Ms. Wilkerson is also a consummate story-teller. The Warmth of Other Sons is one of the finest pieces of narrative non-fiction I have read. She takes the very difficult subject of Jim Crow - one that is so horrifying it is hard to absorb and accept- and humanizes it by telling the stories of three participants in the Great Migration. We ride a train north in the late 1930's from Mississippi to Milwaukee with pregnant Ida Mae Gladney, her husband and two small children, who abandon their lives as cotton sharecroppers and eventually make a home in Chicago's South Side. We escape from Florida's citrus groves to Harlem in 1945 with George Swanson Starling, who risks lynching by organizing his fellow fruit pickers to strike for higher wages. We travel the long highway miles between Monroe, Louisiana to Los Angeles, California with Dr. Robert Joseph Pershing Foster in 1953 and imagine a life of respect and glamour that surely awaits an educated, handsome, well-spoken black man- in diverse, liberal Southern California.
Wilkerson weaves these narratives along parallel lines, taking us through each stage of the migrants' journeys concurrently, pausing to describe the social and political conditions that existed in the region or the era. Rarely have I read a non-fiction work that provides so complete a foundation and builds a structure without overwhelming the narrative in detail.
The author tells these migrants' stories with grace and empathy, but does not sentimentalize or over-dramatize history. She presents the ugliness and horror of Jim Crow and the racism that existed in the North - where discrimination could not be identified by a set of written rules and laws, but was as prevalent and cruel as in the South - without making caricatures of its heroes and villains, as too often happens in literary works.
One of the vital outcomes of studying history is compassion developed through greater understanding and knowledge. Although the Great Migration nominally ended in the 1970's, after the Civil Rights Movement of the previous decade tore away the Jim Crow curtain from the South, it is a story without end. We are a nation of immigrants, celebrating the American promise of life, liberty, and happiness, yet we remain divided by class, color, economics, education, and vision. We are largely integrated, but not always comfortably. Isabel Wilkerson offers a transcendent work that is epic in scope but relayed in the most personal, relevant way. It is the quintessential American story - perseverance and hope in the face of injustice and hate. With works as fine as Isabel Wilkerson's, it is my hope that history can light a way to a better future for all. (less)
"On March 14, 1885, a body is floating in the old Marshall Reservoir, in a light snow, and then under a waxing moon." From its opening sentence, The R...more"On March 14, 1885, a body is floating in the old Marshall Reservoir, in a light snow, and then under a waxing moon." From its opening sentence, The Reservoir draws in the reader with harsh details rendered in shapely language. This is historical fiction at its entertaining, dramatic, and authentic best.
Historian and short story writer John Milliken Thompson read a paragraph in a history of Richmond, VA that sparked his curiosity. His research took him deep into 1880's Virginia, into the death of a single, pregnant woman and the sensational trial of a promising young lawyer. He emerged with a classical Greek tragedy that is rich with period detail and crime noir suspense. It's all here: passion and lust, brotherly love and rivalry, trust and betrayal, tenderness and violence. But murder? You be the judge...
This is not a page-burner. The suspense builds slowly, as the story winds back and forth in time and the details of the dead woman's final days, as well as her childhood, are reconstructed. It's like sipping a few fingers of small batch bourbon, not tossing back a belt of Wild Turkey. You'll want to savor the nuance and the smoldering tension as the characters' true natures emerge and you piece together the clues. Milliken Thompson does a masterful job of giving his characters multiple dimensions. No one wears shining armor or angel's wings, but neither is anyone completely black of heart. Well, almost no one...
I was also impressed by the way the author shows the South struggling to adapt in this generation after the Civil War. The societal contrasts are striking: Slavery may be abolished but racial oppression is deeply rooted; cities are rapidly modernizing, but the South is still an agrarian region; most women have little say in their social or economic futures, but some are finding their way into higher education and white collar employment.
The latter third of the book is a gripping courtroom drama that will have you racing to the end. What you discover in the final pages may not be at all what you'd expected. It is not an easy ending, but it is perfectly executed. What you can be certain of is a brilliantly written drama that brings immediate life to a long-ago tragedy. (less)
Geraldine Brooks has a way of infusing vivid color, texture, sound, and aroma to little-explored slices of history, breathing new life into facts cull...moreGeraldine Brooks has a way of infusing vivid color, texture, sound, and aroma to little-explored slices of history, breathing new life into facts culled from microfiche and special library collections. She is a sublime storyteller, one whose prose leads you to curl up on the sofa at any possible opportunity, or sends you early to bed, so you can lose yourself again in her narrative.
The setting of Caleb's Crossing is the island Noepe (now known as Martha's Vineyard), and Cambridge, Massachusetts Bay Colony, in the 1660's. Although the novel is based on the true account of Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk, the first Native American to graduate from Harvard, the voice of the story belongs to fictional Bethia Mayfield, daughter of the island settlement's minister and childhood friend of Caleb. Through Bethia's wanderings, we fall in love with the wild, sparkling beauty of Noepe. We witness the tension and the tenderness between the recently-landed English settlers and the Wampanoag tribe that have served as the island's stewards for centuries. We become a part of the challenging daily lives of America's earliest immigrants as they learn to adapt their crops, animal husbandry, housekeeping, and their religion and philosophical lives to the demands of a new land.
Bethia receives some schooling from her father, a significant exception in an era where women marry young and devote their lives to their hearth and family. Her intelligence, curiosity, and courage make her an ideal companion to Caleb, the son of a Wampanoag chieftain. He matches her wit for wit, learning English, Latin, Hebrew, and Greek in his quest to ensure his own culture's survival by learning the ways of the English invaders.
As the story moves from Noepe to Cambridge and Harvard College, the narrative focuses more on Bethia as she grows into womanhood, than on Caleb as he undertakes his studies. Again, through Bethia's eyes, we witness the growth of a settlement into a town and the early days of American academe. I wonder if Brooks considered using Caleb as narrator and what made her choose to tell the story through the voice of a young Protestant woman. Bethia's character is strong and nuanced. I think Brooks was wise to use a voice to which she could lend the greatest amount of empathy, one that could comprehend and explain the cultures she encounters with authenticity and clarity.
Caleb's Crossing is a fascinating melding of the ancient- Native American culture, the old- English traditions, and the new- a nation in the making. Geraldine Brooks remains one of my favorite writers of historical fiction. From painstaking research, she weaves nuanced novels with rich characters and fascinating plots that are as engaging as they are informative. (less)
I sat down one evening to skim through the first few pages of The Help to determine if I would proceed with a full read. I was immediately hooked and...moreI sat down one evening to skim through the first few pages of The Help to determine if I would proceed with a full read. I was immediately hooked and a couple of sessions later I closed the back cover. I didn't have to work hard- this is a compulsively readable novel. That this is such an easy read troubles me. Its subject matter is as heavy as Mississippi in August, but the tone is often as breezy as girls' night out in Venice Beach.
For all the accolades and attention Kathryn Stockett has received for telling the hidden-in-plain-sight truth of Jim Crow South in the 1960's, I felt cheated by her story-telling. Aibileen and Minny, black women who have spent their lives in service to white families, are portrayed with unsentimental clarity. These women are the real stories, the voices I most wanted to hear. Yet it was as if Stockett didn't trust her ability to carry a full novel in these characters. Instead, she relies on Skeeter - a young white woman who is having a "Eureka" moment of conscience and self-awakening - as the central protagonist. Skeeter is not a compelling narrator and every moment with her was a moment stolen from the characters whose lives should have been the central focus, the eponymous "Help".
In addition, the character of Celia is wasted in a mush of contradictions and implausible behavior. It makes zero sense that a tough-as-nails girl from the hollers couldn't boil water for coffee. Her presence in the plot is inexplicable, as she neither evolves as a character nor moves the story along. Oddly enough, I adored her. I just wish she would have been allowed to grow and participate in the story, instead of remaining its unfunny punchline.
The narrative comes alive in the delicate dance of shame, anger, control and love experienced by so many of the characters, white and black. The real story is rock-solid Aibileen in the Leefolt home as the family cook, maid and child care provider; it is rebel Minny submitting to her abusive husband, determined to keep her family together; it is society-grasping Elizabeth Leefolt, as she feels the desperate tug between convention and her conscience, which struggles to rise from the swamp of racial segregation; it is the deep love between Aibileen and little Mae Mobley Leefolt, contrasted brilliantly with the cold affect Mae Mobley receives from her emotionally stunted mother. These relationships are so compelling, you know that Stockett is writing from her heart, and they are what make this a beautiful read.
The awakening of the women who constitute "The Help" as they tell their stories is also remarkable. But again, the milquetoast and ironically ambitious Skeeter, with her hapless attempts at romance, gets in the way. There is a moment when her motives at gathering and publishing these stories are questioned by an embittered maid, Gretchen, but Stockett drops this in and quickly retreats. It's as if she isn't certain herself who should profit from the telling of these stories, the white woman who can walk away from controversy to a shiny new life in New York City, or the black women who risk everything- their jobs, their homes, their lives- to share the truth.
In the end, I felt that The Help was written with the specific motive of attracting mainstream success. There is potential for a much more profound and revelatory story from this gifted and passionate writer. It made me long for the heartbreaking honesty and poetry of Maya Angelou's I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings and the novel that changed forever how whites told the story of Jim Crow, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. These novels have withstood the test of history; I don't see The Help holding the same ground.(less)
Written as a series of discrete, first-person stories, Frederick Reiken weaves a narrative built from the nexus of the Holocaust. In August 1941, five...moreWritten as a series of discrete, first-person stories, Frederick Reiken weaves a narrative built from the nexus of the Holocaust. In August 1941, five hundred Jewish intellectuals gathered in Kovno, Lithuania under the pretense they had been selected by the SS for specialized research and archival work. Instead, these men were taken outside the city and shot. A suggestion that two may have survived the massacre becomes the foundation of Reiken's ambitious, complex and often-lovely novel.
An attempt to summarize the story would detract from a reader's discovery of its many layers and nuances. Each chapter leads the reader deeper into a mystery that includes a 60's political fugitive, Katherine Goldman, who eludes capture by CIA Agent Sachs, a cult of wealthy sadists engaged in the torture of children, a dramatic reawakening from a coma, stories of love and cuckoldry in desperate times, an escape to the Negev desert from a mold-infected home on the Atlantic seaboard, a gifted young woman whose intellectual curiosity forces open the infected wounds of a buried past. Music, manatees, martyrs, moonlight and multiple personality disorder make for a novel that will drain and exhilarate. If you take too long to read Day for Night, you may find yourself flipping back through chapters to reorient your understanding of the many characters and their connections. But I can't imagine lingering - you will be compelled by the narrative's tension and pace to push through to the bittersweet end.
It is impossible not to compare Day for Night to the contemporary masters of interlocking narratives: David Mitchell and Michael Cunningham. Reiken's writing doesn't exhibit the same ethereal lyricism of these writers. By contrast, his characters are far more earthbound in language, emotion and action. But like Mitchell and Cunningham, Reiken writes deftly from multiple perspectives: children, women, the elderly, American, Israeli, Eastern European, the hunter and the hunted.
There were enough threads left dangling and a few grasps into a black hole of metaphysical speculation to hint at an overreach of plot. I'm still trying to determine if the many inspired parts build a coherent whole. But if a story lingers and teases at my consciousness long after I have read the end page, I know I've encountered a bit of literary magic.
**spoiler alert** The Wolves of Andover didn’t capture my imagination nearly to the degree of Kathleen Kent‘s first novel about her ancestors in Purit...more**spoiler alert** The Wolves of Andover didn’t capture my imagination nearly to the degree of Kathleen Kent‘s first novel about her ancestors in Puritan New England: The Heretic’s Daughter. The potential for 5-star historical fiction abounded. Kent creates settings and characters that reek, glow, clang, shift and connive with all the hardscrabble ferocity of pre-Industrial London and a filthy merchant vessel, and the pastoral beauty of 17th century New England. But I felt that Kent was trying to tell too many stories in too short of space. Thomas Carrier/Morgan was by far the most interesting character and the hunt for his head the more tense and dynamic story, but we were instead forced to spend much of our time with the busy-body handwringer, Martha.
In reflecting on the novel, I keep coming back to two incidents that knocked against the authenticity of the story and its central character: the wolf bite and Martha’s recording of Thomas’s story in her red diary. Kent carefully constructs Martha to be a woman of uncommon independence, wit and intelligence. Then, the author has her 1) stick her face into an enclosure holding ferocious, bloodthirsty wolves and 2) put into writing a story that many had given their lives to protect and hold secret. Neither incident was necessary to the story and both undermined the gravity of the plot.
Kent writes beautifully but I hope she regains the intensity and integrity of The Heretic’s Daughter. I recommend the outstanding novels of Kate Grenville, another who writes of colonial Britain and the frontiers crossed by those who seek to escape British tyranny (in Grenville’s case, Australia). (less)
For neither the faint nor pure of heart. This is brutal, grimy, potent, bleak and rough. The mystery aspect was compelling, but the relationships were...moreFor neither the faint nor pure of heart. This is brutal, grimy, potent, bleak and rough. The mystery aspect was compelling, but the relationships were exasperating. Good entertainment, but you'll need a hot shower when it's over. (less)
This is a near-flawless gem of storytelling. It is not a glamorous diamond of dubious origin or a smoky topaz that speaks of distant lands. It is a Yo...moreThis is a near-flawless gem of storytelling. It is not a glamorous diamond of dubious origin or a smoky topaz that speaks of distant lands. It is a Yogo sapphire, a native gem of Montana, a stone that speaks of the endless blue of prairie skies, of cornflowers tucked in mountain valleys, of streams running high with wild trout.
Doig's narrator, Paul Milliron, is Montana's Superintendent of Public Instruction. It is the late 1950's and Paul has returned to his hometown in the prairie of central Montana to close its one-room schoolhouse. Paul's story takes us back to 1909, when the prairies bordering the Rocky Mountains were still gateways to an untamed West. We relive a few crucial years of Paul's coming-of-age, when his father, his brothers and one unforgettable teacher form a constellation of influence, love and protection and through which Paul sees the wonder of family, community and Halley's Comet.
There is nothing here but character, setting, plot. And these are everything. Don't mistake the simplicity and gentleness of Doig's narrative as anything other than sheer genius. There are no tricks, no clever twists, no moralizing, sentimentality or scolding to disguise Doig's true purpose: to tell a great story. A great American story.
This is a book I would read aloud to my children, to woo them into loving literature, to fill their imagination with young boys on horseback homesteading in the American West, to make them yearn to translate cryptic Latin proverbs and to allow them to recognize and be grateful for the teachers who give them the gift of knowledge.
Ivan Doig is a national treasure. This book is a work of beauty.
Have you read The Great Brain series, John Dennis Fitzgerald's collection of Western Americana, set in Utah in the late 1800s? The based-loosely-on-th...moreHave you read The Great Brain series, John Dennis Fitzgerald's collection of Western Americana, set in Utah in the late 1800s? The based-loosely-on-the author's-childhood stories are told by young John Fitzgerald and recount the adventures, mishaps, misdemeanors, and rebellions of his precocious older brother, Tom. If you haven't, you are in for a whale of a treat. Although meant for adolescents, adults will appreciate the sophisticated themes Fitzgerald offers up: an Irish Catholic family at cultural odds in a Mormon-dominant community; inherent racism against Jews, Greeks, Native Americans; corporal punishment; ecclesiastical cruelty; creative financial management; and a bit of gentle sleuthing for fans of historical crime fiction.
Why I am waxing on about a series I read more than thirty years ago and what does the Great Brain have to do with Ivan Doig and his post-WWI Montana? Well, here's the thing: These great authors tell stories of the American West, of towns bursting to life by bursting forth the mineral riches that lay beneath their shale and clay crust. They tell stories of communities dependent upon the strength of its law-abiding, God-fearing families. And with only twenty years separating their settings, turn-of-the-century Utah and 1919 Montana are cousins a scant generation apart.
The Great Brain entertains with rollicking stories that have deeper, sharper, darker themes. Work Song has the potential for the same, as the community of Butte, MT faces post-war weariness, the flu epidemic, Bolshevik revolution, and copper mining disasters, but Doig never reaches past simple entertainment. It is a story with rounded edges and fluffernutter filling. After the beauty and power of The Whistling Season, set ten years prior and during which we are introduced to Morrie, Work Song is a let-down. It is a darling and endearing novel, but I venture to guess that thirty years on I'll still remember The Great Brain series and I'll struggle to recall Work Song(less)
This is beautifully written, but so dark and full of despair that I couldn't wait for it to end so I could reenter the light of my clean and well-orde...moreThis is beautifully written, but so dark and full of despair that I couldn't wait for it to end so I could reenter the light of my clean and well-ordered life. That it took only a quiet morning to read is testament both to its gripping power and my determination to not linger in the dust and mud of Depression-era Iowa.
The words and scenes are powerfully rendered and unflinching in their depiction of the isolation and desperation of American farm life in the early years of the 20th century. But the tenuous grasp on solid mental ground of the central characters and the bitterness that runs thickly through their veins overwhelmed so short a space. Did these people never experience joy, forgiveness, laughter, a moment's peace? It was as if Hoover sifted through the many years this book spans and chose to reveal only the most brutal.
In this way, it was a novel that read as a tone poem- a single haunting movement of tragedy- when life is more complex and symphonic. Some gentle harmony would have made the characters greater in dimension and sympathy.
There is an outstanding review below by Shannon that states all that I could want to say about this tremendous book. It's a beautifully rendered story...moreThere is an outstanding review below by Shannon that states all that I could want to say about this tremendous book. It's a beautifully rendered story and a compelling history that I encourage any and all to read. (less)
A gunshot cracks the crystalline stillness of an Illinois winter morning. It is a crime of passion that cracks the facade of uprightness and innocence...moreA gunshot cracks the crystalline stillness of an Illinois winter morning. It is a crime of passion that cracks the facade of uprightness and innocence of a simple country town. Friendships and marriages have crumbled and childhoods withered away in the face of adult guilt, disappointment and anger.
Decades later an old man gathers the threads of his memory and reconstructs the turning point of his youth, as if by acknowledging the details of the murder, he will atone for a friendship abandoned.
In sharp contrast to a story fraught with turmoil and drama, Maxwell's writing is pure and vulnerable. He writes through the perspectives of several characters: young boys, grown men, even a dog; which may be the book's only literary flaw, yet it is this voice that wrenched my sentimental heart the most.
The story itself is compelling, but in lesser hands could easily be maudlin. It is the exquisite writing, the images that needle their way under your emotional skin, that make this novella impossible to forget. You are seduced by the sweet and easy friendship of Lloyd and Clarence, your stomach clenches with the doom present in an increasingly abusive marriage, your pulse quickens as furtive passion reveals itself and grows to its inevitable heady bloom.
I wonder how I could have gone through all of my own decades without encountering Maxwell. Truly a master of American letters.
______________________________________- Literary perfection. I'll be back with more comments, but had to get this in and thank Jeanette for the recommendation. (less)
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