Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 256

June 29, 2017: The US and World War I: Representing the War

[On June 26th, 1917, the first 14,000 U.S. soldiers arrived in France to join the Allied effort in The Great War. To commemorate that centennial, this week I’ll be AmericanStudying the U.S. and WWI—share your thoughts and contexts in comments, please!]On lessons from two compelling American cultural representations of the Great War.One of the war novels most frequently taught in American high school classrooms emerged from World War I, but not from the American or even the Allied experience of it: German veteran Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929). I read Remarque’s novel in a high school English class in Virginia in the early 1990s, and I know that many of my Fitchburg State undergraduates have read it in Massachusetts high school classrooms in the 2010s, to cite at least two specific examples of the book’s enduring presence in those settings. Remarque’s novel is both an immersive, realistic, psychologically nuanced depiction of the war and its effects and a subtle but stirring anti-war statement, and for those and many other reasons (including its status as a too-often banned book) it’s a text well worth continuing to share with young readers (and all other audiences). But at the same time, American literary and popular culture include their own multi-layered collections of Great War representations, and those texts—and in particular a couple under-remembered works on which I’ll focus here—likewise have a good deal to offer students and audiences.Many of the most prominent American Modernist writers and works feature or even focus on World War I, of course: from Jay Gatsby and Nick Carraway’s status as veterans in The Great Gatsby (1925) to Ernest Hemingway’s debut short story collection In Our Time(1925) and anti-war novel A Farewell to Arms (1929) to John Dos Passos’ experimental historical novel The 42ndParallel (1930, and then the first part of his U.S.A. trilogy [1938]). But to my mind the most unique and compelling American WWI novel is Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun (1939), a book that in both its depiction of the physical and psychological effects of war and its anti-war sentiments interestingly parallels Remarque’s novel. Johnny’s unfortunate timing—it was published shortly before the outbreak of World War II, and as of 1941 Trumbo and his publisher J.B. Lippincott decided to suspend printings for the remainder of the war—no doubt contributed to its relative lack of prominence; the 1971 film adaptation(directed by Trumbo himself) is somewhat better known, particularly after clips from it were used in the music video for Metallica’s “One” (1989). But such adaptations offer only glimpses of the psychological realism and depths of Trumbo’s novel, which deserves far wider readership as a stark and significant depiction of both war and veterans.Appearing just two years after Trumbo’s novel was one of the most famous and successful American war movies, Sergeant York (1941); York netted Gary Cooper a Best Actor Oscar, was nominated for 11 Academy Awards overall, and has been added to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry, among many other accolades. Cooper’s impressive performance and the title character’s interesting blend of religious faith and (eventual) wartime courage keeps Yorkfrom becoming propaganda, but I would argue that it tends that way, and would highlight instead a more thoroughly nuanced and successful American World War I film: the silent classic Wings (1927), which interestingly featured Gary Cooper in his first prominent (if still supporting) role. Wings certainly presents at times a spectacular version of war, as illustrated by the famous dogfight sequences(which likely won the film its own Oscar, as the first Best Picture winner). But Wings also features one of the more striking moments from any war film, as one of its protagonists (Buddy Rogers’ Jack) accidentally shoots down and kills his best friend (Richard Arlen’s David, who is piloting a stolen German plane as part of an escape from behind enemy lines), leading to a deathbed scene featuring the first same-sex kiss in an American film. While Wings is not as overtly anti-war as Trumbo’s novel, these and other concluding scenes reflect a nuanced and realistic portrayal of the war’s effects on its participants and veterans, making the film another cultural representation of the Great War that deserves a 21st century audience.Last Great War Studying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other WWI stories or contexts you’d highlight?

June 28, 2017: The US and World War I: African American Soldiers

[On June 26th, 1917, the first 14,000 U.S. soldiers arrived in France to join the Allied effort in The Great War. To commemorate that centennial, this week I’ll be AmericanStudying the U.S. and WWI—share your thoughts and contexts in comments, please!]On two opposing yet crucially interconnected ways to remember a community of veterans.Thanks in large part to the film Glory (1989), we’ve started to develop a collective national narrative of the U.S. Colored Troops who fought in the Civil War; thanks to similar cultural texts such as the film Red Tails (2012), we’ve perhaps begun to do the same for the African Americans who served in World War II. But for whatever reason—perhaps it’s as simple as the absence, to date, of a prominent historical film or other cultural text centered on them?—I don’t think we have much of a collective awareness at all of the equally significant community of African American soldiers who served in World War I. Coming half a century after abolition, in the same era as such defining histories as the Great Migration, the lynching epidemic, and the founding of the NAACP, this World War I service is certainly as significant as those other, more famous ones, and deserves far more remembrance in our 21stcentury culture.If we start to engage with the histories of this community, however, another reason for our general amnesia about them becomes clearer: compared to the pretty inspiring (if of course still complex) Civil War and World War II stories, the history of these World War I soldiers—and of the veterans when they returned home—is a strikingly dark and divisive one. Exemplifying those dark histories are the words of the U.S. chief military commander, General John Joseph “Blackjack” Pershing, who while publicly recognizing African American soldiers privately composed a secret communiqué to white officers instructing them that “we must not eat with them, must not shake hands with them, seek to talk to them or to meet with them outside the requirements of military service. We must not commend too highly these troops, especially in front of white Americans.” And when they returned to the United States, these African American veterans found themselves right back in a society where President Wilson had recently segregated the federal government, where The Birth of a Nation (1915) was a towering cultural achievement, where whatever protections their uniforms had afforded them ended as abruptly as did the war.So we can’t better remember these World War I soldiers and veterans without remembering another in the long national series of hypocrisies and horrors directed at African Americans—which of course doesn’t mean we shouldn’t remember them (quite the opposite). But on the other hand, we can also work to push beyond those negatives to remember the deeply inspiring sides to this community’s service, and to consider how they brought those experiences back with them to the post-war nation. In his May 1919 piece “Returning Soldiers,” published as an editorial for his monthly NAACP magazine The Crisis, W.E.B. Du Bois makes the case for thinking of the soldiers in precisely that way; throughout his stirring editorial Du Bois contrasts the cause for which these soldiers have risked their lives for the “fatherland” to which they will soon come home, concludes, “We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting. Make way for Democracy! We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why.” It’s quite possible to see this era, and this community of veterans, as a vital step toward the Civil Rights Movement—and in any case it’s well worth remembering this inspiring side of their too-often dark experiences.Next Great War Studying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other WWI stories or contexts you’d highlight?

June 27, 2017: The US and World War I: The American Expeditionary Forces (AEF)

[On June 26th, 1917, the first 14,000 U.S. soldiers arrived in France to join the Allied effort in The Great War. To commemorate that centennial, this week I’ll be AmericanStudying the U.S. and WWI—share your thoughts and contexts in comments, please!]On three interesting histories and contexts for the million U.S. soldiers who fought for General John Joseph “Blackjack” Pershing in the Great War.1)      Doughboys: The slang term for U.S. soldiers didn’t originate in World War I; it apparently dates back to the Mexican American War, with a somewhat unclear or contested etymology (the two most likely derivations are the resemblance between brass uniform buttons and doughnuts; or the chalky northern Mexican dust on their uniformsthat made soldiers appear to be made of “adobe,” which was then translated as doughboy). But it was during the Great War that the term became ubiquitous with American soldiers, and I would argue that the reason is a telling one: that this was the first international war in which U.S. troops fought alongside those from many other nations, and so such a shorthand linguistic nickname was necessary both to highlight American participation in the conflict and to distinguish our soldiers from those other groups (each of whom apparently had their own parallel nicknames, including Tommies for British soldiers and poilus for French ones). 2)      Influenza: As I wrote in this post, the 1918-1919 influenza epidemic was deeply interconnected with the Great War, both in its origins and how it spread around the world. And the epidemic hit American soldiers very hard, with more than 40,000 dying from the disease in the fall of 1918 (among the nearly 400,000 who were stricken by it, almost half of the U.S. force). The idea that the war’s unprecedented and horrific levels of death and destruction fundamentally changed the world is one of the most familiar and widely shared historical narratives; but a case could be made that it was influenza, not the war, which most fully produced those effects, not least because returning soldiers carried the disease with them and thus spread it to nations (such as the U.S.) that had not seen or experienced the war’s destructions first-hand. At the very least, it’s impossible to separate the war from the epidemic, as the AEF’s tragic experiences reflect all too clearly.3)      The Bonus Army: Another familiar American historical narrative is that over the last half-century (since Vietnam, the narrative generally goes) the nation has stopped taking good or even adequate care of its veterans. That narrative (which leaves aside veterans of color, on whom more tomorrow) is largely based on World War II, when returning veterans were greatly aided by policies like the G.I. Bill. World War I was a different story, however, as reflected by the stories and histories of the Bonus Army (or Bonus Expeditionary Force, as they called themselves), the group of WWI veterans and their families who marched on Washington in the spring of 1932 to demand promised but greatly delayed compensation for their service. Better remembering the Bonus Army would thus help us likewise better engage with both the longstanding issue of veteran care and the specific experiences shared by many of the million men who made up the American Expeditionary Forces. Next Great War Studying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other WWI stories or contexts you’d highlight?

June 26, 2017: The US and World War I: Entering the War

[On June 26th, 1917, the first 14,000 U.S. soldiers arrived in France to join the Allied effort in The Great War. To commemorate that centennial, this week I’ll be AmericanStudying the U.S. and WWI—share your thoughts and contexts in comments, please!]On two ways to understand a striking foreign policy reversal.As I noted in this post on President Woodrow Wilson’s second term, that term began with one of the more abrupt and striking presidential policy reversals we’ve ever seen (at least in the years Before Trump, as our horrifyingly unprecedented era has changed that historical metric as it has so many others). Having campaigned for and won reelection in 1916 with the slogan “He kept us out of war” and on a platform of continued neutrality in the still-unfolding European and world conflict, Wilson dramatically shifted course almost immediately thereafter: on February 3rd, a month before his March 5thsecond inauguration, he addressed Congress to announce that he was severing diplomatic ties with Germany; and on April 2nd, less than a month after that inauguration, he addressed Congress once again, this time to request that they authorize a War Resolution (which they did four days later). By early June, after some conversation with England and France over whether our troops would initially serve within their units (a concept that came to be known as amalgamation) or in their own separate units (which is what Wilson and the military leadership decided to do), those first regiments of American soldiers set sail for Europe and the Great War. The question of how and why this reversal took place—not only in Wilson’s policies, but also in public opinion, which had been overwhelmingly in favor of neutrality for years but had likewise shifted by early 1917—is of course a complex and multi-layered one, but I would highlight two particularly salient elements here. Ever since the May 1915 sinking of the British passenger liner Lusitania(with 128 U.S. citizens on board) by German submarines, American narratives of the war had positioned Germany as its primary aggressor; beginning in late January 1917, Germany undertook an even more aggressive policy known as “unrestricted (or total) submarine warfare,” targeting neutral shipping (in an effort to blockade and starve Britain) and in the process sinking numerous American ships (five were sunk in March 1917 alone). While these submarine attacks on American ships were nowhere near as dramatic or visible as the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, I would argue that they can and should be seen as a similar, unofficial but clear, declaration of war against a neutral adversary; indeed, since the German submarines were targeting non-combatants, the attacks comprised an even more aggressive and controversial military policy than Japan’s. It’s difficult to argue that Wilson and Congress should not, or could not, have responded to such aggressions.The submarine attacks weren’t the only controversial German action in this early 1917 moment, however, and the other most famous one is significantly more complex. In mid-January, British intelligence intercepted a telegram from German foreign minister Arthur Zimmermann to the Mexican government; Zimmermann promised Mexico that if it joined in a future war against the United States, Germany would help Mexico recover territory lost to the U.S. after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Britain passed the telegram on to the Wilson administration, which released it to the press in late February to great public outcry. It’d be entirely possible to read this entire contratemps as simply (or at least largely) political posturing by the administration to push both Congress and public opinion toward support for a declaration of war. But in any case, the focus on and outrage over the Zimmermann telegram reflects the continued role that hemispheric concerns played in 20th century American wars; every prior U.S. military conflict had featured central such concerns, and while the Great War was of course far more tied to Europe than to the Western Hemisphere, the telegram pushed Americans to recognize the possible extension of that war to our neighbors and borders. A Southern border in particular, of course, that had been determined by one of those prior military conflicts—a dark and complex history to which both the telegram and the outraged American response linked this new conflict.Next Great War Studying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other WWI stories or contexts you’d highlight?

June 24-25, 2017: Crowd-sourced Beach Reads

[For this year’s installment in my annual Beach Reads series, I wanted to focus on mystery authors and novels about which I’ve previously blogged in this space, leading up a new post and author on Friday. As always, this crowd-sourced post is drawn from the responses and nominations of fellow Beach Readers—add yours in comments, please!]First, a reminder that one of my recent Guest Posts, Matthew Teutsch’s on five African American novels we should all read, is a great source for Beach Read ideas!Other Beach Read nominations:Jeff Renye recommends LOVECRAFT COUNTRY (the all-caps are Jeff’s, to make clear the strength of his recommendation!), which is headed to HBO with Jordan Peele Executive Producing! Jeff also nominates, “Sleepings Giants by Sylvain Neuvel [shared with him by Vincent Kling]—finishing the first novel now, part II came out this year, titled Waking Gods.” And he adds, “if you've seen Twin Peaks(original series + Fire Walk with Me), then Mark Frost's 2016 novel The Secret History of Twin Peaks is a must. It's fun, too, as long as you've seen the series, and would make for a good beach read.”Katy Covino highlights “The Dark Tower. Absolutely addicted.”Tim McCaffrey nominates, “Bill Bryson's In a Sunburned Country. Ball Four by Jim Bouton. The Windup Girl by Paulo Bacigalupi.”Shirley Wagner shares, “ Camino Island by John Grisham; Earthly Remains by Donna Leon.”DeMisty Bellinger-Delfeld notes, “Two of my friends have books coming out that I'm reading this summer: SJ Sindu’s Marriage of a Thousand Lies and Nick White’s How to Survive a Summer !”Beazley Kanost writes, “Terry Pratchett's Diskworld novels are funny and smart; I recommend starting with Guards! Guards ! His collaboration with Neil Gaiman, Good Omens , is also a lot of fun. William Gibson's Neuromancer . My favorite murder mysteries are the first 8 or so by Elizabeth George, and P.D. James wrote two I love with a young woman private detective: An Unsuitable Job for a Woman and The Skull Beneath the Skin . Cormac McCarthy's Suttree (set in Knoxville, TN) may not qualify as beach reading but it has a lush and resonant sense of humor and detail that his later, Texas novels lack—and the one scene in fiction that made me laugh out loud.”Rebecca Carpenter shares, “ Never Caught or The Hemingses of Monticello , both great reads!”
Michael Greenwood writes, “Authenticity. Just finished reading The Tender Bar . A rich, first person account of a boy growing up without a dad. The writer used a heavy brush, imbued with a bias for unconditional love and forgiveness, to create characters that walked with Dickensian verisimilitude. I'm reminded about how a book becomes a companion that I look forward to visiting with each day. Then, there's that feeling, often derived from a compelling book, that's similar to when you're with a special someone that ‘sees you’ and you ‘see them.’ I will miss this one.”


Kathleen Morrissey writes, “Arundhati Roy's new novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness has recently come out! After her debut 20 years ago, Roy finally published a new book. She is an avid social activist in India, and this new novel explores some of the systemic issues of the nation. She has an amazing style and unique voice. I will say that it is a commitment if you are looking for something lighter.”

Andrew DaSilva writes, “ Mission to Tibet is a good one. It’s big and will take the whole summer to read!”

Maria DiFrancesco nominates Zadie Smith’s Swing Time .

Larry Rosenwald highlights Kirsten Bakis’ Lives of the Monster Dogs .

Rochelle Davis Gerber nominates J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy.

Diego Ubiera nominates Marlon James.

Nicole Sterbinsky highlights " I Am China by Xiaolu Guo. I'm reading it right now and I'm enjoying it."

Matthew Teutsch Tweets, “To celebrate OK Computer turning 20, how about Radiohead: Welcome to the Machine ?”And Andrea Grenadier adds, “Okay, this is NOT a summer read, but recently finished the amazing Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, and The Purple Swamp Hen by Penelope Lively, her amazing new book of short stories. And for fun, my stepsister Erika Lewis has just published a wonderful piece of fantasy, called Game of Shadows , which I'm really enjoying.”Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Other Beach Read nominees you’d share?

June 23, 2017: Mysterious Beach Reads: Tana French

[For this year’s installment in my annual Beach Reads series, I wanted to focus on mystery authors and novels about which I’ve previously blogged in this space. Leading up a new post and author on Friday, and then one of my favorite crowd-sourced posts of the year—so add your Beach Read suggestions in comments, please!]On two ways to AmericanStudy the talented and popular Irish mystery novelist.Although Tana French was apparently born in Vermont (a fact I only learned while researching this post, for the record) and retains her American citizenship (ditto), I’m not going to pretend that her series of six (to date) bestselling mystery novels set in and around her longtime home city of Dublin isn’t deeply and crucially Irish. As virtually every post in this week’s series has reflected, mystery novels are almost always as much about their settings as their plots: Ross MacDonald’s Southern California, Tony Hillerman’s Southwest, and Attica Locke’s Houston are all central and crucial presences in their mysteries (as of course are Dupin’s Paris, Miss Marple’s St. Mary Mead, and many more). Moreover, one of Tana French’s most important and ingenious formal choices—to rotate the first-person narration of her books between different detectives in Dublin’s Murder Squad, introducing such detectives in earlier books and then shifting the narration to them in later ones—has allowed her novels to trace the distinct Irish backgrounds and situations, experiences and heritages, lives and identities, of her six detective-narrators just as fully as those of her murder victims and their worlds. I’m no IrishStudier (obviously), but I’d be hard-pressed to imagine that any writer has captured 21st century Ireland with more breadth and depth than has French in her stunning series.Yet French’s novels can and do still speak to us AmericanStudiers, and here I’ll highlight one thematic and one formal such transatlantic connection. Each of the six novels has dealt with different central themes; while all of them could be productively linked to American contexts, I would argue that that’s particularly the case with her best novel to date, Broken Harbour (2012). Without spoiling anything, I’ll say that the crimes and mysteries of Broken Harbour (including those involving the detective-narrator as well, as always with French) unfold in a family, home, and community economically and psychologically devastated by the mortgage and financial crises of 2008. One of French’s greatest skills is her ability to take such social and cultural issues and connect them to universal human questions and themes, and Brokenlinks that post-2008 historical moment to a layered and powerful examination of both the ideals and the limits (and of course the dangers) of home and family. I would link all those aspects of French’s amazing novel to a parallel but more distinctly American text, Karl Taro Greenfeld’s psychological and horror thriller short story “Horned Men” (2012). [Greenfeld’s 2015 novel The Subprimes seems to mine the same vein, but I haven’t had a chance to read that yet.] On their own, but even more as a pairing, French’s and Greenfeld’s stories present and plumb the very human horrors in these recent histories.French’s formal use of the rotating first-person narrators can also be interestingly connected to American contexts and mysteries. As I wrote in the post on Lethem and O’Brien, first-person narration is always a tricky element of mystery fiction, and French’s novels largely sidestep the questions I raised in that post; I don’t believe we’re supposed to see these narrators as writing their stories, but they’re clearly remembering them from some unspecified future point (they consistently, purposefully use foreshadowing, for example). But what I’m particularly interested in is the way that French uses her first-person narrations to explore the personal and psychological sides to these police detectives. As always, feel free to correct me, dear readers, but my sense of mystery novels is that they tend more often to present police protagonists with third-person narration (as does Hillerman), and other protagonists (whether private detectives like Lew Archer or sidekicks like Dr.Watson) with first-person narration. If that is indeed the case, it would seem to me that it might relate to our sense of police officers as public figures, ones whose roles are less tied to their private or personal identities than might be those of private detectives or others. Whereas French’s narrators and novels make clear that the lines between private and public, personal and professional, are as blurry and ambiguous for police detectives as they are for all of us.Crowd-sourced post this weekend,BenPS. So one more time: what do you think? Other Beach Read nominees, mysterious or otherwise, you’d share?

June 22, 2017: Mysterious Beach Reads: Attica Locke

[For this year’s installment in my annual Beach Reads series, I wanted to focus on mystery authors and novels about which I’ve previously blogged in this space. Leading up a new post and author on Friday, and then one of my favorite crowd-sourced posts of the year—so add your Beach Read suggestions in comments, please!]On the wonderful first two novels by a new favorite author.Attica Locke’s debut novel, Black Water Rising (2009), was the best book I read in 2014. I shouldn’t have been surprised, as it was shared with me by my favorite writer and book-recommender. But while I knew that meant it would be a good read, I was expecting just that: an entertaining and well-done mystery novel (which would have been more than enough, to be clear). And Black Water Rising is a hell of a lot more than that—I’m not going to spoil any of its particulars here, but will simply say that the book is not only a great mystery and thriller, but also a multi-generational historical novel (one with a lot to say about both the 1980s and the 1960s), a socially realistic depiction of issues such as race, labor, and the rise of the oil industry in Houston and the South, a potent and moving portrayal of family and parenting, and a lot more besides. If you want to know the rest, you know what LeVar Burton and his kid reviewers would tell you to do!I just got Locke’s second novel, The Cutting Season (2012), as a holiday present, and I haven’t had a chance to finish it yet (too busy writing and scheduling future blog posts before the new semester begins, natch). [UPDATE: I subsequently finished Cuttingand it was just as fun and impressive as I predicted it would be.] But I can tell you for sure that no matter how it ends, Cutting Season retains all those elements and adds the histories and legacies of slavery for good measure; the novel reads like a combination of Black Water Rising and David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident(1981), one of my favorite American novels of all time. I would have said it was impossible for Locke to improve upon Black Water, but it seems clear to me that she has indeed taken a significant step forward, engaging more broadly and deeply with American history and identity without losing a bit of what makes her books so engaging and compelling.Locke’s third novel, Pleasantville , is due out this coming April [UPDATE: I subsequently read and loved Pleasantvilleas well, and blogged about it here], and is apparently a direct sequel to Black Water Rising, featuring its lawyer protagonist Jay Porter in a mystery set fifteen years after the end of that prior book (slight but not hugely significant spoilers for Black Water at that link). I’m excited to see where Locke takes Jay this time, and what she might be adding to her repertoire with this next book. But at this point, I also have to agree with Dennis Lehane: “I’d probably read the phone book if her name were on the spine.” When I find an author about whom I feel that way, well, that’s one of the things I love best about reading and culture. Last mysterious read tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Beach Read nominees, mysterious or otherwise, you’d share?

June 21, 2017: Mysterious Beach Reads: Jonathan Lethem and Tim O’Brien

[For this year’s installment in my annual Beach Reads series, I wanted to focus on mystery authors and novels about which I’ve previously blogged in this space. Leading up a new post and author on Friday, and then one of my favorite crowd-sourced posts of the year—so add your Beach Read suggestions in comments, please!]On two ground-breaking novels that explore the mysteries of memory.
One of the more interesting, if mostly taken for granted by readers, literary puzzles is the role of first-person narration in mystery fiction. For a century or so the first-person narrator was a friend and confidant of the detective: the unnamed narrator in Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin stories (which are often seen as originating the genre), Dr. Watson in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales, Captain Hastings in Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot novels, and the like; these narrators usually depicted themselves as consciously writing down the detective’s exploits after the fact (which is plausible enough, if of course complicated in that the narrator thus knows the resolution of the mystery throughout the story). With the 20th-century shift to American hard-boiled detective fiction, however, the first-person narrator became more often than not the detective him- (and eventually her-) self, introducing a couple more complicating questions into the mix: when the story is being narrated, as they are written in the past tense and occasionally include a distant perspective on the events being described (“I should have known she was trouble the second she walked into my office,” to cite a particularly stereotypical example), but at the same time often feel as if the events are unfolding in the present; and, if the story is being narrated from some future moment, whether we can necessarily trust the narrator’s memories (especially since most fictional detectives are not nearly as disinterested in their cases and clients as they might pretend).
As far as I know (or at least as far as I have read), the vast majority of first-person detective novels sidestep these questions, and in fact depend on a reader doing the same: that is, if the reader begins to doubt the detective’s memories or reliability as a narrator, the entire premise of the story would pretty quickly fall apart. While of course unreliable first-person narrators are entirely possible as a fictional option, as Edgar Allan Poe himself proves in stories like “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat,” they would seem antithetical to the goals of mystery fiction, and more exactly to how fully the reader relies on the detective to guide us to the text and mystery’s successful conclusion. But there are a couple of terrific late 20th-century (in fact from the same year, coincidentally) mystery novels that not only acknowledge these issues, but make them central to their literary projects and themes, all without abandoning (revising, to be sure, but still deploying very successfully to my mind) the classic elements of mystery fiction: Jonathan Lethem’s Gun, with Occasional Music (1994) and Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods (1994).
The two novels could not be more distinct in either setting or tone: Lethem’s is a work of satirical and humorous science-fiction, set in a somewhat distant (if certainly recognizably possible) future which includes genetically mutated talking kangaroos and various psychological and medical uses of technology for humans as well; O’Brien’s is a tense psychological and historical thriller, focused on a Vietnam veteran turned politician whose career is destroyed by revelations of a My Lai like incident. O’Brien’s novelist-narrator is not even explicitly a detective, although he certainly has investigated extensively the novel’s central mysteries (which I wouldn’t dream of spoiling here!). But what both novels share is a fascinating use of the issue of memory itself to complicate and enrich their mystery plots: in Lethem’s work, a medical procedure that can erase memories and replace them with pre-fabricated narratives becomes both crucial to the detective’s ongoing investigations and instrumental to his narration, as he goes into a six-year cryogenic sleep in the middle of the novel and awakes on the other side of such a procedure; in O’Brien’s, virtually all of the central themes come down to the parallel questions first of the memories of war and their accompanying traumas and aftereffects and second to how much any individual or community can rely on memory to determine the truths of histories and lives.
It feels somewhat strange to link these two texts in this space, since O’Brien’s is deeply concerned with American history and culture and Lethem’s much less so (although it has plenty to say about life in Los Angeles in the late 20th century, as viewed through its futuristic fun-house mirror). If you’ve only got time for one, I recommend O’Brien, for that reason and just because it’s one of the best novels by one of our most important contemporary novelists. But they both rework the mystery genre in very fun and successful ways, and in so doing both have a lot to say about not only such books and their readers, but about the human identities and issues (like memory) to which they always connect. Next mysterious read tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Beach Read nominees, mysterious or otherwise, you’d share?

June 20, 2017: Mysterious Beach Reads: Tony Hillerman

[For this year’s installment in my annual Beach Reads series, I wanted to focus on mystery authors and novels about which I’ve previously blogged in this space. Leading up a new post and author on Friday, and then one of my favorite crowd-sourced posts of the year—so add your Beach Read suggestions in comments, please!]On a great mystery series that captures the lure of the Southwest, then and now.There were a lot of reasons why Colorado’s Mesa Verde National Park stood out to me among the many amazing stops on my family’s 1990 trip to visit Southwestern National Parks. Exploring thousand year old cliff dwellings, hiking out to the site of long-preserved petroglyphs, surprising a lone coyote at a sunset ruin—these are the kinds of experiences that will hit a 13 year old AmericanStudier in a particular way. But perhaps the most alluring aspect of Mesa Verde is its central mystery: the question of why the Anasazi people abruptly abandoned their cliff dwellings less than a century into their time there, and what happened to them after their departure. Archaeologists and historians have a variety of theories, but to some degree the Anasazi’s fate will always remain a mystery—and will thus keep young AmericanStudiers (and all the rest of us) coming back to Mesa Verde.Even without an event as striking as the Anasazi’s departure, the dominant features of the Southwest’s human landscape—villages atop isolated mesas, dwellings in the sides of gaping canyons, petroglyphs carved in the rock and sand—lend themselves nicely to the mysteriously inclined. No one capitalized on that element more fully, nor more effectively, than Tony Hillerman, the University of New Mexico journalism professor who wrote (among his more than 30 total books) a series of 18 phenomenal mysteries focused on Navajo policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. I may be misremembering for dramatic effect, but I’m pretty sure I was reading one of the best novels in the series, A Thief of Time (1988), during that family National Park vacation—and I know that I won’t ever think of New Mexico’s canyons and ruins without thinking of how Hillerman captures them in the hugely atmospheric, spooky, and pitch-perfect opening to that novel.Hillerman and his Navajo mysteries (as they’re usually collectively known) also interestingly complement another Southwestern writer about whom I’ve written in this space: Mary Hunter Austin. An Oklahoma native and decorated World War II veteran, Hillerman moved to New Mexico for his UNM job and, like Austin, found himself more and more deeply interested in and attached to the region and its histories, cultures, and communities. (As he chronicles in his wonderful memoir.) While I can’t say for sure how the Navajo felt about Hillerman’s books, from everything I have seen they recognized, as I believe would any reader, that Hillerman treated his focal cultures and communities with the same abiding respect and admiration he did his protagonist policemen and the landscapes they patrolled. Perhaps the one thing that links the many different Southwestern authors and artists about whom I’ve blogged over the years is how much they found themselves drawn to the Southwest—to its places, to its histories, and, certainly, to its very American stories.Next mysterious read tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Beach Read nominees, mysterious or otherwise, you’d share?

June 19, 2017: Mysterious Beach Reads: Ross MacDonald

[For this year’s installment in my annual Beach Reads series, I wanted to focus on mystery authors and novels about which I’ve previously blogged in this space. Leading up a new post and author on Friday, and then one of my favorite crowd-sourced posts of the year—so add your Beach Read suggestions in comments, please!]On the author who exemplifies one of the most American literary genres—and whose novels will send the best kind of summer chills down your spine.
When I was initially thinking about what to include in this blog’s purview, way back in 2010, I went back and forth on whether to include topics that are particularly, deeply personal, authors or texts or events that have captivated my attention and interest at various moments in my life (and still do) but that aren’t necessarily quite as far-reaching in their significance as others on which I’ll try to focus in this space. But what I have realized, more and more fully as this blog has developed over those six and a half years since, is a combination of two things: everything here is here, first and foremost, because I care deeply about it, so it’s kind of silly to try to parse out which ones I care about for which reasons; and the central reason why I care about these things enough to consider ‘em as topics isn’t just that they make me happy, but that I think they’re meaningful and powerful enough to merit our attention. Which is to say: I love the movie Willow (that’s right, I do), but I’m probably not going to create an entry on it (although don’t hold me to that). But Ross MacDonald’s series of hardboiled PI novels? Yes, yes I will.
At one early point in my plans for a dissertation—and I do mean early; I was the kind of high school nerd who was already thinking of dissertation options—I thought about tracing the 20th century evolution of the hardboiled PI novel, from Dashiell Hammett to Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane to Ross MacDonald, and up to the female authors (Marcia Muller, Sara Paretksy, Sue Grafton) and protagonists who dominated the 80s and 90s in the genre. The character type is one of the most genuinely and meaningfully American in any artistic medium, and so we can certainly identify core elements of our national identity in each time period across those different authors—Hammett’s cynical and bitter PIs in the late 20s and early 30s shifting to Chandler’s more intellectual Phillip Marlowe in the 40s, for example. In the 50s and 60s, Spillane and MacDonald created amazingly contrasting PIs: Spillane’s Mike Hammer is an old-school hard-ass and misogynist, a creature of the masculine 50s, someone who watches a woman strip naked for him, thinks to himself that “she was a real blonde,” and then shoots her dead in cold blood a moment later; while MacDonald’s Lew Archer is a romantic idealist, an echo of the Beats and counter-cultures of these decades, someone who often articulates a cynical perspective aloud but whose narration is consistently lyrical and impassioned, sympathizing with the worst in who and what he finds in the course of his investigations and consistently seeking the best in them (including falling in love multiple times, and never once, to my knowledge, shooting one of them in cold blood).
Archer’s voice and MacDonald’s prose style are consistently pitch-perfect, and make any one of the twenty or so books in the series (which MacDonald published between 1949 and 1976, while publishing a number of other works under other names; MacDonald itself was a pseudonym for Kenneth Millar) well worth a read. But in the series’ best novels—and I think the high-water marks are The Chill (1964), The Underground Man (1971), and Sleeping Beauty (1973)—MacDonald also creates rich and layered multi-generational historical mysteries, plots that stretch back decades and involve literally dozens of characters, different families and settings and eras, and a wide range of core social and political issues. The structures of these novels are ridiculously tight and impressive and the payoffs deeply satisfying (let’s just say that The Chill in particular is very aptly named), but this historical depth makes these books a lot more than just pleasure reads; they are American sagas without question, tracing families and relationships and identities and places across much of the 20th century, considering how both one very full and compelling world (that of Southern California) and the diverse and changing nation that it in many ways encapsulates grew and decayed, lived and died, from the end of World War II to the post-Vietnam and -Watergate era. Every time I’ve gone back to MacDonald in the nearly three decades since my first encounters, I’ve found new aspects within these texts, new ways in which they can help me understand not only the mysteries of love and relationships and family (as can, say, Agatha Christie or Conan Doyle as well), but also of American identity. There is perhaps no character type more American than the hardboiled PI, and no PI more worth our time and attention, on the beach and anywhere else, than Lew Archer. Next mysterious read tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Beach Read nominees, mysterious or otherwise, you’d share?