Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 257

June 16, 2017: American Beaches: Baywatch

[With beach season underway in earnest, a series AmericanStudying some famous beaches. Leading up to a special weekend Guest Post from a talented young scholar!]On why those beautiful beach bodies are also a body of evidence.A few years back, I humorously but also earnestly noted that to a dedicated AmericanStudier, any text, even Baywatch, is a possible site of complex analysis. I stand by that possibility, and will momentarily offer proof of same. But before I do, it’s important to foreground the basic but crucial reason for Baywatch’s existence and popularity, one succinctly highlighted by Friends’ Joey and Chandler: pretty people running in slow-motion in bathing suits. While I plan to make a bit more of the show and its contexts and meanings than that, it’d be just plain cray-cray to pretend that either the show’s intent or its audience didn’t focus very fully on those beautiful bodies. Moreover, such an appeal was nothing new or unique—while the beach setting differentiated Baywatch a bit, I would argue that most prime-time soap operas have similarly depended on the attractiveness of their casts to keep their audiences tuning in.If Baywatch was partly a prime-time soap opera, however, it would also be possible to define the show’s genre differently: in relationship to both the police and medical dramas that were beginning to dominate the TV landscape in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Baywatch debuted in 1989). After all, the show’s plotlines typically included both rescues and crimes; while the lifeguards often dealt with romantic and interpersonal drama as well, so too did the docs of ER or the cops of Miami Vice (to name two of the era’s many entries in these genres). Seen in this light, and particularly when compared to the period’s police dramas, Baywatchwas relatively progressive in the gender balance of its protagonists—compared to another California show, CHiPs, for example, which similarly featured pretty people solving promised land problems but which focused almost entirely on male protagonists. Yes, the women of Baywatchwere beautiful and dressed skimpily—but the same could be said of the men, and both genders were equally heroic as well.The creators of Baywatch tried to make the cop show parallel overt with the ill-fated detective spinoff Baywatch Nights , about which the less said the better (even AmericanStudiers have their limits). But the problem with Baywatch Nights wasn’t just its awfulness (Baywatch itself wasn’t exactly The Wire , after all), it was that it missed a crucial element to the original show’s success: the beach. And no, I’m not talking about the bathing suits. I would argue that the most prominent 1970s and 1980s cultural images of the beach were Jaws and its many sequels and imitators, a set of images that made it seem increasingly less safe to go back in the water. And then along came David Hasselhoff, Pam Anderson, and company, all determined to take back the beaches and shift our cultural images to something far more pleasant and attractive than . Whatever you think of the show, is there any doubt that they succeeded, forever inserting themselves and their slow-mo running into our cultural narratives of the beach?Special guest post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think?

June 15, 2017: American Beaches: On the Beach

[With beach season underway in earnest, a series AmericanStudying some famous beaches. Leading up to a special weekend Guest Post from a talented young scholar!]On the intense and tragic film that couldn’t compete with historic fears.1959, the same year as the original Gidget movie about which I blogged yesterday, also saw the release of a very, very different beach film: On the Beach . Based on British-Australian writer Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel, the film featured an all-star cast (including Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, and Fred Astaire) as the sailors, scientists, and their friends and loved ones dealing with a post-apocalyptic world. It’s 1964, World War III has taken place, and the resulting radiation is slowly taking over the world and destroying its remaining inhabitants. Mostly set on or around Peck’s submarine, the film uses that setting to create a broadly claustrophobic tone, portraying a world in which likely slow death by radiation poisoning or the humane but absolute alternative of suicide pills seem to be the only possible futures. It’s unrelenting and uncompromising, and deserves to be much better remembered than it is.While that’s true of the film on its own artistic merits, it’s even more true in terms of what the film reveals about the Cold War’s threats and fears. When I think of World War III scenarios in popular films, I tend to think of over-the-top dramatics of one kind or another: the ridiculous satire of Dr. Strangelove (1964); the teenage humor and heroics of War Games (1983) and The Manhattan Project (1986); the flag-waving jingoism of Red Dawn (1984). All of those films can illustrate certain important aspects of the period, but all feel, again, exaggerated in one way or another, extreme in both their plots and tones. Whereas On the Beach, to this AmericanStudier at least, feels profoundly grounded, offers a socially and psychologically realistic depiction not just of the potential aftermath of a nuclear war, but also and even more tellingly of the period’s collective fears about what such a war would mean and do. Seeing [SPOILER ALERT] Fred Astaire kill himself rather than face imminent radiation poisoning—well, that feels deeply representative of the moment’s worst fears.You’d think that such fears might have lead to more widespread opposition to the Cold War’s arms race and military industrial complex—and indeed the U.S. military must have thought so too, as they denied the filmmakers permission to use a submarine or any other official materials. But I would argue that whatever possible influence such fears might have had was far outweighed by a different set of fears, ones exemplified by October 1962’s Cuban Missile Crisis: fears not of nuclear war and its aftermath per se, but rather of the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal, and what would happen if America’s did not match and even exceed that opposing threat. Whereas On the Beach portrayed the horrific results of a nuclear war, the Missile Crisis reflected and amplified fears that the U.S. was potentially unprepared for such a war, one that our enemy was willing and able to bring to our very doorstep. Perhaps no film, not even one as compelling and convincing as On the Beach, could compete with such historic threats—and so the arms race and the Cold War only deepened in the 1960s and beyond.Last beach context tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

June 14, 2017: American Beaches: Gidget and The Beach Boys

[With beach season underway in earnest, a series AmericanStudying some famous beaches. Leading up to a special weekend Guest Post from a talented young scholar!]On popular cultural images of the beach, and what we might make of them.An alien observer seeking to learn about America solely from its popular culture might well think that in the early 1960s the whole nation had gone surf crazy. The hit 1959 film Gidget (1959), starring Sandra Dee as a rebellious 17 year old who joins the local surfer culture and Cliff Robertson as the Korean War vet turned surf guru who shepards her along, quickly spawned two popular sequels: 1961’s Gidget Goes Hawaiian (with Deborah Walley taking over the title role) and 1963’s Gidget Goes to Rome (with Cindy Carol doing the same). One of 1962’s best-selling rock albums was Surfin’ Safari, the debut by the California group The Beach Boys; less than a year later they released their first mega-hit, Surfin’ U.S.A. (1963). There were of course many other popular trends in these years, but on both the big screen and the record machine, surfing was a surefire early 1960s hit.Trying to make sense of why and how American fads get started can be pretty difficult at best, but I would argue that the surfing fad in popular culture can be analyzed in a couple different ways. For one thing, the fad represents an interesting way to illustrate the transition between the 1950s and 1960s—as Gidget demonstrates, surfing culture has often been portrayed as a counter-culture, an alternative to the more buttoned-down mainstream society, and of course the rise of counter-cultures (and the kinds of social and cultural movements to which they connected) is a key element to the 1960s in America. So the popularity of these surfing texts (like the popularity of early rock and roll more generally) could be read as an indication that Americans were ready for such counter-culture movements, and Gidget itself could be defined as a 1959 origin point for much of what followed in next decade. Seen in that light, the hugely popular 1966 documentary The Endless Summerrepresents a high-water mark for all these trends, before the counter-culture began to distintegrate later in the decade.While that specific historical context would be one way to analyze the early 1960s surfing fad, however, I think a longstanding American narrative could offer another option. It was three decades later that the film Point Break (1991) overtly linked surfers to outlaws, potraying a band of surfing bank robbers led by Patrick Swayze’s philosophical Bodhi (a character not unlike Cliff Robertson’s in Gidget). But to my mind, surfing culture has always contained echoes of the Wild West, represented a new lawless frontier where rough but noble cowboys escape the confines of civilization, battle for survival in extreme conditions, and, if they’re lucky, ride off in Western sunsets. The Wild West was always more of a cultural image than a historical or social reality, of course, and an image constructed with particular clarity in a pop culture text, the Western. That genre was famously moving toward more revisionist films by the late 1960s—but perhaps it had already been supplanted, or at least supplemented, in popular consciousness by surfing stories. In any case, to quote “Surfin’ Safari”: “I tell you surfing’s mighty wild.” Next beach context tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

June 13, 2017: American Beaches: The Inkwell

[With beach season underway in earnest, a series AmericanStudying some famous beaches. Leading up to a special weekend Guest Post from a talented young scholar!]On three layers to one of America’s most unique historic beaches.The small town of Oak Bluffs, on Martha’s Vineyard, includes one of America’s most historic African American resorts, a summertime community with and a vibrant contemporary presence. That community has long designated its preferred stretch of the Oak Bluffs town beach “The Inkwell,” a name that was originally conferred out of racial bigotry but that (at least as I understand it, and I’m directly descended from one of the island’s foremost historians!) was subsequently and lovingly adopted by the African American community itself. Indeed, scholar and frequent Islander Henry Louis Gates Jr. named his genealogical and historical organization the Inkwell Foundation, a detail which nicely ties together the site’s past and present roles and meanings in African American and American life.The Inkwell and Oak Bluff’s African American community are also the titular and principal setting for one of the more unique recent American bestselling novels, Stephen Carter’s The Emperor of Ocean Park (2002). Carter, a law professor who has gone on to write many more, equally successful works of fiction, was famously paid a seven-figure advance for Emperor, which combines multiple genres (it’s a murder mystery and legal thriller that’s also an academic satire, historical novel, and romance) into a work that’s not always more than the sum of its parts but is always readable and compelling. And as its titular emphasis on Martha’s Vineyard’s African community suggests (Ocean Park adjoins The Inkwell), Carter’s novel is at its heart a historical and sociological study of that community, and of the complexities of identity that arise from its combination of race, class, and family history (his narrator is the son of that titular emperor, a preeminent African American judge).Similarly connected to those complexities of identity, community, and history is another frequent summer visitor to Martha’s Vineyard, former president Barack Obama. Political commentators have often linked Obama and his family’s Vineyard vacations to those of his Democratic presidential predecessor, Bill Clinton; conservative commentators have used the vacations to argue that Obama is out of touch with most Americans. But others, including many Islanders, have instead linked the Obama family’s time on the Vineyard to the island’s historic and contemporary African American communities. That Obama’s vacations could be read as either deeply connected to those communities or entirely distinct from them is a reflection not only of his own complex American identity, but also of the evolving history and story of this complex and potent American beach and site.Next beach context tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

June 12, 2017: American Beaches: Revere Beach

[With beach season underway in earnest, a series AmericanStudying some famous beaches. Leading up to a special weekend Guest Post from a talented young scholar!]On three stages in the history of an exemplary American beach.On July 12th, 1896, Revere Beach greeted nearly 50,000 visitors on its opening dayas America’s first public beach. The site and occasion represented the confluence of multiple turn of the century trends: the completion of an urban railroad line that allowed those numerous visitors to reach the beach; the City Beautiful movement that heavily influenced landscape architect Charles Eliot, who designed Revere Beach; the increased possibility of free time for leisure and entertainment (thanks in large part to the successes of the labor movement), which led to the popularity of sites like Coney Island and Revere Beach; and the recent waves of immigration, since many of those public visitors to Revere Beach were immigrant families. For all those reasons and more, Revere Beach was more than just the nation’s first public beach—it was a hugely iconic symbol of turn of the 20th century American society.By the second half of the century, however, Revere Beach had become a very different and far more contested kind of symbol. A number of 1960s and 70s factors and narratives contributed to increasingly negative images of the beach and, ultimately, its near-abandonment: demographic shifts that brought more African American visitors to the beach, during the same era as the Boston busing riots which demonstrated just how contentious race remained in the region (particularly between African Americans and working class white ethnics, the two communities who came to comprise Revere Beach’s principal clienteles); deterioration of the beach’s surrounding  neighborhoods, leading to a substantial increase in crime within a short period of time (there were 500 arrests near the beach in 1969 and 2700 in 1974); and the historic Blizzard of 1978, which destroyed or drove out most of the amusements, businesses, and landmarks that had not already succumbed. Whether fairly or unfairly, by the early 1980s Revere Beach was best known for the image of hypodermic needles littering the sand.As the recent article at that last link illustrates, many of those negative images remain in the Bostonian consciousness into the early 21st century. But there’s no question that Revere Beach has also entered a new stage, one marked by the debates over developmentand gentrification on the one hand and traditionand preservationon the other that have informed so much of America’s urban landscape over the last few decades. As always, it’s not necessarily either-or—Revere’s waterfront can be developed (and to a degree must be if it is to survive) without the history being lost, and the history can be preserved (and to my mind must be if we are to remember our past) without sacrificing future growth. And also as always, what’s most needed is an awareness of the past that does not elide the darkest times but preserves the ideals; so that whatever Revere Beach becomes in the future, the site can remain emblematic of its status as America’s first public beach.Next beach context tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

June 10-11, 2017: The Pulitzers at 100: The Underground Railroad

[The first Pulitzer Prizeswere given out 100 years ago, on June 5, 1917. So to celebrate that centennial, this week I’ve AmericanStudied five Pulitzer-winning works of fiction, leading up to this special weekend post on the most recent winner!]On when anachronisms don’t work, when they do, and how to parse the difference.As I wrote in this post a few years back, my unhappy reading of Charles Johnson’s National Book Award-winning historical novel Middle Passage (1990) was one of my more surprising literary experiences, given how many elements of the novel seemed geared to my particular interests and passions. That unhappiness stemmed almost entirely from Johnson’s use of anachronisms, purposefully a-historical words and details (focused especially on his narrator Rutherford Calhoun’s voice, perspective, and identity) that thoroughly pushed me out of the novel’s historical setting and themes (despite Johnson’s stated goal of “clos[ing] the distance between the past and the present” with those anachronisms). While of course much of that response has to do with my own personal perspective and preferences, I argued in that post—and would reiterate here—that such anachronisms risk damaging the project and potential power of historical fiction; or, at the very least, place the emphasis so fully on the “fiction” side of that generic category as to render their novels not at all “historical” in the more meaningful senses of that term.Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016), the historical novel that a few months ago was awarded the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (among its many honors to date), has more than its share of such anachronisms. The literal railroad on which slave runaways like our protagonists Cora and Caesar travel in the novel’s antebellum world isn’t quite an anachronism, although of course it’s a metaphorical twist on the Underground Railroad’s historical details. But each stop and setting along that journey does explicitly and drastically shift those characters, and thus the novel’s readers, in time—beginning with a Charleston, South Carolina that features skyscrapers and medical experiments on African Americans, and continuing through a number of other such time period shifts that I won’t spoil here (but that eventually include 21stcentury elements). I had found out about those elements of Whitehead’s novel prior to reading it, and was thus prepared for a similar experience to that of reading Johnson’s book (although I likely would have minded Johnson’s anachronisms a bit less had I been aware of them going in). But that wasn’t at all the case—I found The Underground Railroad to be not only moving and shattering, beautiful and awful, but also one of the most evocative and effective historical novels or cultural works about slavery I’ve ever encountered.You could make the case that my very distinct experience here had to do, again, with my preparation for these elements; or with the undeniable fact that I’m a different reader at 39 than I was at 13 (meaning I should likely give Johnson’s novel another chance). Both of those are fair points to be sure, but I would also argue that Whitehead uses these shifts in time in a more comprehensive and even genre-related way than did Johnson. Indeed, I would argue that Whitehead’s novel has more in common with Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), as both could be described as works that use science fiction tropes and storytelling both to immerse their audiences in histories of slavery and to link those histories to broader themes of race, identity, memory, and nation. While Kindred’s science fiction story takes a contemporary woman back in time to the antebellum South, and Whitehead’s brings historical characters from that setting across and forward in time to many other moments (including his and our own), both works employ their genres in service of a deep and potent examination of the specific and overarching histories. The question of whether and how any 21stcentury American can truly understand the world of slavery remains an open one; but both Butler’s and Whitehead’s books offer groundbreaking, genre-bending, impressive contributions to that ongoing challenge.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on Whitehead’s novel, or on other prize-winning (or –worthy) books?

June 9, 2017: The Pulitzers at 100: Vietnamese American Stories

[The first Pulitzer Prizeswere given out 100 years ago, on June 5, 1917. So to celebrate that centennial, this week I’ll be AmericanStudying five Pulitzer-winning works of fiction, leading up to a special weekend post on the most recent winner!]On how last year’s winner complements but also complicates a prior winner.Robert Olen Butler’s Pulitzer-winning short story cycle A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (1992) was far from the first American literary text about the Vietnam War, of course; Tim O’Brien’s magisterial The Things They Carried (1990) had come out two years earlier, to cite just one example. Nor was Butler’s the first book to present a Vietnamese American perspective on the conflict; memoirs like Le Ly Haslip’s When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (1989) had already tread that path. But Butler’s book might well have been the first American work of fiction to focus on portraying such Vietnamese and Vietnamese American perspectives on the war and its aftermaths. And in any case the book, based in part on Butler’s experiences as a counter-intelligence officer and translator in the war (during which, he would later note, the Vietnamese people “just invited me into their homes and into their culture and into their lives”), comprises an impressive and important attempt to create a community of Vietnamese American voices and tell their stories of war and loss, exile and flight, resettlement and home, multi-generational family and love, and more. A Good Scentis a ground-breaking and significant book, and certainly deserving of its Pulitzer.Last year’s Pulitzer-winning novel, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2015), wasn’t the first book by an Asian American author to win the Pulitzer for fiction; that would be Jhumpa Lahiri’s stunning debut short story collection Interpreter of Maladies (1999). And of course Nguyen’s was far from the first Vietnamese American novel about the war—prior examples would include Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge (1997) and Lê Thi Diem Thúy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For (2003), to name just two. But in his creation of a multi-layered, mixed-race, anonymous narrator who has been, often at one and the same time, a North Vietnamese spy and mole, a South Vietnamese officer, a CIA agent, a Vietnamese American immigrant, and a consultant on a Hollywood film about the Vietnam War—and who writes and rewrites, narrates and revises, remembers and alters the novel’s stories as part of a conflicted confession to Communist captors about those experiences—Nguyen brings something entirely distinct and new to that tradition. The Sympathizer doesn’t quite reach the same level of meta-fictional complexity and boundary-blurring as The Things They Carried, but it’s in the conversation; and while O’Brien’s meta-narrator fades in and out of the text (due in large part to some of the book’s stories having been initially published separately), Nguyen’s is at the core of every page and moment, lending his novel a potent and vital unity.As any reader of this blog already knows, I’m all about additive rather than competitive ways of reading and remembering, and I believe that Butler’s and Nguyen’s books do indeed work well in tandem, presenting distinct but complementary narratives of the Vietnam war, Vietnamese American immigrant and community, and many other related questions. But at the same time, the nuances and ambiguities of Nguyen’s narrator, and especially his national and cultural identities and affiliations, do complicate any simplistic description of Butler’s project in Good Scent. That is, Butler’s stories and book present a somewhat traditional narrative of the immigrant experience, of individuals and communities torn between an old and a new world, between a past in Vietnam and a present in the United States, and with the war and its effects as the pivot between those stages and worlds. That all makes sense and is shared by many works (Vietnamese American and otherwise)—but it’s difficult to read Nguyen’s novel without recognizing that such categories are far from stable, and that the worlds, times, roles, and identities of any individual life tend much more to blend together than to occupy distinct spots or stages. Very few Vietnamese American immigrants can or should be seen as spies or moles, of course—that way lies the logic of internment—but, like all immigrants and really like every one of us, they are connected to multiple, often contradictory identities and legacies. Nguyen’s brilliant novel forces us to confront that challenging but crucial truth.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on other prize-winning (or –worthy) books?

June 8, 2017: The Pulitzers at 100: The Color Purple

[The first Pulitzer Prizeswere given out 100 years ago, on June 5, 1917. So to celebrate that centennial, this week I’ll be AmericanStudying five Pulitzer-winning works of fiction, leading up to a special weekend post on the most recent winner!]On what the film adaptation of Alice Walker’s novel couldn’t include, what it could have but didn’t, and why it’s still an important complement to the book.Alice Walker’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Color Purple (1983) is also one of the relatively small number of recent books that utilize a literary structure through which the novel significantly developed in the 18th and early 19th centuries: the epistolary form, also known as the novel of letters. Walker uses that longstanding literary form in a partly traditional and partly postmodern way, having her protagonist Celie both exchange letters with her younger sister Nettie and write letters to God; the novel is constructed out of the back and forth between these different types of letters and the distinct perspectives and frames they provide. No analysis of Walker’s novel could leave aside this crucial narrative and structural choice and all the ways it frames such topics as voice and perspective, audience and response, and character arcs and relationships; but at the same time, I think it’s fair to say that no film adaptation of the novel could have successfully mirrored its use of the epistolary form, and certainly Steven Spielberg’s 1985 adaptation did not try to do so. Letters can be used briefly within a film to great effect ( Cloud Atlas stands out in that regard), but I don’t believe they could work as a film’s entire narrative or voiceover structure.That wasn’t the only aspect of Walker’s novel that Spielberg’s film changed, however. To quote the great New York Times critic Janet Maslin : “Mr. Spielberg has looked on the sunny side of Miss Walker's novel, fashioning a grand, multi-hanky entertainment that is as pretty and lavish as the book is plain. If the book is set in the harsh, impoverished atmosphere of rural Georgia, the movie unfolds in a cozy, comfortable, flower-filled wonderland.” The very choice of Spielberg, then as now, and for better or for worse, a filmmaker consistently dedicated to entertainment and sentimentality (full disclosure: I’m not a fan, but your mileage may vary of course), to direct the adaptation likely made such changes in tone inevitable and even expected or intended. But for any viewer familiar with the novel, those tonal changes from page to screen remain quite jarring, and to my mind shift the film’s style much further away from Walker’s than does the likely necessary decision to abandon the epistolary structure. To quote Maslin again, “the combination of [Spielberg’s] sensibilities and Miss Walker's amounts to a colossal mismatch.”Yet Maslin ends that sentence by arguing that the film “manages to have momentum, warmth and staying power all the same,” and I would agree and add that it offers a compelling complement to Walker’s novel. Thanks in large part to Walker’s use of the epistolary form, her book focuses in many ways on characterization, and in particular on capturing the voices, perspectives, and identities of her central female characters with depth and nuance (her male characters, not so much, as many before me have noted). If Spielberg’s film is understandably and perhaps inevitably unable to do the same, it does depict setting in a more multi-layered way; there I would in fact disagree with Maslin, as I believe the film includes both the harshness and the beauty of its Georgia world, multiple sides to that setting that the move away from using Celie’s perspective as a sole or dominant lens allows the film to feature more fully. The world’s beauties should not and do not mask or minimize its horrors; but the beauties are there nonetheless, and if Spielberg’s sentimentality can at times over-emphasize them, we as viewers can instead recognize a story that offers glimpses of both the worst and the best of our communities and experiences. Taken together, Walker’s novel and Spielberg’s film certainly present those multiple layers to a single story.Last Pulitzer post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on other prize-winning (or –worthy) books?

June 7, 2017: The Pulitzers at 100: Angle of Repose

[The first Pulitzer Prizeswere given out 100 years ago, on June 5, 1917. So to celebrate that centennial, this week I’ll be AmericanStudying five Pulitzer-winning works of fiction, leading up to a special weekend post on the most recent winner!]On two literary contexts for Wallace Stegner’s 1971 masterpiece.In the course of a more than 50-year career, Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) published 13 novels, 17 full-length works of non-fiction, and a handful of story collections. He won the 1977 National Book Award for his moving novel of marriage, travel, and aging The Spectator Bird (1976). But I would certainly call the Pulitzer-winning Angle of Repose (1971) his best and most important novel, not only for its unquestionable quality but also because it exemplifies very fully his most abiding concerns and themes across the length of that career: memory and family, embodied in Angle by his late 20th century narrator Lyman Ward, a divorced, isolated, wheelchair-bound historian researching his grandparents Susan Burling Ward and Oliver Ward’s late 19th century lives; and the American West, as those lives (based on the historical figures Mary Hallock Foote and Arthur De Wint Foote) took his grandparents throughout the Western United States. Stegner was frequently referred to as “The Dean of Western Writers,” but I would revise the phrase to something like “Western Storytellers,” as it seems to me that he was most especially concerned with, and spent his career both examining and modeling, how we remember and tell stories of the West.Angle of Repose is well worth reading and enjoying on its own terms, but I want to use the rest of this post to highlight two additional literary contexts for Stegner’s novel. For one thing, Mary Hallock Foote herself was a very interesting and talented writer; Stegner uses (and even quotes extensively from, with permission) her voluminous body of letters in his novel, but she also published a number of short stories and novels, most about the Western settings and worlds into which her marriage to the mining engineer Arthur took her (she was born and raised in New York City). I haven’t read nearly all of those works, but would say that Foote’s 1886 short story “The Fate of a Voice” (published in Century Magazine) nicely encapsulates both her talents and her ambiguous perspective on those Western worlds and experiences. Foote’s heroine, Madeline Hendrie, is a talented opera singer torn between a future in New York and one with Western engineer Aldis; in the course of the story she loses her voice (after an accident of Aldis’), regains it and performs in New York, and then chooses to leave that world behind and spend her life in the West with Aldis. The story concludes with other voices, some lamenting Madeline’s choice and others celebrating it; although overall I believe Foote’s narrator sides with the latter, she certainly airs both perspectives, and both help us understand her own complex artistic and Western life and identity (as well as those of Stegner’s characters).In its own era, Stegner’s book is also part of a group of 1970s novels that focus on historian narrators researching their own family histories and legacies. I’ve written before in this space about two of my favorite such novels: David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident(1981), in which historian John Bradley researches his father and his family’s histories of slavery and rebellion; and E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel (1971), in which historian Daniel Isaacson researches his parents Paul and Rochelle (fictionalized versions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg) and their trial and execution for espionage. Also interestingly in this mix (SPOILER alert) is Gore Vidal’s Burr (1973), as Vidal’s fictional narrator Charlie Schuyler eventually learns that the subject of his historical researches, Aaron Burr, is also his father. Each of these books is distinct and worth its own examination and analysis, but all use the meta-fictional perspectives and structures comprised by their historical narrators to frame and comment upon the stories and histories they’re telling and re-telling. And Wallace Stegner’s novel more than stands alongside these other masterpieces of the genre.Next Pulitzer winner tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on other prize-winning (or –worthy) books?

June 6, 2017: The Pulitzers at 100: All the King’s Men

[The first Pulitzer Prizeswere given out 100 years ago, on June 5, 1917. So to celebrate that centennial, this week I’ll be AmericanStudying five Pulitzer-winning works of fiction, leading up to a special weekend post on the most recent winner!]
On two of the things that make one of our most under-appreciated novels so great.
I haven’t done a poll or anything, but it seems to me that when we Americans think about Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer-winning novel All the King’s Men (1946) at all, we tend to do so through the lens of its portrayal of a fictionalized Huey Long, the popular and controverial Louisiana governor. That’s an entirely understandable perspective, not only because the novel does focus much of its attention on Willie Stark (its Long figure), but also because the Academy Award-winning film (1949) featured a bravura performance from Broderick Crawford as Stark. The book has a lot to say about Stark, not only as an individual and a representation of his own place and era, but in relationship to enduring questions of power and corruption, hope and cynicism, democracy and demogoguery. But my love for Penn Warren’s novel, which is one of my favorite American texts, stems from other, and to my mind even more impressive and important, elements.
For one thing, there’s the narration. Penn Warren’s narrator, Jack Burden, sounds like a combination of the best hard-boiled private detective narrators and H.L. Mencken (or other similarly critical and whip-smart commentators on American society and human nature). I could say more, but instead I’m just going to transcribe one paragraph from the opening chapter, in which Burden is all of those things and then some: “The Boss was down at the other end of the yard where the crepe myrtles were, prowling up and down on the dusty grass stems. Well, it was all his baby, and he could give it suck. I just lay there in the hammock. I lay there and watched the undersides of the oak leaves, dry and grayish and dusty-green, and some of them I saw had rusty-corroded-looking spots on them. Those were the ones which would turn loose their grip on the branch before long—not in any breeze, the fibers would just relax, in the middle of the day maybe with the sunshine bright and the air so still it aches like the place where the tooth was on the morning after you’ve been to the dentist or aches like your heart in the bosom when you stand on the street corner waiting for the light to change and happen to recollect how things once were and how they  might have been yet if what happened had not happened.”
Penn Warren wasn’t a hugely talented poet for nothing, after all. But he was also one of our most interesting and meaningful historical philosophers; and, as I’ve written at length in this (free and downloadable!) article, All the King’s Men is also a complex treatise on the limitations and possibilities of historical research, knowledge, and engagement. I won’t restate that article’s arguments here, but will simply say this: prior to the events of the novel, Jack Burden was a PhD candidate in History, and in one of the novel’s most successful set-pieces he recounts the story of his Civil War-era ancestor, Cass Mastern, into which he was digging for that thesis. It doesn’t seem to me that we can possibly remember Penn Warren’s novel without remembering the amazing Cass Mastern section—and even if the rest of the novel (to which that section certainly connects) didn’t exist, the Mastern narrative would be one of our most compelling and powerful historical fictions. For that reason, and so many others, I can’t recommend Penn Warren’s novel strongly enough.Next Pulitzer winner tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on other prize-winning (or –worthy) books?