A Writer to Watch

We Need New Names is the first novel from NoViolet Bulawayo, who was born and raised in Zimbabwe and is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.  As I was reading the novel, certain other works came to mind, such as Dave Eggers' What is the What and Americanah by Chimananda Ngozi Adichie, which also explore the theme of being an immigrant from Africa and navigating two different worlds and assimilating into an unknown culture in which the reality doesn't match up with the expectations.  Bulawayo has a voice entirely her own and she brings her characters to life in this unflinching, spirited, witty novel that introduces us to 10-year-old Darling and her band of friends, who we first meet stealing guavas from the wealthy neighborhood called Budapest.  Darling is eventually given the opportunity to live with an aunt in America, and ends up in Michigan amidst snow, isolation, and low paying jobs.  An interesting read indeed.

Call the Doctor(ow)

World's Fair is an engaging, smartly written novel with some beautiful passages.  Set in the Bronx in the 1930s, we meet Edgar when he is 9 years old, and the novel culminates with the World's Fair in 1939.  The book explores Edgar's relationship with his older brother, and also centers around his parents' marriage.  The novel is rich with memorable scenes, such as the one in which Edgar, his brother, and their friends build an igloo in the backyard.  I also loved the simple description of a delicious snack provided by Joe the Sweet Potato Man - "It was not only something to eat but something to warm my hands against as if I had plucked a tiny hearth from an elf's house."  Probably my favorite Doctorow work so far, slightly above Homer and Langley and Billy Bathgate. 

Deceipt and Dressage

In her debut novel, The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, Anton DiSclafani explores the intimacies of a close knit family and its unraveling.  Set on the cusp of the Great Depression, protagonist Thea Atwell is sent away to a girls' riding camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains, but the reason why isn't revealed until the end of the book.  Having grown up on an idyllic citrus farm with her twin brother, loving parents, and the freedom to ride horses, Thea's parents decide to send her off to the camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where Thea continues along her path of self exploration, and discovers a world much larger than the one she grew up in.  The mystery of what happened kept me engaged - this is the kind of book you will want to read quickly, and its engrossing along the way to the climax. 

Revisiting Cormac McCarthy

  

I was originally turned off by McCarthy as the first book I read by him was The Road, a post apocalyptic, disturbing novel.  However, I am on a Texas streak and thought I would give the first of his Border Trilogy books a try, and I am glad I did.  After all, how can a book entitled All the Pretty Horses be too disturbing?!  While not nearly as bleak and unsettling as The Road, this novel still has its fare share of violence, but it also has some quiet moments and exquisite passages as well.  Set in West Texas and Mexico, teenager John Grady Cole sets out with his friend Lacey Rawlins on horseback.  "I just wanted to see the country, I reckon," says Grady.  Complete with knife fights, romance, lightening storms, haciendas, and a general rough and tumble tone, McCarthy infuses this story with grit in a meticulously researched and authentic way.  It seems to me that McCarthy perfectly captures the young cowboy - in his bravado and courage, chivalry and tight lipped manner, and very rarely, his expressions of tenderness (toward horses, friends, women, and children) and even sadness.  One of my favorite scenes is when Grady sets out to propose to a girl and he sits with some children he meets and shares his meal with them, then tells them of his dilemma and they offer him various suggestions as to what he should do.  It's one of the only moments that depicts Grady with a bit of kid-like energy still in him. 

I plan to read the second book.  My favorite passages:

"...they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing."  

"What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God - who knows all that can be known - seems powerless to change."  

Shakespearean Tragedy Amidst the Corn Fields

Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1991.  Her novel takes place in 1979 and centers around the Cook family and their farm in Iowa.  Larry Cook, the patriarch, decides to retire from farming and leave the land to his three daughters.  The youngest and the only one who no longer lives on the farm but instead became a lawyer and lives in Des Moine, expresses her concern about this to her father, and he impulsively decides to cut her out of the deal.  The story focuses largely around the other two sisters, Ginny and Rose, and their struggles in their marriages, with each other, with Rose's cancer, and with the sexual abuse inflicted upon them by their father.  It's a bleak tale, in fact there are very few happy scenes or moments.  Nonetheless, it is a powerful story that moves along quickly, and I understand is a modern day version of King Lear. 

Texas Today

It seems like everywhere I turn, there are articles about Texas.  Erica Grieder's journalistic account of the current state of affairs in Texas, entitled Big, Hot, Cheap, and Right: What America Can Learn from the Strange Genius of Texas, is an accessible book that focuses on some hot topics such as religion, politics, big business, and small government, and also touches upon major Texas industries such as cattle and oil.  What I got out of this book, more than the analysis itself, were some interesting facts about Texas, such as the fact that Houston is the most ethnically diverse metropolitan area in the U.S., Texas has more people living in rural areas than any other state, and San Antonio is considered by many to be a progressive city with a significant number of same-sex households.  Grieder does not shy away from some of the challenges in Texas (poverty, schools with little funding, limited services, etc.), but she also tries to demystify Texas and point out that many of its stereotypes may hold less water than we might think. 

Talking about Texas

Larry McMurtry's Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen:  Reflections at Sixty and Beyond, provides insight into the things that were important to McMurtry, such as place, reading, and book selling.  Having grown up in Archer City, Texas, McMurtry was destined to become a cowboy, but once he discovered books, he went on to Rice University and his whole world opened up.  As McMurtry puts it, "In the end my father's career and my own were not as different as I had once thought.  He cattle ranched in a time he didn't like much, and I word ranched..."  One of my favorite quotes from the book is, "First I try to herd a few desirable words into a sentence, and then I corral them into small pastures called paragraphs, before spreading them across the spacious ranges of a novel."  With humility and honesty, McMurtry writes about his own work as a novelist, his life after a major surgery, and his love for the open space and light of Texas.  Finally, McMurtry pays homage to one of my favorite writes of all time - "The first fictions of any value to come out of the West were usually about the struggle of sensitive, art-minded souls to survive and assert themselves amid the discouragements of necessary practical frontier society.  Willa Cather, for example."  It seems that wide open spaces have been the inspiration for some of my favorite writers. 

Both Sides of the Border

The night I arrived in Marfa, TX, Ruben Martinez and Alfredo Corchado were speaking at the Marfa Book Company.  Exhausted from the nearly nine hours it took to get there, I missed the talk, but vowed to read both of their recently published books. 

In Ruben Martinez' Desert America, he writes, "Most of all there was space, Western immensity.  The area has one of the vastest stretches of land in the Lower 48 with the fewest people and roads and human-built structures."  Martinez focuses on some of the political and demographic shifts in several different desert regions, such as Joshua Tree, CA, Velarde, NM, and my beloved Marfa, TX. 

Part personal cathartic account, part ethnographic research, and part investigative journalism, Martinez' book is a blend of approaches.  Perhaps I was just antsy to get to the chapter on Marfa (at the very end, of course), but I think I was looking for facts and found more anecdotal evidence, which can be just as powerful but did not capture my attention in this case. 

Alfredo Corchado's Midnight in Mexico, like Martinez' book, weaves in the author's personal experience.  Corchado recounts his life as a journalist in Mexico and in the U.S. focusing on border issues, and more specifically, discusses drug trafficking, and the impact of it on his life, his emotional state, and his personal safety.  

Together, these two books are an interesting introduction into the darker sides of life on the border. 

It's never too late to read Yates

I'm a huge Richard Yates fan, with my favorite of his novels being Revolutionary Road and The Easter Parade (see previous blog posts).  I read the behemoth Collected Stories of Richard Yates, which anthologizes all of his short stories, including the stories in Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, Liars in Love, and some previously unpublished stories as well.  Yates' stories are so readable and engaging, yet heartbreaking too.  Yates shows the reader his characters' ugliest vulnerabilities, most intimate sufferings, and scarring childhood events.  It is his unflinching insight that draws the reader in, and his straightforward, clear writing that is so quintessentially Yates.  These stories are not uplifting (his story "A Private Possession," ends with, "And when the sobs finally begin they are long, scalding ones, the kind that come again and again.")  And yet, Yates sometimes catches the reader off guard with one or two unexpected hilariously funny lines, which tempers the tragedy with some comedy.  In "Regards at Home," Yates writes, "That was an old failing: she never seemed to realize that if people could see her underpants they might not care what kind of hat she was wearing."  In this same story, the protagonist dislikes his wife when she fills the role of, "dependable typist at Botany Mills, or the grudging potato peeler or the slow, tired woman who frowned over the ironing board to prove how poor we were."

Yates draws on many of his own experiences to create his stories, such as his time in WWII, bout with tuberculosis, and troubled marriages.  These stories are not uplifting, but they are crystalline and illuminating and too good to miss.