A Childhood Classic (but not my childhood)

Sometimes I am really amazed at some classic novels that I simply never read when I was growing up.  It's never too late though!  I found L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables to be smartly written and thoroughly winsome.  Anne, an "outspoken morsel of neglected humanity," is an orphan who comes to live with Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert on bucolic Prince Edward Island.  The Cuthberts original set out to raise a boy, but are surprised to discover a girl waiting for them at the train station.  Anne's boundless optimism, imagination, and love for words and honest expression are infectious to both the reader and the characters who populate the novel. 

Crossing into McCarthy Territory

The Crossing is the second book of McCarthy's Border Trilogy.  Set in New Mexico just before WWII, brothers Billy and Boyd Parham come of age amidst the lonesome landscape of the New Mexico border.  Billy, just sixteen years old, is a young, self-sufficient cowboy, who sets out to return a trapped wolf to the mountains of Mexico.  He returns to find his parents killed and the family horses taken, and pursues the horse thieves with his brother.  This gritty, intelligent novel explores brotherhood and what it means to be completely alone in the world.  Its bleak and beautiful, violent and vibrant.  I still can't say that I love McCarthy, but he does write with such distinctive voice and confidence that I find myself wanting to read more of his work. 

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. 

West Texas of Yesteryear

 

I returned from my recent trip to West Texas inspired and in awe of the expansiveness, the silence, the space, the light, and the sheer beauty of the region.  I'm reading all kinds of books about Texas, and happened upon The Lonesome Plains:  Death and Revival of an American Frontier, by Louis Fairchild, at the public library.  Published by Texas A&M University Press in 2002, Fairchild relies heavily and interestingly on first person primary accounts (letters, journals, etc.) of West Texas settlers in the 1800s.  Often living many miles apart and not seeing anyone other than family for long stretches at a time, the empty endless land often created a deep sense of loneliness and isolation, for which settlers hungered to escape, however briefly.  Neighbors often came together for two specific reasons- as Fairchild puts it "times of misfortune" such as accidents and deaths, and annual religious revival meetings.  As Fairchild writes, "of all the late nineteenth century agricultural frontiers, western Texas was probably the most isolated and the most lonesome..."  The religious gatherings often gave the settlers an opportunity to have an "emotional release," an outlet from the stoicism and harshness of their daily lives.  This is a very specific book that was of particular interest to me, but it may not be everyone's cup of tea.  It is very readable, and was clearly painstakingly researched and presented in a really clear and informative way. 

A Smattering of Steinbeck

It was, not surprisingly, an utter delight to read Steinbeck's America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction.  This collection shows off Steinbeck's range and ability to engage readers on a variety of topics, including the lives of California agricultural workers in the 1930s, dogs, Paris, Salinas, war, and ospreys.  Steinbeck had this fabulous ability to write both seriously and humorously, impassioned and lighthearted.  In "Always Something to Do In Salinas," he writes, in describing the social structure with regard to those in the field of agriculture, "Now we had a new set of upstarts:  Lettuce People.  Sugar People joined Cattle People in looking down their noses.  These Lettuce People had Carrot People to look down on and these in turn felt odd about associating with Cauliflower People."  In, "My War with the Ospreys," Steinbeck writes, "Those lousy, slip-shod, larcenous birds , those ingrates, those - those ospreys."  Even though many of the essays in this collection were written over 50 years ago, some of the themes seem very relevant to today.  In "Dear Adlai," he writes, "Having too many THINGS they spend their hours and money on the couch searching for their soul."  

Other favorite quotes:

From "L'Envoi":  "I do know this - the big and mysterious America is bigger than I thought.  And more mysterious."  
From "America and Americans":  "We are afraid to be awake, afraid to be alone, afraid to be a moment without the noise  and confusion we call entertainment."
"Even businessmen in Texas wear high-heeled boots and big hats, though they ride in air-conditioned Cadillacs and have forgotten the reason for the high heels."  
"Such screwballs are very valuable to us and we would be a duller nation without them, as our economy and our means of production gently shove us nearer and nearer to a dull and single norm."  

This is a book to have on the shelf, with engaging, funny, smart, informed, witty, opinionated essays to be read again and again. 

Still talking about Potok

Earlier this year I read several Potok novels, my favorite being My Name is Asher Lev.  Potok has a distinctive writing style that is very consistent throughout all of his books, which I had enjoyed in his other works but found repetitive in In the Beginning, which tells the story of David Lurie's upbringing in the 1920s in the Bronx and follows his young life through the Great Depression, World War II, and the Holocaust.  While Potok's novels are all page-turners, In the Beginning was not one of my favorite of his works, but perhaps only because Potok's dialogue and family scenes are very similar to other novels of his that I already read.  Also, while In the Beginning is more sweeping in scope and slightly less insular than his other works, it lacks the focus and intensity that I appreciated in Potok's other novels.  Regardless, Potok is a wonderful writer and an important voice in American literature, though I would recommend starting with The Chosen or My Name is Asher Lev. 

Comanche Characteristics

Having read Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry and The Son by Philipp Meyer this year, I was very interested to learn more about the Comanches that featured so prominently in these novels and in American history.  S.C. Gwynne's Empire of the Summer Moon is a readable non-fiction account of the life of Cynthia Ann Parker, a member of one of the most powerful families in the days of early Texas, who is captured in 1836 at the age of nine by the Comanches and ends up choosing to marry a Comanche chief and stay with the tribe for over twenty years.  She has a mixed-blood son named Quanah, who becomes the last and most famous chief of the Comanches.  Interestingly, Cynthia Ann is eventually discovered and taken from the tribe, at which point she tried to repeatedly escape back to the tribe.  After her daughter Prairie Flower died, Cynthia Ann died six years later after self-starvation and illness.  

As white settlers arrived in Texas, the Comanches fought to maintain their tribal lands, which led to brutal battles over four decades.  A group called the Texas Rangers was formed especially to deal with the threat of Comanches.  Eventually the tribe diminished and the U.S. government provided reservations for the remaining Comanches, who were appalled at this offering, having no initial interest in becoming farmers.  Over time, Quanah and other Comanches adopted some conveniences of non-native culture. 

Unlike other native tribes, Comanches did not engage in agricultural pursuits or make artisan goods, and they had a simple cultural structure that was not stratified or rigidly organized.  They were a hunter-gatherer nomadic tribe (their primary diet was buffalo), and were exceptional horsemen which gave them a major advantage when at war.

So the next time you are in Texas under a bright moon, remember that under that bright moon the powerful Comanches lived and fought, and lived out its legacy as the most powerful tribe in American history. 

BB King (of the Bronx)

Billy Bathgate, written by E.L. Doctorow and published in 1989, tells the coming of age story of a teenage boy from a poor neighborhood in the Bronx, who figures out a way into a group of mobsters led by the infamous Dutch Schultz.  Told from Billy's perspective, Doctorow does a brilliant job of capturing a young boy's bravado, vulnerability, ingenuity, desire, and need to belong and be loved.  Having grown up without his father, Billy seeks mentors and father figures, and finds it in the clan-like and familial (as well as brutal and mercurial) Schultz gang. Billy gets in over his head but manages to find a way out.    

Billy Bathgate is one of Doctorow's most acclaimed novels, as it won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was the runner up for the Pulitzer Prize.  

The only other novel I have ready by Doctorow is Homer & Langley, which I also really enjoyed.  Can't wait to read more! 

Supporter of Porter

Perhaps it is fitting that on the cusp of my first trip to West Texas, I have just finished The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, published in 1965, for which she won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.  While the stories were published in 1962, most of them were written in the early 1930s.  Porter grew up in Texas and Louisiana.

Porter's stories take place all over the world - West Texas, the South, Mexico, Berlin, the German countryside, etc.  Her characters are electric as her settings are.  There were some stories that didn't really hold my interest, and others that were piercingly good, such as "Old Mortality" and "Holiday."  In the latter, a young woman gets advice from her friend about where to go for her spring holiday, and she goes to the country to live with a "family of real old-fashioned German peasants, in the deep blackland Texas farm country." 

Porter is an important writer in the American canon, and while I didn't like every story in this collection, it is absolutely worth reading a handful of these distinctive stories. 

Serena: Simply Too Good to Put Down

I have read some of Ron Rash's works, and now Serena is by far my favorite.  Set in 1929, the novel focuses on Serena and George Pemberton who both find themselves brimming with power, sensuality, ruthlessness, and the desire for profit.  The Pembertons were timber barons trailblazing near Asheville, North Carolina, at the time that the U.S. government was trying to establish the Smoky Mountains as a national park.  Serena sets her sights on timber in Brazil, and assumes that her husband will want the same.  However, he can't quite let go of his interest in his young son whose mother was someone who worked briefly at the lumber camp, and now lives nearby.  The book ends tragically, but was very captivating, atmospheric, and even cinematic.  Nothing like a good old-fashioned novel! 

Prim and Proper

Jane Austen's classic novel Pride and Prejudice was published 200 years ago in 1813.  The novel centers around the Bennett family and the marrying off of their daughters, in particular, Elizabeth Bennett, who warms up to Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy over time.  Reading Pride and Prejudice was kind of like watching Downton Abbey, but with none of the dramas outside of the romance plot lines.  Pride and Prejudice is particularly insular, focusing on the restrained interactions between the Bennetts, their neighbors, immediate family, and potential suitors.  While I don't think a 200 year old book need be stodgy, I found that to be so in this case.  Austen was no doubt a master of her time, but this is not a book that provoked much thought for me or caught my interest. 

Favorite quotes:

"'My dear, dear aunt,' she rapturously cried, what delight!  what felicity! You give me fresh life and vigour.  Adieu to disappointment and spleen.  What are men to rocks and mountains?""

"This is a most unfortunate affair; and will probably be much talked of.  But we must stem the tide of malice, and pour into the wounded bosoms of each other, the balm of sisterly consolation."

Satirical Steinbeck

Having traveled to France in the early 1950s, Steinbeck wrote The Short Reign of Pippin IV in 1957, which is a satirical tale of a chaotic French government at the time of the French Revolution.  France finds itself in need of a king, and the unsuspecting Pippin Heristal, based on his lineage, is recruited for the task.  While Pippin would rather be left alone to his hobby, astronomy, he must inherit the throne and try to bring peace and prosperity to his nation.  Pippin's wife Marie accepts her queendom with a sense of duty, and his precocious and rather wild daughter Clotilde becomes intrigued with an "egg king" hailing from Petaluma, CA.  As I am not an expert on French history, I'm sure that many of the satire and jokes were somewhat lost on me, and I didn't find the antics that hilarious or over the top.  All in all, this was not my favorite Steinbeck novel by a long shot, but I do admire his versatility, and he still remains one of my favorite authors of all time, with my favorite books being To a God Unknown, East of Eden, and The Grapes of Wrath. 

Some memorable quotes:

"In the salon she told her husband, 'Closed the window over the cheese - a full kilogram of cheese suffocating all night with the window closed.  And do you know what her excuse was?  She was cold.  For her own comfort the cheese must strangle.  You can't trust servants anymore."

"I want my little house, my wife, and my telescope.  Nothing more.  If they had not forced me to be king I would not have been forced to be kingly."