From the Prairie to the City

Over the last year, the Willa Cather I have come to know and love is the Cather who writes of the Nebraska prairie.  Interestingly, some of her works that take place in different environments are my least favorites (I'm thinking of Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock, neither of which I even finished).  Uncle Valentine and Other Stories:  Willa Cather's Uncollected Short Fiction, 1915-1929, falls somewhere in between for me.  In these seven stories, Cather set her stories in the urban landscape (NYC and Pittsburgh).  While collectively it is a good read, I didn't find any of the stories to be stand outs or particularly memorable.  That said, My Antonia and Cather's books set in rural places are some of the best works of fiction that I have ever read!

The Point is the Point

One of my favorite places in this vast and varied world is Point Reyes National Seashore.  I feel alive and expansive in this land of serenity and beauty.  Curious to know more about this majestic place, so close to my house yet so far away, I purchased An Island in Time:  50 Years of Point Reyes National Seashore, by John Hart, which highlights some of the major issues that have defined Point Reyes over the last 50 years, such as dairy farming, the animals that inhabit Point Reyes, and its very creation.  This is somewhat of a "coffee table" book in that it has lots of glossy photos, but it also has a good deal of information as well.  I wasn't riveted by Hart's writing, but it did provide a good overview of Point Reyes and some of the controversies and debates about the land over the years.  I'm interested in pairing this with The Solemn Land, a much older work written by local Point Reyes historian Jack Mason. 

Texas Trilogy

With Cities of the Plain, McCarthy concluded his Border Trilogy.  In this third work, McCarthy brings together his two protagonists in the earlier works, John Grady Cole and Billy Parham.  John and Billy are in early adulthood as ranch hands in New Mexico in the 1950s.  It is interesting to learn their fates, but this was my least favorite of the three books in the trilogy.  Trying to read as many books as I can before the end of the year, thus the relatively short posts!

The Grass is Always Greener, with Capote

The Grass Harp is classic Capote - wit, quirky characters, tender moments amidst hilarious ones, and immensely fabulous storytelling.  I really don't think it gets much better than this!  Read it.  Period.

Detroit City

This summer, I plan to take a trip to Michigan, starting in Detroit.  I've heard so many things about this city - its violence, its 80,000 abandoned buildings, its lawlessness, its failed public schools, but also its possibility, rebirth, and redevelopment.  Is Detroit rising from the ashes once again?  I took to reading Mark Binelli's account of the city, entitled Detroit City is the Place to Be:  The Afterlife of an American Metropolis.  Binelli's ethnographic and journalistic focus makes for an interesting account, with lots of interviews of locals from various backgrounds.  His writing is punchy and smart, if a bit longwinded.  For example, he writes, "It's an almost classically structured tale of humble origins transcended by entrepreneurial moxie and much diligent toil, all eventually brought low by tragic flaws (hubris, greed, long-simmering prejudices come home to roost)."  The book included some staggering facts such as the fact that recently, Michigan had the highest unemployment rate of any State, and one study identified nearly half of all adults as functionally illiterate.  This book provides a great starting point for understanding some of the history of Detroit, its current challenges, and its future.

Almost to the end of my Yates era

 Now that I have finished A Good School, I'm just one book away from having read all of Richard Yates.  Yates' novels and short stories are never uplifting, but always intriguing.  A Good School focuses on one year at a New England all-male prep school just at the start of WWII.  Focusing largely on the relationships between the students, Yates captures the angst and awkwardness of teenage boys as they strive to fit in, make friends, discover their passions.  As expected, there are fist fights, love affairs, hazing, sports, friendship, rivalries, and a few heartbreaking moments of isolation and loneliness.  Yates also explores the relationships between the male professors and administrative staff and their wives or lovers.  This wasn't my favorite from Yates, as it wasn't as rich in exploring the intimacies of relationships as some of his other novels (such as Revolutionary Road or The Easter Parade, but I would still say that A Good School is a "good" read. 

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.