Meredith Sue Willis's
Books for Readers # 211
October 24, 2020
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Octavia Butler, Livie Tidhar, Lillian Smith, Penelope Lively, Deboarah Clearman, Carter Seaton, Henry James
Meredith Sue Willis Has Two New Books for Fall 2020...
Latest Review of Soledad in the Desert!
Latest Review of Saving Tyler Hake
Free online writing exercise from Suzanne's McConnell's
new edition of Pity the Reader!.
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In This Issue:
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Special Halloween Review of "Turn of the Screw" by Eddy Pendarvis
Two "Chronicles" by Hilton Obenzinger
Good Reading Online and More
Readers Respond
Shorter Reviews
Irene Weinberger Books
Phyllis Wilson Moore's syllabus of
West Virginian/Appalachian Literature
BOOK REVIEWS:
Elizabeth Nourse, 1859-1938: A Salon Career by Mary Alice Heekin Burke
Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler
Remedios by Deborah Clearman
White Poison by Michael Harris Reviewed by Deborah Clearman
The Broken Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin
Judgment Day by Penelope Lively reviewed by Ingrid Blaufarb Hughes
Buried Seeds by Donna Meredith reviewed by Ed Davis
Debbie Doesn't Do it Anymore by Walter Mosley
The Long Fall by Walter Mosley
Known to Evil by Walter Mosley
The Other Morgans by Carter Taylor Seaton reviewed by Edwina Pendarvis
Killers of The Dream by Lillian Smith
Strange Fruit by Lillian Smith
Central Station by Lavie Tidhar
Saving Tyler Hake by Meredith Sue Willis Reviewed by Rebekah Ferrell
Book Reviews, if not otherwise credited, are by MSW.
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This issue has a couple of firsts: a republished review of Donna Meredith's Buried Seeds, by Ed Davis, to accompany the one in Issue #208 by Eddy Pendarvis.
The second first is that I am, for the first time, running a review of one of my own books, Saving Tyler Hake, reviewed by Rebekah Ferrell. This novella, from the indomitable Mountain State Press--which features work related to my home state, West Virginia--is my first serious work centering on teachers. Teaching is my family business (father my high school science teacher, mother a substitute, uncle and aunts, and a grandfather who taught in a one room school with an eighth grade education!), but I haven't focused much on teachers in my novel writing. I've always imagined a big novel about teachers, but this novella is my first go at it.
We also have two more of Hilton Obenzinger's "Chronicles," soon to be featured in a hard copy book, and more reviews and commentary by Deborah Clearman, Ingrid Hughes, and Eddy Pendarvis,
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Poetry by Hilton Obenzinger
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September 9, 2020
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Will anyone years from now understand
Or care about this moment September 2020?
How do we survive a sky that’s such DEEP TOTAL ORANGE?
ORANGE STREETS ORANGE HILLS ORANGE FEET
ORANGE LIPS ORANGE BAY ORANGE BRIDGES?
Can we put out all the fires?
Are we on the cusp of civil war?
Or has the civil war already begun?
How did we get lost in our own birth canal?
Where do we put our feet when there is no ground?
Who will breathe what we exhale?
What hopes have we squandered?
How many ventilators do we need if we never exhale?
Should I wait to write this poem until after the election?
Will I know who won by November?
When do these chronicles come to an end?
In November or January?
Or will they end in 2024?
Or when the fires are out?
When do we beat back the Boogaloo Boys?
How do we throw off THE GREAT ORANGE SKY?
ORANGE EYES ORANGE FEAR ORANGE DEATH?
Will this chronicle end after the plague has gone into hiding?
After I go into hiding?
We know the plague will never really go away
It goes into hiding like an angry rejected messiah
And it’s ready to pounce back at any time
A persistent hidden malignancy like Nazis
I stare at the all-encompassing Orange Sky and hope
We can put out all the fires
-- Hilton Obenzinger
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RBG for a Blessing
RBG dies on Erev Rosh Hashanah
September 18, 2020
May her memory be for a blessing
RBG bless this day our daily hope
Let her memory be a shield
RBG protect us from harm
May her memory ignite
Young girls and boys to act
Let her story be an example
RBG live like her
May we make a planet worthy of her
May we remember all that she has done
And all that we should do
May her memory stop being undone
May her memory be a rocket ship for truth
May all the lies fall away
As she smiles at us from sky’s memory
May her memory give relief
May her memory give strength
May she soar as a diva
And we listen to her lucid aria
May her memory allow us
To outlive the virus
To put up with a lot of shit
Put up with smoke and flames
Put up with bizarre fake conspiracies
May her memory let us sing and dance
With patience, cunning, and courage
May her death be for a blessing on Rosh Hashanah
And every year may Creation
Weigh our souls
May RBG measure all our deeds
With equal justice
And may RBG
Bless us with her memory
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-- Hilton Obenzinger
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Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw: Where the Truth Lies by Eddy Pendarvis
Sometimes it seems every book written in the late 1800s or early 1900s is about an orphan. Remembering that an orphan is a child who has lost at least one parent, not necessarily both—names that first come to my mind are Huckleberry Finn, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist,
Little Nell, Lorna Doone, Jim Hawkins, and, for younger readers, Heidi and Pollyanna. If you include stories, especially fairy tales, the list gets much longer. I guess their popularity with readers (and writers) is partly because most of us harbor our child self deep in our memory, along with feelings about how frightened that child sometimes felt. In addition, most of us, maybe parents in particular, feel empathy for the hurts and hopes of children because children are so vulnerable without the protection of an adult. The orphans in those classics of a century or so ago survive the danger they confront, but fearing for them is part of the pleasure of the stories. In celebration of Halloween, I decided to re-read one of the most famous horror stories about a pair of orphans, a brother and sister—not Hansel and Gretel, but a story almost as famous.
The Turn of the Screw, Henry James’ novella, published in 1898, is set in England. The story begins on Christmas Eve, when a dinner guest offers a ghostly tale of something terrible that happened twenty years before when a young governess accepted a position to educate two orphaned children.
We learn that the children’s guardian, a bachelor uncle has placed his little niece, Flora, and nephew, Miles, in his country home, though he lives in London. He entrusts their upbringing to this new governess and admonishes her not to bother him with any problems. Not long after the governess arrives at Bly (maybe the name of the house should’ve turned her right around) she sees a ghost. At least that’s how it seemed to readers in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Now readers aren’t so sure.
For better or worse, Freud’s theories drastically changed how this story is read. Readers now are uncertain as to how trustworthy the governess’s perceptions are. That first ghost sighting, for example. She sees a man standing on a tower of the Bly estate and later describes him to the housekeeper as having red hair, short and curling; red whiskers; and a long, pale face with sharp, strange eyes. She notes that he is bare-headed. The housekeeper quickly recognizes this description as fitting Peter (yes) Quint, who had died not long before.
The governess soon sees a second apparition. This one, a woman, appears out of nowhere as the governess gazes across a lake. The woman, dressed in black, is described to the housekeeper as “pale and dreadful,” an image of “horror and evil.” Is she the former governess, Miss Jessel, who also died recently?
The governess is convinced the ghosts are after Flora and Miles to corrupt the children. Worse, she suspects that the children are complicit in this evil attempt. The housekeeper is skeptical, and so is the modern reader. After Freud, and in spite of his detractors, who would’t harbor suspicions of the significance of a bare-headed (a fact important enough for the governess to mention twice), red-haired man standing “erect” on (still another phallic symbol) a tower? And a female ghost seen across a lake—the watery symbol for female qualities, such as birth? These images appear sexually loaded to more readers today than in James’ time.
Even to readers of his day, James’ governess seemed anxious and overwrought. Early on, she seems unduly impressed with her young charges. On meeting little Flora, she says: “She was the most beautiful child I had ever seen.” We can accept that; but she goes on to call the child “radiant” and her beauty “angelic.” During the governess’ first night in the house, she thinks she hears a child, maybe Flora, crying “like one of Raphael’s holy infants.” According to the governess, Miles, who’s kicked out of school for behavior that, supposedly, is too bad for the school’s headmaster to specify—is also “incredibly beautiful.” The governess finds in his countenance “something divine that I have never before found in another child to the same degree.” These attributions of beauty and divinity contrast with her impressions of the ghosts, whom she regards as evil incarnate, particularly Peter Quint, with his “white face of damnation.”
So, does the governess actually see ghosts, or is the she mad? When readers ask that question, what they mean is how did the author intend for us to answer it. In spite of critics who say that the author’s intentions have little bearing on the literary work itself, some of us can’t help being curious as to whether James meant this to be a ghost story or the story of an obsessed woman whose delusions have a tragic effect on an innocent child.
My recent re-reading of the story suggested yet another possibility. Maybe Henry James intended to write a story illustrating that truth is sometimes unknowable—as insubstantial as a ghost.
James did’t intentionally make use of Freudian symbolism. He wrote this tale before Freud’s theories were widely known. However, that does’t preclude their being sexual symbols. All of us, even the greatest authors, communicate more than we intend to communicate. For one reason, few of our mental associations are available to our consciousness when we’re speaking or writing.
Whatever James consciously intended, his “potboiler,” as he called it, is a horror story that’s fun to read and puzzle over, especially so close to Halloween, when we symbolically greet Death by offering little hobgoblins treats to appease them and, maybe, keep grim truth at bay for another year.
Judgment Day by Penelope Lively reviewed by Ingrid Blaufarb Hughes
One of my favorite Penelope Lively novels is Judgment Day, a story which revolves around a church, in this case an ancient church in need of restoration. (At least bits of it are ancient, as one character puts it.) The village in which it stands is a “muddled place—its associations incoherent, its strata confused. Ugly for the most part, but shot here and there with grace….”
The church itself is “perilously sited beside the Amuck garage, its gray stone extinguished by lime green and tangerine plastic bunting… On the other side, the George and Dragon’s car park presses up tight against the churchyard wall… what must once have seemed so large, so solid, so impregnable, now squats small and a little apologetic: a pleasing anachronism, of architectural interest. Time has juggled the order of things.”
The story is told mostly from the viewpoints of three characters. Clare Paling is affluent, bookish, happy with her husband and two children. She lives across from St. Peter and St. Paul and agrees to help raise funds for repairs out of interest in its history and a need to be occupied. The vicar, George Rad well, who lives next door to her in a twin house, is a dull, uncertain man who stumbled into his work for lack of other interests. He is irritated by Clare’s matter-of-fact agnosticism, even as he develops an attraction to her, or perhaps because of it. “She made
him think of gooseberries. He had never known if he loved them or hated them; that acid compelling taste, they way they furred your mouth. He did’t know if he wanted to hit her or grab her.” [When Clare tells her husband that George Rad well seems to have “inappropriate feelings” for her, Hubby laughs, "at length.”]
Sydney Porter, another neighbor of the church, is a retired accountant and churchwarden, who has organized his life to protect himself from the kind of pain he experienced when his wife and daughter died in the Blitz. An occasional fourth point of view is that of a boy, Martin, whose family lives next door to Sydney Porter and who Sydney allows himself to adopt, despite his vow.
Besides these people, all living on the green by the church, there is the constant presence of the biker boys, a gang who roar around the green at night, overturning garbage bins, breaking a window here or there, requiring the vicar and Sydney Porter to lock the church at night. Claire considers “these nocturnal visitations… the unleashing of some elemental force, sinister and uncontrollable [by] restless, frustrated, destructive youths.”
Lively explores other forms of violence as well, both accidental and deliberate: Sidney Porter’s war experiences; Claire losing her temper over a parking space; one of the fighter jets that various characters have admired crashing into a crowd at a nearby airs how killing several people. St. Peter and St. Paul itself has a bloody history—the killing of several Levelers in the churchyard in the 17th century as well as the trial and transportation to Australia of farm laborers demanding better wages in the 19th century. These events become the subjects of a reenactment to be performed on the day of the great fund-raising event for the restoration.
So history becomes another of the subjects of Judgment Day. Clare Paling, who remarks often on its misery, violence and bleakness, is as often challenged by the irritable Miss Bellingham who feels sure that Clare’s views are too gloomy and disparaging of history and that the public would rather see charming children in pretty frocks doing traditional dances than a staging of the church’s violent past. One of the pleasures of the novel is Clare’s intelligence on this and other subjects. When Sidney Porter, watching a rehearsal of the reenactment observes, “You can’t help wondering if it’s anything like it was…” Clare responds “The past is always our own projection. I mean the real past is no longer accessible, because you can never divest it of our own wisdoms and misconceptions.”
She’s also amusing on the new Bible, when she feels she should expose her children to religion and in church reacts against it. She finds herself thinking: “I beg your pardon? You did say Corinthians one thirteen? Is nothing sacred? Where are the sounding brasses and tinkling cymbals, for God’s sake?.... Where are the paths of righteousness and the valley of the shadow of death… God never told people to reproduce, he told them to be fruitful and multiply…..”
Lively is always in command, moving easily from one character’s head to another’s or sliding into omniscient, describing Sidney’s pleasure when he finds himself taking care of a neighbor’s child, the vicar’s crush on Clare.As the story builds, the church assumes its lost glory under the spotlights set up for the pageant. Then the ugliness suggested in the first pages manifests, along with the satisfactions of alterations in the major characters.
If you read this book you may find yourself looking for more Penelope Lively novels. One of her many virtues as a writer is that she never repeats herself.
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Remedios by Deborah Clearman
A few months ago I reviewed the first of Don Winslow's novels about the Mexican drug cartels, The Power of the Dog. I did not read the rest of the trilogy, and probably won't. It is well-researched and, I believe, fairly close to a true picture of
the mega-violent drug cartels, but one of these multiple-hundred pagers is enough for me. I'm willling to be choked by the horror once, but I don't need to repeat the experience.
Deborah Clearman's new novel Remedios, set in Guatemala, covers some of the same territory. The horrors are here, but she takes her time with the people. She writes about what organized crime does to people on the ground--mothers and honest police officers and college professors and a kid who wants to be a chemist and ends up making methamphetamine for his father's attractive friend who brings the drug business to the fictional town of Remedios..
Clearman gives acknowledgments to many people she knows in Guatemala who are not, she says, models for the people in her novel, but you trust her knowledge of how drug manufacturing and selling can corrupt and destroy the people it touches
She writes about one very close Guatemalan family that is far from poor, but still besieged by financial woes and by the memories of the political Violencia of the 1980's. The most prominent character, Fernando, is a college professor who is passionately in love with his wife and feels powerfully responsible for his extended family. He is genuinely and generously delighted when Memo a friend from high school– for whom Fernando as a teenager arranged a soccer scholarship–turns up again. Memo is strong, secretive and attractrive to everyone around him: especially to Fernando himself, to his wife, and to his son.
We get well-handled points of view for all those characters, and for Memo too, which is a bit of a coup for Clearman, because Memo holds himself away from all confidences and as much as possible from feelings. There are deaths, but there are also survivals.
It's an excellent story, but perhaps even more than the story, I like the layers of Guatemalan society: the way the families are organized, the occasional wry judgements on norteamericanos, the religious lines drawn between traditional Catholics and the evangelicals.
It's a moving, sad, and very worthwhile book.
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Central Station by Lavie Tidhar
A lot of Tidhar's focus is on world creation, which always pleases me, as does the big cast of characters. This 2016 book won or was nominated for a ton of science fiction awards, and won the 2017 John W. Campbell Memorial Award. The novel is set in the future at an enormous travel hub (space travel) on the border between the Israeli cities of Tel Aviv and Jaffa. The community around it has a wonderful mix of ethnic groups whose families immigrated: people from or with roots in China and Nigeria along with Jews and Arabs and various others.
One interesting idea is that the world wide web has gone interior: every baby is at birth implanted with a node that allows the person it becomes to be part of the "conversation," which is everything going on everywhere (including across space) all the time. You can pull out information as needed, of course, or just
listen, or send out a feed of your daily life and musings. The plot, such as it is, has two people arriving at Central Station: one to see his father die (the death takes place at the very cool Suicide Park), and, not by plan exactly to resume his great love affair. The other arrival is a strogoi, a young woman who is a kind of vampire: she has overdeveloped canines, but doesn't suck blood. Rather, she takes data from her victims, who seem to like it. There's a "crippled" book seller who has no node and lives in silence--that is, doesn't take part in the conversation. He and the strogoi have an affair.
There is also a woman who makes a living in the gaming universe. Her love affair is with an ancient soldier, a robot with a little bit of dead human soldier still animating him. There are some very strange children, from the vats (an alternative to biological gestations and birth) who may or may not be about to be the next stage of "human" evolution. (Tidhar apparently uses the Central Station universe as a setting for the majority of his straight SF stories).
The thing I like best about this is that everyone keeps keeping on, which is really what human beings do, until we die. We now are in the middle of a terrible pandemic with dire political circumstances, but hour by hour, we eat, chat, read, do chores, have sex, try to figure out how to get the best for our children, etc.
So unlike too many science fiction and fantasy novels, this one is a slice of future life with plenty of danger and mysteries. Some but hardly all are thwarted or solved–and then we go on. It's a kind of high realism, if you like.
He says in an interview at Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, "I like that SF allows you to talk about the big questions—what is life? Why are we here? Is there a God?—whereas in the rest of fiction, a lot of the time we pretend that Earth and humans are all there is, and this huge, strange, mysterious universe isn't out there. But it is out there! It's right there! How can you not write about it?"
Parable of the Talents by Octavia ButlerButler is prodigious. I liked the Parable of the Sower, the first half of this series, and had trouble getting into this one, but once I was in, I was all the way in. It is made up of a mélange of journal entries and selections from Lauren/Shaper/Sharer/Olamina's poems that make up her religious text, the Book of Earthseed.
It's a post-apocalyptic world, one that actually functions in some ways. Late in the book a new political administration comes in and offers some hope after the awful events under the religious right-wing president who was elected at the beginning of the book.
Butler builds up a consciously created community and then tears it down brutally: she doesn't seem to mind doing this. There are a lot of damaged and re-damaged people, but the heart of the story, or maybe one way to read the story is that a woman invents a religion (Earthseed) which has as its essential dogma: God is Change and Change is God. The religion insists that we shape Change/God even as Change/God shapes us. It's simple and practical, with only one weirdness, which is that there is a Destiny for human beings to go to the stars and seed the planets there with earth people and plants and animals.
The novel lays out this belief system not as something necessarily true but as a stark contrast to the Christian American Church, which includes, along with a lot of your normal uptight judgmental Christians. a host of evil "Crusaders."
I really liked the idea of a sincere, struggling woman who has invented a religion and is a natural leader of people. The heart of the novel is her struggles, her loves, her quest. Her baby is stolen from her early on, and there is a question about how hard she is trying to find her (she thinks she is). The baby becomes the daughter who is the impresario of the novel, telling a little of her own story but mostly sharing and commenting on Lauren/Shaper/Olamina's journals. Eventually they meet, and it is interesting, if not easy or even good, but it is very powerful.
Butler is the real thing: inventive and humanistic, and died way too soon.
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White Poison by Michael Harris Reviewed by Deborah Clearman
In this sweeping epic we see the California Gold Rush and war of extermination against the native peoples of northern California through the eyes of protagonist Alexander Wells. At age 76, Wells has just received a medical death sentence and decides to write down the story of his life, beginning in 1852 when as a 17-year-old farm boy from Illinois his wagon train is attacked by Medoc Indians. Full of rage and blood lust, young Alex joins a posse of Indian fighters to punish the Medoc. The ensuing massacre instills in Wells a burden of horror and guilt that haunts him for the rest of his life.
Harris convincingly portrays Alexander Wells through stints as a successful prospector, failed rancher, failed husband, heartbroken father, and successful lawyer as he grows from rough youth to seasoned elder. Through tragedy and hardship, his moral fiber is constantly tested. The book is a tour de force in capturing a life.
Moreover, this life personifies sixty years of brutal history in northern California. Rigorously researched, Harris incorporates a number of historical figures into the novel and places his protagonist into actual events. He even quotes extensively from Joaquin Miller, the flamboyant “poet of the Sierra,” who lived with and wrote about the California Indians.
The catalyst for the fictional memoir is also a historical event: the dramatic discovery in 1911 of Ishi, the last wild Indian of California, sole survivor of his Yahi people. Alexander Wells dreams of meeting Ishi to solve a mystery: was the entire Shasta tribe murdered by deliberate strychnine poisoning at a treaty-signing feast in 1851?
Whether or not the Shasta were fed beef tainted by white powder, their people were all but wiped out by the end of the century. By weaving together history and fiction, Harris has created a powerful and poignant masterpiece in White Poison.
The Other Morgans by Carter Taylor Seaton reviewed by Edwina Pendarvis
The prologue to Seaton's new novel feels almost epic in the way it places the main character, her problem, and her opportunity right in front of us at the outset. We first see her alone on the family farm in Fayette County, West Virginia.
At the edge of the pasture stood a young woman in jeans so tight her mother often questioned how she got them on. A single black braid split her back like an exclamation mark. In her left hand, she held an envelope from the Fayette County sheriff's office. Her heart sank as she stared at it. She knew what was inside—the farm's annual tax bill.
In her right hand is the other piece of mail addressed to Audrey Jane Porter. She turns the cream-colored envelope over to open it and sees an embossed gold crest and a red wax seal. The contents of this envelope change her life.
The letter inside brings word of an almost impossibly huge inheritance. As the only living descendant of Jackson Morgan, a man she's never heard of, AJ is heir to the man's millions. Soon, AJ learns that, in order to gain her inheritance, she has to agree to live at Morgan's home, Langford Hall, in Dillard County, Virginia, for a year and learn how to manage his four thousand acre farm.
Silver linings come with clouds, and the changes in AJ's life aren't all for the good. Leaving West Virginia for an extended period of time poses problems for her. AJ and her daughter, eight-year-old Annie, live with AJ's mother, Alice, on a family farm. With a lot of hard work, AJ and Alice eke a living out of their small farm. Alice is too old to work the farm without help, and Annie doesn't want her mother to leave. The problems leaving pose, however, are minor compared to some that AJ encounters during her sojourn in Virginia.
When she arrives at Langford Hall, a congenial older woman named Isabelle is comfortably ensconced in the house during work days and, understandably, hopes to continue working there. Isabelle, who was, among other things, an assistant to the deceased millionaire, has a sentimental attachment to the place and a thorough knowledge of its history, which she shares with AJ through conversation, old journals and letters, and a visit to the family cemetery where the Virginia branch of the Morgan family lies buried.
Author Seaton's eventful story of the happenings during AJ's stay raises many important social issues, especially issues related to gender. Of particular interest to me was the fact that a good percentage of the male characters, alive or dead, are (or were) terribly flawed in their moral make up. Their destructive responses to life's challenges ranged from slave-holding, to drunkenness, to wife-beating, to larceny. Heroes like Ben, a World War II pilot, and Moses, more loyal than his slavemasters had any reason to expect, are few and far between. The women's flaws are minor by comparison—AJ's mother is timid at times and often narrow-minded; women in AJ's hometown are gossips; and AJ, though strong, is full of self-doubt.
In a way, this novel is the reverse side of the coin to one of my favorite books by Seaton: Father's Troubles. Set in the early twentieth century, it too focuses on a family history. Father's Troubles depicts the misfortune that acquiring a fortune brings to a Huntington, West Virginia, man and his family. In that story, the influence of one man's actions on those who love him portrays even greater emotional stakes than are at issue in The Other Morgans. This new novel makes a fine companion piece to the earlier one. .
Whether flawed or heroic, male characters get the lion's share of drama in AJ's story. So much so that for a time I rooted for Isabelle to be secretly plotting to take over the estate, but Isabelle's not the antagonist. In fact, as with many excellent novels, the protagonist of this tale is also the antagonist. In this sense, The Other Morgans is the story of an intriguing psychological struggle. To fulfill her dreams and her duties to herself, her family, and her community, AJ first has to be clear about what her dreams and duties are. The story's end offers a poignant contrast to its beginning.
Buried Seeds by Donna Meredith reviewed by Ed Davis
(See another take on Buried Seeds from Edwina Pendarvis in Issue #208)
I found myself excited to learn that Donna Meredith’s new novel Buried Seeds (Wild Women Writers, 2020)was about, among many other things, the West Virginia teachers’ strike of 2018. I’d closely followed the event through the media and the involvement of my teacher-niece, but I longed to experience what the strike felt like—and knew from having read her novel Fraccidental Death that Meredith would not disappoint. Buried Seeds is actually two novels beneath one cover, alternating between Clarksburg, WV teacher Angie Fisher’s strike narrative and Angie’s great-great-grandmother Rosella Krause’s early twentieth century activism in the struggle for women’s right to vote. If you liked Barbara Kingsolver’s parallel plotlines in her latest novel Unsheltered, you’ll doubtless
enjoy Meredith’s interesting mashup.
Angie Fisher is an excellent Everyteacher, fiftyish, funny and self-deprecating—but what makes her so relatable, besides her compelling voice, is her super-pressurized life. When Angie reluctantly accepts leadership of the American Federation of Teachers in her district, she sets herself up for an agonizing dilemma: how can she lead a strike when her unemployed husband Dewey is applying for work with the local FBI, likely to frown on such law-breaking? During this time, she also deals with her dad’s growing dementia, her sister’s divorce and her daughter, a single mom, giving birth to a child with severe hearing loss. Money is a big problem, and we see all too clearly why state teachers are disgusted with a legislature that wants to give them a mere 2% pay raise while health insurance premiums skyrocket.
After Angie and Dewey are forced to move in with her parents, Trish and the new baby Bella soon follow—and if the old farmhouse weren’t already over-crowded, sister MacKenzie winds up there, too, when she leaves her husband. While such pressure may to some appear over the top, my own first-hand knowledge of close families tells me otherwise. These developments remind me how I felt reading, in Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, a scene where the cash-strapped protagonist is Christmas shopping. I’m grateful to Meredith and Kingsolver for making me relive the ache of poverty I felt in my own childhood, nowhere better represented than in the fact that hearing aids for Bella, not covered by the teachers’ current insurance, will be an impossible expense for this family.
Alongside Angie’s anguished life, Meredith shoots us into the early 1900s, where we meet, alongside Angie, her great-great grandmother Rosella, who’s endured similar suffering. Adopted young, Angie knows nothing about her parents, much less this long-lost relative. Rosella, an artist, is now in San Francisco, along with her fourteen-year-old daughter Solina, for the opening of Rosella’s pottery show. The account we’re reading is based on the scrapbook Angie’s mom gifted her with. Scenes are recreated through the diary Solina kept, describing her mother’s life story as she related it during this auspicious trip. Even more important than finding out that Rosella was a great artist is that she was an activist as well, working tirelessly for women to earn the right to vote in 1907. A former journalist, Meredith is a scrupulous researcher. I learned a lot about other significant women’s issues while also enjoying exciting plot twists and turns.
And there is plenty of plot in this book. A seasoned writer of mysteries, Meredith doesn’t ignore the need for suspense to keep readers tantalized. In Angie’s story, we learn quickly that Rosella was her great-great-grandmother, but who was Angie’s mother and father? And while many readers will know how the WV teacher’s strike turned out, we want to know if Angie and her husband will reconcile. Perhaps most heartbreaking: will infant Bella get her hearing aids? Similarly, the Rosella narrative is fueled by wondering who reported her as a “bigamist and baby killer” to the press and whether her greatest artistic achievement will be ruined by the media attack? All eventually comes clear, along with many other shocks and surprises.
Buried Seeds is rich indeed. If I have a quibble with it, it’s that perhaps it’s a little too rich as the author includes so much, especially in Rosella’s section. But if it’s a bit overstuffed with event, it does not ignore character, to me the gold standard. By novel’s end, I do know, through Angie Fisher, something of how it feels to lead a strike for justice as well as economic necessity. It feels like the only thing a person of integrity can do, in order to live with oneself and face one’s children and grand-children. I’m grateful for that vicarious experience.
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Saving Tyler Hake reviewed by Rebekah Ferrell
As each set of wandering eyes and gossiping lips hovers over a tragedy in Smith County, West Virginia, a group of middle-aged women is sent back thirty years to when they sat at the very school desks they now teach in front of.
Through the narration of Tyler’s 10th grade English teacher, Robin Sue
Willis, a West Virginian native now living in New Jersey tied her story to its setting all the way to the editing process – by asking that this novella be published by West Virginia’s oldest traditional literary press, Mountain State Press.
Through the storytelling, heavy Appalachian plot line and hints of the classic country twang inherited by each character, the reader can infer that though Willis’ body moved elsewhere, her heart and soul stayed in the great Mountain State.
Saving Tyler Hake was a compelling read from start to finish. With the heavy use of dialogue, the relationships within the book flourish, proving that any incident within a small town has a way of sneaking into every crevice of daily life.
With the use of flashbacks, Willis bridges time in a small town, as well as the relationships that grow and fade therein. And with an end tying up what had happened to Tyler Hake after all, we see that good can come of the misfortune from being born on the wrong side of the bridge.
Elizabeth Nourse, 1859-1938: A Salon Career by Mary Alice Heekin Burke (with Lois Marie Fink)
Nourse was an American expatriate in Paris, a contemporary of Mary Cassatt and Gertrude Stein. She was not, however, an experimenter, but a woman of deep religious feeling (Catholic) who loved nuns and mothers and children as subjects, and also European peasants, who were her most frequent subjects for paintings.
She lived with her sister in France.. They spoke only French to each other, and she showed in the big Salons. This book is the catalog of her 1980's retrospective in Cincinnati, where she was born. She had a twin sister who died as a young married woman.
Part of what's interesting about this is how she was a so-called Academic painter, but took whatever she wanted from the Impressionists and others. It is also instructive to learn how many women, including Americans, were studying in Paris in the 1880's and 90's (there was a wonderful exhibit at the Clark in Williamstown, Massachusetts in 2019 that was about that).
Nourse crossed paths with many important artists, but was pretty focused on making a living as an artist. She was extremely serious and talented, working hard, doing everything, but never interested in art for its own sake. She always painted subjects.
Oh, and all the people in her pictures are beautiful in her eyes and how she presents them. The old are beautiful through lines of experience, the young gaze out frankly at us,, and that is their beauty. A lot of her work is a little quiet for my taste, but attractive in this present time of enforced calm and great anxiety. And the story of what it took for an American woman to have this career is fascinating.
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TWO BOOKS BY LILLIAN SMITH
Killers of The Dream by Lillian Smith
Killers of the Dream by Lillian Smith is an historically essential book--a direct look at the effects of racism on Southern white people. Smith says early on that this is not a personal story--and, in fact, she avoids using many stories. She insists she isn't doing doing memoir or fiction, and the result is passionate but abstract. The parts that are most vivid are, in fact, the stories, the concrete examples of events in her childhood and other dramatized examples,. She tries to write about everyman and everywoman, but it often seems over-generalized, and the style is impressionistic, with heightened language that is too imprecise and overwrought for my taste.
Whatever its flaws, however, it is one of the first of its kind: an exposure of the wages of racial sin, as well as sexism and religious bigotry, on the white people of the American South. It was published in 1949,
with revisions in the early 1960's, and a 1994 introduction.
The book has some wonderful moments, especially the story from Smith's early life of how her family took in what the town perceived as a white child mistakenly living with black people. The girl is simply snatched from her foster home, and brought to Smith's house, where she becomes Smith's companion, sharing clothes and play. Further investigation by the town elders indicates that, no, the child isn't white but black, albeit very light skinned. She's sent off to a "colored" orphanage, in probably the worst situation yet. The girl Lillian-- quite reasonably-- just doesn't get it. If the other girl looked white, why was she black? How could she be one thing and then another and then snatched back to the first thing?
The point is, of course, the arbitrariness of race, but here we're getting it from a white witness, who ultimately spent her life teaching white girls a better way and joining in as an ally the early struggles of the Civil Rights Movement.
Strange Fruit by Lillian Smith
Lillian Smith's best known book is a novel published in 1944, before Killers of the Dream.. This novel, like the nonfiction book, is mostly about what racism does to white people and to a Southern town, although she does write several educated characters of color. One is a doctor who is deeply kind and sacrifices his own anger to be able to heal his people. She also creates two more college educated black characters, a brother and sister, Bess and Ed, who are believable. I was less satisfied with Bess and Ed's younger sister Nonnie, who is part of the couple whose love story destroys a lot of people
Nonnie is, like the little girl in Lillian Smith's real life story, pretty much white in appearance, and she takes a white lover, a young man she grew up with, who is briefly inspired by his experience in war and his love to turn against the racist culture of his community, but he falls away from his best moment quickly.
There are maybe a dozen or more point of view characters, so it becomes a group novel, or perhaps a novel about a community in South Georgia, a town the produces turpentine and cotton. The novel has a murder of passion and ends with a lynching, although the title is not from the Abel Meerpol aka Lewis Allan song made famous by Billie Holiday. Smith says it was about what Southern segregation and Jim Crow did to twist its children and turn them into strange fruit.
The book was, to my surprise, a best seller. I was expecting a historical curiosity, but it is in fact quite gripping. Smith handles her multiple points of view skillfully, and, as I suggested her African-American characters aren't half badly done. The lynching is seen and smelled, but not narrated directly.
Banned in Boston and Detroit and by the US Post office, Strange Fruit sold millions anyhow, and probably ought to be on high school reading lists, but It won't be, of course--there's too much sex and too many N-bombs.
Apparently Smith didn't write anything this good again, although she wrote a lot, much of it nonfiction, some polemical. She ran a camp for girls and young women, was an activist and writer for the whole rest of her life. She never wrote directly, however, about her own sexuality and her long relationship with another woman..
For more on Strange Fruit and Lillian Smith, read some of these reviews and essays:
https://www.bookforum.com/print/1802/strange-fruit-by-lillian-smith-7794;
https://www.artsatl.org/review-uga-press-lillian-smith-reader-fortifies-authors-brazen-legacy/; and
https://www.thedailybeast.com/lillian-smiths-bombshell-novel-about-interracial-love .
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SHORTER REVIEWS, MOSTLY GENRE
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Three by Walter Mosley: The Long Fall , Known to Evil, and Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore
I seem to be consuming Walter Mosey books like potato chips. These are the first two Leonid McGill mysteries plus a stand alone book in a first person woman's voice.
I like McGill, althoug not as much as Easy Rawlins. He's an ex-amateur boxer, mid-fifties. The place is New York City instead of Los Angeles, and the time around 2008 or 2009. I miss Los Angeles in the nineteen sixties, but New York is always fun. We're up to computers and cell phones, but not smart phones.
McGill is shortish and thick, only a h.s. education, and a background of running
errands and ruining people for the Mafia, but never killing anyone. He is of course well-read and extremely smart and good at lots of things, as a PI and Mosley protagonist should be.
His MIA father was an ideological communist, and McGill, of course, suffers a lot, both beatings and psychologically. His favorite child is not his genetic son, and he has a strange flat relationship with a wife who has been serially unfaithful (two of three kids not his). She's trying to get back in his good graces, but he isn't having any of it, although he supports her to keep his family together. He loves someone else, and once again, in both of these books all these backstory details are what I like best, and also the various low lifes and nasty rich white people who pop up. McGill is always thinking, always on the job, and always enjoying the pleasure of outwitting the people who underestimate him.
And finally, a standalone Mosley called Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore, is not a murder mystery at all, but has violence and a lot of violence-prone people, including another of Mosley's signature cool professional killers who helps the protagonist. It is set in the so-called adult film industry, first person narration by Debbie Dare/Sandra Peel. She's quite appealing and also extremely explicit, as she warns us at the beginning. The final third comes up with a pretty hokey plan to commit suicide that I don't really find believable, but maybe it's the best Mosley could think up to raise the ante for the end. I was perfectly happy with her retirement from the adult film industry, her husband's death, a couple of attacks on her for money and passion. But in spite of my sense that I didn't believe the plot development, it works or tying up the threads. I liked the book a lot: as with so much of his work, it's short, crisp as a cracker, heart and politics in the right place. For a summary and some more comments, see the Chicago Tribune's review.
Big bonus: his world view never sets my teeth on edge.
The Broken Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin
This is the second of Jemisin's first trilogy, which precedes The Fifth Season et alia, and the others. This one takes place in the city of Shadow, beneath the World Tree. The narrator is Oree Shoth, a blind artist who enjoys her life selling tourist kitsch in a busy, friendly marketplace.
The human-turned-god and the Nightlord from the first book make a cameo appearance in this one, but there are plenty of other gods and godlings. The plot turns around the question of who is murdering the godlings?
So we have a mystery that carries us through the story with great panache. There are too many gods for me--this is where fantasy falls down in my estimation: it's hard to get too concerned when you don't really grasp or remember what each character has the power to do or not. Is the point they're just folks, like very rich very powerful folks? I'm not sure, but, hey, it's N.K. Jemisin and she's always worth reading.
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READERS RESPOND
Darrell Laurant wrote: "I loved the essay on typos by Edwina Pendarvis that appeared on your book blog. I spent 30 years as a newspaper reporter and columnist, during which I probably committed enough typos to fill a volume in themselves. Some got caught, many didn't. Once, we ran the wrong date on the masthead at the top of the front page -- leaping from Wednesday to Friday and skipping over Thursday -- perhaps causing lots of readers to fear they had inexplicably lost a day out of their lives. I've always compared typos to cockroaches. You can spray and spray and feel confident that they are all eradicated, only to find a new crop the next day. I once decided to test our readers by printing a short piece of writing that contained a few intentional typos and challenging them to locate them. And they did, along with two more typos in the piece that were unintentional."
Darrell Laurant runs a great site for writers and readers at snowflakesarisewordpress.com
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GOOD STUFF ONLINE & ELSEWHERE
Lewis Brett Smiler has a short story "Down the Stairs" in the Horror Anthology Night Terrors Volume 4. It's a Kindle book, available on Amazon.
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Yet another of Hannah Brown's wonderful true stories about life with her son Oren. This one is "One Morning in Maine," and this time she and Oren go to Yom Kippur services without her having had her morning coffee. I've been linking to this series of essays for the last several issues. Just as a reminder: Hannah Brown is the author of If I Could Tell You, inspired by her experiences of raising a son with autism.
She has been the movie critic for The Jerusalem Post since 2001. She is a lifelong writer, going back to elementary school when I knew her at P.S. 75 in New York City.
Suzanne McConnell speaks about her book Pity the Poor Reader on Youtube.
Some old material on editing: These pieces are 5 years old, but of more than archival interest: Dan Menaker wrote on the ideal of editing and the publishing that (used to?) make it possible. I blogged a short response.
Check out:"Snowflakes in a Blizzard,"an author-centric free book marketing service created by author Darrell Laurant that is followed by hundreds of bloggers. Each week he features three books -- novels, non-fiction, poetry, short-story collections -- in individual posts. He says, "Some of the authors we embrace are obviously in need of more exposure. In other cases, the inclusion of a book is simply an effort to get unique writing out to our blog followers." Take a look at the website. It has a template for submitting your book to the project. And it's featuring one of my books!
Phyllis WIlson Moore's syllabus of West Virginian/Appalachian Literature
Phyllis Moore's syllabus for a course on West Virginia literature, "Rooted in Solid Ground: Journeys into Appalachian Literature." See syllabus here.
(From the introduction)
"Many of the seventeenth and eighteenth settlers of West Virginia came from Scotland, Ireland, England, Germany, among other European locales, to ports on the eastern coast of North America. They moved on to (what was then) the mountain wilderness west of the colonies.. These settlers and others brought their history and heritage, memories and stories, as well as the drive to be independent land owners. They were not here first or here alone, however. They massacred, uprooted, or in the best cases merged with Native Americans. Some brought with them, or later purchased, African Americans as slaves.
"The mountains’ mix grew to include increasing numbers of ethnic groups from countries such as Italy, France, Poland, Greece, Belgium, and Spain, etc. The religions represented were as numerous as the groups themselves. Each brought skills and a heritage; all had the desire to record their “ways” for future generations. They did not forget their past homes or their past.
"The state’s literature developed from this hodgepodge of cultures, social classes, races, and religions, plus the beauty and constraints of this specific place. The literature is of value; it defines this place, our place, and yet has universal themes and appeal.
"The topics and lessons included here offer a small sample of the literature created by early immigrants and their descendants."
Phyllis Moore is, as always, looking to include a plea for more ideas and names of authors.
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Also from Phyllis Moore: A List of Books for Young Adults with Appalachian Themes and Writers From Phyllis Wilson Moore.
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Meredith Sue Willis's
Books for Readers # 212
Back Issues MSW Home About Meredith Sue Willis Contact
This Newsletter Looks Best in its Permanent Location Online!
December 23, 2020
Department of Shameless Self-Promotion
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MSW is teaching Novel Writing at NYU by Zoom starting February 24, 2021.
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A Short Piece in A Journal of Practical Writing on Developing Character by Changing Proper Names
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MSW sometimes blogs about the political issues.
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Two new books:
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Your New Reading Lists:
Ernie Brill's Abbreviated
History of Expanding the Canon
More Timely Poems by Hilton Obenzinger
Good Reading Online and More
Announcements & News
Shorter Reviews
Readers Write
Irene Weinberger Books
Phyllis Wilson Moore's syllabus of
West Virginian/Appalachian Literature
BOOK REVIEWS:
All Souls Rising and Master of the Crossroads by Madison Smartt Bell
Heartwood by James Lee Burke
Wild Seed and Mind of My Mind by Octavia Butler
We Were Legends in Our Own Minds
by Richard Cobb and Carter Taylor Seaton
Reviewed by Carrington Hatfield
When the Watcher Shakes by Timothy G. Huguenin
When the Thrill Is Gone and All I Did Was Shoot My Man by Walter Mosley
Locas by Yxta Maya Murray
Rembrandt's Eyes by Simon Schama
Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
Marcella by Mrs. Humphry Ward (Mary Arnold Ward)
The Lightness of Water by Rhonda Browning White Reviewed by Donna Meredith
My original idea for this newsletter was to make a record of some of my own reading in hopes others might enjoy what I'd read. Increasingly, as other people joined in the conversation, I'd get new ideas for reading myself. This issue has lots of new ideas via Ernie Brill and his book lists . He has been developing these lists over many years of teaching and reading: books by and about women, African-Americans, Asians, and many other groups whose voices have only recently begun to be noticed in the mainstream media. Also in this issue are more poems from Hilton Obenzinger's "Chronicles" as well as reviews by Carrington Hatfield and Donna Meredith and, of course, my own explorations and pleasures--genre, historical novels, Mrs. Humphry Ward again, Rembrandt!
Finally, I wanted to share author Belinda Anderson's satisfaction in writing a series of super-local books about
Alderson, West Virginia. Anderson has written several excellent books of fiction for children and adults (see our review of Witchy Wanda here), and then a few years ago, she was invited to write a short book as a fund raiser for the nonprofit organization Alderson Main Street. The project turned into a yearly series of small books of anecdotes and history--all carefully researched--answering questions like "Does Alderson, WV have a leash law for lions?" and "Have there ever been any famous people at the Alderson Federal Prison Camp?"?
She says that one of the pleasures of selling books in non-literary venues like Visitors' Centers is that you get people who might not ordinarily buy your books. "At one of the signings," she writes, "someone had come in just to see an art exhibit at the visitors center, then apparently decided that buying one of these booklets was a good thing, since there was a line of people. As I prepared to sign her booklet, she asked, 'Did you write it?'"
I love that story: most of the people who ask me to sign their books are my friends and families and know darn well I wrote it!
Learn more about Belinda Anderson and her work at www.belindaanderson.com and https://www.facebook.com/AuthorBelindaAnderson . Check out a clip of a t.v. program about the Alderson series here.
TWO CHRONICLES BY HILTON OBENZINGER
Bookends
October 25, 2020for Sojun Mel Weitsman Roshi
and Hozan Alan SenaukeIn summer 1968
I walk with my friend Alan
To meditate at the Berkeley Zen Center
We sniff tear gas in the air
And see police roaming the streets
Abbot Mel hosts the meditation
Gentle and kind, a saving soul in deep silence
No sirens, no nightsticks
The world in turmoil
Yet also glimpses of another way
No need to explain, simply say, “1968”
Mel opens the space on the wall for Emptiness52 years later
I return to the Berkeley Zen Center
To have lunch with Alan
Hozan Alan is now Vice-Abbott
And Abbot Mel is now 91
He is stepping down from his position
And Alan will step up later in the year
In a Mountain Seat Ceremony
I have not seen Mel for half a century
And we say hello and chat
The visit now and the visit then are bookends
To one shelf of an endless libraryWeeks later I watch on the Internet
The stepping down ceremony for
Sojun Mel Weitsman Roshi
Retiring at long last
Stepping down as Abbot
He is tender and smiling
Joking sweetly
The world in turmoil
The virus digging into our flesh
And hatred and violence digging into our souls
But there’s also hope only days before the election
No need to explain, simply say, “2020”
Mel opens the space on the wall for Silence
Mysteries of Pandemia
December 2, 2020
My habits and desires have changed after months of isolation in Pandemia. I suddenly developed a taste for warm Diet Dr. Pepper soda. What a surprise. No ice, room temperature, a warm syrupy beverage some people might think is disgusting. I don’t know why this drink suddenly became my favorite. I also stopped watching cable news all the time. I would turn the TV on in the middle of the night to see if 3000 more votes were counted in Maricopa County or what wild demon would escape Trump’s mouth. But suddenly I was no longer glued to the screen. I am able to turn off the TV and live in silence for long hours. Silence is definitely a change.
I have been learning how to read again, skipping the words. I’ve also gotten into a habit of speaking with objects around the house. I greet my favorite spoon and fork, the spoon so large and oval and the fork with a great bulbous handle. I thank the Japanese bidet for electronically saluting when I walk into the toilet; the lid lifts up to attention every time, and I salute back. I reason with the roses in the backyard. I greet the redwood tree every morning. (It’s big and tall and hard to avoid.) I also have lengthy conversations with dead people – and I don’t think I’m the only one who does this. I don’t have any idea what day of the week it is. All days are the same. Which month? I forget to pay bills, and I’m not alone. I love my wife – we’re stuck together, trapped on the same lifeboat - and this is the time to work out all our problems. Or kill each other. Other couples do the same. This is why I’m learning how to read, but without words.
I had a dream within a dream in which I woke up to discover that I was a Black woman getting ready to go to work at the grocery store. This is odd because I’m descended from Polish Jews. So in this dream I went back to sleep and had a dream that I woke up to realize that I was a white teenage boy in high school in Tulsa. Each time that I woke up in the dream I marveled to discover my new body. Breasts, hair, youthful muscles, genitals, unfamiliar hands. I’ve never been a woman, much less a Black woman; and I’ve never been to Tulsa. Back to sleep, and I wake up again but this time as a young Chinese woman jogging through the park. This goes on for a while, as I turn into dozens of different people, until I finally wake up from the dream of a dream of changing into yet another body. I get out of bed and look at the mirror, greatly disappointed: I’m a shriveled up chubby old white guy, after all. I’m not as interesting as the people I met – or inhabited – on my world flesh tour.
REVIEWS
All Souls' Rising and Master of the Crossroads by Madison Smartt Bell
These are top notch historical fiction. Bell uses various point of views of people who make it through at least these two books of the trilogy. His best characters are a couple of white guys, especially the French doctor who is present and observing of most of the major action. He is the most understandable and morally attractive of the characters, and our best eyes. He becomes an aide to Toussaint himself and captures some of the mystery and power of that great general and nation-maker. Toussaint is an excellent horsemen, reader and reciter, mentor of children, especially boys, faithful to his wife, brutally pragmatic when he needs to be. He gets some point-of-view time as a prisoner in a cold French prison near the Swiss border, but even when he has the point-of-view, much remains a mystery, which I appreciate.
Other characters who get points-of-view include the maroon (runaway slave) Riau, who is also a commanding officer and vodou devotee. The women characters are deeply embedded in their sex-mother-rape victim roles. Only a couple of the white ones break out a little:
one is a murderer who has a religious conversion to vodou, and another whose house in town is the center for a lot of the story. She is a sexual adventurer and intriguer of considerable energy and agency.
The primacy of the consciousness of white characters is Bell's way, I assume, of inserting himself into the story. His one major foray into the consciousness of a man of color (Riau) works most of the time, but is occasionally awkward. Riau, for example refers to himself in the third person sometimes, in the first sometimes. It isn't hard to follow at all, but exactly what point is being made--something about a different way of placing oneself in the world-- isn't always totally clear. But you get used to it, as you get used to it as you get used to someone with an accent.
Bell has reasons for almost all of his bloody events and quirky voices: the novels are heavily researched, and he confesses in his introduction that his materials are mostly from French sources, including someone very like his French physican, and letters of Toussaint himself.
The gruesome battles and tortures are historical; so are the extremely racialized political factions (aristocratic white guys, wealthy mulattos, petit gens blancs who support the Jacobins and hate both the property-riich slave-holding groups, and the masses of black slaves.) The black ex-slaves are generally seen at some distance, which is too bad. One would like to hear their voices imagined, but Bell was probably wise not to to try to convey them. So he uses his French outsiders as his eyes and consciousness, and a few black people (Riau and Toussaint) who are unusually well educated.
The story does equally well (and this is unusual) in giving equal weight to the individual stories and to the events of history. In France, the king is beheaded, and England and Spain are attacking the French colony Sante Domingue (present day Haiti and Dominican Republic). Everyone on allsides is committing atrocities (one nasty piece of work murders his father, a famous torturer, by skinning him alive). The first novel begins with a crucifixion and continues on from there. Bell seems to delight in the details of the horror, but balances it as best he can with a little family love and military strategy. It is possibly the best combination of history and fiction I've read.
The original (1995) New York Times reviewer said "This bizarre and rich stew is the perfect stuff of fiction, whose subject is never reality but competing realities.... Beneath the social and political collusions and betrayals, the real subject of the novel -- and the ground-floor perspective for its understanding of history -- is the human body and its fragile relation to human identity under conditions of torture and mutilation." The whole review is at https://www.nytimes.com/1995/10/29/books/the-black-face-of-freedom.html .
The second book of the trilogy, Master of the Crossroads, follows Toussaint Louverture's early campaigns. It feels somewhat less well edited than the first volume (repeated phrases, some wandering), but it picks up momentum in the second half, getting better and better on Toussaint himself. A lot of politicial information and explanation is conveyed nicely in dialogue as characters drink rum and smoke cheroots. Characters we know very well by now argue what they think is likely to happen. The technique allows Bell to eschew a lot of summarizing. Battles are told economically and sensually.
I didn't think I'd read the third book, but now I think I might. I've gotten attached to the characters. Also, I keep thinking that now I might go back and read that history of Haiti that has always just seemed too tedious: this group rises and kills that group, then that group splits and kills each other, and on and on.
The trilogy is a big time commitment, but I'm finding it worthwhile.
Here's an interesting professor/historian's take on the novel:
https://h-france.net/fffh/maybe-missed/madison-smartt-bells-haitian-revolution-trilogy/
Rembrandt's Eyes by Simon SchamaIt took me two years to read this very large book, but I finally finished it. Schama writes very well, sometimes trying too hard for effects, but he has
done his homework.
It took me so long partly because it is very dense, but also because of the physical size. You can't take it to bed with you–if you dropped it, it would crush your chest. You can't curl up with it, because it needs support and strong light for all the wonderful pictures. So I usually read it at the dining room or kitchen table with lots of space to open it and peruse the art..
I had wanted for a long time to know more about Rembrandt, which this gave me, along with some solid perks: first, a little history of what is now the Netherlands, at least during the seventeenth century. If we think the Republicans and Democats hate each other now, take a look at the wars between sixteenth and seventeenth century Protestants and the Catholics. Second, there is a huge chunk of the book about Peter Paul Rubens who was what Rembrandt wanted to be: wealthy, highly honored, used for diplomatic missions, etc. Rembrandt's career ended in not-quite penury and falling out of fashion. Very sad--financial collapse as well as the death of his loved ones from the plague.
Then, of course, the pictures, and Schama's enthusiastic commentary on them. Almost every page has images, mostly in color. Very satisfying book, although when something takes that long, you feel you really need to start over again.
Marcella by Mrs. Humphry Ward (Mary Arnold Ward)
Marcella was published in 1894 and set 10 years earlier. Mary Arnold Ward was part of one of the great middle class intellectual families of England (her uncle was Matthew Arnold). She is often best known for opposing women's suffrage, and I've been dipping into a scholarly book about her called Behind Her Times: Transition England in the Novels of Mary Arnold Ward by Judith Wilt. This 2005 study has a lot of say about "valorization" and other concerns of university English departments, and I have to admit I'm having trouble reading it, but on the other hand, it's good to have someone who has read and thought about all of Ward's works.
Because I am a reluctant fan of her novels. She is a very late Victorian, and the world she writes about is, in fact, quite different from even George Eliot's and Charles Dickens'. Mrs. Humphry was a kind of conservative, and she did oppose women voting for members of Parliament, but she also said women should vote in local elections and she seems to have thought women should run educational institutions and medical ones.
Then there's the protagonist of this novel, the beautiful, talented,and passionate Marcella, a sort of combination of Austen's Emma and
Then, unexpectedly (for her, not for readers of Victorian novels who know about these reversals of fortune), her disgraced father inherits substantial country property, and she moves in with him and her fascinating cold mother. Reluctantly she realizes she enjoys the beauty of the English countryside--and having an inherited position in the community. She thinks she knows better than the poor people themselves what they need, how they need to live, and makes egregious errors. She soon meets the squire next door who will eventually be a Peer and is presently running for Parliament, and he falls in love with her. Marcella is in love with the idea of her possibilities--and how she might use his fortune for good among the poor in the villages. So she pledges herself to the future Lord, getting his agreement to her plan for how to use his money.
Then--of course it was going far too smoothly--she meets another handsome young landowner, this one a radical in politics, also running for Parliament. He challenges her Lady Bountiful approach to the working people in the village, and soon she is torn between him and her intended. and we are off and running in that wonderful way of novels back in the day when you knew there were going to be major impediments but true love would (probably) triumph.
Aside from enjoying the pattern of the story and all the rich details of local characters and conflicts (there's a lot about poaching, which is an excellent point at which to enter into the meaning of property and class in the nineteenth century), what I really love is that Marcella goes out and gets a job. She doesn't sit home and wait--for anything. She engages in a series of mistakes and struggles, and her beauty and forceful personality do her more harm than good. The handsome radical landowner seduces her with his ideas, but she does not let him seduce her physically;
Marcella breaks off her engagement and trains to become a nurse. She works competently and well in London, serving people, bravely stepping between an abusive husband and his wife. Yes, she eventually ends up back on her property, and of course she eventually sees the value of the right man. I suppose this is conservatism, but Marcella's moral and physical adventures are gripping and exciting, and she only gives herself to her lover when she is strong and experienced.
The Reluctant Midwife by Patricia Harman
Patricia Harman, a longtime nurse midwife, has a good-hearted series of novels about midwives set in fictional Hope River, West Virginia. Harman has a clear, direct
voice– in this novel, the voice of a registered nurse named Becky Myers during the Great Depression, who has lost her livelihood. She goes back to Hope River, hoping for work, but she has in tow her ex-employer, physician-surgeon Isaac Blum, who is in an acute state of silence, immobility, and stupor. She cleans his teeth, tucks him into bed at night and generally cares for him. The nurse, Becky Myers, finds small and larger jobs, including helping her friend the local midwife, even though she is not comfortable assisting at births. Meanwhile, Dr. Blum begins to go out on veterinarian calls with the midwife's husband.
Becky gets a part-time job at a Civilian Conservation Corps camp, one of the government-run programs for out-of-work young men that did projects in the park system and helped support their families through the lean years. Becky runs a clinic for the young men in the CCC, and over the course of the novel there are enormous physical challenges for her–serious illnesses and wounds to treat, drives through icy mountain passes, brutal births, an extremely dangerous pregnancy, and a terrifying forest fire.
The inner thread of the story shifts occasionally from Nurse Becky's point of view and her journals to the Doctor's journal, and we gradually learn why he has fallen into this mental apathy, and why he continues to pretend to be in it. Without sugar coating any of the situations, and with a number of sad deaths of characters we like, Harman brings us to a conclusion that isn't a huge surprise, but nonetheless is very satisfying.
We Were Legends in Our Own Minds by Richard Cobb and Carter Taylor Seaton Reviewed by Carrington Hatfield
Have you ever wanted to go backstage? We Were Legends in Our Own Minds is just the ticket you’ve been waiting for.
In their new book, memoirist Richard Cobb and co-author Carter Taylor Seaton tell the tales of Cobb’s career managing civic arenas, such as Charleston, West Virginia’s Civic Center and Huntington’s Civic Arena, among other. The book tells of his encounters with Rock and Roll bands such as Sly the Family Stone, Black Oak Arkansas, Elvis Presley, and many more. This book depicts what rock and roll meant to West Virginia and pays homage to the great rock artist era ’70 – ’89.
From Aerosmith to ZZ Top, Richard Cobb saw them all during his twenty- five- year career managing mid-market arenas where they played. He tells stories about eating Fig Newtons with Elvis on his private airplane, about his struggle with Sly Stone on and off the stage, and about his battles with protesting conservative Christians who hoped to scuttle a scheduled performance by Ozzy Osbourne. “We Were Legends in Our Own Minds” is a background pass to all these musical adventures.
“Richard Cobb’s memoir shines a bright spotlight on the early burgeoning concert venue scene. He helped usher West Virginia, especially, into what would eventually become: A state of Rock n’ Rock!”
-- Chris Ojeda, Lead guitarist/ vocalist with Byzantine
Music wasn’t the only type of entertainment that Cobb’s book details. He booked shows such as Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, Holiday on Ice, and The Harlem Magicians.
So, what do you do when you find yourself living a life of rock and roll, as an Appalachian man born in coal country? Do you follow the crowd or do you shine among the best? Richard Cobb chose to be a part of the attraction, not the crowd. He booked many bands and famous celebrities we all know and love or at least remember! Photos in the book capture many of the memories.
This book immersed me into a life of rock and roll that I could have only imagined. Cobb and Seaton do a wonderful job of portraying what a life of rock roll looks like, especially here in the mountains.
“ We Were Legends in Our Own Minds” will capture the hearts and minds of any music lover and give them a peek into the behind the scenes they have always wanted.
The book is $19.99 and is available from Mountain State Press, www.mountatinstatepress.org, Amazon, Amazon and local bookstores and gift shops.
Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
This is an admirably written novel that didn't get to me emotionally. I read it because I've always meant to read a Stegner, and it appeared in the book (like the Madison Smartt Bell trilogy above) Historians and Novelists Confront America's Past (and Each Other) compiled and edited by Mark C. Carnes (Simon & Schuster 2001). I've been reading the Carnes book slowly, stopping to explore novels it mentions that I haven't read yet. (See my notes on it in Newsletter # 210.)
Angle of Repose has as its narrator, Lyman Ward, an historian himself, who is trying to put together a book, something like the book we're reading, about his
The story has lots of wonderful scenes and places, but Stegner wants it to be essentially the story of a failed marriage that is also a totally committed marriage. That works fairly well, although I feel that Stegner thinks he loves the woman, but really doesn't. She is in the end the little lady who says to the big heroic cowboy, "Don't leave me, darling," to which the hero says, "A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do." That is to say, in spite of his professed admiration for the woman, Lyman the narrator, and I believe Stegner the author, are all in for the man. For all of the woman's artistic and financial accomplishments (her book illustrations and travel articles often support the family), he presents her as trying to hold back, imprison, and change her husband. He has no real sympathy for gentility and not much for strong women.
The part I like best is the "real west." Stegner writes brilliantly of landscapes and mines and irrigation systems and the details and possibilities of Western life.
Lyman, the narrator, is largely wheel-chair bound and unhappy with pretty much everything in his life but his work. His curmudgeonly relationship to modern times (the 1970's) feels pretty silly from the 2020's. In spite of his suffering, I don't like him much.
Anyhow, another reader will no doubt like it, and I am glad I read it.
Locas by Yxta Maya Murray
Yxta Maya Murray is a law professor and part-time novelist, and Locas, published around 1997, got great reviews and was treated as if it were non-fiction about girls in a Mexican-American Los Angeles gang. It's gripping and readable, with a strong, simple structure alternating two young women's voices as they tell what happened to them at a crucial moment in their lives and in the life of the gang, or clika, the Lobos..
Lucia and Cecilia tell their stories of trying to find their places in a world of male privilege and male violence. Cecilia's brother (Lucia's lover) is the jefe of the Lobos. . It's set in Echo Park L.A., as it was in the nineteen eighties, and it offers an interesting picture of women striving for success in a world that is a disastrous outgrowth of poverty in two nations.
What it doesn't do--and I'm sure Murray would assert that she doesn't have to-- is give a full picture of that time and place and these lives. The two protagonists have each achieved something by the end of the book, however partial and limited the achievement. They are also both looking at a bleak future hollowed out by loss. The story is compact and narrow (making a point about their lives, of course). The problem with one's tendency to accept it as "real" because of the power of the voices is that the focus is too narrow to say much about anything but these two characters and about the big themes of poverty, male supremacy, etc. Anything not about gender, poverty, gang crime, failure of parenting, is scoured out. Any part of the "civilian" world is ignored. Even something like the cooking and food is only shown as something else the "sheep" girls do for their men. They don't savor food themselves, apparently. Even their clothes and hair to which they give so much artistic attention are sneered at.
Cecilia has a friendship, really a love affair, with an enemy gang girl that is rather lovely, and Lucia's ambition to be a jefa herself is interesting. But for me, so much seems left out that at some level I don't quite believe it: what about those girls who make an art of make-up? What about the who might actually have enjoyed reading (even if super hero comic books?) Doesn't someone occasionally get a job and leave--perhaps back to Oaxaca?
Something in me suspects that those who actually lived this life, instead of recreating it fictionally, would have seen even if cloudily and peripherally, a few elements that didn't work toward the one effect. Murray wants her world closed and suffocating, and I admire the work, but isn't it possible that totally pessimistic is as unrealistic as the opposite?
The Lightness of Water by Rhonda Browning White Reviewed by Donna Meredith
The authentic voices in this outstanding collection belt out their stories in language born and bred in the hills and hollows of West Virginia. Most of White's characters speak in a close first person style that invites readers to live briefly in their skin. They range widely: a young wife hooked on pills, an ex-soldier, a bickering elderly couple, a ten-year-old girl. Those who enjoyed Belinda Anderson's The Well Ain't Dry Yet will appreciate the characters in White's stories, since they, too, feel like people you've met somewhere along the way.
"All Grown Up" is one of my favorites. Emotions bounce from ceiling to floor on a little girl's "best birthday ever," one that promises two presents instead of the usual one. From the opening sentence, the reader aches for Susie in all her sweet innocence, sharing in her delight that she is deemed grown up enough to make her own cake. The day is perfect. Until Uncle Bobby arrives. Susie adores her uncle, who scoops her off the floor and spins her around:
I bury my nose in his neck, smell his Aqua Velva, his Camels, and his Kickin' Chicken. One of his girlfriends said he smells like raw maleness, which has to smell nasty, but I think he smells like a handsome man. Uncle Bobby sets me back on the floor, but my head thinks I'm still up in the air. I love him in ways I can't name.
But Susie is about to witness a darker side to her uncle. Falling down drunk—literally—Uncle Bobby tilts the whole beautiful day into total disaster as he "lays spread across the pretty broken pieces of [her] birthday." Susie does grow up on her birthday, not in the way we would wish for her.
Another of my favorites features a woman determined to be accepted by the local D.A.R. chapter. She wasn't to become their secretary "so badly [she] aches for it." At a wine tasting at the president's home, Claire witnesses "the first fine crack [she's] seen in the perfect world of the Paxtons. Before her visit to their historic home is over, she witnesses many more—but the flaws are not only in this upper crust family. Claire's jealousy and social climbing leads her into actions she regrets and ultimately into a reassessment of her goals. All the stories have plenty of surprises and twists to keep readers engaged with the characters. I highly recommend this collection.
See our review of this book here.
MORE REVIEWS--MOSTLY GENRE
When the Watcher Shakes by Timothy G. Huguenin
I don't usually read horror A website of literary terms describes horror as a genre of fiction aimed at creating certain feelings in a reader. "Gothic horror" may or may not have supernatural elements, and is, as I understand it, the sort of quintessential horror we associate with novels like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and writers like Lovecraft and Poe. "Supernatural horror" has ghosts and zombies and demons and such like at the center, and "non-supernatural
I write this mostly for my own benefit, because I've always tended to read (a) to learn how to live and (b) to take a journey. I'm interested in looking at parts of the world I wouldn't see on my own (the lives of athletes, say or inside the heads of serial killers). I read mysteries and crime novels because I enjoy the wounded, grumpy-but- brave P.I.'s and cops, and I especially like the down-and-out lowlife characters they mix with. I also love the cities and other places where they transpire. I often ignore the sleuthing and procedures totally. I've never read for plot of strictly for sensation, which may be what bothers me about horror. It tends to feel like everything is about that one thing: the frisson, the shriek, the floor dropping out from under us. The questions never get answered, there's no detailed backstory on how the evil developed. I tend to get impatient and stop reading.
And yet–I kept reading Timothy G. Huguenin's When the Watcher Shakes . This is largely a non-supernatural novel with a portion of unexplained and probably supernatural elements. A semi-hermit is living on a mountain top with a little store, and a man comes traveling through. The sermi-hermit warns him against going to the valley below, and of course the traveler hikes directly down where he finds a small walled enclave of what is apparently a religious cult.
Huguenin builds up Abestown and its customs and government with great care, and there is well-conveyed sense of the beliefs and history of the place, and a nicely gradual exposition of some grim things that happen in the town. People tend to die when they go against the rules, and toward the end, the focus of all the evil turns onto one person, who turns out to have supernatural strength . That's where I pull back a little, for the reasons detailed above, but generally the story telling is excellently well-paced and while the characters are shown mostly from the outside, there are plenty of speeches when they reveal themselves.
Huguenin is clearly a skillful, up-and-coming horror writer. Take a look at his book and his website.
Wild Seed and Mind of My Mind, Two Patternist novels by Octavia Butler
His millennia long project is to create a world where he isn't alone. He is breeding a new race that will be like him, long lived (he's 4,000 years old or so by the end of the second book). The other main character in Wild Seed is Anyanwu, who is a mere three hundred years old, an African wise woman, a healer, who is interested in keeping an eye on her many descendents.. She is is in many ways the equal Doro may or may not want, but she is fully human and fully alive, just differently abled, as it were.
The second book, Mind of my Mind, is scattered among many points of view, but the main character is Mary, a child of Doro and a descendent of Anyanwu's. This one is the most powerful of all his offspring. She can create new forms of people too--telepaths tied together in a pattern.
I like these novels--I have never not liked any of Butler's work. Here, however, Butler seems most engaged in ideas and questions rather than following all the paths of personality. The books are a good example of one of science fiction's great possibilities, to privilege ideas and ask big questions. "Mundane" fiction asks "What would it be like to have been born the child who became Marilyn Monroe?" The Patternist novels ask, "What if human beings come up against a force that is not human, has no conscience, has no real ability to love, and yet is lonely and hungry not to be alone."
In other words,what is human?
Heartwood by James Lee Burke
This one was the second Billy Bob Holland (I didn't read the first), and quite good. I wonder if maybe the second of a series the best? It still has energy and freshness, but also the long view. The writer is in control. Burke is a delightful writer of half-paragraph descriptions of landscape and weather, in the Texas hill country this time.
There are lots of bad guys, mostly rich. The story pits the country club good old boys in a very small town called Deaf Smith against the working class and poor. I also like that the home-grown Chicano gang bangers called the Purple Hearts. There's a good victim/thief called Wilbur Prickett and his blind native American wife Kippy Jo.
All the guys call each other Mister, and the bad guys are as polite as the good ones.
When the Thrill Is Gone; All I Did Was Shoot My Man; and And Sometimes I Wonder About You by Walter Mosley
Mosley is good at titles too.
These are more Leonid McGill novels are set around 2010. We've got lots of computer acrobatics and cell phones as plot devices, and a fairly up-to-date New York City: The World Trade Center is gone, for example.
P.I. Leonid McGill is an energetic 55 year old ex-boxer (and ex-employee of criminals) who runs up stairs in high rises because he can't find time to exercise. He's proud of his pugilistic skills, but even more of his mental skills. He occasionally has a slightly too high opinion of his own abilities, but generally lands on his feet, alive. He's a bit of a kvetcher, and seriously sorry about his previous life framing people for crimes they didn't commit. He has lots of present day challenges too, including the usual bad guys who want to kill him and deeply puzzling mysteries to solve. He also has a ridiculously unfaithful wife and fraught relationships with his three kids, two of whom aren't his.
The woman he loves (not his wife) is staying away from him, and then he has to stay away from her. But the crowd of minor characters is always closely observed and lovingly rendered. His attention to skin color is a revelation, whatever the race of the person.
The second novel here, All I Did Was Shoot My Man, continues a lot of what was going on in When the Thrill is Gone. Leonid's wife is now going through menopause; his favorite son (not his genetic son) is working at McGill's detective agency, and McGill's search for his MIA Communist dad seems to be approaching a climax. There is a complex story line, too, McGill trying to help out someone he sent to jail years ago, for a multi-milllion dollar heist. There are vicious middle European killers after McGill and his whole family.
The third in this group of fast reads is And Sometimes I Wonder About You, which has a lot of action, and ends with a wedding where almost everyone McGill knows and appreciates makes an appearance. It has a valedictory feel, but I think there are a couple more McGill novels for me to snack on one day.
I don't know that these McGill books are a knock-out, but they definitely win on points.
GOOD READING & MORE ONLINE
Publisher's Weekly has an article by Laura Treacy Bentley on Launching a Book During a Pandemic.
A new story by Hannah Brown "A Bowl of Lightning" is about mother love and autism. This time, Oren has to have his second Marian JMWW BLOG. As usual, precise and with deep insight.
Suzanne Martinez's latest story in Flash Fiction Magazine
Barbara Crooker's Poem of the Month is called "Calling Down the Crows."
Barack Obama's favorite books of 2020.
READERS WRITE
Carole Rosenthal writes to say, "I am reading a wonderful graphic novel which I think you would like even if you are not a great fan of the form--... Alison Bechdel's Fun Home--which was actually made into a Broadway musical that I'm sorry I missed, even though I am NOT a musicals-fan....I read Are you My Mother by her which I thought was really really good. But this work is brilliant. A real novel in its writing that contains fantastic turns of phrase and senses of characters, but also with terrific illustrations for each frame. Highly recommended."
ANNOUNCEMENTS AND NEWS
Bonnie Proudfoot's book of linked stories Goshen Road is garnering nominations and honors. Take a look! (Also see our review of Goshen Road.)
Carter Sickels' new novel is getting great reviews!
A report from WOAY TV on Belinda Anderson's just-published: book about Alderson, West Virginia.
This new volume of a booklet called “History Highlights and Tantalizing Tidbits” is based on the history of Alderson. This year’s booklet marks the 7th volume and reveals new information that even Alderson residents may not know--all researched and written by Belinda Anderson!
Just published on Kindle: Cook & Eat Global
by Linda Lombri and Virginia Cornue
William Stoever's new book Africa, Japan, and Everywhere In Between is now available here. We have a short sample to whet your appetite:
Vietnam War, 1966: A Pretend Correspondent
An Khe forward base.
"You have any trouble getting accredited?" the colonel asked.
What to say? Could I fake it? Maybe better not. "Oh, I'm not accredited yet. Just getting started."
"WHAT!?? Wait here!" He dashed out the door and returned in half a minute with a marine in combat fatigues carrying an assault rifle. "Watch him!" he commanded the marine.
First time in my life under armed guard …
The colonel reappeared a couple minutes later and gestured impatiently: "Follow me!" He led me to a jeep holding three soldiers. "If you're not accredited, you're a civilian. You could be arrested and prosecuted. Now get off the base and DON'T COME BACK!"
He turned to the soldiers: "Take him to the south gate and leave him OUTSIDE THE BASE!"
So here I was, 200-plus miles from the relative safety of Saigon, with no obvious way to get back there. Terrified at the idea of trying to hitchhike over 200 miles of hostile territory; the Vietcong sometimes intercepted traffic on the roads and shot people.
What to do? Didn't see any way out of my predicament; miserably hungry.
I also felt exposed – no triple tier of fences between me and any Vietcong sniper who might take a potshot at me. But what could I do: crouch down in order to present a smaller target? even lie down? That'd be pretty uncomfortable, and I doubted how much protection it'd give anyhow.
CUTTHROAT: A JOURNAL OF THE ARTS is seeking submissions for THE CORONA CHRONICLES
Cutthroat is an online anthology of stories, novellas, novel excerpts and creative nonfiction from 5,000 to 15,000 words focusing on the COVID-19 Pandemic. Works need not be about the pandemic per se but should include it as a factor in the story. Send us a story that reflects these crazy times. Any style or genre. We are aiming for a late spring 2021 publishing date. Submit between 11/1 & 12/31 only. Visit our home page for guidelines: http://www.cutthroatmag.com/
Ernie Brill's Abbreviated History of Expanding the Canon
International top-notch short novels less than 200 pages
International Woman 's Literature
These lists emerge from a lifetime of writing, reading, and talking with friends about books. My family, especially on my mother's side relished reading and storytelling.
I wanted to be to a writer when at the age of twelve I discovered Damon Runyon, fellow New Yorker who explores the shenanigans of the underworld and theatre people, and like many American writers, elevates the vernacular of 'real' life to spectacular art. This opened doors to American voice-- the known (Mark Twain, Edgar Lee Masters, Langston Hughes, Carl Sandberg, Zora Neale Hurston, Lee Smith and others), and I also found lesser writers of the same high artistic caliber (John Beecher, Sterling A. Brown, Chester Himes, Toshio Mori, Pedro Pietri, Ernest Hebert, Toni Cade Bambara, France Chung, Meridel LeSueur, Thomas McGrath.)
I am a combination of the fiction writer and anti-racism activist. It began in high school in the sixties
and continues to this moment. I read "areas," There were about three in high school. I sought out fiction and poetry about cities, since my classrooms were full of stories about horses and the prairies- The Yearling, Old Yeller, Kilmer on trees. Never projects on fire hydrants. I gobbled up big city novels such James Farrell's Studs Longian and the stories of Bernard Malamud.
A major life-changing event was my participation in the historic San Francisco State College Student strike of November 6, 1968-March 21,1969. Ten to twenty thousand students led by the Black Students union shut down the college for over four months , demanding a Department of Black Studies that changed the face of American higher education and created not only the country's first Department of Black Studies but an entire School of Ethnic Studies that in 2019 celebrated its 50th anniversary for fifty years offering courses in Black Studies, Latinx Studies, Native American Studies, and Asian American Studies.
In the spring before the strike, another student and I had made a list of all the English Department's course offerings, undergraduate and graduate. There were fifty courses with offerings of 500 books (in those days we read ten books per class). Results? There were two books by African American writers: Richard Wright's Native Son and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. There were no books by Native American writers. One teacher said, "They have no books because they have no written language." This was around the same time N. Scott Momaday , Kiowa/Comanche Professor, won the Pulitzer Prize for A House Made Of Dawn. .Also, despite the phenomenon of the Latin America Boom in international literature led by writers Carlos Fuentes and Octavio Paz of Mexico, Jorge Borges of Argentina and Jorge Amado. Before the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Miguel Angel Asturias, not one work of Latino American lit was taught, nor one by an Asian American author.
As the civil rights movement and Black Power movement began to merge with the anti-Vietnam war movement, publishers began to publish more African American writers, and people like myself began sharing dynamic new works by such writers as Alice Walker, Ronald Fair, Ernest Gaines, along with devouring past masterpieces such as Richard Wright's Uncle Tom's Children, William Attaway's Blood On The Forge, and the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling A .Brown, and Robert Hayden.
Students throughout the country were questioning both the class race nature of the content of the curriculum and the sexism of it. This curriculum battle is still being waged in American colleges and high schools
The first two lists (African American Classics and International top-notch short novels less than 200 pages ) emerged from these struggles. The third list (International Woman 's Literature) emerged from my teaching a high school Senior World Literature Class. Many high schools and colleges might have a list such as this: The Oedipus Cycle- Sophocles; The Heart of Darkness- Joseph Conrad; Things Fall Apart- Chinua Achebe; The Stranger- Camus; Notes From The Underground- Dostoyevsky; The Death of Ivan Ilych- Tolstoy; The Metamorphosis -Kafka; All Quiet On The Western Front; Hamlet; The Handmaid's Tale- Margaret Atwood. We see one out of nine books by a woman. Similarly, we seen in this alleged "world literature" class that there is only one book by a writer of color, and only two books by writers who do not come from Europe, showing the overwhelming discrepancy of writers from Europe.
The last list is The Literature of Protest, which consists of novels that are extremely rare, in which the main characters fully triumph. It has often been a puzzle to me that even when they seem to win, something happens to stymie or defeat them such as in Dubious Battle or Invisible Man. This could very easily be changed. For example, take the choice many schools make of selecting Ernest Gaines novel A Lesson Before Dying where an older teacher is given the task of helping an innocent boy involved in a murder prepare himself for death. Although it is undoubtedly a touching novel, the boy will die and he cannot do a thing about it. On the other hand, in Gaines' A Gathering Of Old Men, someone is murdered and eight elderly black men gather in the morning , each with a shotgun. Get the book and find out why.
This experience of making the lists was one of the most difficult of my career.
I came up with the Literature From Vietnam when American publishers started publishing novels from Vietnam such as Bao No's The Sorrows of War, a nightmarish account of a young man from Hanoi coming of age in war.
I did a project in the spring with twenty eight rowdy seniors. It was supposed to last a month but all of a sudden there were speakers and extended projects and, as one at first reluctant woman wrote "I suddenly saw what education could be."
Over my life, I have given out hundreds of lists. Many involve social issues as mentioned above, yet some were made out by special request, such as twenty books of fiction that center around music, trees, roads, family abuse, the holocaust in Europe, international humor (from Rabelais to Grace Paley, trees, music, the fiction and poetry of Chicago, New York, Berlin, South Africa.
I am perfectly happy to take requests and or answer any particular questions anyone has about books on the list.
Get in touch with Ernie Brill by e-mail at Erbrill69@gmail.com
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Meredith Sue Willis's
Books for Readers # 213
Back Issues MSW Home About Meredith Sue Willis Contact
This Newsletter Looks Best in its Permanent Location Online!
Feb 25, 2021
Top:Lillian Roth and Susan Hayward, Olivia DeHavilland in
The Snake Pit . Bottom: James Baldwin; American freedmen voting.
Announcements
Irene Weinberger Books
Readers Respond
Things to Read Online
Short Reviews
Ernie Brill's Reading List for Expanding the Canon
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BOOK REVEIWS:
Case Histories by Kate Atkinson
Emma by Jane Austen
Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
Worlds End by T.C. Boyle
City of Ashes and City of Glass by Cassandra Clare
A Short History of Reconstruction by Eric Foner
Friend by Pauletta Hansel Reviewed by Bonnie Proudfoot
People of the Whale by Linda Hogan
Day of Atonement and The Ritual Bath by Faye Kellerman
Pleasantville by Attica Locke
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
True Grit by Charles Portis
I'll Cry Tomorrow by Lillian Roth
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
Dearth by Lynda Schor
Before She Sleeps by Bina Shah
The Art of Time in Fiction: As Long as It Takes by Joan Silber
Improvement by Joan Silber
The Third Life of Grange Copeland by Alice Walker
The Snake Pit by Mary Jane Ward
This issue has reviews of two nineteen fifties books on mental illness and alcoholism,a review by Bonnie Proudfoot of poetry by Pauletta Hansel, and reviews of some of my quarantine genre reading.
But I want to begin with some interesting responses to an essay I wrote about Cultural Appropriation in Fiction. My essay talks about fiction in the voice of those of different racial-ethnic-gender backgrounds. It takes the line that, in drafting, writers should avoid censoring themselves at all costs, but that in revision, they should edit their approaches to cultural/racial/gender differences just as they would edit their word choice.
Kate Gardner sharpens this argument in a piece in A Journal of Practical Writing.
Elaine Durbach (her Roundabout was reviewed in this newsletter), said, "Cultural appropriation feels like a swamp to me, with no firm ground that can be trusted, but at least with this [article] you’re providing us with geographic landmarks. I like the point that it is time for us to hear far more from writers who have had too little exposure, too little consideration from major publishers.
"But I also have difficulty with the idea that we can only write about what we have experienced personally. So many great creators of sweeping novels would have been shrunk to tiny memoir-esque cameos. Is all fiction a choice between very specific, unique characters and generalized types? Even writing about our own gender and ethnicity, unless we’re doing autobiography, aren’t we generalizing to some degree to make our characters relatable? Eccentric characters that break all stereotypes are fun to explore, but can readers connect with people so unlike anyone they are likely to have encountered?
"Does it help – does it work – to assume universal tendencies? Could that young white student have written about the lynching by assuming that her characters felt the same way that she imagined she would have? Or does that involve a very slippery slide away from truths we actually can’t comprehend?"
Eddy Pendarvis comments, "The issue that is also important is that of exploitation. I feel that writing about, say, poor Appalachians, whether you've lived it or not, can be exploitative if any part of you expects to get more attention because of that focus. It's worse, though, if you haven't lived it. Worse for practical reasons (unlikely to come off as real to people who have lived it) and moral ones."
Dreama Frisk wrote, "I have wondered if I would ever write anything beyond what is closely based on truth, would I want to. I am terribly interested in essay writing. I flat out could not write as a person of color. However, I was one of the few white teachers in a program here in Arlington County. Mainly we had older immigrants but older Black students, too. I had a rocky start, but eventually successful. Taught there for 25 years. They forgave me for being white and took me into their hearts and they, in mine. What I did learn was facing that I was white, and to remember that. The Black students hated 'wannabees.' All of the races had other groups they disliked. So, strangely enough, I think white people should write about their people. Like white rich people or white poor people like my people."
Carole Rosenthal writes, " I just read your piece on cultural appropriation....and found it interesting and useful, and generous. Yes, the advice to just use whatever form of cultural appropriation emerges in first draft is a very good thing to be reminded about. First drafts have to just emerge, if possible, and if you are in the throes of an idea that presents itself as someone else's prose it's a good idea to just let that happen and not to stop to figure it out in your own words and slow down the velocity and passion of what you're doing. Very good to be reminded of that!!!!"
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Deborah Clearman, author of Remedios, writes to say. "Cultural appropriation is an issue I deal with all the time, since I often write from the POV of Guatemalans—sometimes indigenous, sometimes mestizo. I launched REMEDIOS in the same year that AMERICAN DIRT received notoriety. Naturally I was pretty sensitive on the issue. The only good thing about a Zoom book launch is that I was able to be joined by a Guatemalan writer. I felt that Eduardo’s presence at my launch (remotely, as he was in Guatemala, quarantined with Covid) and his blurb helped validate my work.
"I don’t know if an outsider’s perspective on a culture or a society is important. But when I started writing about Guatemala I was living there, and deeply curious about the people I was living with. I did my utmost to portray them authentically. I’ve read a lot of novels about neurotic divorced women living in New York, and have never been particularly interested in writing one of those."
And finally, Kate Gardner wrote a longer, carefully argued piece that I hope you will read at The Journal of Practical Writing, linked here. Just one of her interesting insights is "I don't think being a writer exempts us from shouldering some responsibility for engaging with the reckoning process that is transforming us and our readers. After all, true freedom comes with responsibility to each other – a lesson the Covid pandemic continues to hammer home. Freedom and responsibility are inextricable partners in adult life."
BOOK REVIEWS
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Friend by Pauletta Hansel Reviewed by Bonnie Proudfoot
In early March of 2020, just before the Covid-19 pandemic began to make itself known, Pauletta Hansel, former Cincinnati Poet Laureate, author of 7 previous books of poetry, and winner of the 2017 Weatherford Award, gathered a group of poet/participants together to explore the potential of the epistolary poem. The workshop met in person for the first week; then, the world changed. Gatherings were prohibited, non-essential workers were ordered to stay home, and staples like toilet paper began to disappear from shelves. Ohio residents tuned into the daily briefings of Governor Mike DeWine, everyone began counting. The result is Friend, a collection of poems written by Hansel in the form of letters, in part, to her students in the class that was no longer able to meet in person.
These letter-poems are untitled, but dated from March 16th to June 17th, with the majority of the poems written in the first 6 weeks of the pandemic. “Counting.” writes Hansel in “March 27th, 2020,” “That’s how to get through. / But you have to know what to count. / The number of days / since you entered a door not your own. (Six) / . . . The hands that have touched you (Two). . . The feet I stand from my neighbor (Ten). / . . . The news counts the sick and the dead.” Each poem draws upon voice and the pronouns “you”, “we,” or “us” to bring the reader close to the poet. Immediate and intimate, we see the journey of facing the pandemic head on, a theme of physical distancing and geographic limitations that the poetry foregrounds throughout the book. In “April 10, 2020,” Hansel writes, “Friend, How would you describe the scent / of a newborn baby / Salt and blood? / The woman-slick just beginning to dry? / Is it days or weeks / until she’s milk and powder. . . To me now she is only screen / no whiff of flesh / drifting from my phone.” Along with the birth of her grand-daughter, Hansel’s poetry recalls the recent passing of her mother. In “March 18th, 2020,” Hansel writes, “Last night I dreamed / it was my mother calling/ on the red phone beside my bed. Until I’d laid down / the receiver with its satisfying clunk, I had forgotten / she was dead. Awake, I never forget. . . . In the end, the only speech my mother knew: / touch. Friend, if I could find her on the other side / of the corded line, I’d say, I miss you. / I don’t wish you were here.”
Although some of these poems are built of loss, others reveal a surprising sense of discovery. On the paths the poet walks, we see small fish that survive in puddles after the Miami River floods, or graffiti on the floodwall, “we are a balloon / in a world full of pins” to which the poet answers, “I say we are the pins / this earth, soft beneath us.” Photographs of the graffiti are interspersed throughout the book as the poet collages these words and images into the poetry. The final image, in “yellow chalk / fainter now, words fading into the path: / ‘We will be OK.’”
Toward the end of the book, “April 25th, 2020,” Hansel moves into an introspective mode, examining not only what she has written, but also what she sees as an invisible thread that weaves itself through this book, “Perhaps all my poems begin with I want, / and I’ve learned to make the words / invisible. . . / we are all in the room, friend, . . . / We call the room longing; we are in it together, / alone.”
There are many delights for the reader in this slim volume of poetry. These poems work, as do other poetic diaries (for example, Robert Creeley’s A Day Book), as a close poetic meditation on a time of change in American culture. Yet the poems additionally nod to the way that letters work, finding points of connection to received letter-poems, expanding upon themes proposed by some of the participants in the Spring 2020 workshop. As a result, subjects feel examined from a multitude of perspectives. Additionally, as letters, the poems retain the feeling that they are addressed not only to the other poets in the class, but to the reader, a “friend” who gains access to the inner life of the author as well.
Hansel’s poetry is spare, honest, clear-eyed, and tender without feeling sentimental, attentive to language and to the craft of poetry. This collection reminds us of what kept us going when the entire nation was under duress and strain in the not -too-distant past, as the death toll from Covid-19 rose exponentially. Friendship, family, poetry, each other. On “June 17th, 2020,” the final poem in the book, Hansel extends gratitude to those who “stocked the shelves / loaded the delivery vans / that kept the rest of us alive.” She writes, “Do you remember when the only thing asked of us was to keep our breath at home? Even that was more than we could give. . . Friend, no matter / how little we thought we had, / it was always too much.” Poet and essayist Richard Hague writes, “these poems attest to resiliency, to the power of community, and to the soul of art.” Hague goes on to say, “We must thank Pauletta Hansel for the courageous attention she has paid.”
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The next two reviews are of books I read after an e-mail discussion with Phyllis Moore, who did training as a nurse in psychiatric institutions during the nineteen fifties. She says both of these books capture a great deal of what she saw herself. The first one is a popular novel, supposedly very autobiographical, that was turned into an even more popular and praised film; the second a memoir, also turned into a film.
The Snake Pit by Mary Jane Ward
I loved the movie version of this on the television late show when I was a kid, and I was pleased by how much I liked the novel in this 2021 reading. The novel has some of a certain flighty-fem quality
and a lot of assumptions about what women want (or used to want), but women are the moral and psychological center.
V. Cunningham, Virginia, the main character, worries about make up and her husband and how it's best that he makes a living for both of them (even though she has a writing career).
It follows V. on her ups and downs through various levels of wards in a mental hospital after a break-down. There are wonderful witty moments and terrific minor characters, both staff and patients. The institution is considered a very good one, but there is still a lot of borderline torture going on. The poignancy of V.'s desire to "get well" is powerful, and the arc of the story makes it very clear exactly when she truly begins to get better. What is much less clear is what was really wrong with her, and whether the treatments she gets (especially shock therapy) are actually helping or harming.
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I'll Cry Tomorrow by Lillian RothThis one gives some good backstory on the days of vaudeville and the life of a child performer, but the heart of the story is a scathing, unflinching revelation of the narrator's experience with alcoholism.
Roth had writing help from Mike Connolly and Gerold Frank, and I think they captured her tone pretty well. She was a very public person, so she takes to having support staff, as if were, and to
speaking to the world naturally. I looked at some old clips of her on early 1960's television when she made her come-back, and she has a wonderful smile and great stage presence. She seems genuine (which isn't the same as ordinary or lacking in drama). She seemed to be enjoying her celebrity and the people around her, and her opportunity to sing. I expect this delight in singing was probably always a part of her charm.
Her experience of alcoholism is unsparingly ugly. I mean vomit and public humiliation ugly. I don't suppose it's so shocking to read it now as when it came out in 1954, but it's bad enough. She spent time in an insane asylum, too, but her treatment seemed much kinder than Mary Jane Ward's snake pit.
Anyhow, I couldn't stop reading–Roth is self-centered and under-educated, and seems to have believed that her mother really had her and her younger sister's best interests at heart when she pushed the two girls on stage.
Interestingly, the Susan Hayward biopic version was toned down a lot–I expect Hayward's hair got messed up when she was drunk, but that they didn't show the damage to skin and liver. Roth's book goes totally bare-faced.
A Short History of Reconstruction by Eric Foner (abridged version of Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution)
I may decide to read the full length version of this one day, but this was a good overview. I read it for my favorite use of history, which is to make today seem less awful, but also just because of my ignorance.
Biggest takeaways: there were
ten years of significant advances politically (more than economically) for black men and by extension black families after the Civil War. Laws were passed giving basic civil rights to freedmen, some schools were established, and a lot more. Actually, a lot more than I realized.
Another takeaway: much of what was forced on the South by Federal troops was actually aid for all working class poor, white as well as freed Black people: public schools, libraries, use of public transportation, restaurants, etc.
This is the one that always surprises me: The Jim Crow laws really weren't put in place till the 1890's. Also, a lot of the federal laws (flagrantly ignored in the South) were still in place and available to lawyers later when they started lawsuits for early civil rights during the twentieth century, then as the civil rights movement gathered momentum.
Also of appalling interested was the viciousness of the first iteration of the Ku Klux Klan (founded in 1865, extended into almost every southern state by 1870 )–and how it was actually beaten back for a while, although replaced by other organizations and tactics for the white supremacists. So many echoes in all this today with the uprising of white supremacist groups.
Finally, there was the dark night of the so-called "Redemption" of the South as the old planters and new merchant class took over-- voter suppression of the blacks, laws to keep black farmers in place, measures to stop people from voting, etc. Meanwhile, some concrete accomplishments lasted, and people never forgot the time when the system actually worked for them in some places, for a while.
For more, see my blog post.
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Dearth by Lynda Schor
Lynda Schor is known as a writer who is feminist, comic, and always edgy. This, her first novel, has a story line
is full of realistic violence and terror along with passages of fantasy largely contained in long, elaborate dreams (Ray's) and folk tales (usually told by Stella, Ray's partner in sex and a hunt for her missing husband) along with a murky atmosphere.
The situation is that Ray, a widower and teacher of college geology, comes to El Paso for a visit with his friends Stella and Felix. The friendship flourished when Ray's wife was alive, and the idea is to take a road trip, along the Mexican the border, to places they used to go as two couples.
Then Felix goes missing, and for a while, the book seems to be on-track to be a genre thriller. Geography and porous boundaries are essential to the foreground of the novel, but also to the questions that underlie it. And do I need to say that the longer the story goes on, the more the borders between dream reality and mundane reality begun to blur?
There is a realistic beating of Felix in a motel in Mexico, and Felix seems likely to be involved in immigrant politics and possibly drug smuggling. When he's gone, Ray and Stella go looking for him, rather desultorily. They are soon involved in a murky situation that leaves Ray unclear as to whether he and Stella have actually killed an abusive father and husband. Then there is the question of what happened to the wife and child of the abuser?
What had been dark shadows and suspicion (how many people is Stella having sex with?) becomes for Ray an inability to do the simplest things like ask questions about Felix. It is only with the greatest effort that Ray gets hold of Felix's phone and computer and begins to make a few calls. Everyone agrees that police have to be left out of it altogether, and when the Border Patrol gets involved, there is dark, heavy suspense over what they are going to do to Ray and Stella. Ray makes small efforts to take care of business in the mundane realm, but is increasingly wrapped up in dreams.
The book is an amazing performance, clear about the pervasive confusion the characters feel, a triumph of heavy, sometimes terrified, sometimes funny emotions and motivations. A lot of what makes it work is a world of tacky motels and Tex-Mex roadside bars and diners.
It's a trip, in all kinds of ways--a trip well worth taking.
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Emma by Jane Austen
During the quarantine, we saw a socially distanced theatrical staged reading of Emma at Shakespeare & Company. It was an in-process play by Kate Hamill, who has done a lot of adaptations, reactions, and revisionist versions of famous literature
including at least four Jane Austen novels and a "feminist revenge fantasy" of Dracula. She spoke in a video interview of having received an important insight from one of her professors that Jane Austen's great subject is the destructive force on ladies of not being able to work in the world.
This online production was interesting in how it dealt with having no one in the same space, and, as usual, the splendidly trained S&C ensemble acting was wonderful. I wasn't thrilled, however, with Hamill's admittedly unfinished script, with its characters seeming so crude compared to Austen's novel. A small example is that Hamill's Miss Bates, a kind, garrulous impoverished gentlewoman, is combined with another character from the books. Hamill's Miss Bates keeps a school, but Austen's Miss Bates is impoverished precisely because she cannot be an entrepreneur and keep a school, if she's to continue to be a gentlewoman. She stays home, watches over her elderly mother, and for most of this novel, also cares for her niece Jane Fairfax. And, of course, the great disaster looming over Jane Fairfax is that she appears to have to go out as a governess to earn her own living, which endangers her caste.
One of the most interesting things in the novel is Emma's brutal prejudice against a prosperous farming family in the community, and her desire that her friend Harriet not de-class herself by associating with them. .
Hamill's dramatized version keeps trying to turn the couples into twenty-first century Beatrices and Benedicks. Everyone has one liners and is clever and in love. It isn't that none of this is in Austen's novel. Indeed, it's a novel that starts with one marriage and manages to complete four more (if I counted correctly)
before it's over. Sorting out the right couples is very much of what powers the plot.
I think looking at class and the crushing of women's possibilities (and boredom enhancing some of their worst instincts) is always what to watch in Austen, and in her early novels she handles it with a light touch that is hopeful even as bad things happen. Mansfield Park and Persuasion have a different tone.
Anyhow, after the online production, I was ready to reread Emma yet again.
Thank you, once again, to the Gutenberg Project for digitalizing so much nineteenth century literature. These novels go very well on the e-readers, with the linear, forward movement. It's how they were written, and how they were read: you rarely need to go back. If you use an e-reader and don't have all of Austen and all of Eliot and as much of Dickens and Trollope as you can stand on your e-reader, you are denying yourself one of life's major treats.
In my humble opinion.
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SHORTER REVIEWS
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The Third Life of Grange Copeland by Alice Walker
Walker's first novel, and quite good. She has described it as an effort to deal with the damage racism and segregation have caused African-Americans to do to themselves. The tone is occasionally overly portentous, but it is a novel that pays off in the end and fulfills its promises. Grange Copeland himself changes over his lifetime--a lot of the changes happen offstage--we miss the middle third of his life when he has fled North-- but his final period, the Third Life of the title is brilliantly, powerfully conveyed in his final act is a grandfather determined to save his granddaughter..
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Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
I bought this maybe a year ago during a sale of Kindle e-books, and ran across it when I was thinking
about writing in the voice of people unlike you. It is an excellent example of cross race writing, mostly successful (it's James Baldwin after all) in its all white cast of characters. The one thing that doesn't work so well is the main character, David's, back story. It is a generic American white culture that is rejected by David himself, and thus not of much consequence to the story.
The novel is set in Paris and is very much a part of its time, the nineteen fifties, with a narrator who drinks all day and hangs out all night in a gay subculture while having a girl friend on the side, and feeling great revulsion for the old queens he lets buy him drinks and meals. He falls in love with the handsome Italian bartender Giovanni, and struggles with passion and self-disgust, which is what makes the story such a powerful witness to a particular milieu.
Here's an excellent, longer reassessment of the book in the New Yorker.
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Worlds End by T.C. Boyle
The contemporary New York Times review praises this novel as a great leap forward from Boyle's previous books of fiction of which it said, "...caprice and mugging were the norms, and the career seemed to point in the direction of superior literary horseplay, not heft."
I love that "Superior literary horseplay."
I wasn't mad about this novel (and here's some more balancing praise from Publisher's Weekly and The Guardian). Sometimes I read novels at the wrong moment in my life. I have been recently enjoying a great deal some of the genre tough (but sensitive!) guy writers like Walter Mosley and Michael Connolly and Dennis Lehane. So it isn't the violence or the raunch that bothers me here, but maybe rather that I have always had a problem with what the Times reviewer called "wit writers," a new term to me--dark comedy, language games, etc., erudite show-off-ism.
So I want to be fair and say that this is an interesting, well-researched novel of New York's communities along the Hudson River: it covers family members from the Dutch 1600's but also the 1949 right wing riots at a Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill (called Peterskill here). There are some super scenes, too, including the Peekskill riots (seeming quite timely in winter 2021), but also Dutch parties, nicely researched as to food and drink, scenes of the Catskills and the great river, and yes, the shocking dark humor of two vehicular accidents at a historical marker sign. Along with a lot of solid realism, Boyle manages some of the brilliance of a Monty Python sketch but also enormous breadth and even some depth.
Boyle doesn't, however, seem to have much respect for anyone in his novel: not the ridiculous idealists; not the degenerate drunk remnants of the native Americans of the region; not the wealthy Van Warts who are mostly stereotyped oppressors; not their poor tenants the the Van Brunts, who occasionally rebel, but mostly fawn. The flipping back and forth between the centuries is done neatly, and the scenes are entertaining.
It's a bravura performance of wildly separate plot lines brought together by blood lines, and the the ending alone is worth reading for its satisfactory send-off for the last of the Van Warts.
But not an overlooked American masterpiece.
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Two Books by Joan Silber: The Art of Time in Fiction: As Long as It Takes and Improvement
The Art of Time is a very small book, part of a series from Graywolf, that has some good stuff for teaching writing and for writers. My favorite on this reading is "switchback" time, which is the alternating time frames which I have used myself. She describes it as "a zigzag movement back and forth among time frames," and distinguishes it from flashback, which she finds a little tacky (!!) So of course with my enthusiasm for Silber's book about fiction, I wanted to read one of her novels.....
Improvement is a 2018 Pen/Faulkner winner that garnered a lot of high praise. It is a great example of a novel-made-of-short stories, told from many points of view mostly excellent, with maybe one or two of the point of view characters and their stories that weren't up to the standard of the others. That is to say, I might have liked the book better with 50 fewer pages, but I'm a fanatic about cutting out the padding.
One thing she does extremely nicely is to include a couple of characters of color who get story-length points of view that don't exploit and enrich the story. The loose connections are nicely done too, and there is an important character who hardly appears in the present time of the story, but has a lot to do with the story's action. This is Claude, a very small time criminal who falls touchingly in love and drives badly. I also enjoyed Kiki a great deal: she has a penchant for Turkish rug merchants, and for living by her own lights.
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True Grit by Charles Portis
....was truly lovely. How can you not love his best ever character, Mattie Ross, the one armed spinster who tells the story in her fourteen year old voice.
It has always had fans and good reviews, and deserves all of those. Emily Temple of Literary Hub made some interesting comments analyzing the first paragraphs..
I've been writing about cultural and gender appropriation, and here we have a book where a man really does a female character extremely well. He does it with a very precise, eccentric character with a marvelously idiosyncratic voice, which may be the secret: Mattie Ross's direct, brave, and dry voice manages to convey innocence and conviction. To some extend, gender is totally beside the point--the focus is all on action (cowboy shoot-outs and rattlesnakes and cut-off fingers). Also, given the the time and place and descriptions of Mattie's skinny boyish body, one guesses she hasn't hit puberty yet– not uncommon for a fourteen year old in the nineteenth century.
Anyhow, the book works, and it's a great pleasure. Rooster Cogburn is a drunken boor (but very skilled at killing), and he is also sincerely interested in keeping Mattie alive and getting her man. If some of the events are a little over the top (the sluggish rattlers in a corpse's rib cage), you don't even notice till the book is done.
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People of the Whale by Linda Hogan
This is the story of a fictional West Coast Indian tribe that is trying to recapture its mythical traditions in the face of cultural and environmental degradation. There is a troop of Good Old Boys led by a seriously demonic bad guy. The good guys are the main character Ruth, who stands up at least sometimes to the men, loses her beloved husband, and her beloved son. She fishes on a boat her father gave her, is also a basket weaver and general stand-up sort of person–a traditional person of contemporary times.
Her husband Thomas, however, out of solidarity with his gang of guy friends, joins the army and goes to Vietnam. So there's a whole second traditional world torn apart in the novel as well, Vietnamese villages. At first I resisted this move to different landscapes, but ended up accepting Hogan's choice--a lateral connection between people who oppose the cultural hegemony of the United States.
Thematically, it isn't subtle, but very lovely.
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The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
The first three quarters (this seems to be something that I find in a lot of contemporary novels) was really good. The narrator is a spy of sorts, we discover, and his dilemmas come from his complete immersion in the life of the enemy who isn't his enemy at all, He really doesn't know or seem to care much about the Communism he supposedly is fighting for.
He makes his harrowing escape from Saigon as it falls, and almost makes a life in the United States, but out what seems to me more intellectual commitment on the part of the writer than natural development of the character, he goes back to Vietnam, now working for the other side in its ill-planned attempt to infiltrated Laos. He is captured, writes this book we're reading as a confession, gets re-educated, with mind torture, and ends up heading out as a boat person.
It's clever, and has tremendously good parts, but maybe tries to cover too much.
I love the parts, though, about Vietnam and the warlord he works for, and then the refugee's view of the States.
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Cook [& Eat] Global by Linda Lombri and Virginia Cornue
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This gorgeously illustrated new Linda Lombri/Virginia Cornue cookbook Cook [& Eat] Global is keyed to events and locations in their Sandra Troux mystery series.
The recipe sources range from Korea to Haiti to the delis of New Jersey. There are familiar standards like Croque Monsieur and Peking Duck, but also instructions for how to make cassava bread and the Russian refresher, kvass, as well as main course Nigerian soups and entire dinner menus.
Each section tells you which mystery inspired the recipes: "A Sampling of Recipes from South Korea and China," for example, was suggested by The Mystery of the Ming Connection.
It's a cliché to say that reading about food makes you hungry, so let me just offer a gentle warning: if you don't want to spend the next several days in the kitchen, don't read this book on an empty stomach!
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GENRE ROUND-UP
Pleasantville by Attica Locke got an award for court room drama, has some murders and surprises, all the things one wants in crime/mystery,
but, as the Washington Independent Review of Books says, "Like the best thriller writers — your Dennis Lehanes, Tana Frenches, or Gillian Flynns — Locke's books have central mysteries, but that's never what they're really about."
The central character here is Jay Porter, a lawyer in a depression for a year since his wife died, barely hanging on to his law practice in order to keep his family together. He is recalled to life, as it were, by murdered young women and corruption in high places–both chemical poisoning by corporations, and shady political tricks.
There is a run-off election for mayor of Houston and a suspect for murder who is probably being framed for political reasons. Lots of good characters of all races, but the most important ones are African-American. The de rigueur beatings of the hero and danger to his children, the surprise traitors and help from unexpected places.
I love best the way she handles real life stuff–the legal jockeying for position, the trial, the nitty-gritty of neighborhood canvassing for votes, the difficulties of a class action suit.
The only thing that irks me is Locke's decision to use present tense for the present time of the story. Since there is a lot of back story and flashback, very well told, in the common past tense, I kept jumping when we suddenly are in the present tense. I'm betting this bothers very few people who don't' teach novel writing, and I'm sure Locke has an utterly god reason for doing it, but I don't see it, and I don't care for the technique.
Otherwise: clarity, a richness of character and event and issues, suffering and striving. A really good book!
I read Faye Kellerman's Day of Atonement before I read the first book in her series, The Ritual Bath,and think it is probably the better of these two, but the first one was interesting, and sets up the series. The orthodox Jewish material and dilemmas are interesting, and I'm Rina and her deep attachment to her Judaism.
The main investigator is Peter Decker, and Kellerman does unusually well on getting a guy's take on an attractive woman, too, but both books feel a little thin to me (especially compared to the meaty Pleasantville above). Just not good enough, in spite of the fun details and arguments about religious topics. And yet–truth to tell– I read Ritual Bath straight through in one evening because it was a world that took me in. Not sure why it was not satisfying. How can a murder mystery with lots of interesting information and characters etc. seem too light? Maybe because Rina's motivation isn't clear to me? She seems to be a sort of high-minded tease, and her inner life doesn't feel inner. I miss Connelly's and Mosley's suffering protagonists who I make fun of for suffering so soulfully.
Since I read Day of Atonement first, I had the fun of finding something new– at least to me, probably not to people who pay attention to best selling mysteries/crime. Kellerman's husband is also a crime writer. He's a child psychologist with a consulting psychologist sleuth; she a never-practiced dentist. In this novel, Peter and Rina have married, and Peter, an adopted kid raised Baptist finds out he's Jewish. This novel is set three quarters in Borough Park Brooklyn in a frum community where he finds his birth mother. Gorgeous sexy orthodox Rina wants to help solve crimes and causes vague echoes of Lucy Ricardo wanting to perform with Ricky's band.
I like the local color as usual, and find the famous warmth of the family a little cloying, until it turns out there are lots of interesting cracks in the façade, including an ex-yeshiva boy serial killer and heroics on the part of the sleuth. If's oddly light, gets darker as it goes along. I had fun.
Case Histories by Kate Atkinson is the first Jackson Brodie book, which I never heard of before. As usual, loved the British local color: beans on toast for breakfast and understated wit. It's also got lots of quirky characters that I enjoy, goes fast. Atkinson seems a little dismissive of the parameters of detective fiction: she blithely, almost defiantly, tosses in the physical attack on the sleuth, the sabotaged house and car, the nasty ex-wife, beloved darling little smart-ass daughter.
It begins with a couple of chapters of "case histories" that seem random, only connection that a young woman or child is the "vic" in each case. They gradually, and in an interesting way, began to come together for Brodie's case(s) although a few things are left hanging–for another book? The combination of half-mocking the genre and yet really making lovable characters–and some pretty nasty crime–works for me.
I think this one counts as genre--dystopian fiction that was apparently teased out of a shorter story: Before She Sleeps by Bina Shah. It wasn't as good as I'd hoped. The women too dependent on men, including the big win at the end, escape to a better place with a possible male lover/husband. Some really good ideas (the women of the night who do everything as courtesans but have sex) but Shah keeps adding in back story and world building in a kind of clunky "oh by the way" fashion. She acknowledges having had a lot of help, and the final third still feels hasty to me. Reminds me a little of J.G. Ballard in tone.
I reread Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling. I've been going through the Harry Potters again occasionally just for fun, and maybe to study how they work. This one is the point at which the novels get more serious: Voldemorte attacks Harry in person, and an admirable young character dies (but as usual, Rowling pulls punches by not sacrificing anyone really important to Harry.) Parts are wonderful, but I begin to see hints of Rowling's basic conservatism: girls are disposable or interchangeable except for Hermione, and Mrs. Weasely is stereotypically momish.
It's true that Potter usually succeeds because of his friendships and willingness to share (helping out his rival Cedric in this novel), but in the end it's his simple heroism that wins the day. Malfoy and his henchmen are unmitigated Evil. Best parts are the camaraderie and humor and adventure and action, of course, but also Rowling's unfailing success with the right names (even for candies! Cockroach clusters--yummy!). Hagrid the half-giant is nicely done (but not his female counterpart, Mme. Maxime). I'm probably asking too much of it. Still, when people say, "It's just a story!" or, "It's just entertainment," they almost always are demanding that you accept the underlying assumptions and prejudices of the work in question.
I reviewed the first book in this series, City of Bones, in Issue #209 and was pretty enthusiastic. I've now completed the first three of a six book series. Here are some thoughts on Cassandra Clare's City of Ashes and City of Glass
: It was slow for me getting into City of Ashes, probably because it had been six months since I read the first volume. The lesson here may be that these "can't eat just one" fantasy novels call for giving in to the impulse. Still, at certain point it came back: Oh, yeah, teens rampant. It's all about who loves whom, a kind of global teasing, of us readers mostly. I had forgotten a lot of the set up, so the first quarter was a bore. But then, once I had the basic structures and characters back. I had a lot of fun.
It's YA urban/supernatural fantasy by genre, and the YA tone makes me chuckle: snappy one-liners by the teen vampires and shadow hunters, constant high kinetic action, people die–and get brought back. When the main character Clary is out of the city, she misses New York pizza. There are lots of sexy kisses and desire, usually stopped by events before anything in the way of intercourse can happen. A couple of gay lovers, lots of evil addressed mostly in open battle.
The first book was like cotton candy, the second one took me a long time to get into, and the third one was more fun than a barrel of monkeys. I'm not a big fan of the angel lore, but in the end, the angels like everyone else, seem to be just people with powers.
CC herself recommends reading a separate series of her books before going on with the final three Mortal Instruments books. Marketing?
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READERS RESPOND
In response to Issue # 212's review of Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose, Belinda Anderson writes: "[I have cited Wallace Stegner] in teaching as an example of how to write excellent descriptions. I was somewhat dismayed to learn of the controversy over whether he won a Pulitzer Prize for a novel that appropriates the personal papers of Mary Hallock Foote. 'Stegner had lifted large amounts of Foote's writing nearly verbatim,' says a 2003 article in the Los Angeles Times called 'Tangle of Repose.' The article continues: 'The issue isn't whether Stegner did or didn't, but rather whether he should have used so much of Foote's writing in a book carrying his byline, whether he used it fairly, and whether Stegner showed a sexist streak by dismissing accusations, often from women, that he used the work of a writer of little renown, but extraordinary skill, to bolster his literary reputation.' My understanding [after reading this article] is that while he did indeed accurately quote her letters and lifted a lot of her phrasing, the family felt he did not do justice to her as a person."
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Danny Williams writes about what he wants from literature: "John Prine knew how to use words.Thinking a lot about Prine since he passed. So many creative perfect lines. This morning I was humming 'Angel from Montgomery' in my head. 'The years just roll by like a broken-down dam.' Of course he means 'The years just roll by like water over a... ' Then your brain can't help but insert the missing words, and without you knowing it, he is forcing you to help create the song along with him. Wow.
"When a writer uses a fractured sentence like 'She learned what pills were when,' you force me to straighten it out with 'learned what pills were supposed to be administered when.' And now my brain and yours are collaborating, instead of a strict compartmentalization of you writing and me reading.
"And that's what I need from literature, being blown out of my compartment."
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RECOMMENDED READING ONLINE
Diane Simmons article on Vaclav Havel and traveling in the Czech Republic and Vaclav Havel.
Good blog with more ideas for what to read next.
An article about The Turner Diaries, a white supremicist novel that inspires insurrection...
Wonderful sad poem by Barbara Crooker.
15 BOOKS ABOUT APPALACHIA TO READ INSTEAD OF HILLBILLY ELEGY by Kendra Winchester.
My blog post on Reconstruction: a fuller discussion of Eric Foner's A Short History of Reconstruction.
Suzanne Martinez story about trying to live outside the city during the pandemic: "Quitters."
A close reading of a well-made first paragraph (Emily Temple on True Grit)
A site that asks you to name books you like and then recommends others--all automatically.
ANNOUNCEMENTS
Latest news from Suzanne Martinez, who had an amazing end-of 2020 literarily. Her story "Promises" was published in Flash Fiction Magazine on November 4th AND nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Another story, "Lost & Found at Sunfish Pond" was published by The Wild Word at the end of November and "Quitters' will
be published in The Dovetail Diaries shortly.
Pamela E. Barnett, Dean, School of Arts & Sciences, La SalleUniversity at Princeton University Press isexcited to share news of Ken Bain’s forthcoming book: Super Courses: The Future of Teaching and Learning--and to offer you a discount to pre-order a copy! Enter code BTI30 at checkout to receive a 30% discount, available through 6/30/21: "Super Courses offers specific and useful examples for promoting deep and meaningful learning. But I am most moved by the way Ken Bain’s book promotes the development of the student as a human being. These courses work not only because of a set of research-based strategies, but because of the powerful assumption that students are curious, altruistic, social, and aspirational human beings. The super courses profiled here are built on that understanding and thus promote human flourishing as well as learning.”
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Ernie Brill's Abbreviated History of Expanding the Canon
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International top-notch short novels less than 200 pages
International Woman 's Literature
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IRENE WEINBERGER BOOKS:
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BUYING BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS NEWSLETTER
If a book discussed in this newsletter has no source mentioned, don’t forget that you may be able to borrow it from your public library as either a hard copy or as an e-book. You may also buy or order from your local independent bookstore. (To find a bricks-and-mortar store, click the "shop indie" logo left).
I have a lot of friends and colleagues who despise Amazon. There is a discussion about some of the issues back in Issue # 184, as well as even older comments from Jonathan Greene and others here.
A new not-for-profit alternative to Amazon.com is Bookshop.org which sends a percentage of every sale to a pool for brick-and-mortar bookstores. You may also direct the donation to a bookstore of your choice.
Lots of individuals have storefronts there, too including me.
The largest unionized bookstore in America has a web store at Powells Books. Some people prefer shopping online there to shopping at Amazon.com. An alternative way to reach Powell's site and support the union is via http://www.powellsunion.com. Prices are the same but 10% of your purchase will go to support the union benefit fund.
Another way to buy books online, especially used books, is to use Bookfinder or Alibris. Bookfinder gives the price with shipping and handling, so you can see what you really have to pay.
Another source for used and out-of-print books is All Book Stores. Also consider Paperback Book Swap, a postage-only way to trade books with other readers.
Ingrid Hughes suggests "a great place for used books which sometimes turn out to be never-opened hard cover books is Biblio. She says, "I've bought many books from them, often for $4 including shipping."
If you are using an electronic reader (all kinds), don't forget free books at the Gutenberg Project—mostly classics (copyrights pre-1927), and free, free, free!
Kobobooks.com sells e-books for independent brick-and-mortar bookstores.
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More and more public libraries are now offering electronic books for borrowing as well.
RESPONSES TO THIS NEWSLETTER
Please send responses to this newsletter directly to Meredith Sue Willis . Unless you say otherwise, your letter may be edited for length and published in this newsletter.
BACK ISSUES click here.
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LICENSE
Books for Readers Newsletter by Meredith Sue Willis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from Meredith Sue Willis. Some individual contributors may have other licenses.
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Meredith Sue Willis, the producer of this occasional newsletter, is a writer and teacher and enthusiastic reader. Her books have been published by Charles Scribner's Sons, HarperCollins, Ohio University Press, Mercury House, West Virginia University Press, Monteymayor Press, Teachers & Writers Press, Mountain State Press, Hamilton Stone Editions, and others. She teaches at New York University's School of Professional Studies.
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BACK ISSUES:
#213 Pauletta Hansen reviewed by Bonnie Proudfoot; A conversation about cultural appropriation in fiction; T.C. Boyle; Eric Foner; Attica Locke; Lillian Roth; The Snake Pit; Alice Walker; Lynda Schor; James Baldwin; True Grit--and more.
#212 Reviews of books by Madison Smaartt Bell, James Lee Burke, Mary Arnold Ward,Timothey Huguenin, Octavia Butler, Cobb & Seaton, Schama
#211 Reviews of books by Lillian Smith, Henry James, Deborah Clearman, J.K. Jemisin, Donna Meredith, Octavia Butler, Penelope Lively, Walter Mosley. Poems by Hilton Obenzinger.
#210 Lavie Tidhar, Amy Tan, Walter Mosley, Gore Vidal, Julie Otsuka, Rachel Ingalls, Rex Stout, John Updike, and more.
#209 Cassandra Clare, Lissa Evans, Suzan Colón, Damian Dressick, Madeline Ffitch, Dennis Lehane, William Maxwell, and more.
#208 Alexander Chee; Donna Meredith; Rita Quillen; Mrs. Humphy Ward; Roger Zelazny; Dennis LeHane; Eliot Parker; and more.
#207 Caroline Sutton, Colson Whitehead, Elaine Durbach, Marc Kaminsky, Attica Locke, William Makepeace Thackery, Charles Willeford & more.
#206 Timothy Snyder, Bonnie Proudfoot, David Weinberger, Pat Barker, Michelle Obama, Richard Powers, Anthony Powell, and more.
#205 George Eliot, Ernest Gaines, Kathy Manley, Rhonda White; reviews by Jane Kimmelman, Victoria Endres, Deborah Clearman.
#204 Larissa Shmailo, Joan Didion, Judith Moffett, Heidi Julavits, Susan Carol Scott, Trollope, Walter Mosley, Dorothy B. Hughes, and more.
#203 Tana French, Burt Kimmelman, Ann Petry, Mario Puzo, Anna Egan Smucker, Virginia Woolf, Val Nieman, Idra Novey, Roger Wall.
#202 J .G. Ballard, Peter Carey, Arthur Dobrin, Lisa Haliday, Birgit Mazarath, Roger Mitchell, Natalie Sypolt, and others.
#201 Marc Kaminsky, Jessica Wilkerson, Jaqueline Woodson, Eliot Parker, Barbara Kingsolver. Philip Roth, George Eliot and more.
#200 Books by Zola, Andrea Fekete, Thomas McGonigle, Maggie Anderson, Sarah Dunant, J.G. Ballard, Sarah Blizzard Robinson, and more.
#199 Reviews by Ed Davis and Phyllis Moore. Books by Elizabeth Strout, Thomas Mann, Rachel Kushner, Craig Johnson, Richard Powers and more.
#198 Reviews by Belinda Anderson, Phyllis Moore, Donna Meredith, Eddy Pendarvis, and Dolly Withrow. Eliot, Lisa Ko, John Ehle, Hamid, etc.
#197 Joan Silber, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Alexander Hamilton, Eudora Welty, Middlemarch yet again, Greta Ehrlich, Edwina Pendarvis.
#196 Last Exit to Brooklyn; Joan Didion; George Brosi's reviews; Alberto Moravia; Muriel Rukeyser; Matthew de la Peña; Joyce Carol Oates
#195 Voices for Unity; Ramp Hollow, A Time to Stir, Patti Smith, Nancy Abrams, Conrad, N.K. Jemisin, Walter Mosely & more.
#194 Allan Appel, Jane Lazarre, Caroline Sutton, Belinda Anderson on children's picture books.
#193 Larry Brown, Phillip Roth, Ken Champion, Larissa Shmailo, Gillian Flynn, Jack Wheatcroft, Hilton Obenziner and more.
#192 Young Adult books from Appalachia; Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse; Michael Connelly; Middlemarch; historical murders in Appalachia.
#191 Oliver Sacks, N.K. Jemisin, Isabella and Ferdinand and their descendents, Depta, Highsmith, and more.
#190 Clearman, Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods, Doerr, Octavia Butler, Colson Whitehead, Miss Fourth of July, Goodbye and more.
#189 J.D. Vance; Mitch Levenberg; Phillip Lopate; Barchester Towers; Judith Hoover; ; Les Liaisons Dangereuses; short science fiction reviews.
#188 Carmen Ferreiro-Esteban; The Hemingses of Monticello; Marc Harshman; Jews in the Civil War; Ken Champion; Rebecca West; Colum McCann
#187 Randi Ward, Burt Kimmelman, Llewellyn McKernan, Sir Walter Scott, Jonathan Lethem, Bill Luvaas, Phyllis Moore, Sarah Cordingley & more
#186 Diane Simmons, Walter Dean Myers, Johnny Sundstrom, Octavia Butler & more
#185 Monique Raphel High; Elizabeth Jane Howard; Phil Klay; Crystal Wilkinson
#184 More on Amazon; Laura Tillman; Anthony Trollope; Marily Yalom and the women of the French Revolution; Ernest Becker
#183 Hilton Obenzinger, Donna Meredith, Howard Sturgis, Tom Rob Smith, Daniel José Older, Elizabethe Vigée-Lebrun, Veronica Sicoe
#182 Troy E. Hill, Mitchell Jackson, Rita Sims Quillen, Marie Houzelle, Frederick Busch, more Dickens
#181 Valerie Nieman, Yorker Keith, Eliot Parker, Ken Champion, F.R. Leavis, Charles Dickens
#180 Saul Bellow, Edwina Pendarvis, Matthew Neill Null, Judith Moffett, Theodore Dreiser, & more
#179 Larissa Shmailo, Eric Frizius, Jane Austen, Go Set a Watchman and more
#178 Ken Champion, Cat Pleska, William Demby's Beetlecreek, Ron Rash, Elizabeth Gaskell, and more.
#177 Jane Hicks, Daniel Levine, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Ken Chamption, Patricia Harman
#176 Robert Gipe, Justin Torres, Marilynne Robinson, Velma Wallis, Larry McMurty, Charlotte Brontë, Henry James, Fumiko Enchi, Shelley Ettinger
#175 Lists of what to read for the new year; MOUNTAIN MOTHER GOOSE: CHILD LORE OF WEST VIRGINIA; Peggy Backman
#174 Christian Sahner, John Michael Cummings, Denton Loving, Madame Bovary
#173 Stephanie Wellen Levine, S.C. Gwynne, Ed Davis's Psalms of Israel Jones, Quanah Parker, J.G. Farrell, Lubavitcher girls
#172 Pat Conroy, Donna Tartt, Alice Boatwright, Fumiko Enchi, Robin Hobb, Rex Stout
#171 Robert Graves, Marie Manilla, Johnny Sundstrom, Kirk Judd
#170 John Van Kirk, Carter Seaton,Neil Gaiman, Francine Prose, The Murder of Helen Jewett, Thaddeus Rutkowski
#169 Pearl Buck's The Exile and Fighting Angel; Larissa Shmailo; Liz Lewinson; Twelve Years a Slave, and more
#168 Catherine the Great, Alice Munro, Edith Poor, Mitch Levenberg, Vonnegut, Mellville, and more!
#167 Belinda Anderson; Anne Shelby; Sean O'Leary, Dragon tetralogy; Don Delillo's Underworld
#166 Eddy Pendarvis on Pearl S. Buck; Theresa Basile; Miguel A. Ortiz; Lynda Schor; poems by Janet Lewis; Sarah Fielding
#165 Janet Lewis, Melville, Tosltoy, Irwin Shaw!
#164 Ed Davis on Julie Moore's poems; Edith Wharton; Elaine Drennon Little's A Southern Place; Elmore Leonard
#163 Pamela Erens, Michael Harris, Marlen Bodden, Joydeep Roy-Battacharya, Lisa J. Parker, and more
#162 Lincoln, Joseph Kennedy, Etel Adnan, Laura Treacy Bentley, Ron Rash, Sophie's Choice, and more
#161 More Wilkie Collins; Duff Brenna's Murdering the Mom; Nora Olsen's Swans & Klons; Lady Audley's Secret
#160 Carolina De Robertis, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Ross King's The Judgment of Paris
#159 Tom Jones. William Luvaas, Marc Harshman, The Good Earth, Lara Santoro, American Psycho
#158 Chinua Achebe's Man of the People; The Red and the Black; McCarthy's C.; Farm City; Victor Depta;Myra Shapiro
#157 Alice Boatwright, Reamy Jansen, Herta Muller, Knut Hamsun, What Maisie Knew; Wanchee Wang, Dolly Withrow.
#156 The Glass Madonna; A Revelation
#155 Buzz Bissinger; reader suggestions; Satchmo at the Waldorf
#154 Hannah Brown, Brad Abruzzi, Thomas Merton
#153 J.Anthony Lukas, Talmage Stanley's The Poco Fields, Devil Anse
#152 Marc Harshman guest editor; John Burroughs; Carol Hoenig
#151 Deborah Clearman, Steve Schrader, Paul Harding, Ken Follet, Saramago-- and more!
#150 Mitch Levenberg, Johnny Sundstrom, and Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns.
#149 David Weinberger's Too Big to Know; The Shining; The Tiger's Wife.
#148 The Moonstone, Djibouti, Mark Perry on the Grimké family
#147 Jane Lazarre's new novel; Johnny Sundstrom; Emotional Medicine Rx; Walter Dean Myers, etc.
#146 Henry Adams AGAIN! Also,Fun Home: a Tragicomic
#145 Henry Adams, Darnell Arnoult, Jaimy Gordon, Charlotte Brontë
#144 Carter Seaton, NancyKay Shapiro, Lady Murasaki Shikibu
#143 Little America; Guns,Germs, and Steel; The Trial
#142 Blog Fiction, Leah by Seymour Epstein, Wolf Hall, etc.
#141 Dreama Frisk on Hilary Spurling's Pearl Buck in China; Anita Desai; Cormac McCarthy
#140 Valerie Nieman's Blood Clay, Dolly Withrow
#139 My Kindle, The Prime Minister, Blood Meridian
#138 Special on Publicity by Carter Seaton
#137 Michael Harris's The Chieu Hoi Saloon; Game of Thrones; James Alexander Thom's Follow the River
#136 James Boyle's The Creative Commons; Paola Corso, Joanne Greenberg, Monique Raphel High, Amos Oz
#135 Reviews by Carole Rosenthal, Jeffrey Sokolow, and Wanchee Wang.
#134 Daniel Deronda, books with material on black and white relations in West Virginia
#133 Susan Carpenter, Irene Nemirovsky, Jonathan Safran Foer, Kanafani, Joe Sacco
#132 Karen Armstrong's A History of God; JCO's The Falls; The Eustace Diamonds again.
#131 The Help; J. McHenry Jones, Reamy Jansen, Jamie O'Neill, Michael Chabon.
#130 Lynda Schor, Ed Myers, Charles Bukowski, Terry Bisson, The Changing Face of Anti-Semitism
#129 Baltasar and Blimunda; Underground Railroad; Navasky's Naming Names, small press and indie books.
#128 Jeffrey Sokolow on Histories and memoirs of the Civil Rights Movement
#127 Olive Kitteridge; Urban fiction; Shelley Ettinger on Joyce Carol Oates
#126 Jack Hussey's Ghosts of Walden, The Leopard , Roger's Version, The Reluctanct Fundamentalist
#125 Lee Maynard's The Pale Light of Sunset; Books on John Brown suggested by Jeffrey Sokolow
#124 Cloudsplitter, Founding Brothers, Obenzinger on Bradley's Harlem Vs. Columbia University
#123 MSW's summer reading round-up; Olive Schreiner; more The Book Thief; more on the state of editing
#122 Left-wing cowboy poetry; Jewish partisans during WW2; responses to "Hire a Book Doctor?"
#121 Jane Lazarre's latest; Irving Howe's Leon Trotsky; Gringolandia; "Hire a Book Doctor?"
#120 Dreama Frisk on The Book Thief; Mark Rudd; Thulani Davis's summer reading list
#119 Two Histories of the Jews; small press books for Summer
#118 Kasuo Ichiguro, Jeanette Winterson, The Carter Family!
#117 Cat Pleska on Ann Pancake; Phyllis Moore on Jayne Anne Phillips; and Dolly Withrow on publicity
#116 Ann Pancake, American Psycho, Marc Harshman on George Mackay Brown
#115 Adam Bede, Nietzsche, Johnny Sundstrom
#114 Judith Moffett, high fantasy, Jared Diamond, Lily Tuck
#113 Espionage--nonfiction and fiction: Orson Scott Card and homophobia
#112 Marc Kaminsky, Nel Noddings, Orson Scott Card, Ed Myers
#111 James Michener, Mary Lee Settle, Ardian Gill, BIll Higginson, Jeremy Osner, Carol Brodtick
#110 Nahid Rachlin, Marion Cuba on self-publishing; Thulani Davis, The Road, memoirs
#109 Books about the late nineteen-sixties: Busy Dying; Flying Close to the Sun; Looking Good; Trespassers
#108 The Animal Within; The Ground Under My Feet; King of Swords
#107 The Absentee; Gorky Park; Little Scarlet; Howl; Health Proxy
#106 Castle Rackrent; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows; More on Drown; Blindness & more
#105 Everything is Miscellaneous, The Untouchable, Kettle Bottom by Diane Gilliam Fisher
#104 Responses to Shelley on Junot Diaz and more; More best books of 2007
#103 Guest Editor: Shelley Ettinger and her best books of 2007
#102 Saramago's BLINDNESS; more on NEVER LET ME GO; George Lies on Joe Gatski
#101 My Brilliant Career, The Scarlet Letter, John Banville, Never Let Me Go
#100 The Poisonwood Bible, Pamela Erens, More Harry P.
#99 Jonathan Greene on Amazon.com; Molly Gilman on Dogs of Babel
#98 Guest editor Pat Arnow; more on the Amazon.com debate
#97 Using Thomas Hardy; Why I Write; more
#96 Lucy Calkins, issue fiction for young adults
#95 Collapse, Harry Potter, Steve Geng
#94 Alice Robinson-Gilman, Maynard on Momaday
#93 Kristin Lavransdatter, House Made of Dawn, Leaving Atlanta
#92 Death of Ivan Ilych; Memoirs
#91 Richard Powers discussion
#90 William Zinsser, Memoir, Shakespeare
#89 William Styron, Ellen Willis, Dune, Germinal, and much more
#88 Sandra Cisneros's Caramelo
#87 Wings of the Dove, Forever After (9/11 Teachers)
#86 Leora Skolkin-Smith, American Pastoral, and more
#85 Wobblies, Winterson, West Virginia Encyclopedia
#84 Karen Armstrong, Geraldine Brooks, Peter Taylor
#83 3-Cornered World, Da Vinci Code
#82 The Eustace Diamonds, Strapless, Empire Falls
#81 Philip Roth's The Plot Against America , Paola Corso
#80 Joanne Greenberg, Ed Davis, more Murdoch; Special Discussion on Memoir--Frey and J.T. Leroy
#79 Adam Sexton, Iris Murdoch, Hemingway
#78 The Hills at Home; Tess of the D'Urbervilles; Jean Stafford
#77 On children's books--guest editor Carol Brodtrick
#76 Mary Lee Settle, Mary McCarthy
#75 The Makioka Sisters
#74 In Our Hearts We Were Giants
#73 Joyce Dyer
#72 Bill Robinson WWII story
#71 Eva Kollisch on G.W. Sebald
#70 On Reading
#69 Nella Larsen, Romola
#68 P.D. James
#67 The Medici
#66 Curious Incident,Temple Grandin
#65 Ingrid Hughes on Memoir
#64 Boyle, Worlds of Fiction
#63 The Namesame
#62 Honorary Consul; The Idiot
#61 Lauren's Line
#60 Prince of Providence
#59 The Mutual Friend, Red Water
#58 AkÉ, Season of Delight
#57 Screaming with Cannibals
#56 Benita Eisler's Byron
#55 Addie, Hottentot Venus, Ake
#54 Scott Oglesby, Jane Rule
#53 Nafisi,Chesnutt, LeGuin
#52 Keith Maillard, Lee Maynard
#51 Gregory Michie, Carter Seaton
#50 Atonement, Victoria Woodhull biography
#49 Caucasia
#48 Richard Price, Phillip Pullman
#47 Mid- East Islamic World Reader
#46 Invitation to a Beheading
#45 The Princess of Cleves
#44 Shelley Ettinger: A Few Not-so-Great Books
#43 Woolf, The Terrorist Next Door
#42 John Sanford
#41 Isabelle Allende
#40 Ed Myers on John Williams
#39 Faulkner
#38 Steven Bloom No New Jokes
#37 James Webb's Fields of Fire
#36 Middlemarch
#35 Conrad, Furbee, Silas House
#34 Emshwiller
#33 Pullman, Daughter of the Elm
#32 More Lesbian lit; Nostromo
#31 Lesbian fiction
#30 Carol Shields, Colson Whitehead
#29 More William Styron
#28 William Styron
#27 Daniel Gioseffi
#26 Phyllis Moore
#25 On Libraries....
#24 Tales of the City
#23 Nonfiction, poetry, and fiction
#22 More on Why This Newsletter
#21 Salinger, Sarah Waters, Next of Kin
#20 Jane Lazarre
#19 Artemisia Gentileschi
#18 Ozick, Coetzee, Joanna Torrey
#17 Arthur Kinoy
#16 Mrs. Gaskell and lots of other suggestions
#15 George Dennison, Pat Barker, George Eliot
#14 Small Presses
#13 Gap Creek, Crum
#12 Reading after 9-11
#11 Political Novels
#10 Summer Reading ideas
#9 Shelley Ettinger picks
#8 Harriette Arnow's Hunter's Horn
#7 About this newsletter
#6 Maria Edgeworth
#5 Tales of Good and Evil; Moon Tiger
#4 Homer Hickam and The Chosen
#3 J.T. LeRoy and Tale of Genji
#2 Chick Lit
#1 About this newsletter.
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