Coalminer's Wife

I bet this was one of the books that Joshilyn Jackson (Between Georgia) was going to recommend to us when she emailed to say she couldn't get on the blog. Why? Because her review of Red Helmet is on its back cover, calling Homer Hickam a national treasure. In addition, Stephen Coonts from the New York Times calls him, in his review, the Mark Twain of our time. Some publicity hype, perhaps? But coincidentally connected to the States list.

At book club this week, we discussed place affecting story line. The book was Song Yet Sung, set on the eastern shores of Maryland in the 1850s, with dirt poor farmers and oyster men. We agreed the setting was critical to the plot but soon our conversation moved on to the ability of a well written story to shatter stereotypes. I recognized this as yet another motive underneath my reading about States. Yes, I have stereotypes of Cajuns, cowboys and coalminers. And the books I've been reading have dimensionalized these iconic Americans into thoughtful, honest and complex persons.

Highcoal is a company town of 624 people. What people there are who do not work for the mine have jobs or responsibilities that directly support it and keep the town together: the constable is a company employee, the pastor does an occasional shift, the general store owner outfits the miners. It's one of those towns, like Wilmington, NC, where testosterone is in the air, here perhaps the under scent of coal dust. All the men have nicknames that are the masculine quick label of each person's family or significant live experience. Cable, son of Wire, is the mine manager lovestruck to marry a high-power, manic energy woman named Song, an Asian-American acquisitions negotiator for her wealthy father. As soon as Song reaches Highcoal, the young marriage begins to fall apart. There are echoes in this story of Next Step in the Dance, with a woman fighting against her town, its population and her husband in order to figure out who she is. Chapter 19 begins with Song waking up, not knowing where she is, feeling disoriented, frightened and out of place in Highcoal, in herself as well.

The story moves on to almost formulaic events: corruption and crime in the mine and a disaster trapping the main characters. Yes, the book details all aspects of mining: dangers, safety and sales. It presents beautiful scenery of West Virginia mountains and their inaccessibility. It is inexcusably chauvinistic about coal mining and its importance to America. Song starts out as being repelled by mining: it's filthy dirty, low class, and somewhat quaintly last century. This bias prevails throughout the country, not only in the environmentalists concern about acid rain, but more broadly based to seem to be an outright repugnance towards heavy labor and dirty blue collar jobs.

An appendix included in the book is the remarks that Hickam gave at the memorial for the Sago miners in January 2006. They are the most moving words in the volume.

I have linked Hickam's website to the blog and emailed him last night. If you go to his website, you will see that he had a serious operation recently. I wished him well. If I do happen to hear back from him, I will add his reply to this posting.

Later that day ... Mr. Hickam answered already. He is recuperating in St John's and has a slow Internet connection so he promises we will hear more next week. Thought I'd insert my email and his reply.

Mr. Hickam: Along with several of my best friends, I have started a blog with a pledge to read and review over fifty books this year, each set in one of the great States of the USA. I selected Red Helmet for West Virginia after having read October Sky several years ago. That book resonated in me, a woman who as a teenager set off model rockets wth the boys in high school and who grew up to have a son who went to space camp and hung pictures and flight badges in his room from all the Apollo astronauts.

Reading Red Helmet once again proved to me that there are only six degrees of separation, if not fewer, between everyone. The copy of the book I have has Joshilyn Jackson's review on the back cover. I had chosen her Between Georgia as on of our States. When I emailed her, she responded that she had wanted to comment on my blog but had a difficult time signing on. She mentioned that she wanted to tell me which of selected books she particularly liked. I am certain now Red Helmet was one of her must read recommendations. Also in the back of the book are the comments from Stephen Coonts, comparing you to Mark Twain. I also picked Letters from Hawaii for our 2009 resolution reading, so I guess I knew intuitively which authors to put in this august group.

I will link your website to my blog, theslackersbookclub.blogspot.com
<http://theslackersbookclub.blogspot.com/> (hope you have a chance to
visit).

To get intrusively personal, I am wishing you all the best. My prayers are with you to obtain the strength and patience you need to recover. Illness is an ironic blessing, a wonderful time to reevaluate and realize things have gone otherwise remarkably well and we can be quite happy in who we ended up being. I have already undergone two bouts of cancer: breast cancer in 2001 -- just as my son was graduating from high school and leaving New York to go to school in Texas -- and again last year, when I had aggressive uterine cancer, known as clear cell cancer, I guess fairly uncommon. During this last go-round, my husband was also undergoing several heart surgeries, ending up in a quadruple bypass. We could not take care of each other but, thankfully, had neighbors as wholesome and loving as those you've known in West Virginia. I should clarify that I come from "upstate" New York, not the City, where it's unlikely anyone would bring over Thanksgiving dinner consisting of both lasagna for the menfolk and traditional turkey and the fixins for me.

Which brings me back to Red Helmet and Song and her NYC background. At first, I thought her being Asian-American was a contrivance to make her even more unlike Highcoal natives. But by the end of your story, I was tearing up at how wonderfully she learned to become a "simple man" by learning to be a novice miner. I compare her to Colette and her "better than the locals" attitude when learning to love T-bub in Tim Gautreaux' Next Step in the Dance.

Our reading about places this year has proven that stereotyped don't hold and that family and community anchor one's soul and well-being.

My illnesses have convinced me not to radically change my life but to document it more and to share it with as many who want to read more about human experiences in all their universally unique iterations. You have shared your life and perceptions already with so many. My thanks and I hope to bring more readers to come to know your talent and insights. All the best.

And Mr. Hickam's response:

Thank you. Linda will write more next week. Right now, we're on St. John on a slow modem. I'm glad you liked Red Helmet, Song and Cable.

I'm also glad to meet a fellow cancer survivor.

Best wishes,

Homer Hickam
www.homerhickam.com

And then Linda wrote back:

Hi ... what a great letter, thank you -- you are quite the writer yourself! I am Linda, Homer's wife and assistant and we are back from our trip now. Homer is doing great, cancer free and back to all his old activities and exercising. As with you, we had great friends and family to support us. We used caringbridge.com to keep up with all the wonderful well-wishers, a great idea for a siteto help with communciations when someone is ill. Do you know it?

What a project for your book club and thank you for picking Red Helmet to feature. We met Joshilyn on a book talk panel event and she is a fun gal, we count her as a friend and love her writing. Coonts is from WV too, and we know him a little ... writers need to stick together indeed!

Not sure if you need anything from us about RH -- see its page here for some neat links, photos of the first women miners, a scholarship we started for the children of miners and a petition for a national miners' day: http://www.homerhickam.com/books/helmet.shtml By the way, the audio is up for a national award with Foreword Magazine, and is very well read. Homer reads his Sago speech on it too. I see your link for Homer goes to his blog page, an entry right after his cancer surgery which is only a tiny snapshot of one day -- could I ask that this link go to our homepage? ... Homer doesn't have time to blog often so it is always far behind ...

Thank you for helping people keep reading GREAT books! Linda Hickam

Nebraska: Plains Song by Wright Morris

Again I feel like I have been lead astray by book sellers' summaries of an author's prestigious awards: for Morris, two National Book awards, a Guggenheim and NEA fellowship, all honoring him between the late 50s and mid-80s. Where all those august panels that reviewed his work populated by men? Plains Song is the story of three generations of women. It clearly does not read as though it was written from first hand experience.

The women are stoic, silent and simple, traits that may have been desirable for a woman venturing into the plains to farm and live a hard, weather dependent life. But nothing happens in the story that shows any of their grit ... they have no challenges to best. Unlike Colette, the main character does nothing more strenuous than gather her eggs.

Cora, the first woman to head to Nebraska with her husband Emerson and his brother Orion, is aloof, self-sufficient and immediately estranged from her husband. Her child rearing responsibilities triple when she takes on the daughters of her sister in law who dies in childbirth. Emerson does little but daily farm chores, avoiding his house full of women who do not provide him with the hands he needs to be prosperous. Cora and her brood are about as interesting as her Leghorns.

The only woman in the family who dares leave Nebraska is Cora's sister in law Belle's daughter, Sharon, who heads to Chicago to study music. Her life there is portrayed equally flat and without memorable events or encounters. Morris writes best when describing Sharon on the train between home and Illinois: "she felt inexpressible relief ... the clang of the last crossing bell rang down the curtain on ceaseless humiliations, inadmissible longings, the perpetual chores and smouldering furies, the rites and kinship with half-conscious people so friendly and decent it shamed her to dislike them." The train whistle here lacks the image of comfort and knowledge of one's place that Gautreaux uses as his metaphor for T-Bub and Colette in our Louisiana selection.

When Sharon returns the final time for Cora's memorial, Nebraska isn't Nebraska anymore. Her niece shows her where the farm used to be. The family now grows soybeans with enormous house size harvesters. Her life seems as unbelievable as the exhibit of woolly mammoths they visit at the museum in Lincoln. Nothing and no one are worth remembering.

Morris intrudes into Sharon at the novel's end. The story has progressed to the late 70s and Sharon finds herself caught up accidentally in a convention of women libbers. It's as if Morris can't figure this out and he portrays the gathering as sort of an invasion. If this is his attempt to say the previous generations of Atkins women had it better by knowing their place in the drudgery and repetitiveness of small farm life, it fails to do so. And it makes him seem as passe and out of date as his tin-type depicted characters. But then again maybe in 1980 when the book was published it seemed apropos. Today it seems it should be in the exhibits at the Lincoln museum.

Finally, I must assess the book in its depiction of place. Because my mid-West geography is sparse, when Cora heads west and certain rivers or towns are mentioned, I had no idea where she was. In fact, until Lincoln was mentioned almost half way into the book, I was tempted to check our list to see which state I was reading about. Unlike Perrin's Vermont books which too are about farming, but producing things fairly unique to the state, the Atkins acreage could be almost anywhere in the early 20th century. Because the story lacks strong, economically productive men, the reader does not come away with a sense of accomplishment from the task. Morris creates characters who suffer for leaving Nebraska: Orion going off to WW1, Blanche to the school for "special" students in Chicago. But when they return home, they "fit in" to the mundane but without any indication of coming back more worldly or expanded from their travels.

Louisiana: The Next Step in the Dance by Tim Gautreaux

Flat out admission: I don't think I've ever read a book set in or about Louisiana that I didn't like. And this is no exception. So I went back to my reasons for reading 50 states posting to make sure that I just didn't gush about how charming the patios is, how likable the characters.

Tiger Island, the home town in the story, is in the DNA of the Colette and T-Bub. Not just that the are related to a large percentage of the population, but the cuisine, economy, geography and history of the area are passed down to them genetically. This is the story of Colette's struggle to decide whether or not she belongs to the "tribe."

When she flirts with a man from Texas and eventually leaves on the train to go to California, she is trying to grow beyond her origins. She wants prosperity and excitement, two things that she believes Tiger Island cannot deliver. T-Bub is the personification of the Island and is comfortable in himself and his position there. He will do anything for Colette, even divorcing her, in order to find a way to make her happy.

The book was written pre-Katrina so the events it portrays are centered in the boom and bust of coastal oil production. This cycle of having jobs and folding money shows Cajun culture as rowdy roadhouses with drums of steaming crayfish and hot under the collar locals itching for a fight. T-Bub's dual urge to dance the two-step and defend his honor (the influence of the Napoleonic code in Louisiana) drives Colette to distraction. She decides he is unambitious, low class and too interested in other women. And then when the economy cools, so do the lusts and tempers.

They're young, relatively newly married. I went to a wedding yesterday for two "kids" from the town -- the bride still finishing up school and the husband newly graduated but working in a fast food joint (given the current bad economy) and saw T-Bub and Colette at the altar. No amount of prenuptial counseling can prepare for lack of work, aging and ill parents, and figuring out who you are as you grow up with someone who you loved at a younger age.

Colette turns into a very likable woman the more Cajun she becomes. The descriptions of her hunting nutria, entering a shooting contest in the seediest of back-bayou bars, and setting up a shrimping business are the best description of place seeping into character development and plot advancement.

Gautreaux not only has an ear for native language, he also has the knack to use local idioms outside of dialogue to depict the place: when T-Bub is going shrimping, Gautreaux describes the approaching storm as "the sky looked like the underside of a skillet with flames of lightning licking along its bottom." You can see the roux browning.

By the time I reached chapter 20, I felt the characters had already passed the denouement and reading through five more chapters of disaster besetting Colette and T-Bub was too much. I also felt the last chapter was too smug, bringing them back to their former prosperity. I was not looking for closure, but an indication that they now could live together in a never-ending cycle of challenges. Their difficulties were not Herculean nor like the trials of Job: it was life and they learned how to live it together, for the better. This did not entitle them to live happily ever after but to feel supported in their community and secure in their identity with families, neighbors and home town.

Until I figure out a better way to do this

For those of you who are having a difficult time navigating around the blog and cannot remember where the complete list of states is, here it is again.

I've also added the date of the book review after the title so you can find it when you want to make a comment.

1. Alabama: Crazy in Alabama, by Mark Childress -- November 1, 2009
2. Alaska: Cold Water Burning, by John Straley -- January 12, 2009
3. Arizona: And Die in the West, by Paula Mitchell Marks -- August 22, 2009
4. Arkansas: Arkansas Traveler, by Earlene Fowler -- January 5, 2009
5. California: American Lightning, by Howard Blum -- April 20, 2009
6. Colorado: Citizen Coors by Dan Baum -- August 14, 2009
7. Connecticut: God and Man at Yale, by William F. Buckley -- March 2, 2009
8. Delaware: Henry F. DuPont and Winterthur, by Ruth Lord -- June 14, 2009
9. District of Columbia: River, Cross My Heart by Breena Clarke -- March 1, 2009
10. Florida: The Orchid Thief, by Susan Orlean -- November 11, 2009
11. Georgia: Between Georgia, by Joshilyn Jackson -- January 10, 2009
12. Hawaii: Letters from Hawaii, by Mark Twain -- February 5, 2009
13. Idaho: Across Open Ground, by Heather Parkinson -- December 18, 2009
14. Illinois: Sin in the Second City, by Karen Abbott -- March 16, 2009
15. Indiana: The Magnificent Ambersons, by Booth Tarkington -- November 25, 2009
16. Iowa: Little Heathens, by Mildred Armstrong Kalish -- August 9, 2009
17. Kansas: Charlatan, by Pope Brock -- March 7, 2009
18. Kentucky: Belonging - A Culture of Place, by bell hooks -- August 6, 2009
19. Louisiana: The Next Step in the Dance, by Tim Gautreaux -- February 15, 2009
20. Maine: The Beans of Egypt, Maine, by Carol Chute -- February 1, 2009
21. Maryland: Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, by David Simon -- October 18, 2009
22. Massachusetts: The Crazy School, by Cornelia Read -- March 3, 2009
23. Michigan: Cache of Corpses, by Henry Kisor -- October 9, 2009
24. Minnesota: Tall Pine Polka, by Lorna Landvik (Alternative: Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis) -- October 24, 2009
25. Mississippi: The Optimist's Daughter, by Eudora Welty -- January 21, 2009
26. Missouri: A Ghost in the Little House, by William Holtz -- November 20, 2009
27. Montana: Crazy Horse and Custer, by Stephen Ambrose -- June 10, 2009
28. Nebraska: Plains Song: For Female Voices, by Wright Morris --February 16, 2009
29. Nevada: Bringing Down the House, by Ben Mezrich -- March 19, 2009
30. New Hampshire: Hotel New Hampshire, by John Irving -- September 11, 2009
31. New Jersey: The Last Good Time, by Jonathan Van Meter -- March 29, 2009
32. New Mexico: Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather -- January 28, 2009
33. New York: Falling Man, by Don DeLillo -- April 11, 2009
34. North Carolina: Down River, by John Hart -- November 28, 2009
35. North Dakota: Dakota! by Dana Fuller Ross (aka James Reasoner) -- March 24, 2009
36A. Ohio: Knockemstiff, by Donald Ray Pollock -- May 6, 2009
36B. Ohio: Winesburg, by Sherman Anderson -- May 18, 2009
37. Oklahoma: The Worst Hard Time, by Timothy Egan -- August 5, 2009
38. Oregon: The Sky Fisherman, by Craig Lesley -- November 9, 2009
39. Pennsylvania: Meet You in Hell, by Les Standiford -- May 27, 2009
40. Rhode Island: Theophius North, by Thornton Wilder
41. South Carolina: Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters by Mark Dunn -- June 14, 2009
42. South Dakota: The Grass Dancer, by Susan Power -- November 27, 2009
43. Tennessee: The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter by Sharon McCrumb -- October 22, 2009
44. Texas: That Old Ace in the Hole -- August 27, 2009
45. Utah: Devil's Gate, by David Roberts-- July 27, 2009
46. Vermont: First Person Rural, by Noel Perrin -- January 20, 2009
47. Virginia: The Billionaire's Vinegar, by Benjamin Wallace -- June 3, 2009
48. Washington: Reservation Blues, by Sherman Alexie -- April 7, 2009
49A. Wisconsin: Loving Frank, by Nancy Horan -- May 4, 2009
49B. The Women, by T. C. Boyle -- May 13, 2009
50. West Virginia: Red Helmet, by Homer Hickam -- February 28, 2009
51. Wyoming: Out of Range, by C. J. Box -- August 24, 2009

BONUS POINTS: State by State - A Panoramic Portrait of America, edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey.

Letters from Hawaii, by Mark Twain

Before I get into my review, I have to digress. A couple of things happened that reinforce my enjoyment of this venture. First, when I was coming down in the elevator after work tonight, a woman looked at the book and asked what it was about. When I told her it was great and about Twain going to Hawaii in 1866 and writing to a newspaper in SF, she told me that her family had a connection: they bought Twain's mother's house in Fredonia, NY. She said it was a beautiful Victorian with curved halls that she got lost in. Another connection, like Hamagrael knowing Perrin's wife.

And the copy of the book I got from a branch of the local library consortium out in the boonies has one of those old stamped, date-able pockets in it so you can see when the book was taken out, as opposed to the new device of sticking in a random dated card with no particular history for the book. When it came out in 1966, the hundredth anniversary of Twain's voyage, it was read four times. Still some interest in '68 and '69, tapering off to one or two readers, than a four year drought between '75 and '79 and again between '80 and '84, etc., etc.

I remember when I went to the rare books section of the library at Hamilton College and checked to see when a Latin grammar book was last borrowed. This rhythm of reading patterns engages me. What is it about the fashion of a topic that waxes and wanes? How does something really enjoyable or instructive go out of fashion? I miss this look back in books I borrow now; the thread with previous explorers is now broken by improved technology.

But on to Hawaii. I have sixteen different pages listed that I wanted to cite in my review as being not only great, visual descriptions of Hawaii, but quintessentially Twain. I can't possibly cite them all. These were the sentences that could not have been written as wryly by anyone else: on being a heathen, sinning, and offering up your grandmother as atonement; speculating on the original of ham "Sandwich;" about the nastiness of photography as opposed to the softening of portraiture; and the universal reaction of being disappointed in seeing a "natural wonder" for the first time.

This is a laugh-out-loud book, the first I've come across since I read since The Know It All, by A. J. Jacobs. Twain twists the end of many paragraphs by disclaimers about his own observations, -- quaint reflections of a time before political pundits from both parties. He is his own self-deprecating person, and an honest assessor of the less-than-stellar Europeans he encounters in the scantly populated Islands.

Another thing that threw me back was the entire idea of writing about a place in terms of what the people are engaged in as commerce, what their ancestors believed in, and how the land looks. It reminded me of geography exercises in grammar school. It's sad to remember how we wrote about tires from Akron, cars from Detroit, steel from Pittsburgh and Bessemer, Alabama, when these economic strengths are no longer valid. In 1866, Hawaii didn't have pineapples, surfers or Don Ho. Twain writes about sugar production, converting molasses to rum, and naked native girls swimming in the surf with only their heads above water.

I have never felt a draw to go to Hawaii. Twain's description of the stereotypical volcano, beaches and tropical forests seem pristine -- not like a lure for an island vacation. I'd go there, but only back in time with MT.

Oops, what happened to Montana?

Did we select something and I forgot to add it to the list or do I need to do more research?

Not the "LLs" -- The Beans of Egypt Maine by Carolyn Chute

Just as I suspected, this is the author whose latest book I read about in the New York Times book review a couple of months ago and thought, yuck. (Here's the link to the review http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/04/books/04chut.html) For a woman who has no electricity and is married to an illiterate, she obviously does not have her own website.

Let me say it again about these Beans, yuck. Chute has chosen to continue a life of rural impoverishment, and like her characters, does not display any economic or interpersonal motivation to improve. Now into her fifth book, I wonder what she does with her royalties ... certainly not spend them on frivolities, let alone basics like central heating.

But holding to my pledge to assess the states according to my reading goals: the book does not come across as uniquely Maine. Ignoring a throw-away reference to fiddle heads in the woods, the location could just as easily be Appalachia or the pine woods of Georgia. The characters, other than an occasional "a-yuh," do not sound like "Maine-iacs." They are maniacs -- religious fanatics, ex-cons or soon to be cons, sex fiends, bullies.

There is no sense of history or future to the story line. Chute intentionally depicts a life of cyclical abuse, unemployment, and alienation. Characters appear and disappear without purpose or explanation, a device that is used to show how little understanding or curiosity Earlene has about her life and its place in Egypt. Everyone seems expendable and interchangeable.

I don't necessarily want to be uplifted by everything I read and I am not addicted to happy endings or morals in a story. It is Chute's choice to live like this, to write about this kind of marginal existence. But like the sign both she and her fictional Pomerleaus put in their driveway to keep out strangers, I would willingly not enter her "plot" again.