Bonus Points for the Anthology: State by State, a Panoramic Portrait of America

I think I mentioned early on when I resolved for 2009 to read a book set in, concerning the history of, or written by an author from each State, that I felt undermined to discover that Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey had pretty much had the same idea in 2008. The two Mr. W's brought together 51 young, talented and often award-winning writers (with an occasional cartoonist, actor and chef thrown in for good measure) to do an updated, more personal reprise of the WPA's American Guide series created through the Federal Writers' Project in the 1930s. (And here I am, a would-be author, dealing with the latest depression recovery/stimulus funds as a government worker and the only writing I do is to compress grant announcements and summarize award recipients for web page content, hardly either personal or insightful about my home State.)

Statistically, the two Mr. W's pulled together a stronger selection of excellent storytellers than my effort to identify 51 books wherein the essence of a place played the lead role. Of the 50+ I plowed through this year, 20 earned solid high marks, the kind of books you grab someone by the shoulder and say "read this book," or better yet, you lend your copy to a friend who has a long bus commute to work each day. In State by State (SxS), more than half hit the bull's eye and only about a dozen made their States so boring that they wouldn't seem worth the trip, whether land-based or across the written page.

I thought it would be fun to align my preferences from this anthology against my rankings of the 50 State list I compiled, to see if there was something in a State, per se, that emerged irrespective of how or who wrote about. (See I am too much of a governmental bureaucrat, thinking my statistics will be meaningful, but thankfully, too much of a budding-writer to acknowledge that this was a pointless exercise.) Nonetheless, Florida came through in both top rankings. I've already extolled Susan Orlean for showing that the crimes of her orchid thieves had to take place in the Floridian swamps. Here, Joshua Ferris writes about how it was to grow up on the Florida Keys after relocating from Illinois in the mid-80s. He recalls an almost Huckleberry Finn kind of childhood, with open water, including swimming in the front yard during the eye of his first hurricane, with societal fringe neighbors and employers, and with his discovery that even after personally meeting Jimmy Buffet, his adulthood began with a car ride singing American Pie. (By the way, Susan Orlean also contributed to State by State but for Ohio where she grew up, and sorry Susan, compared to The Orchid Thief, this essay wasn't as compelling.)

Will Blythe writes of New Hampshire, as a native North Carolinian currently living in New York City, not as a resident, exile or transplant. He compares his appreciation of NH thus: "Maybe as a traveler, I'm like a mistress to a great man; my nocturnal privileges allow me to know things the good wife can only dream." Blythe is broad in his essay: writing of religious history, transcendentalism, frost heaves, and the forty varieties of silence in the State -- sort of like the number of shades of green in Eire. It has the same look, feel and people that I found in Irving's Hotel New Hampshire.

Other renderings in SxS glistened and lured me into the highly visual landscapes and made interesting people attractive, in contrast to many more mediocre stories from my blog list. Lydia Millet leaves New York City for Arizona and immediately buys a house in the desert "where the horrible meets the divine." She makes the scenery spectacular and the distances immeasurable, but it is her comparison of these geographic treasures against the diminished and marginal lives of the other local residents and the community that is drawn to the local mini-mart that fully fleshes out her place there as a transplant. Ellery Washington moved from Chicago in 1965 to Albuquerque when his father got work in the nuclear labs. As practically the only Black family in the area, his observations of New Mexico are somewhat similar to Millet's. Washington returns to New Mexico on a visit with his French boyfriend where he tour the sites of NM but discover instead his "defensive kind of local patriotism."

A short essay on Montana by Sarah Vowell is rich in history and has one of the best wrap-up lines: "memorize this line from a Richard Hugo poem set in Philipsburg so you have it handy for life's cold snaps -- "The car that brought you here still runs."

Jack Hitt lures the reader to South Carolina, the real SC, not the Colonial Williamsburg-like theme park of restored Charleston. He and his family are such generational residents, that his encounters with rich, absentee new home owners outshines their wealth and pretensions when he can name the people who previously owned each house in his neighborhood.

Alexander Payne, the man who brought us "Sideways," tours his State of Nebraska like movie's vineyard road trip, infused with humor: "that long flat State that sets between me and any place I want to go ... in fact, you're probably just skimming though this chapter on your way to Nevada."

Yes, there are a couple of States that I think don't stack up as well. The chapters for both Oregon and Vermont are done as cartoons, I guess a new genre that young'ns find attractively concise, but which I conclude doesn't give a sense of place, despite maps and drawings, nor of how a setting and local culture impacted the author. Both Kentucky and California left me flat.

State by State was a perfect way to wrap up my 2009 book list resolution. I ventured forth on a journey to look for how essential a story's setting was to the advancement of its plot. I also wanted to see if that setting took on a unique character because it was anchored in one place or another across America. SxS, especially when read over a short period of time as I did through my second reading, shows that people need to identify with a geographical home base. Others routinely ask new acquaintances where do they come from as a kind of short hand way of placing them in a culture or history. But that is other-imposed and too often stereotypical. Daphne Beal in her essay on growing up near Milkwaukee says her DNA is encoded "WISC." Neighborhood, town, and eventually State, become a more than a stage setting or backdrop for peoples' lives. The symbol of family trees implies family roots, roots that take hold and nourish memories.

January 8, 2010
Four Seasons in Rome by Anthony Doerr (Idaho)
I hesitate to mix look-backs to the 2009 list with picaresque reviews, so I'm going to tag onto the State by State write-up things I have to say about authors I discovered through theses essays.
Last night I finished a wonderful small travelogue, Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World, by Anthony Doerr (Idah0). He won the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, receiving the letter telling him the morning he returns from the hospital after his wife gives birth to twin boys. They pack them up and go. There are so many perspectives interwoven seamlessly: not knowing Italian, getting writers block and being diverted into reading all of Pliny instead of writing, coping with the physical exhaustion of two infants, and of course, the sights, smells and history of Rome.

Two passages quoted below struck me not only for their insights but the power of Doerr's composition:

"Habitualization ... Viktor Shklovsky wrote ... devours work, clothes, furniture, one's wife ... What he argued is that, over time, we stop perceiving familiar things ... Complexities wane, miracles become unremarkable, and if we're not careful, pretty soon we're gazing out at our lives as if through a burlap sack ... A good journal entry ... ought to break up the habitual and lift away the film that forms over the eye, the finger, the tongue, the heart. A good journal entry ought be a love letter to the world. Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience ... become new all over again."

"Every story seeks, in Emerson's words, the invisible and imponderable. Faith, loss, emotional contact. But to get there, oddly enough, the storyteller must use the visible, the physical, the eminently tangible: the reader, first and foremost, must be convinced. And details -- the right details in the right places -- are what do the convincing ... a writer ... hunts down the most vivid details and links them in sequences that will let a reader see, smell and hear a world that seems complete in itself ... builds a stage set and painstakingly hides all the struts and wires and nail holes, then stands back, and hopes whoever might come to see it will believe ... A journal entry is for its writer; it helps its writer refine, perceive, and process the world. But a story ... is for the reader ... A writer manufactures a dream. And each draft should present a version of that dream that is more precisely rendered and more consistently sustained than the last. Every morning I try to remind myself to give unreservedly, to pore over everything, to test each sentence for fractures in the dream."

Seeing a new world through the opening eyes of his twins, and so committed to excellence in observation, style and purpose, Doerr doesn't need to be standing atop the Janiculum Hill to be head and shoulders above the mass of contemporary authors.

January 9, 2010
The Magician's Assistant by Ann Patchett (Tennessee)
This book has a crackerjack beginning. My hands were almost shaking from the tension that Patchett builds up with the opening crisis as Sabine's husband Parsifal dies. Thinking this book would be a natural compare and contrast for the face to face book club's reading of Didion's Year of Magical Thinking (even with such a similar title), I eagerly read on. Soon Sabine is dreaming fantastical dreams about Parsifal's true love Phan, dreams that are exceptionally comforting if a tad ominous. After Parsifal's will is probated, she learns he had changed his name from Guy Fetters (harken to irons imprisoning him) and he has family in Nebraska in stark contrast to what she had been led to believe, that his well to do parents died in a car crash in Connecticut. His mother contacts her; they connect in Sabine's grief and she eventually flies to Nebraska to stay with them for several weeks. As she comes to learn of the horror of Guy's early life, and to see it repeated before her eyes in the family's successive generation, she dreams less of Phan and Parsifal and their beautiful life and home in Los Angeles and their travels and professional successes. The absence of those dreams diminishes the tale. Sabine's mourning would not pass without some sense of renewal and rebirth, but leaving her in Nebraska at the abrupt end of the novel has reality bite. Her card trick at her sister-in-law's wedding, while a milestone for her in terms of difficulty, falls flat on the wedding guests and seems to be little consolation for her resuming her life on the West Coast alone. With an open invitation to her other sister-in-law to come back to LA with her, with her architectural models collecting dust unfinished in Phan's mansion, and with her parents taking care of Parsifal's overweight white rabbit, Sabine seems stalled, waiting for another night time trance to move her out of the drifts of Nebraska.

A Look Back: The Best from 2009

I have never put together a retrospective that ranks the books I have read over the course of a year. Probably, because when I was reading a biography/memoir for each letter of the alphabet, selecting the top ten hardly seemed a meritorious distinction. With a field of 51 States, several of which had alternate selections, I have a large enough pool to make "piles" that make sense to me.

Strangely, 9 were my favorites and I added a tenth, like all good annual reviews, simply for transitional purposes. Here goes:

1. Florida: The Orchid Thief. This story could not have taken place anywhere else. The swamps with their unique flowers and Indian culture is not only the setting but the motive for these crimes. In addition, the author writes of an off-resort landscape that is arch-Floridian.
2. Kansas: Charlatan. Granted, this story could have taken place as readily in Missouri or any other mid-America State, but I was charmed and amused by this true crime story that is rooted in a time and a naivete of simple homespun but yet still contemporary human longings.
3. California: American Lightning. Does anyone see a pattern here? Once again, I am captivated by a true crime story of unionization and violence in America and the country's first attempts to respond to "terrorism."
4. Washington: Reservation Blues. What a joy to discover Sherman Alexie, compounded when my younger son similarly came to like this author through his short stories in his American literature class this semester where many of the same characters reappeared. Catch Alexie's recent interview on Colbert on Hulu to see his humor in action and his pride in the written word.
5. New Hampshire: Hotel New Hampshire. My first acquaintance with John Irving. Subsequently, I have discovered these themes and images recur in most of his novels, but still love the story and its rendition of New England.
6. Wisconsin: The Women. 2009 was the year I also discovered T. C. Boyle and almost became a groupie, toying with the idea of going to his lecture in Peekskill his fall when he was engaged for part of the 400 year celebrations of Henry Hudson's discoveries. Boyle surpasses the other version of Frank Lloyd Wright's loves and life, Loving Frank, that next to The Women, comes across as a provincial history, lacking in distance and assessment.
7. Illinois: Sin in the Second City. A good book to read after Charlatan to continue to venture into early 20th Century American vice. Also a great contrast to 21st Century New York legislative dysfunction.
8. Hawaii: Letters from Hawaii. Mark Twain at his funniest tethered to nonfiction.
9. Vermont: First (and Second and Third, etc) Person Rural. So quiet, so contemplative, so Vermont. A journal of day to day living in simplicity and community.
10. Rhode Island: Theophilus North. My tenth "force-fit" only as an unanticipated segue into 2010's list of picaresque novels.

Another 10 are books I would not hesitate to strongly recommend to anyone looking for a great read set in an interesting place with unforgettable characters and an author with a powerful writing style: Crazy in Alabama, Meet You in Hell (Pa), The Billionaire's Vinegar (Va), Citizen Coors, The Last Good Time (NJ), The Next Step in the Dance (La), Down River (NC), The Sky Fisherman (Or),The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter (Tn), and The Worst Hard Time (Ok).

Next will be my attempt to compare these top 20 State stories with those in the anthology, State by State.

An Unanticipated Segue to 2010: Theophilus North in Newport for the Summer of '26

I finished all 50 States, plus DC, at 2:45 PM on Tuesday, December 22. With the last minute rush of the holidays, and a need to take a deep relaxing breath, I've put off writing up the last review. But here goes:

Theophilus North was the last novel written by Thornton Wilder in 1973. It is heavily autobiographical and a look-back of almost 50 years. The hero of the story, Ted North, summers in Newport but only as an ancillary to the moneyed class that inhabits the cottages/mansions, as the tennis and French instructor for their children and as a professional reader to those too infirm, agoraphobic, or "entitle" to find amusement and interests out of doors. Wilder employs two structure devices on which to hang his tales: paralleling the city of Newport to the nine cities of ancient Troy and the motives of his protagonist, to his childhood ambitions and the attractions of nine possible careers: as a missionary, anthropologist, archaeologist, detective, actor, magician, lover, and my favorite, rascal/"el picaro."

To quote at length from Chapter One, Wilder's description of a rogue:
"... el picaro ... the man who lives by his wits, “one step ahead of the sheriff,” without plan, without ambition, at the margin of decorous living, delighted to outwit the clods, the prudent, the money-obsessed, the censorious, the complacent. I dreamt of covering the entire world, of looking into a million faces, light of foot, light of purse and baggage, extricating myself from predicaments of hunger, cold and oppression by quickness of mind. These are not only the rogues, but the adventurers. I had read, enviously, the lives of many and had observed that they were often, justly or unjustly, in prison. My instinct had warned me and my occasional nightmares had warned me that the supreme suffering for me would be that of being caged and incarcerated. I have occasionally approached the verge of downright rascality, but not without carefully weighing the risk.”

Ever since I introduced T.C. Boyle's Mungo Park to my book club and was surprised by their quite Victorian reaction to his escapades with native sexual practices, I decided that the blog for 2010 would be nothing but picaresque novels. Imagine my surprise to find Theophilus just as intent on being a rogue. In the next couple of days, I will post the list of randy adventurous books I have culled for next year's resolution. And I guess the theme is not that far afield from 2009. This year, I had been looking to validate that where a story happened was not incidental to its outcome. But passing through all the States has been a journey of sorts. Picaresque novels per se have a voyage overlay.

As I progress into the next resolution, I am looking for books that typify that personal voyage, one where the main character, through all his or her missteps, encounters unbelievable characters and situations, placing himself/herself in temptation if not risk, and gaining wisdom and personal insight thereby. That is the standard against which I will assess the novels next year.

But before that list, I will post two more reviews for 2009: one my first assessment of which of the 51+ from the States met or exceeded what I was looking to find (the centrality of location) and how my list aligns against that of the bonus book, State by State, the 2008 published anthology of 50 authors' treatment for each State. I'm interested to see if my preferences for a State from this book match those on our list, to see if there is anything intrinsic about a State that makes it prime real estate for literature.

Open Space and Quiet People

Idaho, sheep, 1917 with the threat of being drafted looming over the just-beginning life of Walter Pascoe. Well, that just about does it for my review. This is a first novel, written in 2003, by a young author named Heather Parkinson, whom it seems has not published another. This book is so down-shifted, it is laconic. Three-fourths of the book has minimal dialogue ... the most intense back and forth is between Walter and his fellow soldiers on the train as they return home from France. Prior to that, he hardly speaks to his parents, boss or fiancee. So does anything compensate for this introspection? Not really. The description of sheep herding is distanced and hardly rooted in the visceral. Walter's mother's illness and his father's life as a merchant in a small town is not portrayed as influencing his life decisions. Everything is withheld ... his fiancee never tells him she is pregnant when he is drafted, never writes to tell him she lost the baby. If it weren't so late in December, I'd actively look for an alternative to represent the State; but, my interest is in Rhode Island and getting ready for 2010.