Neo-Gothic Southern

I raced through John Hart's Edgar award-winning mystery Down River in less than a day. (A much better investment of time than engaging in Black Friday bedlam.) The Slackers did not select that many murder mysteries as they tend to be our "default" genre when we don't have another reading theme. But this story is captivating. It faintly echoes The Sky Fisherman in its focus on the importance of a river to a family's history. It is more tightly written with more changes in its flow than Cache of Corpses. I have already reserved the two other Hart mysteries from the library, both set in North Carolina as well.

Like so many of our other books, Hart has his main character, Adam Chase, leave home -- actually driven away by his father's choice to side with Adam's stepmother. (Clever pun in the name, Adam being expelled from his paradise and then chasing his family history and sins.) The gentility of his Southern aristocratic estate bucks violently against the marginalized population of the county who live in swamps, manufacture meth, and incur outrageous gambling debts. As these allures tempt and encroach on his family and friends, providing motivation for several acts of violence, Hart also interweaves a motive of financial opportunities, the siting of a nuclear power plant along the river, as a force of evil to not only the status quo but to the land itself.

And like the best of murder mysteries, Adam has his own devastating back story to deal with, whether to reconcile himself to being ostracized by almost everyone in the county, to redeem his destroyed reputation, and to reconnect with the woman he left behind.

While North Carolina does not play as critical a role in Down River as Florida does in The Orchid Thief, it does come across as vitally important to plot development and intrudes more than say Alabama does in Crazy in Alabama. The place does not make the characters act as they do, but the location colors the perspectives of the inhabitants, and constrains the choices they can make.

December 5, 2009: Surroundings as Facade: The King of Lies

This is John Hart's first murder mystery, also set in Salisbury, Rowan County, North Carolina. Once you've read two books by the same author, you tend to see if there are any recurring themes, plots or characters. Like Down River, TKOL is high neo-Gothic, with a "genteel" wealthy Southern family that is controlled by a Tennessee Williams' type of Big Daddy; and in which the son comes to not only despise him but nearly to die from his hatred. However, I my thoughts comparing this book to others on the States' list, I find it evocative of Hotel New Hampshire, with violent rape, sibling's attempts at suicide, and deceased, idolized mother.

It is an excellent mystery, just a tad below Down River if only for its too pat ending. As far as place affecting the tale, North Carolina is less vital in this book. Hart portrays surroundings as highly constructed facades and his lead character, Work Pickens, as a too willing participant in the charade. All characters have been assigned roles by the despotic father, Ezra Pickens, with the town also under his mystique. Hart uses the simile of a frog staying in a pan of boiling water and not jumping out as long as the frog was put in when the water was tepid and only gradually heated. But because Work and his sister Jean are so emotionally destroyed by Ezra, a better simile might be the progressive ingestion of lead paint from the old peeling family manor. They are driven crazy, one to alcohol, the other to bouts of self-destruction. Ezra, his money, his estate all have to be obliterated for the characters to become whole. Jean moves from away from North Carolina but Work finds peace in farming the land nearby.

Another Step in the Dance Much Farther North

As I mentioned in the last review I posted -- for Indiana -- I am closing in on finishing the States and taking time to assess the year long effort, how the books stack against each other, and what I got out of this themed resolution for 2009. I certainly ended up reading more stories about Native Americans than I normally would have chosen from our local library. And if they are a sub-genre of larger American lit, I found them more provocative than some of the stories set in mainstream mid-America during the early decades of the Twentieth Century.

The Grass Dancer begins with a few untitled pages introducing Harley, a Dakota Indian, as he recalls a dream about his father and brother. Immediately, the book moves on to a short story set in 1981 where Harley meets a young half-breed girl from Illinois who has traveled to the Dakota powwow to dance. More of Harley's friends and family are introduced but the tale ominously ends in another car crash, recalling the one hinted at in the introduction.

What I liked most about this novel is how Susan Power quickly got the reader curious about Harley and how these tragedies came about and would effect his life. The second and subsequent half dozen chapters keep going farther and farther back into tribal and family history, 1977, 1961, all the way back to 1864, and each presents a vignette on an invent on another Dakota that is as life-altering as Harley's. In the last two chapters, Power returns to 1981 and ties these traditions and lore to Harley becoming an adult.

Many of the subplots included in the other books on the States list that have Native Americans as main characters are found here as well: the compromises to maintain their religious beliefs and view of the Earth when confronted with aggressive Catholicism; a similar tension between contemporary and native music; and the inevitability of alcoholism and its associated physical dangers as brought on by underemployment.

Never having been to the Dakotas, I find it impossible to distinguish whether Powell's depiction of the terrain is applicable only to that State. However, what she succeeds in doing is making the place magical. Features of the landscape are alive, speaking a continuous and cohesive language to those open to listen. It is reverent.

The Waxing and Waning of Place: The Magnificient Ambersons

Sometimes looking back over 2009, I feel like these 50+ books are falling like coins in one of those sorting machines that are now located in the front of the grocery store: more Native American stories, more period pieces, and dare I say, more slugs than I expected. I am sorely disappointed in The Magnificient Ambersons. This is the second Pulitzer Prize winner on the list that didn't seem that engaging to me.

Booth Tarkington won in 1919 and this is the story of a place and a family that respectively move from quaint town to industrial city, and from landed gentry to to manual labor and SROs. It focuses on George Amberson Minafer, a gilded age youth, who is a coddled bully growing up and a pompous effected snob as he matures. He haughtiness is amplified when the Morgans move back to town. Mr. Morgan is a former boyfriend of George's mother and Morgan's daughter becomes George's love interest. Both relationships are destroyed because of George's vanity.

Meanwhile, Tarkington has the town grow, prosper and get covered with soot. The Amberson's too set in their patrician ways cannot deign to participate in industrialization, except on the speculative investment end. You can predict their fall to ruin.

The story construction is detached, wry observation in the first part, moving to more critical portrayal of George as protagonist, and finally to a denouement that seems horribly contrived and jarring. You do not want to see George redeemed or Morgan forgiving. As written, TMA seems dated, a book appealing to an audience rushing into the Roaring Twenties but still believing in a happy, tidy ending.

There is no sense of Indiana per se, just another unnamed mid-Western town like the one in Babbitt. Tarkington is steeped in class rather than place as controlling his characters' motives and actions. Maybe I should have read Hoosiers.

Who Owns Family History, or Writing Away Guilt

The Ghost in the Little House, by William Holtz, an English professor at the University of Missouri, put me back into my more typical reading frame of mind as it is a scholarly biography of Rose Wilder Lane, daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder of "Prairie" stories fame. I never read the Little House stories, being more a Nancy Drew type of girl and when Michael Landon did the TV series, it seems quite the domesticated come-down from his exciting single life on Bonanza, so I didn't watch that either. So, I went into this book without any major preconceived notions except the obvious: Laura was the author. Wrong, Rose was.

Holtz builds this case almost day by day. If I had been clever, I would have flipped to the appendix where there are actual side by side comparisons of what Laura sent to her libraries as her longhand versions and what was published. Then the nuances would have had more an effect of a loud speaker announcement. Rose ghost wrote for many other famous contemporaries including Lowell Thomas so her credentials and publishing successes are documented. She also had columns and short serialized stories running in Ladies Home Journal, Woman's Day and other newspapers and magazines, on topics that ran the gamut from a history of American needlepoint to one of the first well articulated tracts on Libertarianism to her own recollections of farm life in Missouri.

Not only was there are ranging breadth to Rose's writing, Holtz himself has several concurrent themes to weave together and he does so in such a way as to let Rose's powerful turn of phrase reign through numerous quotations from her letters and journals. But his own writing is as strong to support the life long conflicts and compromises between daughter and mother, to connect a family's history and values to the larger American pioneering experience, to contrast those national, innate values with world events and other cultures through Rose's wanderings, and to carry these themes across personal time as Rose's ideology matures. She was eccentric, perhaps manic depressive, and starved to recreate a loving parental experience. She relived her grandparents' and parents' uprootings and relocations on a much grander, international scale, compelled by example to build and remodel house after house, always trying to create a perfect home.

This was a book where every couple of pages I glued in a post it note to highlight an especially poignant paragraph. I enjoyed one of my favorite biography games: who turns up unexpectedly. While there are many cameo appearances, I limit my citations to those "hits" from the 50 state list -- Rose's husband is described as earning his money by babbitry, and both Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson are Rose's friends.

And of all these passages I marked, I will cite only one that hit closest to home: "The scholar must acquire a taste for old book reviews, but in this case the reviews matter less for what they tell us about the books, many now forgotten, than for what they reveal about the reviewer." As I near the end of the list, I am going through my reviews and trying to sort my preferences into broad categories of "loved it, liked it or eh." I am finding that despite doing my best to use only the criterion of how well the State as place was depicted as an agent in the story, there are too many other characteristics of style and plot that I personally value. So at the end, I will do a review of the reviews ... sort of like Rose's end of the year journal entries ... to see what I accomplished and what I learned about myself in 2009.

Maybe I Collect States

Somehow I managed to put off reading The Orchid Thief to the last handful of states left on the Slackers’ list. Intentionally too, because I thought this was yet another Southern novel about vaporous women. When I went to the library and picked up the remaining six or seven titles, I started with South Dakota, put it down, and skimmed the back cover for Susan Orlean’s book. Wow! It’s “true crime.” I finished it in less than two days.

Orlean comes to Florida to do a follow-up story on three men arrested for stealing endangered, protected orchids from the swamps. The man behind this caper is John Larouche who believes that by having two Seminole Indians as partners in crime, he is covered from prosecution, or at least assured of being acquitted. While that incident is the “pseudobulb” germinating her book, Orlean devotes more of it to trying to understand the impulse to collect, the history of dubious land speculation and development, and the effect of a flat, inhospitable, vegetative landscape on the behavior of its indigenous and transplanted residents.

Much more than many of the Slackers’ state books, in the The Orchid Thief, Florida is a main character. Her description of the fear and fascination of black water sink holes with poisonous snakes, alligators and swarming insects is far removed from a visit to Busch Gardens. Her interpretation of the urges of rare plant collectors leads her to more universal insights into the conflicting human needs to do something to set oneself apart while still belonging to a community doing the same thing, even if it means not being a member in good standing. She cleverly weaves these two themes together: "I passed so many vacant acres and looked past them to so many more vacant acres and looked ahead and behind at the empty road and up at the empty sky; the sheer bigness of the world made me feel lonely to the bone ... I was starting to believe that the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size."

The Orchard Thief reminded me of The Billionaire’s Vinegar and the history of Dupont’s creating Winterthur, and strangely enough, about the great Mormon migration. I recently read a short article on the Internet that reported that research scientists have discovered that compulsive collecting and hoarding is genetic. Whether spending thousands of dollars to discover and own a new variety of orchid or to bid on a rare bottle of wine, these collectors are purchasing status -- as the items themselves are destined to remain in atmospherically corrected homes and displayed or shared selectively, only by invitation. There is nothing public about their collections, other than the notoriety they garner from successfully beating other obsessive – compulsives in this game of acquisition.

Winterthur is a public garden. Dupont collected just as single-mindedly but to create something beyond his immediate personal space. He is cultivating landscape, but one that does not need to be tamed or risk reverting to the wild.

Maybe because vacationers from the North rarely venture into the still wild interior of Florida, it is difficult to think of it in terms beyond sandy beaches and groomed golf courses. Orlean compares its threatening rawness against the wide open spaces of the West, concluding Florida is just as much, if not more, omninous: "The pioneers out west were crossing wide plains and mountain ranges that were too open and endless for one set of eyes to take in ... The pioneer-adventurers in south Florida were traveling inward, into a place as dark and dense as steel wool, a place that already held an overabundance of living things ... To explore such a place you had to vanish into it ... it might be easier to endure loneliness than to endure the idea that you might disappear."

Orlean does all she can not to be tempted to become a collector herself. She describes orchids as beautiful deformities, often looking like scary people or threatening animals. But still she hunts for the elusive ghost orchid. She similarly describes Larouche as an attractive yet toothless, hyperactive, and undependable man, but nevertheless someone she needs to track and discover. The people in her book and the setting are more like Tim Burton's view of Florida than it is like Disneyland, images that are so burned in your mind, you don't need postcards.

Elemental: Fire and Water

Craig Lesley's novel set in Oregon, The Sky Fisherman, reminds me of at least two of the other States books. Hot on the heels of the Alabama craziness, this is a story of a boy whose father died in the Lost River and whose ambitious mother is married to a man whose career with the railroad has been shunted to a sideline. She eventually leaves him to move to a town where her first husband's brother lives, to have him help her raise Culver. So this is a story of a boy seeking a male role model, all of whose flaws, even crimes, temper his maturation. For the blog's purposes, here is a story where one of the characters intentionally selects the place to define her son's history and opportunities.

It also has a parallel story of the local Indian reservation, reminiscent of Alexie Sherman. The juxtaposition of the town's and tribe's police force as they deal with major arson and catastrophic floods sets the speed of the book, relying on Native American time and perspective of events and land.

Because the plot develops so languidly and many mysteries remain unsolved at its conclusion, the book is haunting. The story does have a decidedly male perspective: they work in a sporting goods store, take people out on the Lost River as fishing guides, volunteer as firefighters. Women, other than Culver's mother, who is a tad one-dimensional in her ambition, play supporting roles to the much more actively engaged men ... maybe with the exception of the hobos. It is a rugged book, where place is a challenge and a struggle to master after pitting oneself against the elements and the storms from personal failings.

Crazy About this Storyteller

Ah, where to start. So, this morning I opened up the book again to see what to write about because the story and the characters are wonderful and unforgettable (to sound trite). So there as his inspiration are two quotes that could not have anything in common except to Childress: Lewis Carroll's Alice observing that in Wonderland, they're dreadfully fond of beheading people and Martin Luther King opining on the need to march in prayer pilgrimages. Then on the first page of the story, Peejoe, now a grown up Peter Joseph, admits to putting the scene from Vertigo on endless loop where Kim Kovak forsakes Jimmy Stewart and drives off in her green sedan.

Okay, now you know what happens in Crazy in Alabama, right? Orphaned PeeJoe and his older brother Wiley are being raised by their grandmother, MeeMaw, in Pigeon Creek, surrounded by eccentric uncles in the family business, funerals, and a frustrated, fertile (of both body and mind) Aunt Lucille. Lucille, like -- in Next Step in the Dance, is compulsive about leaving Alabama and going to California to become a movie star. When she deserts her six children and dumps them on MeeMaw, PeeJoe and Wiley get shunted off to Uncle Dove, to Industry where racial tensions are escalating. Keeping both the adventures of Lucille and PeeJoe running parallel, the craziness spreads to all.

I'm sure if I spent more time this morning, I would find many more allusions to classical literature. But the novel is outrageously funny despite its themes of murder and oppression. There is no attempt to make the characters "speak Southern" nor are there references to family recipes or descriptions of geography. Rather it is the way they express themselves relating to their surroundings, neighbors and place in history that makes this book resonate as both essentially Alabaman and American. This book belongs at the top of the Slackers' list, and not just alphabetically.