The Women is T. C. Boyle's latest novel and it is a variation on the story that the Slackers selected for Wisconsin, Loving Frank, about Frank Lloyd Wright and his mistress Mamah Cheney, for whom he built Taliesin. That novel, as my review of May 4 noted, is more a delving into the motivation, anxiety and self-articulation of Mamah than it is a portrait of an architect and his influence on what parts of America came to look like and value.
Boyle's rendition is more dimensionalized. Kitty, the first wife, and Anna, his mother, are portrayed similarly as in Horan's book. New perspectives are introduced that emphasize other angles of Wright's personality: Miriam, the poseur and morphine addict, who seduced him with solace after Mamah's death, and Olga, his last wife, who finally makes his house more of a home.
After reading the second novel, Wright's architectural style became clearer to me, yet more symbolic, representing an articulation of his personal traits and needs. He wanted to create comfort, a retreat -- but he wanted to work there as well. He wanted light to stream in through windows without shades -- but he wanted no outsider to look inside. He wanted buildings to grow out of the earth organically -- but he also wanted them to float, unbounded.
It is this last tension that lends itself to a comparison with Wright's moral and ethical decisions. He has to be free to attract adoring women who are ornamental; however, he not only introduces them as his household staff, but actually expects they will cook for his construction crews and apprentices. He manages to dress his women in his own designs, given any occasion, and decorate them and each room of Taliesin to his exacting taste; yet, he leaves them with the responsibility and embarrassent of having to deal with mountains of unpaid bills for such ornaments and luxuries. He continues his extramarital affairs, publically flaunting community values, only to repeatedly become a fugitive until he and his current lover are found yet again by the press or angry spouses.
Boyle employs more literay devices to make the story captivating. Using a Japanese apprentice as the narrator allows both Frank and his women to be examined at more arm's lenght, whereas the Horan novel is more simpatico to Mamah. Oddly enough, it is Boyle's persona of Tadashi as Wright's contemporary that makes the novel read less romantically, less nostalgically. The interpretive footnotes not only help to cross reference the flashback plot, but also permit Boyle himself to intrude at his comic and erudite best.
Because Boyle involves more characters in the novel, its themes of heritage vs. alienation, of homeland vs. the allure of the foreign, of image vs practicality, of the nagging daily details of life vs personal destiny, and of the quest for fame vs. its manipulated publicity, are more evident as they find expression from every quarter, in all characters.
The Women closes out my trip to Wisconsin, but Boyle himself detours me to The Road to Wellville to Battlecreek, Michigan and cornflake king Kellogg and from there back to California, to the Riven Rock estate near Montecito, to meet the son of Cyrus McCormick, he of reaper fame.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Where's the GPS? Wrong Turn in Ohio
It's the word, holler, that gets to me. You can still hear it around here to describe the ramshackle houses under the Normanskill bridge or other self-contained clans further down the Hudson River. You tell your children not to go there; you wonder if the town's school bus picks up any of them and takes them to classes rather than BOCES. These are places where sexual offender lists are interchangeable with the telephone directory, where census agents never appear.
Such is Knockemstiff, Ohio, as referenced in one review of the stories as "an alternative universe to the American dream." Yes, bloggers, the place creates the people who inhabit it. Even when characters, in their drugged out cravings, head off to California, they never make it outside of the county. Each story tells of fights, unemployment, every imaginable variation of illegal substances and illicit sexual encounters. The populace is marginalized and not trapped in poverty and ignorance, but completely acclimated to it.
This is author Donald Ray Pollock's first novel. It is his home town and he worked in both its hog slaughtering plant and paper mill, now both long gone. He must have known, first hand, of events and families such as these. I cannot say this book was a good pick for our 50 states. The Plains Dealer called it "a great read about a bad place." I would say it is rather an exercise that shows an author can write well about the most sordid aspects of life. But then I don't read de Sade. Somewhere else I saw a reference that Knockemstiff could trace its roots to Winesburg, Ohio. If that is the case, it must be kudzu. I suggest we add Winesburg as a more acceptable alternative town to visit; go to Knockemstiff only if you fancy a detour into Hieronymous Bosch.
Such is Knockemstiff, Ohio, as referenced in one review of the stories as "an alternative universe to the American dream." Yes, bloggers, the place creates the people who inhabit it. Even when characters, in their drugged out cravings, head off to California, they never make it outside of the county. Each story tells of fights, unemployment, every imaginable variation of illegal substances and illicit sexual encounters. The populace is marginalized and not trapped in poverty and ignorance, but completely acclimated to it.
This is author Donald Ray Pollock's first novel. It is his home town and he worked in both its hog slaughtering plant and paper mill, now both long gone. He must have known, first hand, of events and families such as these. I cannot say this book was a good pick for our 50 states. The Plains Dealer called it "a great read about a bad place." I would say it is rather an exercise that shows an author can write well about the most sordid aspects of life. But then I don't read de Sade. Somewhere else I saw a reference that Knockemstiff could trace its roots to Winesburg, Ohio. If that is the case, it must be kudzu. I suggest we add Winesburg as a more acceptable alternative town to visit; go to Knockemstiff only if you fancy a detour into Hieronymous Bosch.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Loving Frank, but Loving Mamah More: Wisconsin
Loving Frank is the story of Mamah Borthwick Cheney and her life from 1903 to 1914, from when she first met Frank Lloyd Wright, until the end of their affair. I selected this book for Wisconsin because I believed that being an architect is all about interpreting place and space, and Wright, most notably, is American in his perspective, creating homes for his clients to live locally-informed lives. I was expecting the book would confirm my bias --- that it was by his works that I would come to know Wright and Wisconsin.
However, Loving Frank is more about Mamah's struggle with her place in society as a married woman, albeit, one actively advocating the expansion of women's voting rights and employment opportunities, somewhat beyond the pale of the regimented upper class social circle that her breeding, education adn marriage to Edwin Cheney had made for her. Wright, as well, is married to a conventional wife, Catherine, who occasionally socialized with Mamah and Frank when they fell in love.
Mamah's attraction to Frank is a complete free fall. Her struggle and the story's tension focus on how to carry on an affair, a juggle that is significantly eased for her by a spinster sister ready to watch over her children and cover her assignations, and by another friend from college who takes her into her home in Boulder when she finally breaks away from her family, before heading off to Germany with Wright. Their behavior becomes a front page scandal. Families are tremendously hurt. Spouses dig in their heels, but with public statements of forgiveness and longed for reconcilation.
Trained as a German scholar, Mamah serendipitously meets Ellen Key, a Swedist feminist, in Berlin, on whom she projects her redemption, if not her justification for abandoning her children, only to realize that Key's premise is that while marriage and the support of a husband are no longer required in her world, to fulfill a woman, her being is best articulated through motherhood. Mamah's rationalization continues unabated.
Nancy Horan, a native of Oak Park, surrounded by Wright houses and intrigued by a society that unfavorably judged his unconventional behavior and iconoclastic style, composes a novel that is, while romantically alluring, ultimately aloof. Mamah is not Frank's muse, more his anchor, as conventional a role for an early 20th Century woman as those of her counterparts with marriage parchments.
Taliesin does align with our blog's goal to acknowledge the centrality of setting to story: it is their refuge, the source of his family's roots, the physical manifestation of his credo -- that a building must come out of its location and must be constructed to ease the lives of its residents. Taliesin does that, but it also the place where the lives Mamah and Frank built come to a distastrous end.
Despite everything that I liked about Horan's rendition of Mamah and Frank, I am seduced to read T.C. Boyle's version of Wright's life and loves, his latest novel, The Women. As I write this review, I am only 50 pages or so into Boyle's book. I prefer it. There is a rhythm to his writing that both moves the story along more quickly and immediately captures attention. His device to tell the story through a "translation from the Japanese" is clever, but apt, given the influence of that culture on Wright's designs. Boyle writes with many more layers of literary allusions. So far, a much richer read. I will add more after finishing it, but suggest to the Slackers that they might want to go with Boyle over Horan for Wisconsin
However, Loving Frank is more about Mamah's struggle with her place in society as a married woman, albeit, one actively advocating the expansion of women's voting rights and employment opportunities, somewhat beyond the pale of the regimented upper class social circle that her breeding, education adn marriage to Edwin Cheney had made for her. Wright, as well, is married to a conventional wife, Catherine, who occasionally socialized with Mamah and Frank when they fell in love.
Mamah's attraction to Frank is a complete free fall. Her struggle and the story's tension focus on how to carry on an affair, a juggle that is significantly eased for her by a spinster sister ready to watch over her children and cover her assignations, and by another friend from college who takes her into her home in Boulder when she finally breaks away from her family, before heading off to Germany with Wright. Their behavior becomes a front page scandal. Families are tremendously hurt. Spouses dig in their heels, but with public statements of forgiveness and longed for reconcilation.
Trained as a German scholar, Mamah serendipitously meets Ellen Key, a Swedist feminist, in Berlin, on whom she projects her redemption, if not her justification for abandoning her children, only to realize that Key's premise is that while marriage and the support of a husband are no longer required in her world, to fulfill a woman, her being is best articulated through motherhood. Mamah's rationalization continues unabated.
Nancy Horan, a native of Oak Park, surrounded by Wright houses and intrigued by a society that unfavorably judged his unconventional behavior and iconoclastic style, composes a novel that is, while romantically alluring, ultimately aloof. Mamah is not Frank's muse, more his anchor, as conventional a role for an early 20th Century woman as those of her counterparts with marriage parchments.
Taliesin does align with our blog's goal to acknowledge the centrality of setting to story: it is their refuge, the source of his family's roots, the physical manifestation of his credo -- that a building must come out of its location and must be constructed to ease the lives of its residents. Taliesin does that, but it also the place where the lives Mamah and Frank built come to a distastrous end.
Despite everything that I liked about Horan's rendition of Mamah and Frank, I am seduced to read T.C. Boyle's version of Wright's life and loves, his latest novel, The Women. As I write this review, I am only 50 pages or so into Boyle's book. I prefer it. There is a rhythm to his writing that both moves the story along more quickly and immediately captures attention. His device to tell the story through a "translation from the Japanese" is clever, but apt, given the influence of that culture on Wright's designs. Boyle writes with many more layers of literary allusions. So far, a much richer read. I will add more after finishing it, but suggest to the Slackers that they might want to go with Boyle over Horan for Wisconsin
Monday, April 20, 2009
California : Metaphysical Anarchy and Conspiring Events -- American Lightning by Howard Blum
Blum weaves the lives and personalities of three famous American men at the beginning of the Twentieth Century: Clarence Darrow, noted defense attorney; D. W. Griffith, father of modern cinema; and William J. Burns, founder of a detective agency and predecessor to J. Edgar Hoover before the FBI was the FBI. Their lives come together over the 1910 bombing of the Los Angeles Times building. Burns, then known as America's Sherlock Holmes, is engaged by the City to track down the bombers. Darrow eventually comes to defend the men who are affiliated with the Iron Workers Union. And Griffith's cinematic inspiration feeds off the themes of labor versus capital, as being the Second Civil War. They all converge sooner or later in LA, a town whose officials are profiting not only from keeping it a closed shop but also from their speculative irrigation projects ... think Chinatown.
Driving to work with my son this morning, I described the book to him using buzz words and names from high school history: Gompers, AFL, CIO. But then told him that this book was much more interesting because of the interconnecting stories. Because this period of history was taught so dryly to me, it took me over 275 pages to get familiar with the players and their parts.
No one's motives are 100% "pure." Money, ego and "cause" run rife on both the side of wealth and that of want, but are reported with equal objectivity by Blum. Burns is out of Chicago like Morris Fishbein, the AMA investigator in Charlatan; but his motivation goes beyond wanting the success of his business/industry. He wants to solve the crime and punish the perpetrators to conclude a period of violence by Socialist terrorists, to move the Nation past an outmoded political philosophy and propel it into the complexity of modern industrial production.
Darrow, portrayed as a reluctant defense attorney, recognizes the guilt of the McNamara brothers. While he plans to argue their case within the larger context of class warfare, he knows they would be found guilty of this explosion as their association with a nationwide network of dynamiters is made public. But the more interesting, contrasting conspiracy related in the book is that of a series of events that lead to them pleading guilty rather than going to trial: a bomb is discovered just in time before the President's train crosses a bridge on its way to California; a primary for Mayor of Los Angeles where the Socialist candidate makes it to the run-off election, scheduled within a week of the start of the trial; and the bribe of a potential juror by the defense team, itself an act that eventually leads to Darrow being accused and brought to trial. Serving as his own attorney, his defense arguments, like those of the McNamaras, are that he is captive of his time and place, acting in a rational, if illegal manner. Blum uses actual testimony; Darrow is surely a moving orator.
Griffith, the last in this triumvirate, is the first to recognize the propagandist potential of film. His early work often focused on the plight of the exploited working man and the underlying poverty that compelled certain actions, sometimes violent, often ennobling. Griffith films many of his works in Queens, but is drawn west, at a time when LA smells of oranges and everyone coming to town stays at the same first class hotel, where eventually the three characters meet in passing. When Birth of a Nation is shown at the White House, the first movie ever shown there, Woodrow Wilson compares it to writing history with lightning, a nice quote that pulls together the sound and fury from the storm of explosions of the young labor movement.
Finally, the context of American Lightning within the blog list of books: There are similar story lines with crime and corruption found in turn of the century ruckus towns like Los Angeles and Chicago and the more modern Atlantic City. There are recurring heroes who fight for the American way. But it was Blum's insight as he describes researching and writing the book that best connects it to my last review of Falling Man. He hints at this through Darrow's summary statement to the jurors: "... you may hang these men from the highest tree ... send me to the penitentiary .. but until you go down to the fundamental causes, these things will happen over and over again ... as lightning comes to destroy the poisonous miasmas that fill the air." He concludes, placing an image of the burning LA Times building against that of the World Trade Center, drawing parallels with the underlying motivations of the terrorists and the reaction across the country.
But where were the contemporary American giants to interpret the New Age of Terror and to inspire average citizens to move beyond ideological bloodshed?
Driving to work with my son this morning, I described the book to him using buzz words and names from high school history: Gompers, AFL, CIO. But then told him that this book was much more interesting because of the interconnecting stories. Because this period of history was taught so dryly to me, it took me over 275 pages to get familiar with the players and their parts.
No one's motives are 100% "pure." Money, ego and "cause" run rife on both the side of wealth and that of want, but are reported with equal objectivity by Blum. Burns is out of Chicago like Morris Fishbein, the AMA investigator in Charlatan; but his motivation goes beyond wanting the success of his business/industry. He wants to solve the crime and punish the perpetrators to conclude a period of violence by Socialist terrorists, to move the Nation past an outmoded political philosophy and propel it into the complexity of modern industrial production.
Darrow, portrayed as a reluctant defense attorney, recognizes the guilt of the McNamara brothers. While he plans to argue their case within the larger context of class warfare, he knows they would be found guilty of this explosion as their association with a nationwide network of dynamiters is made public. But the more interesting, contrasting conspiracy related in the book is that of a series of events that lead to them pleading guilty rather than going to trial: a bomb is discovered just in time before the President's train crosses a bridge on its way to California; a primary for Mayor of Los Angeles where the Socialist candidate makes it to the run-off election, scheduled within a week of the start of the trial; and the bribe of a potential juror by the defense team, itself an act that eventually leads to Darrow being accused and brought to trial. Serving as his own attorney, his defense arguments, like those of the McNamaras, are that he is captive of his time and place, acting in a rational, if illegal manner. Blum uses actual testimony; Darrow is surely a moving orator.
Griffith, the last in this triumvirate, is the first to recognize the propagandist potential of film. His early work often focused on the plight of the exploited working man and the underlying poverty that compelled certain actions, sometimes violent, often ennobling. Griffith films many of his works in Queens, but is drawn west, at a time when LA smells of oranges and everyone coming to town stays at the same first class hotel, where eventually the three characters meet in passing. When Birth of a Nation is shown at the White House, the first movie ever shown there, Woodrow Wilson compares it to writing history with lightning, a nice quote that pulls together the sound and fury from the storm of explosions of the young labor movement.
Finally, the context of American Lightning within the blog list of books: There are similar story lines with crime and corruption found in turn of the century ruckus towns like Los Angeles and Chicago and the more modern Atlantic City. There are recurring heroes who fight for the American way. But it was Blum's insight as he describes researching and writing the book that best connects it to my last review of Falling Man. He hints at this through Darrow's summary statement to the jurors: "... you may hang these men from the highest tree ... send me to the penitentiary .. but until you go down to the fundamental causes, these things will happen over and over again ... as lightning comes to destroy the poisonous miasmas that fill the air." He concludes, placing an image of the burning LA Times building against that of the World Trade Center, drawing parallels with the underlying motivations of the terrorists and the reaction across the country.
But where were the contemporary American giants to interpret the New Age of Terror and to inspire average citizens to move beyond ideological bloodshed?
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Displacement: Falling Man by Don DeLillo
This is the second time I've read this book this year, once for each Tower. Read it first for this 50 States blog, but decided to hold off on a review until it was up for my regular "face-to-face" book club this month. Sad to say, I have not found it any more engaging this time.
Anyone who witnessed the planes crashing into the World Trade Center buildings has to be looking for a catharsis. I know I am. That's why I selected this book to represent New York.
I guess no review of Falling Man is complete without divulging what I was doing on 9/11. I was undergoing radiation for my first go-round with cancer. I was bald. Wearing one of my husband's old soft golfing hats to work every day and hiding in a back office building so none of my fellow workers would see me in a weakened state. Several of us, all women, congregated into a conference room to watch the WTC on TV. I called my husband, my sons, to let them know what was happening. I had worked in the Tower, taken my oldest son to Windows on the World for his first visit to NYC. It was my building. It made me think my illness was dwarfed by all this suffering. Later in the days and weeks that followed, the deaths crept north: a brother-in-law of a woman in the Capitol had died; executives from several State agencies were there for work and also perished.
I still need interpretation and closure and I had hoped DeLillo would have given another perspective. Alas, he does not. If you research his books on the Internet, you discover that one of his major themes is the effect of terrorism on daily living. This does not come across forcefully, however, to me in Falling Man. His major characters are contrived, even as they cluster conveniently alphabetically: Jack/Justin, Keith, Lianne, Martin and Nina. They are Woody Allen stock New Yorkers without the wit or distance, only the angst.
Their lives are self-centered, interpreted by parents foibles and compulsive habits that pass on from one generation to the next. Are these people really the quintessently New York? And should the culture and the characters in the City represent the State? Keith and Lianne move through the novel as though 9/11 could have been a bad subway accident or a City debilitating snowstorm. The event does not demark their lives. She still obsesses about getting Alzheimer's from her father and he loses himself in endless poker tournaments, both compulsions that predate 9/11. Keith's returning to Lianne's apartment after the fall of the Towers is undecipherable. Things that happen to him are lacking in passion. Although Lianne seems to have more feelings, they are misdirected and ineffectual, except to be omphalosceptic.
I must give credit to DeLillo for the style of the book. It is completely disjointed and choppy, intentionally so, to convey the displacement of 9/11. But there is no respect to the victims, no national interpretation, no sense that this was a seminal event in the lives of his characters. As well as having no segue between paragraphs as a device to emphasis the disjointedness of thought and plot, DeLillo alternates the New Yorkers' stories with those of the terrorists. He has one of the say "Others exist only to the degree that they fill the role we have designed for them." This is DeLillo's theme: it not only applies to the zealotry of the Muslims, but also to the four main characters.
Maybe I should have selected Drums Along the Mohawk.
Anyone who witnessed the planes crashing into the World Trade Center buildings has to be looking for a catharsis. I know I am. That's why I selected this book to represent New York.
I guess no review of Falling Man is complete without divulging what I was doing on 9/11. I was undergoing radiation for my first go-round with cancer. I was bald. Wearing one of my husband's old soft golfing hats to work every day and hiding in a back office building so none of my fellow workers would see me in a weakened state. Several of us, all women, congregated into a conference room to watch the WTC on TV. I called my husband, my sons, to let them know what was happening. I had worked in the Tower, taken my oldest son to Windows on the World for his first visit to NYC. It was my building. It made me think my illness was dwarfed by all this suffering. Later in the days and weeks that followed, the deaths crept north: a brother-in-law of a woman in the Capitol had died; executives from several State agencies were there for work and also perished.
I still need interpretation and closure and I had hoped DeLillo would have given another perspective. Alas, he does not. If you research his books on the Internet, you discover that one of his major themes is the effect of terrorism on daily living. This does not come across forcefully, however, to me in Falling Man. His major characters are contrived, even as they cluster conveniently alphabetically: Jack/Justin, Keith, Lianne, Martin and Nina. They are Woody Allen stock New Yorkers without the wit or distance, only the angst.
Their lives are self-centered, interpreted by parents foibles and compulsive habits that pass on from one generation to the next. Are these people really the quintessently New York? And should the culture and the characters in the City represent the State? Keith and Lianne move through the novel as though 9/11 could have been a bad subway accident or a City debilitating snowstorm. The event does not demark their lives. She still obsesses about getting Alzheimer's from her father and he loses himself in endless poker tournaments, both compulsions that predate 9/11. Keith's returning to Lianne's apartment after the fall of the Towers is undecipherable. Things that happen to him are lacking in passion. Although Lianne seems to have more feelings, they are misdirected and ineffectual, except to be omphalosceptic.
I must give credit to DeLillo for the style of the book. It is completely disjointed and choppy, intentionally so, to convey the displacement of 9/11. But there is no respect to the victims, no national interpretation, no sense that this was a seminal event in the lives of his characters. As well as having no segue between paragraphs as a device to emphasis the disjointedness of thought and plot, DeLillo alternates the New Yorkers' stories with those of the terrorists. He has one of the say "Others exist only to the degree that they fill the role we have designed for them." This is DeLillo's theme: it not only applies to the zealotry of the Muslims, but also to the four main characters.
Maybe I should have selected Drums Along the Mohawk.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Caught in the Rosary Beads Dream Catcher: Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie
If it wasn't in the mid-30s and snowing today, I'd go outside, walk to Capitol Park, measure General Philip Sheridan's short legs and then try to figure out some way to make it look like I shot his horse between the eyes -- as reparations.
Yes, like Sheridan, I was born in Albany, but our schools certainly did not stress his scorched earth tactics in the Shenandoah Valley or his post-Civil War involvement in the Indian Wars, particularly his slaughter of the buffalo. Sherman Alexie introduces his readers to Sheridan under the reincarnated guise of a talent scout at Cavalry Records. Sheridan's partner is George Wright, and Alexie hints at his similar atrocities, making them more and more clear to a reader unfamiliar with his part in the Yakima War as the story evolves, with him ultimately hailing a cab outside the recording studio in NYC and being driven to his 1865 grave on the west coast.
But I'm focusing exclusively on only one of the many intricately interwoven subplots in Reservation Blues. Alexie begins with Southern blues legend Robert Johnson at the crossroads of Wellpinit on the Spokane reservation, giving away his devil-possessed guitar to Thomas Builds-the-Fire. Thomas, passing it along to Victor Joseph, and, who, with Junior Polatkin, forms the band Coyote Spring. Johnson moves up the mountain to Big Mom, the woman he has sought for years, who is not only a larger than life earth mother figure, but also with her own guitar made out of a '65 Malibu and the blood of a child killed in 1890 at Wounded Knee, taught music to everyone from Benny Goodman to Jimi Hendrix.
While touring bars and finding their voice, the band switches between two back-up vocal groups, sisters Chess and Checkers Warm Water of the Flat Head tribe, and white groupies Betty and Veronica. While these women illustrate the allure and repulsion between the sexes and the races, they are portrayed with much more complexity and reality than their names would imply.
Alexie also brings into the story the effect of missionaries on the beliefs and customs of the tribe. But unlike Louise Erdrich's The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, Alexie has the Catholic believers sincere, the doubters respectful, and the conflicted priest responsible for winning the first basketball game in tribal history against the Assembly of God team.
As these examples suggest, the story sparkles with wit and beautiful turn of phrase. The insult of TEFAP surplus commodity food, cheap HUD building construction, and the benign neglect of the Bureau of Indian Affairs are all depicted with a satiric distance that better engages the reader than the heavy-handed mockery in The Last Report.
The plot builds not only on Thomas' stories but on the dreams and nightmares of the band members. Alexie is a poet first, and he uses Coyote Spring song lyrics to introduce each chapter. He builds in cultural refrains throughout the novel, pitting an existential "the horses screamed" against the pop inquiry "who's the lead singer."
Reservation Blues hits all the high points the Slackers are looking for in our tour of the States. The reservation in Washington is described using the word "gone" ... but it still has an in the blood attraction. National, family, and tribal history makes Wellpinit infinite: a reader sees it, but even more so, hears it's siren song.
Yes, like Sheridan, I was born in Albany, but our schools certainly did not stress his scorched earth tactics in the Shenandoah Valley or his post-Civil War involvement in the Indian Wars, particularly his slaughter of the buffalo. Sherman Alexie introduces his readers to Sheridan under the reincarnated guise of a talent scout at Cavalry Records. Sheridan's partner is George Wright, and Alexie hints at his similar atrocities, making them more and more clear to a reader unfamiliar with his part in the Yakima War as the story evolves, with him ultimately hailing a cab outside the recording studio in NYC and being driven to his 1865 grave on the west coast.
But I'm focusing exclusively on only one of the many intricately interwoven subplots in Reservation Blues. Alexie begins with Southern blues legend Robert Johnson at the crossroads of Wellpinit on the Spokane reservation, giving away his devil-possessed guitar to Thomas Builds-the-Fire. Thomas, passing it along to Victor Joseph, and, who, with Junior Polatkin, forms the band Coyote Spring. Johnson moves up the mountain to Big Mom, the woman he has sought for years, who is not only a larger than life earth mother figure, but also with her own guitar made out of a '65 Malibu and the blood of a child killed in 1890 at Wounded Knee, taught music to everyone from Benny Goodman to Jimi Hendrix.
While touring bars and finding their voice, the band switches between two back-up vocal groups, sisters Chess and Checkers Warm Water of the Flat Head tribe, and white groupies Betty and Veronica. While these women illustrate the allure and repulsion between the sexes and the races, they are portrayed with much more complexity and reality than their names would imply.
Alexie also brings into the story the effect of missionaries on the beliefs and customs of the tribe. But unlike Louise Erdrich's The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, Alexie has the Catholic believers sincere, the doubters respectful, and the conflicted priest responsible for winning the first basketball game in tribal history against the Assembly of God team.
As these examples suggest, the story sparkles with wit and beautiful turn of phrase. The insult of TEFAP surplus commodity food, cheap HUD building construction, and the benign neglect of the Bureau of Indian Affairs are all depicted with a satiric distance that better engages the reader than the heavy-handed mockery in The Last Report.
The plot builds not only on Thomas' stories but on the dreams and nightmares of the band members. Alexie is a poet first, and he uses Coyote Spring song lyrics to introduce each chapter. He builds in cultural refrains throughout the novel, pitting an existential "the horses screamed" against the pop inquiry "who's the lead singer."
Reservation Blues hits all the high points the Slackers are looking for in our tour of the States. The reservation in Washington is described using the word "gone" ... but it still has an in the blood attraction. National, family, and tribal history makes Wellpinit infinite: a reader sees it, but even more so, hears it's siren song.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Illicit Glamour: The Last Good Time by Jonathan Van Meter
When gambling was legalized in Atlantic City New Jersey in the late 1970s, hotels that had fallen on bad times were hastily covered over with mirrors on the walls and carpeting on the floors -- but they were still seedy low class buildings. That comparison epitomizes the book's recurring theme that, long before there were professional image makers, there were men who knew that the sensation they projected in hand-made Italian suits, a cocktail in one hand and a cigarette in the other, and the best table at the dinner club covered a multitude of sins, if not crimes.
Such a man was Paul Skinny D'Amato, owner of the 500 Club and reputed matchmaker, promoter, and friend of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra. The book is a Rat Pack groupie's ultimate fan magazine. There is no subtlety in discovering any six degrees of separation, as the book names names, especially in connecting the Mob to the election of JFK and the death of Monroe. Parts of the story takes place outside of New Jersey, but Atlantic City certainly is portrayed the incubator of a lot of those headlines with D'Amato often being the behind the scenes expediter.
Like Mezrich in Bringing Down the House, Van Meter wants a reflected, vicarious part in the Rat Pack and D'Amato's action. There is no distance between him and his subject: no humor like in Charlatan, no erudite history like in Sin in the Second City. Just envy. But like Brinkley in Charlatan, D'Amato created his own place, molding Atlantic City into his schizophrenic vision: a mecca for high rollers and a vacation spot for the average man to lose his money gambling.
D'Amato and Atlantic City are intrinsically bound together and Van Meter does a good job in showing it as next to impossible to separate the two. In addition, he shows that the people in this community knew and loved Skinny, even it if was only his persona or for what profits he brought to their town. Much more troubling is the account of how the place he created came back to destroy his family and friends. Everyone seems tarnished: people with sullied reputations have them confirmed; others with a vestige of respectability come across as manipulated.
I have admitted in my reviews that I have never been drawn either to Las Vegas or Atlantic City. By going there, in books rather than in person, I now realize that it is their blatant promotion of vice and the purposeful attraction of people with addictions that I find most unattractive. Panderers can never be as tragic as sinners.
Such a man was Paul Skinny D'Amato, owner of the 500 Club and reputed matchmaker, promoter, and friend of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra. The book is a Rat Pack groupie's ultimate fan magazine. There is no subtlety in discovering any six degrees of separation, as the book names names, especially in connecting the Mob to the election of JFK and the death of Monroe. Parts of the story takes place outside of New Jersey, but Atlantic City certainly is portrayed the incubator of a lot of those headlines with D'Amato often being the behind the scenes expediter.
Like Mezrich in Bringing Down the House, Van Meter wants a reflected, vicarious part in the Rat Pack and D'Amato's action. There is no distance between him and his subject: no humor like in Charlatan, no erudite history like in Sin in the Second City. Just envy. But like Brinkley in Charlatan, D'Amato created his own place, molding Atlantic City into his schizophrenic vision: a mecca for high rollers and a vacation spot for the average man to lose his money gambling.
D'Amato and Atlantic City are intrinsically bound together and Van Meter does a good job in showing it as next to impossible to separate the two. In addition, he shows that the people in this community knew and loved Skinny, even it if was only his persona or for what profits he brought to their town. Much more troubling is the account of how the place he created came back to destroy his family and friends. Everyone seems tarnished: people with sullied reputations have them confirmed; others with a vestige of respectability come across as manipulated.
I have admitted in my reviews that I have never been drawn either to Las Vegas or Atlantic City. By going there, in books rather than in person, I now realize that it is their blatant promotion of vice and the purposeful attraction of people with addictions that I find most unattractive. Panderers can never be as tragic as sinners.
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