All the Birds in the Sky

Posted on January 15, 2017 by

all-the-birds-in-the-skyAs children, Patricia and Laurence were equally awkward but in different ways. Laurence wanted nothing to do with going outdoors, preferring instead to tinker with technology. He even managed to create a simple two-second time machine, which is handier than you might think. Patricia loved getting grubby outdoors, instead of staying indoors and tidy like her sister, Roberta. And it turns out that nature took an interest in Patricia—she discovered she could talk to animals, among other things.

The first half or so of this novel by Charlie Jane Anders shows how these two misfits become friends, liking each other even when they didn’t understand each other. I love the idea of bringing science fiction and fantasy together in this way, and the near-future world Anders builds has lots of potential to develop in interesting ways.

The second half of the book turns to Patricia and Laurence as young adults. Having been apart for 10 years while pursuing an education in their areas of talent, the two come together again and discover that their different talents have put them in entirely different worlds. Both worlds are pursuing solutions to the earth’s problems, but they cannot connect—and may even destroy each other. Again, an interesting idea.

This book has lots of interesting ideas, too many in fact. As entertaining as the story is at time, the book as a whole feels largely underdeveloped. It might have been better as two separate books, where the two phases of the characters’ lives would have room to breathe. As it is, significant elements get brought up and then dropped with little explanation or serious follow-up. This happens with plot elements, such as the assassin who tries to guide Patricia and Laurence when they are kids. We learn his ultimate fate, but a lot of what happens in between gets completely left out. In the second half, we get a lot of details about robots developing sentience, but that doesn’t go anywhere in the end.

The problem is even worse when it comes to emotional elements. I was especially troubled by the treatment of Patricia’s relationship with her family. They are clearly abusive, locking her in her room for days and slipping food under the door. And her sister torments the cat. It is a shocking environment, and it’s understandable why Patricia would leave. But by the latter half of the book, everything is copacetic? I mean, sure, that happens, but we never see it happening. Similarly, when Patricia and Laurence’s relationship takes a major shift, we get most of it in flashback rather than going on the journey with them.

The plot is leisurely for much of the book. In fact, although I enjoyed the pace of the first half, by the second half, I was starting to feel that it was all set up. No singular conflict or problem had emerged, other than the secrets the main characters must keep and the fact that the world is falling apart. And then it becomes ALL CONFLICT (almost) ALL THE TIME as the story races through several major showdowns between science and magic to come to a screeching halt at the end.

And now is where I note that most of these complaints only emerged after I finished the book and thought about it for a bit. I was engaged in the story all the way through, and many of these complaints were mere niggles in the back of my mind as I read on, wondering where this would all go. But when I was done, I couldn’t help but wish for the book(s) this could have been. As pleased as I am to come across fantasy novels that aren’t part of a series, I’d rather a story with so much potential for awesomeness be given the space it needs.

 

Posted in Fiction, Speculative Fiction | 4 Comments

A Long Way from Chicago and A Season of Gifts

Posted on January 14, 2017 by

long-way-from-chicagoI’m on record as believing that the Newbery committee has a thing for the Depression. I can name at least three or four books in the past decade or so set in the Depression that have won the Newbery medal. (The only other setting quite so popular is medieval England.) So several years ago, when my mother sent me the Newbery award-winning A Year Down Yonder, by Richard Peck, I was skeptical. As it turned out, I needn’t have been: the book was individual, lively, warm, and very funny.

A Long Way from Chicago (a Newbery honor book) actually precedes A Year Down Yonder. In this one, Joey (the narrator) and Mary Alice spend several summers in a row away from their parents, down in a small, rural town with their Grandma Dowdel. At first, the children are wary. Grandma is strong-minded, unconventional, and opinionated, and she prizes her privacy. She also believes in the liberal use of firearms when people infringe on that privacy — when they blow up her mailbox, for instance, or try to steal her melons. She’s not above tricking the snobby and the greedy, either. I won’t reveal the outcome of the story, but there’s an elaborate chapter that involves an eviction, a stovepipe hat, a church bazaar, and a wicked banker that had me laughing aloud and wondering how I could become a Grandma Dowdel in my old age. And the book doesn’t focus on the grimness of the Depression. Of course it touches on it, since everyone is living with the consequences of joblessness and poverty, but the real center of the book is elsewhere. In the end, Joey and Mary Alice learn not just to admire but to love their strange, reserved, oddly generous grandmother. I think I liked this one even better than A Year Down Yonder — the flavor of the whole town comes through beautifully.

season-of-giftsA Season of Gifts is good, but doesn’t quite live up to the other two. In this book, a new family — a preacher and his wife and children — move in next door to Grandma Dowdel. Since Grandma doesn’t “neighbor” and she doesn’t go to church, the family initially sees her as a potentially dangerous lunatic and stays out of her path. But inevitably, they are all drawn into her orbit: first, little Ruth Ann, who wants to be just like her, then Bob, whom she rescues from a nasty situation with town bullies, then the mother, then the father, and finally fourteen-year-old, Elvis-obsessed Phyllis. This novel doesn’t look at Grandma quite as closely as the other books, and her eccentricities aren’t shared as warm-heartedly. Still, it was enjoyable to read, and I liked spending a little more time with Grandma Dowdel.

These books are comedies. But Richard Peck does a good job of making us understand the real connection beneath the gruffness and farce. There’s a chapter at the end of A Long Way from Chicago, when Joey, on his way to serve in the second World War, travels on a troop train through Grandma’s town. He sends a telegram, letting her know he’d be coming through in the middle of the night, though they won’t stop. When they roll through, he sees a sight:

She stood at her door, large as life — larger, framed against the light from her front room. Grandma was there, watching through the watches of the night for the train to pass through. She couldn’t know what car I was in, but her hand was up, and she was waving — waving big at all the cars, hoping I’d see.

And I waved back. I waved long after the window filled with darkness and long distance.

 

Posted in Children's / YA Lit, Fiction, Historical Fiction | 3 Comments

The Wangs vs. the World

Posted on January 13, 2017 by

wangs-vs-the-worldCharles Wang had the perfect American success story. He came to the U.S. from Taiwan, where his family had lived since evacuating China, and he turned his father’s small urea-manufacturing business into a major cosmetics empire. But that was before the 2008 crash. All of a sudden, he and his family had nothing, and Charles began longing for China and family property lost decades ago. So he concocts a plan to get his children back together and get them all back to China, where some private land ownership is now allowed.

The three children—Saina, Andrew, and Grace—are all old enough to have ideas of their own. Saina is a recently disgraced performance artist who’s just bought a house in rural New York. Andrew is in college and has dreams of becoming a stand-up comic. And Grace, away in boarding school, is making a name for herself as a fashion maven on Instagram. The family also includes Barbra, Charles’s second wife, a woman he met briefly in Taiwan who came back into his life after his first wife died.

This novels is a comedy, and author Jade Chang pokes gentle fun at all her characters. It’s rarely feels mean-spirited, however. And even when it does, the targeted character gets a moment of triumph to make up for it. For example, Grace seems shallow and a little ridiculous when we first meet her. When being whisked away from school by her father, she decides to pack the celebrity pictures and inspirational images from her bulletin board instead of adequate clothes. Later, however, we learn that she has genuine talent. Saina and Andrew’s talent in their fields is less clear, but the novel seems to recognize that they are still figuring themselves out.

Personally, I found the children’s stories of learning about themselves to be more compelling than Charles’s longing for China. But, as I think about it, maybe his story isn’t so different from theirs. He’s had this idea of who he is, an American success story, and that rug has been pulled out from under him. Now, he’s creating a different vision of himself as a Chinese landowner.

This is a gently comic and enjoyable book that I’m glad to have read. It’s not a book that will likely land on my own best-of-the-year list, but it was still worth my time.

Posted in Fiction | 3 Comments

The Tijuana Book of the Dead

Posted on January 12, 2017 by

tijuana-book-of-the-deadMy sister gave me this book. “I don’t read a lot of poetry,” she said. “I guess it doesn’t say much to me. But this poetry — this is my language.”

Luis Alberto Urrea writes novels, poems, and short stories. The Tijuana Book of the Dead is poetry, but it has a narrative flow to it. This is border poetry, though it’s interested in bridges as well as borders, and it takes us on a sort of tour of Tijuana: back alleys, canyons, the lawns and suburbs of Los Angeles, deserts, people commuting on the bus to work, people just out of prison, people waiting for miracles or jobs or taxis, people eating chili or green salsa or tomatoes or melted cheese on Wonder bread. We hear the language telling us the stories of these people and these places. Most of the poems in this collection are in English, but a few are in Spanish — I had a friend translate a couple for me, and they’re exceptionally lovely, nodding to Cuban poetry. Some are a fabulous, relaxed mixture:

Y los muchachos cling

To the cantina’s jukebox heart, sing:

We never go nowhere we never see nothing

But work: these fingers bleed every daylong day,

Aching from la joda of the harvest –

 

Y la muerte, esa puta que nos chifla

From the bus station balcony, from I-10,

From Imperial Ave. truck lot behind the power station,

From waterbreak delirium, from short-hoe

Genuflections down pistolbarrel fields –

Imperial Ave. truck lot behind the power station. Nice.

The imagery is sometimes lyrical, sometimes mystical, sometimes straight from the daily grind, occasionally grotesque. The voices are those of everyday people, usually of the author himself and the people around him: the vatos, as he says, the people who never thought they’d find themselves in a poem. He likes haiku, like these about Chicago:

Jackson & Harlem

I will fuck you up

Come back here motherfucker

You bout to get served

Ogden & Western

Oil change and filter —

$39 special!

Coffee and donuts

Chicago Sun-times

Killed wife, girl, in-laws —

Several hard hammer-blows —

Insulted manhood

There’s humor and tenderness in these poems, but there’s anger, too. “Definition” tells us that “Illegal Alien, adj./n.” is “A term by which/ An invading colonial force/ Vilifies/ Indigenous cultures/ By identifying them as/ An invading colonial force.” The repetition and the line breaks make the poem snarl.

I’ll close with my favorite poem. I loved this for all kinds of reasons, but two stand out: one is the idea of naming the nameless, and the other is the idea that the afterlife is a town in Mexico where the poet’s grandfather is in charge. See if you can find this book, and see what you think about it.

There is a town in Mexico

where no one ever dies, and those who have

passed on pass back through

the cottonwood square where alamos trees

are whitewashed halfway up

their trunks, and those few awkward dead

the world coughs up stop

by a bench where my grandfather sits

at a black typewriter and a stack

of oystershell colored sheets. “Name,”

he says as he rolls the page

with that ancient sound, that machine

of poetry and dreams taking its morning taste

of forever. And those inarticulate dead

who made it through mango trees, agaves spiked

a dusty jade, past snapping turtles

in the huerta’s bog, scratch their heads,

try to remember their names. Any name

will do. My grandfather, for example,

calls John the Baptist “Juanito.” Zapata

never comes to town, or he’d get a name as well.

The dead call themselves their own true names:

Honeysuckle, Hummingbird, Wind,

Coyote, Blue Deer. My grandfather types.

Once they sign the page, these few

scoop a drink from the cool stone

fountain, shade their eyes, and stare

at all those shiny

forgotten coins.

 

 

Posted in Poetry | 4 Comments

Stoner

Posted on January 11, 2017 by

stonerStoner, by John Williams, was first published in 1965. It sold about 2000 copies, then went out of print. In the past few years, however, it has been republished to an almost cult-like following, first in Europe and then in the United States. The critics have gone bananas over it, calling it “masterful,” “powerful,” “a classic.” Morris Dickstein called it a “perfect” novel. Emma Straub called it “the most beautiful book in the world.” Essays urged readers to get a copy as soon as humanly possible, and get going on the enlightenment.

Well… okay. (If you haven’t read it, you might want to stop here; I plan to discuss the book in some detail.) The story of Stoner is this: William Stoner is a man who comes from a farming background, and fully expects to be there all his life. His father sends him to agricultural college, so that he can do a little better on the land than his parents have. While he’s there, he takes a one-semester English survey, and encounters Shakespeare’s sonnet 73. It causes a seismic shift inside him, one he can’t articulate but which changes his entire life: he changes his major (without telling his parents) and becomes a student of literature, eventually taking his Ph.D. and becoming an English professor. This is probably his happiest time, because slowly, inevitably, his quiet life is bled of all meaning and purpose. He refuses to serve in the first World War. He falls in love and marries, but within a month realizes that his marriage is a failure; he has a child, whom his wife uses to manipulate him; he takes joy in teaching, and then a vicious contretemps with his department chair reduces his teaching to a grey nothingness; he has a happy affair, and when others discover it, he has to let her go. The only integrity that remains is Stoner’s lifelong love affair with literature. The words, the structure and grammar, have meaning, and he is a sort of priest at the altar of that meaning. Williams’s prose is reserved, realistic, even wry at times, and is a pleasure to read even when the events are painful.

The idea of the reviewers and essayists who loved this book seemed to be that Stoner is a kind of anti-Gatsby. He’s not the usual American hero; he isn’t rich or flashy; he doesn’t get the beautiful girl; he isn’t, by any normal measure, cool. This is just the story of a life, the story of someone who is a failure by most measures, but is a devoted teacher and scholar, someone who finds meaning even when others have made his life futile.

I couldn’t enjoy the book, however. Williams sets Stoner up as a kind of teacher-scholar saint, much more sinned against than sinning, and others around him are caricatures. I was especially uneasy about the two real villains of the book, his wife Edith and his department chair Lomax. Edith is that all-too-common trope, the woman who has been raised to be a useless society girl. She is so sheltered and repressed that she throws up on their wedding night, and can’t stand for Stoner to touch her. But later, she decides she wants to have a baby, and abruptly turns into a “wild and demanding” nymphomaniac, tearing at Stoner’s clothes and requiring sex every couple of hours until she conceives — and then the switch flips again and she can’t bear his hand on her. After the birth of the child, she’s bedridden for a year, then turns into a hard-edged social butterfly, doing theater, painting, sculpture, and playing the piano for hours a day. And she still finds time to launch a deliberate campaign to use their daughter, Grace, to make Stoner miserable. When Grace falls into despair, Edith still doesn’t change. At no point does she show one moment of tenderness, intelligence, kindness, or self-awareness. She is an absolute two-dimensional selfish troll from beginning to end. One wonders what would have happened if Stoner hadn’t been so self-absorbed.

Holland Lomax, the department chair, might be even worse as a heavy-handed villain, because his evil comes out visibly: he’s hunchbacked and has a limp. He is fiercely defensive about being a “cripple,” and he and Stoner clash over another student who also has a physical “deformity.” Lomax persecutes Stoner for decades, giving him intro-level classes at odd times of the day and threatening him. Later, Stoner falls in love with a graduate student (another two-dimensional character, but this one idealized: intelligent, glasses, agrees with everything Stoner says) and Lomax is the one who threatens to fire her over the affair. I was honestly surprised at this kind of dated nastiness. I expect it in Dickens, but in a book written in 1965?

I don’t necessarily disagree that this book is well-written. But I’ll argue a lot with anyone who says this is a perfect novel, or anything remotely close to it. There are good things about it — there are some beautiful passages, and some interesting things about its construction, and about a man who refuses to engage in war all his life — but it falls down over and over again when it comes to any character but Stoner himself. There just isn’t the depth to it that I was expecting from the raves.

Have you read it? Did you adore it? Argue with me in the comments!

Posted in Fiction, Uncategorized | 8 Comments

The Way to Rainy Mountain

Posted on January 10, 2017 by

way-to-rainy-mountainIn 2012, I read N. Scott Momaday’s groundbreaking novel House Made of Dawn, which is the story of a young Native man who has returned to the reservation from the second World War in order to face his demons. The Way to Rainy Mountain is another type of thing altogether. This book is a combination of folklore, history, memoir, and art, telling stories about the Kiowa people. It’s a short book, but extremely vivid, as Momaday puts his own memories together with sacred stories about the way the Kiowas came into the world (through a hollow log, as it happens) and made their way as rulers of the Southern plains.

Part of the way this book functions is that it looks forward and looks back at the same time. The myths and stories are from a time when the Kiowas were a powerful people, hunters on horseback, reverent of their god and of the beautiful land, making rituals and making conquests. Momaday’s history and memories, on the facing page, are about the decline and fall of that people: images of his grandmother, one of the last people to speak Kiowa; her grave, at the base of Rainy Mountain; the scattered old people from whom he learned his own history.

Momaday tells the stories in a distinctive voice. He uses the phrase “you know” and “this is how it was” repeatedly, as a way to touch base with the listener. The stories are often about encounters with the fantastic: the sun god, a buffalo with horns of steel, a grandmother spider, a huge water animal roiling beneath the surface. But just as often, they’re about everyday life: a man stealing another man’s wife, a great hunter, travels, cold weather. The art takes a phrase from one of the stories and repeats it under the picture. The history tells about peyote rituals, sacred spaces, treaties broken, battles lost: a whole way of life that comes down to Momaday himself, and the way to the cemetery at the base of Rainy Mountain. This book is a living thing, but Momaday’s sadness over what is past permeates his telling.

Here’s my favorite of the folk stories:

A long time ago there were two brothers. It was winter, and the buffalo had wandered far away. Food was very scarce. The two brothers were hungry, and they wondered what to do. One of them got up in the early morning and went out, and he found a lot of fresh meat there on the ground in front of the tipi. He was very happy, and he called his brother outside. “Look,” he said. “Something very good has happened, and we have plenty of food.” But his brother was afraid and said, “This is too strange a thing. I believe that we had better not eat that meat.” But the first brother scolded him and said that he was foolish. Then he went ahead and ate of the meat all by himself. In a little while something awful happened to him: he began to change. When it was all over, he was no longer a man; he was some kind of water beast with little short legs and a long, heavy tail. Then he spoke to his brother and said: “You were right, and you must not eat of that meat. Now I must go and live in the water, but we are brothers, and you ought to come and see me now and then.” After that the man went down to the water’s edge, sometimes, and called his brother out. He told him how things were with the Kiowas.

Posted in History, Memoir | 4 Comments

White Noise

Posted on January 8, 2017 by

white-noiseSomething is wrong in a small college town in Middle America. There’s an unexpected sense of malaise, and the teachers and students at the local school are falling mysteriously ill:

Investigators said it could be the ventilating system, the paint or varnish, the foam insulation, the electrical insulation, the cafeteria food, the rays emitted by microcomputers, the asbestos fireproofing, the adhesive on shipping containers, the fumes from the chlorinated pool, or perhaps something deeper, finer-grained, more closely woven into the fabric of things.

J.A.K. Gladney (Jack) describes this nonspecific menace with a kind of serene detachment and optimism. Surely things will get better! But he can’t quite mask his own disquiet and his nagging fear of death, and eventually this manifests as a poisonous cloud — an “airborne toxic event” — the result of an industrial accident, that floats over the town, requiring evacuation. In the aftermath, Jack and his family must confront their secrets, their poses, their fears, their ideas about the meaning of life and love, and a new set of quite extraordinary sunsets.

I’ve read a bunch of reviews of this book, including the introduction to my edition, written by Richard Powers, and none of them have addressed what I think is really the heart of the book. Don DeLillo does a spectacular job — prescient, even — talking about American consumerism, reality TV, psychopharmaceuticals, and the ways we connect before the Internet even existed in any real way. There are scenes sprinkled throughout this book that are gems, and I’ll talk about a couple later on. It’s a serious book, about death, fear, love, and meaning, and it’s also extremely funny: the founder of Hitler Studies who doesn’t speak or read German, for instance, or the mantras that come at random from radios and televisions (“Now we will put the little feelers on the butterfly,” “Only your code allows you to enter the system,””It’s the rainbow hologram that gives this credit card a marketing intrigue.”) His characters speak almost in code, as they use snatches of advertising in their dialogue. (Coke is it, Coke is it, Coke is it.)

But as I was reading, I kept thinking how warm this book is for a postmodern tour de force. This is no Pale Fire or even Pnin. It doesn’t dazzle, even in its best-constructed scenes. This book is essentially a domestic comedy, almost a satire. The relationships between Jack and Babette and their children and stepchildren and many exes from all over the place are the center of the book. We get to know Heinrich, the gloomy teenage boy; Denise, the tenacious girl; Wilder, the wordless toddler and his epic, day-long crying jag; Jack, who watches his children sleep so he can sleep himself; Babette, generous in every way; Jack’s ex-wife, who reads and interprets novels for the CIA. At the heart of this maelstrom of personalities lies the fear of death that feeds the accidents of the rest of the book: the airborne toxic event, the self-aggrandizing behavior on campus, the self-medication, the consumerism. One of the central questions of the book is whether fear and death can poison the family love that is the real topic of White Noise.

I’ve mentioned that there are several memorably well-constructed scenes that are absolute gems. If you’ve read this, I could probably just name them and you’d know: a scene in a college classroom, comparing Elvis to Hitler; a plane that almost falls out of the sky. Maybe my favorite was the Most Photographed Barn in America, in which Jack and his friend Murray go to see this site. As they approach, they see several signs for it, and then people setting up their cameras to photograph it.

“No one sees the barn,” he said.

A long silence followed.

“Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.”

He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated side, replaced at once by others.

“We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies.”

There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides.

“Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were in the past, those who will come in the future. We’ve agreed to be a part of a collective perception. This literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism.”

Another silence ensued.

“They are taking pictures of taking pictures,” he said.

 

Of course, then we realize that we are observing Jack and Murray observing the people taking pictures of taking pictures. It is an exceptionally elegant little piece about signs, simulacra, and the meaning of tourism, and there are other parts of this book that work with the same precision, punch, and humor. One of DeLillo’s main ideas is that the map is not the territory: we are not to confuse the sign with the reality, something that becomes more and more difficult in a postmodern world.

White Noise made a real impression on me, and I also thoroughly enjoyed it, something that’s been on my list for a very long time. I can see its long shadow and its influence on other authors, especially on David Foster Wallace, who I am certain must have read this book with great attention. Have you read this, or something else by DeLillo? What did you think?

Posted in Fiction | 13 Comments

The Fire Next Time

Posted on January 7, 2017 by

the-fire-next-timeThis 1963 book by James Baldwin is heart-breakingly relevant today. Not only did it inspire two important books of 2016—The Fire This Time and Between the World and Me—but it also feels at times like it could have been written last week. Baldwin writes of hearing a police officer use a racist slur and ask why he can’t stay uptown where he belongs as he’s walking across the street to the library. He writes of being stopped and frisked at age 10. And he writes of always being aware of the limitations racist society placed on him and how many of his friends fled to the bottle or the needle.

Baldwin fled to the church and become a preacher at a young age. But the church wasn’t a haven that stuck for him, and he ponders some of his issues with God and the church in “Down at the Cross,” the essay that makes up most of this book. Some of what he says reminded me of James Cone’s ideas in The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Both write about the solace African Americans find in church, but Baldwin finds the solace ultimately empty:

Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty—necessarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who have discovered the true faith the spiritual duty of liberating the infidels. This particular true faith, moreover, is more deeply concerned about the soul than it is about the body, of which fact the flesh (and the corpses) of countless infidels bears witness.

Cone echoes this sentiment in his chapter on Reinhold Niebuhr, and as a Christian myself, I think this is a fair critique of much of the church. I’ve seen plenty of ministry efforts that are focused on Bible teaching to the exclusion of providing real help or that provide substantive help as a means to get a foot in the door for preaching. That’s not to say it’s true across the board, but I do think self-examination is always in order.

Baldwin also describes a meeting he had with Elijah Muhammed of the Nation of Islam in which Muhammed advocated the founding of a black nation and the separation of the races. He appears to find much of what Muhammed has to say compelling, but he ultimately rejects this vision as well. This was a point where I wish I had more knowledge of the context and of the Nation of Islam as a whole. I just a few days ago listened to an interview on Reveal with white nationalist Richard Spencer, and some of the logic seemed similar to me. Baldwin, however, rejects this logic, partly for practical reasons but also because “Whoever debases others is debasing himself.”

Baldwin then goes on to share something of his vision for the future and the possibilities ahead:

We should certainly know by now that it is one thing to overthrow a dictator or repel an invader and quite another thing really to achieve a revolution. Time and time and time again, the people discover that they have merely betrayed themselves into the hands of yet another Pharoah who, since he was necessary to put the broken country together, will not let them go. Perhaps, people being the conundrums that they are, and having so little desire to shoulder the burden of their lives, this is what will always happen. But at the bottom of my heart I do not believe this. I think that people can be better than that, and I know that people can be better than they are.

He doesn’t get specific on what we can do to shoulder our burdens—it’s not that kind of book. The general idea is that the fate black Americans and white Americans are intertwined. The history of how black Americans came to this country and how they’ve been treated through our history needs to be acknowledged, and our social structures reexamined in light of this understanding. We can’t just expect black Americans to adopt white priorities. It is time for us to recreate our country together:

Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lover, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophesy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!

Posted in Classics, Nonfiction | 6 Comments

The Haunting of Hill House

Posted on January 6, 2017 by

haunting-of-hill-houseThis book by Shirley Jackson might have had more of an impact on me if I weren’t already a fan of the 1963 film (soooo creepy!), but it’s still a good book, even if you know what chills are coming and are thus less easily shocked by them.

Hill House is not a good house. Right in the first page, we are told this:

Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. With, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and door were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

Right from the start, Hill House was built wrong. The angles aren’t quite right, and doors aren’t exactly where they’re supposed to be. And the house has a dark history. A dispute between heirs led to suicide. And now, it’s empty, visited by caretakers who refuse to stay the night.

An academic interested in the supernatural, Dr. John Montague wants to understand Hill House, so he gathers a group of two women who’ve shown some psychic ability and a heir to the current owner to come stay at Hill House and see what happens. The book focuses on one of the women, Eleanor, a spinster who spent the last several years caring for her mother. Hill House looks like the opportunity for liberty she’s been longing for, a chance to remake herself away from the family members she loathes.

It takes a while for it to become clear that the house is working on Eleanor in a way that is different from the others. But eventually, Eleanor becomes bound up in the house in a way that frightens the others.

So what is it about Eleanor that makes her a target? She’s alone and detached even from those close to her, and she’s prone to fantasy, as is evident from her musings on the drive to Hill House and her quick attachment to Theo, the other woman in the group. It’s unclear, though, how much of Eleanor’s thinking, especially late in the book, comes from her or from the house.

The house itself is surely an object of terror, but early on, it’s usual haunted house stuff—cold spots, rattling doors, writing on walls. Creepy, yes, but it’s easy to shake off (or at least it is if you’re reading at home at not at Hill House). The real fright comes from the way the house becomes beguiling. It woos Eleanor, even as it plays its tricks. And Eleanor was ripe for wooing.

There’s something inside Eleanor that makes it possible for Hill House to reach her. There’s the part that wants to be remade, to live a new life, to slough off old commitments. And a lot of people feel that way at times. The desire to slipping out of our old live and into something new, away from the current irritations, can make even the worst situations look appealing. And once that wooing voice gets in our heads, what might we do to accept the offer?

Posted in Classics, Fiction, Speculative Fiction | 13 Comments

The Cornish Coast Murder

Posted on January 5, 2017 by

cornish-coastI read about the British Library Crime Classics on Litlove’s site a couple of years ago. They are reprints of lesser-known crime fiction, put out by the Poisoned Pen Press, with titles like A Scream in Soho, Sergeant Cluff Stands Firm, and The Female Detective. What could be more appealing? So when I saw one on my library’s shelf — The Cornish Coast Murder, by John Bude — I grabbed it.

The book, written in 1935, opens in the tiny town of Boscawen, on (surprise!) the Cornish coast. The local doctor, Pendrill, and Vicar Dodds are settling in to their weekly ritual of dinner, whiskey, and — best of all — dividing a case of detective thrillers between them. This pleasant evening is interrupted, however, when the vicar receives a telephone call, informing him that the local magistrate, Julius Tregarthan, has been murdered.

I haven’t read a mystery quite like this in years. The local inspector, Bigswell, is competent and thorough, but baffled by the conflicting evidence. He gets help from the vicar, who, as a devotee of detective novels, believes in the “intuitive method,” which means he eliminates suspects based on his feelings that they couldn’t possibly have killed anyone and then works from there. The magistrate’s niece Ruth, a young veteran of the Great War, and one of Tregarthan’s servants are all suspects at one time or another.

This book came out the same year as Gaudy Night. Well, it’s no Gaudy Night — we don’t have the deep characters, the real relationships, the wrestling with problems of autonomy and love, and the consequences of detection. It’s not plotted as beautifully as an Agatha Christie novel, either, and some readers may feel they weren’t given enough information to solve it by themselves. But on the other hand, there are no horrific, gruesome murders, no grimly alcoholic and tormented inspector, no perversion, no betrayal. If you’re looking for light, entertaining reading, and a loving description of a real place (something you don’t often get during this time period), The Cornish Coast Murder is a fun way to pass a couple of hours. I might even look for others. A Scream in Soho sounds good, doesn’t it?

Posted in Classics, Fiction, Mysteries | 6 Comments