Monthly Archives: April 2018

Blood and Moonshine: Gods of Howl Mountain

30 Monday Apr 2018

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In the autumn of 1952, with “I Like Ike” signs sprouting in the North Carolina lowlands, up in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Maybelline Docherty is her own authority, thank you. Known as Granny May, like most mountain folk thereabouts, she’s had a hard life. Her husband died young in the First World War; their daughter lives in an institution and hasn’t spoken in twenty-odd years; and Granny May’s grandson, Rory, lost part of a leg fighting with the Marines in Korea and has been drifting and moody ever since. But Granny May doesn’t know the meaning of the word surrender, and she intends to continue enjoying life to the fullest. As a former prostitute, she makes polite folk turn away. But they still drive up the mountain for her herbal remedies, which they fear as possibly un-Christian yet wish to believe in, and she’s famous for her cakes.

The Blue Ridge Mountains, as seen from Blowing Rock, North Carolina (courtesy I, Zainubrazvi, via Wikimedia Commons)

Rory troubles her, however. He earns a good living running moonshine to buyers off the mountain, which puts him in the crosshairs of the police, who can sometimes be bribed. But there’s a new Federal revenue agent in town who plays by different rules, and as Rory soon learns, he’s a sadist of the first order. Meanwhile, Rory feuds with Cooley Muldoon, a young buck with more swagger than brains who’s willing to match Rory blow for blow, and whose father owns the largest piece of the moonshine business. Between these two threats and an attraction for a preacher’s daughter who handles venomous snakes as part of the church service, Rory has chosen to live dangerously. But Granny May says, “Christ’s father let him die on that cross.… But Christ never had no Granny like me.”

In my review of Fallen Land, Brown’s previous book, I loved the prose and the pacing but faulted the too-easily resolved conflicts between the main characters and the intellectually sophisticated observations that came from the mouths of unschooled teenagers. Not here. Gods of Howl Mountain is a much better, more complex, more believable novel, and its power propels you through the narrative, much like the engine in Rory’s beloved souped-up muscle car, named (of course) Maybelline. Rory and Granny May are compelling characters, their dialogue credible, and often a hoot besides.

Once or twice, you may come across a reference to something you might not expect, or said in a way that seems out of character, but those instances don’t intrude. If there’s a weak link, it’s Cooley Muldoon, the villain, who’s got nothing to recommend him and is simply villainous. He’s relentless, though, and very inventive, so nothing will be easily resolved, you can bank on that. Granny May’s traumatized daughter, Bonni, seems idealized, as though Rory’s view of her is actually accurate. I also wonder whether Bonni’s silence is too convenient, being essential to the plot. Rory has undertaken to find out exactly what renders her speechless, and who’s responsible. I like that part of the narrative, but I think it might have worked better had the story not turned on that device.

The prose, however, needs no qualifiers, and it’s the first thing that strikes you about Gods of Howl Mountain:

[Granny May] squinted down her nose, eyeing the tree in the yard. This tree, lone survivor of the blight, stood a centerpiece of all she surveyed from her porch. The others of its kind, chestnuts, had once covered these mountains, the bark of their trunks deeply furrowed, age-twisted like the strands of giant steel cables. Their leaves sawtoothed, golden this time of year, when the falling nuts fattened the beasts of the land, sweetening their meat. That army of hardwoods had fallen, victims of death-black cankers that starved and toppled them. Some exotic fungus had slipped in through wounds in their bark, the work of antlers or claws or penknives. This tree stood alone in the meadow, crowned high against the impending light.
A spirit tree.

This is Granny May’s first appearance, and it’s as though she were that tree, unblighted, standing tall, determined to live her way, from the land and part of it.

With Gods of Howl Mountain, Brown has gone a big step further from the promise revealed in Fallen Land, and I recommend it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

The Limit of Good Intentions: Hour Glass

23 Monday Apr 2018

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Review: Hour Glass, by Michelle Rene
Amberjack, 2018. 292 pp. $15

The Black Hills of South Dakota are no place for two children to fend for themselves, especially in August 1876, barely a month after Little Bighorn. But that’s the trouble that twelve-year-old Jimmy Glass, and his six-year-old half-sister, Flower, face when their father, their only parent, catches smallpox. Jimmy doesn’t know what ails his Pa, but it looks serious. It’s up to them to find a doctor, so the two manage to load Pa into a wagon, for which they have no horse, and sweat the contraption into Deadwood, the nearest town.

Deadwood exists because of the gold strike in the Black Hills, and the miners’ presence defies Federal law, which had supposedly kept “settlers” out of Sioux territory. So Deadwood isn’t merely a garden-variety frontier brothel-and-casino town, but one with defiant vengeance in its bones. And, it should be said, Flower is a potential target, as half Lakota Sioux and developmentally different — she doesn’t speak, won’t look people in the eye, and hates to be touched. When asked to say her name, the best she can reply is Ower. That becomes Hour; hence the title.

C. E. Finn’s 1880s photograph of Calamity Jane (courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

The relationship between the protective older brother and the emotionally inexpressive sister offers a twist on a familiar theme: Innocent children melt hard, greedy hearts. What’s more, who else should take the besieged children under her wing than Calamity Jane, as colorful a figure as you could want? She drinks like ten fish, curses like a sailor, but shoots straight, rides hard, and takes no guff from any man. In fact, on first meeting, Jimmy is convinced she is a man, a whisper of the feminist theme that pervades the novel:

Her skin was tanned and leathery, and she wore the uniform of a pioneer. If she had any bit of femininity about her shape, it was hidden beneath the layers of buckskin. Her hat was a man’s hat, worn from use, ornamented with Indian feathers. Everything about her had read ‘man’ until she pulled away that bandana to show the more delicate features of a woman’s mouth. Her crystal-blue eyes glared down at me as I froze in place.

Through Jane’s good offices, Pa Glass is put in quarantine with other smallpox victims, where she tends him herself. Dora DuFran, the madam of Diddlin’ Dora’s (no lie), takes in the children, who immediately become the pets of the house. But for me, the chief charm of Hour Glass is how Jimmy treats his little sister and does his best to look out for her. We’d all be proud of a son like him, sensitive, empathic, trying his best to play the man’s role he’s been thrust into when he knows he’s still a child. Jimmy also has a preternatural gift for peacemaking, and it’s hard not to like that too.

But it’s equally hard to figure out how he gained such self-knowledge and skills, for, like much else in Hour Glass, they just seem to fall out of the sky. How indeed would a young boy born to tragedy, likely having no playmates and only one parent who is probably too busy to spend much time on him, seem so fully formed in self-concept and so talented socially? To me, this is the sort of novel that works while you’re reading it, because you’re caught up in adventure after adventure. But after you put it down, you think, No.

None of the good guys ever does anything really bad, and there are no villains, only an occasional badass. Disagreements never leave lingering resentments or even change the course of the story. Though each chapter moves well, once the episode is done, it’s on to the next, with very little reflection. For instance, despite the feminism and good-heartedness that inform this novel, Jimmy never reckons with what a brothel is, or what it must be like to work there. His notions of sex are formed enough to make him draw back in horror at the notion that his sister might be condemned to that life one day. Yet he never connects his fear to the women he sees, which allows him to have unalloyed gratitude toward Dora, who’s profiting off them.

I’m glad Jimmy and his sister get taken care of — nobody wants to see kids suffer — yet I also want them to struggle, to face more prejudice and suspicion than they do, to get into fixes that even Calamity Jane can’t rescue them from. I can’t help think that not only does the author try too hard to protect her characters, pulling back from her strong premise, she has superimposed a twenty-first-century sensibility on a nineteenth-century narrative. Unfortunately, her choice of language sometimes suggests as much, as when her characters use words or phrases like backlash, fine with it, or best-case scenario.

Late in the novel, Jane remarks of her own legend spinning that “folks don’t want real stories.” Maybe not, but the lies have to seem like truth.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Spy Family: Paris Spring

16 Monday Apr 2018

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Review: Paris Spring, by James Naughtie
Overlook, 2016. 320 pp. $27

Will Flemyng, who works undercover for the British Embassy in Paris, is accosted on the métro by an East German agent named Kristof. At first, Will wonders whether Kristof is willing to trade information or change sides, and since it’s April 1968, and talk of democracy in Prague has the Soviet bloc on edge, Kristof’s sudden appearance offers possibilities.

Or does it? A subsequent rendezvous turns testy when Kristof threatens to expose Will’s brother, Abel, who spies for the United States, as a traitor. Will refuses to believe him or be bullied. But he also keeps his own counsel, because this is family, and the Flemyngs are close, matter of state or no. So Will doesn’t tell his boss, Freddy Craven, all he should, and there too lie emotional ties. Freddy’s like a father to Will, an older man in ill health who’s shown him the ropes of tradecraft, and for whom Will would risk anything.

Meanwhile, the student population has fomented rebellion, and the streets are boiling. The embassy is expected to watch these events carefully, and in return, with so much focus on Paris, any diplomatic mistake will quickly become public knowledge. Freddy, like any sensitive soul, realizes something’s up with Will, but he doesn’t know what. A love affair that ended a few months before? The tensions of the job? But before that question can be resolved, Grace Quincy, a world-famous journalist who could pry secrets from a clam without having to open it, blows into Paris. Will, knowing that Grace is trouble and that her flirtatious attentions mean she’s digging for information, nevertheless invites her over. But before that happens, she’s murdered at Père-Lachaise cemetery, of all places, and the police quickly learn that Will’s name is on her dance card. It’s obvious that one side or other had her killed, for reasons of espionage, but who, and why?

Pierre_Mendès_France, the Socialist politician who had helped extricate France from Vietnam, was willing to form a coalition government in May 1968 and listen to the student demands. But the Gaullists increased their power in the next election (courtesy Dutch National Archives via Wikimedia Commons)

Naughtie excels at portraying Paris under siege and the student protests:

. . .the canteen in the student building was filled with a rolling crowd and had the air of a cavernous bar in the early hours, a dance hall with the lights down. There was a group in one corner listening to a guitar, some of them flat out on the floor, and across the room an argument was threatening to turn into a struggle. Somebody ran shouting from the room. At least five people were handing out newspapers and campaign sheets at the door, one of them wearing a Mao cap, the others in black.…Someone was cooking oil. A few on the floor looked as if they’d slept there for days and the place looked like a school gymnasium on a wet afternoon. They’d rigged up an urn to boil water for coffee, and people were pulling stale bread rolls from a cardboard box. Someone had brought in a cat, which sat on top of the jukebox with its tail rigid in the air and its eyes wide.

But good as that is, it’s just the vivid background. The real story involves two families. First, it’s the Flemyngs, and how the brothers balance their feelings and ties against the secrecy demanded by their work, which affects a third, older brother, Mungo. Until reading Paris Spring, I didn’t know I wanted an older brother named Mungo, but it helps that this one is supportive, caring, and paternal, without being pushy or controlling, the family mediator. Mungo comes to know Freddy as well, so there’s plenty of warmth to go around in this coldest of cold-blooded professions.

The other family consists of Will’s allies, foremost among them Freddy, of course, but also others encountered during his travails over Kristof. Rivalries exist, to be sure, but even as temporary friends, they stick together. They know better than anyone else what the power of secrets can do, especially those that may or may not exist, except in rumor. As Freddy tells Mungo, who’s a historian, “You warn your students of the fog of war. Well, I know it to be real. I breathe the fumes.”

Naughtie’s grasp of spydom as a brethren echoes John le Carré, and the same could be said of his focus on characterization. Paris Spring fails to emulate the master in that it resolves with a couple turns that may be too neat; another neatness is how indulgent Freddy is with Will, which strains credulity at times. Nevertheless, Paris Spring is an excellent thriller, elegant in the way le Carré’s are — as few moving narrative parts as possible, a focus on motive instead, and characters who believe in what they’re doing. Bravo.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

The Elephant in the Seraglio: The Architect’s Apprentice

09 Monday Apr 2018

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Review: The Architect’s Apprentice, by Elif Shafak
Viking, 2014. 424 pp. $28

Jahan, a twelve-year-old Indian boy, arrives in sixteenth-century Istanbul escorting a white elephant, Chota, as a gift for Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. Since Jahan owes his arrival and new job of elephant trainer to subterfuge and the intercession of a greedy, vicious Christian corsair, the boy’s path won’t be smooth. Nevertheless, as a mixture of ambition, reckless curiosity, and blind naïveté, Jahan carves out a remarkable career in the sultan’s menagerie. He knows little about elephants per se but has a bond with Chota, having grown up with him, and parlays that into a recognized position at the palace. Chota is widely considered the most astonishing beast in the menagerie, so his trainer comes to notice. He even attracts Princess Mihrimar, the sultan’s only daughter, and the two teenagers have a flirtation, mild in itself but serious enough to get him killed — slowly — were the wrong people to find out.

That might be enough adventure for a dirt-poor lad from nowhere special, but there’s more. Jahan receives a palace education and comes to the notice of Mimar Sinan, the Chief Royal Architect, who takes him on as an apprentice, one of four he employs. Between the corsair, who expects Jahan to steal jewels for him; the princess; the rivalry among the apprentices; and the chance to design and construct beautiful buildings with Sinan, The Architect’s Apprentice has plenty of story to keep the narrative moving. Throw in court intrigue, which includes the quaint Ottoman custom in which the newly crowned sultan has his brothers strangled to secure his throne, and there’s a lot going on.

Princova_mešita, or Prince’s mosque, Istanbul, designed by Mimar Sinan (courtesy Ondřej Žváček, via Wikimedia Commons)

This narrative bounty, not to say superabundance, naturally cuts two ways. You get an amazingly broad picture of sixteenth-century Istanbul and an appreciation of how precarious life can be, even — especially — for the very fortunate. Shafak covers theme after theme: religious intolerance, the warfare state, architecture as a philosophy, jealousy, the meaning of love, where true happiness lies, the purpose of genius, and what humans value most. That last notion prompts me to assume that putting a white elephant at the novel’s center is intentional symbolism. Nobody sees Chota’s soul as Jahan does; in fact, they don’t know or care that the beast has one. And if you like, Jahan may even be Melville’s Captain Ahab in reverse, since Chota, his talisman, is purer than any of the greedy, back-stabbing schemers who populate the palace.

But because there’s so much narrative in The Architect’s Apprentice, it’s necessarily episodic. At times, this sweeps you away, like a magic carpet through an exotic world that no longer exists. At others, I want Jahan to grapple more deeply with his black-and-white attitudes. For him, the elephant in the room is how he idealizes those he loves and can’t or won’t see their flaws or the dangers they present to others, himself included. His loyalty is touching, but it can be stubborn too, and he seldom allows others to challenge his code.

Consequently, toward the end, when he comes to realize a few truths he’s been hiding from himself, it feels sudden, dragged in, perhaps. However, Shafak does an excellent job of pulling the disparate pieces together. The episodes lead somewhere, after all, to a conclusion worth waiting for.

The scope and subject demand rich, effortless prose, without artifice or self-consciousness, and Shafak delivers, as with this paragraph describing Jahan’s first look at Istanbul:

Jahan glimpsed partly hidden female faces behind latticed windows, ornamented birdhouses on the walls, domes that caught the last rays of sun and lots of trees — chestnut, linden, quince. Wherever he turned he saw seagulls and cats, the two animals that were given free rein. Perky and pert, the seagulls soared in circles, diving to peck at the bait in a fisherman’s bucket, or the fried liver on a street vendor’s tray, or the pie left to cool on a windowsill. Nobody seemed to mind.

The Architect’s Apprentice offers a look — rare to this reader, at least — of an unfamiliar time and place. Shafak writes with authority and conviction, and the result is a lovely novel.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Lock Her Up!: Miss Kopp’s Midnight Confessions

02 Monday Apr 2018

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Review: Miss Kopp’s Midnight Confessions, by Amy Stewart
Houghton Mifflin, 2017. 365 pp. $26

What profession would someone named Constance Kopp follow besides that of a loyal, hard-working officer of the law? Indeed, Constance is a deputy sheriff in Bergen County, New Jersey, the first woman in the nation to hold such an office, for this is early 1916, when even the notion of a woman wearing a badge and a weapon causes anxious mirth. Her exploits have earned her much attention in the press, which Constance would hate even if the stories recounted the truth or treated her as a serious professional instead of an object of condescending admiration. Worse, she receives marriage proposals by mail from men who write as if they’re doing her a favor. But Constance has no wish to marry and lives with her two sisters, Norma and Fleurette.

As deputy sheriff, Constance is the matron of the Hackensack female jail, a few of whose inmates have swindled, thieved, or attempted murder. But most are young women whose only crime is running away from home to lead an independent life. As the novel opens, there are two such cases, followed quickly by a third. Constance will do her best to protect these women, exceeding her authority if necessary, but the system is rigged. The law will almost certainly bear down on the runaways, accusing them of immorality, mental illness, depraved character, or anything else that sells newspapers and wins votes. Imprisonment without trial in a reformatory is the typical punishment until age twenty-one, after which the woman becomes a ward of the state, which can then decide whether she’s fit to marry, and whom. Sterilization remains a possibility.

Constance has many reasons to struggle against this persecution and the mindset that drives it, some of whose loudest proponents are women. The impulse to lock up independent-minded women has hardly faded since 1916, so Stewart need invent nothing–and in fact, she hasn’t, for the Kopp sisters are real, and so is just about everything that happens in this novel.

The Bergen County Jail, Hackensack, New Jersey, as it exists today (courtesy northjersey.com)

Writing faithfully to history carries several demands, not least to make adherence to fact seem spontaneous rather than inevitable. Stewart succeeds, but the novel’s greatest strength is the sisters’ unusual ménage. They live together in more or less close disharmony, and their battles mirror their conflicts elsewhere. Constance continually squares off against priggish, bossy, unpleasant Norma but most often gives in because Constance is dependent, and Norma manages the household. What? you ask. A deputy sheriff who champions independent women is herself dependent? But out of uniform, Constance is lazy about chores, not terribly disciplined, and a coward — she would rather face down a vicious, prejudiced district attorney than stand up to her own sisters. This is a brilliant stroke, true to the split between the public and private selves that applies to many people, but there’s more. The two elder sisters argue most often about Fleurette, a pretty, spoiled eighteen-year-old who dreams of going on the stage — not one day, but now, a potential runaway right at home.

An image came to mind of Fleurette at the age of nine or ten, when she kept an album of pictures of fashionable people in pretty places. There was a newspaper drawing she particularly liked of debutantes strolling down the Catskill boardwalk under their parasols. She had a little paint set and she colored in all the dresses, making them as bright as peacocks while the world around them was newsprint gray and drab.

Consequently, Constance gives in to Fleurette more easily than Norma does, because she recognizes the spirit to escape expectations, as she did. But another, more important reason is that Fleurette is Constance’s illegitimate daughter, a tightly guarded secret that the girl herself doesn’t know. Without having to say so, Stewart shows that Constance could have been an inmate at the Hackensack jail. So everywhere the deputy looks, she sees her reflection, which gives her a personal stake in everything.

There’s no mystery in Miss Kopp’s Midnight Confessions, nor much detection, yet the tension remains constant. You care about these people’s struggles against inequality, though it must be said that their situations, rather than their characters, compel attention. I understand what Constance and Norma don’t want, and what they’re trying to protect, but not what they dream of in unguarded moments. That lack of yearning keeps the novel from being stronger, more immediate than it is.

Nowhere is that deficit more obvious than Constance’s maternal feelings for Fleurette, which should be more visceral. Her empathy, though powerful and fully earned, is all very well, but however indifferent a mother Constance is, she has that undeniable bond. Doesn’t she wish things were different, or at least, imagine how life would be like if she didn’t have to resort to subterfuge? Perhaps this is why the ending, though satisfying, feels a little tame. Nevertheless, Miss Kopp’s Midnight Confessions is witty, entertaining, and thought-provoking, a pretty good combination, in 1916 or now.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.