Monthly Archives: September 2022

An account of one’s own

29 Thursday Sep 2022

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Here’s another nugget I uncovered while researching my forthcoming novel, Lonely Are the Brave.

In an early draft, I had one of my main characters, Kay Sorensen, open a bank account in 1917 while her husband’s away serving in the army. I thought it only natural, since she’s working for her father’s timber company and dreams of a business career.

Then I happened on an appalling historical fact: almost every state in the Union required a man’s cosignature before a woman could open a bank account. In 1919, when my story unfolds, Tennessee may have been the only exception.

Clarksville, TN, where this late nineteenth-century building serves as a visitor center, was home to the first American bank run by women, 1919 (courtesy Jugarum, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

My research discovery supports a feminist theme of the novel and handed me a point of conflict when Kay’s husband returns from Over There; so much the better. But I was shocked to learn that the laws remained on the books until the 1960s.

The Ugly Guts of Colonialism: The Exiles

26 Monday Sep 2022

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Review: The Exiles, by Christina Baker Kline
Morrow, 2020. 361 pp. $28

Australia, 1840. Mathinna, motherless eight-year-old daughter of the chief of the Lowreenne tribe, has been hiding from the white people who want to take her away. The governor of Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) and his wife wish to keep the girl in their household to see whether they may train her “savagery” out of her. Mathinna distrusts the whole enterprise.

Mathinna, a real historical figure, as rendered in Thomas Bock’s watercolor, 1842 (courtesy http://artyzm.com/e_obraz.php?id=414 via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Meanwhile, Evangeline Stokes, country vicar’s daughter and governess to a London family, has fallen afoul of her employers. A ruby ring belonging to the family is found in her possession, and in the ensuing outcry, she shoves another servant down the stairs. Never mind that her employer’s son gave Evangeline the ring, or that the child growing in her womb is his. Never mind, either, that the servant she pushed was conniving against her out of jealousy, or that the fall caused no physical injury. Larceny and attempted murder see Evangeline to Newgate Prison, from where she’s sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation to Australia.

That’s what happens when your presence embarrasses someone of wealth and social position.

The Exiles tells the story of Evangeline’s journey to Australia and her unlikely friendship with Hazel Ferguson, a young girl sentenced for stealing a silver spoon. Hazel’s streetwise where Evangeline’s an innocent. She also has marketable skills, a knowledge of midwifery and herbal remedies, learned from the mother who otherwise neglected her. Interwoven with the convict narrative is Mathinna’s life as a collected object in the governor’s house, a plaything in which her benefactors, as they believe themselves, may lose interest any moment.

Kline never lets her sympathy for her characters soften their lives; “no—and furthermore” thrives here. She also knows her ground thoroughly, re-creating the Australia of more than a century and a half ago as though it were the air her characters breathe. The ship, the prisons, the work the convicts do, the endemic cruelty and barbarity, the sanctimonious superiority from ordinary citizens and officials—all come through vividly. As a Newgate matron tells Evangeline, best not to count on anyone in life, man or woman. “The sooner you understand that, the better off you’ll be.”

Throughout, physical detail sets the scene:

There were some things she’d never get used to: the screams that spread like a contagion from one cell to the next. The vicious fistfights that broke out abruptly and ended with an inmate spitting blood or teeth. The lukewarm midday broth that floated with bony pig knuckles, snouts, bits of hooves, and hair. Moldy bread laced with maggots. Once the initial shock subsided, though, Evangeline found it surprisingly easy to endure most of the degradations and indignities of her new life: the brutish guards, the cockroaches and other parasites, the unavoidable filth, rats scurrying across the straw.

The moral and legal bankruptcy of colonialism emerges on every page, shown but not told. Kline’s too subtle an author to beat a drum; instead, she lets you hear the music for yourself, and a sorry tune it is. The counterpoint comes from the governor’s mansion, where Mathinna learns to speak French and wear fine dresses. But she’s tolerated—barely—if, and only if, she reflects the image her hosts demand. Any hint of her true identity must be erased. This represents the other side of the system that populates Australia with accused criminals, labeled savages too, though they have white skins.

The two narratives, convict and indigenous child, reveal a complex fabric of prejudices, attitudes, assumptions, determination and energy that helps build a nation. But the convicts have one advantage, an inherent paradox that gives them something to hope for. The servitude that banishes them from England, though brutal and unjust, allows them scope to make something of themselves, what they probably couldn’t have done in their homeland.

No guarantees, mind; they must survive their sentences, swallow their individuality rather than express it, see the correct opportunity should it arrive, and seize it. But Mathinna and her people, as with all the other subdued tribes, don’t even have that chance.

Beautifully written, utterly gripping, The Exiles makes a compelling story from an author unafraid to hurt her characters, a boldness I admire. My only quibble with this otherwise excellent novel is to ask where Mathinna’s narrative fits in, other than thematically, historical truth notwithstanding. I like her portion for itself, for the writing is as clear and persuasive as the rest, and Kline makes the governor, his wife, and daughter three-dimensional, flawed people instead of shapeless villains. Even so, if you remove Mathinna, the plot doesn’t change an inch, which made me question her role and wonder why it wasn’t larger than it is.

Still, that objection doesn’t diminish The Exiles, a superb novel well worth your time.

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

When It All Turns to Dust: The Four Winds

19 Monday Sep 2022

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Review: The Four Winds, by Kristin Hannah
St. Martin’s, 2021. 448 pp. $29

The Texas Panhandle in 1921 seems a place thrumming with promise and possibility. But as Elsa Wolcott turns twenty-five, she sees only a life relegated to a forgotten shelf. Stricken by rheumatic fever at age fourteen, she believes herself frail, a theme her parents harp on to keep her isolated and cooped up out of sight. They find her physically unappealing, and apparently that’s grounds to pretend she doesn’t belong to them.

As a result, Elsa’s only friends are books, and her family’s there to remind her that she’s too old and plain to marry. Nevertheless, in her first act of rebellion, she sneaks out one night, latches onto an eighteen-year-old farm boy named Rafe Martinelli, and winds up having to marry him.

Elsa’s family disowns her—natch—but the Martinellis are also displeased, especially since Rafe was headed to college. Still, they’re warm people, unlike the Wolcotts, and Elsa throws herself into farm life, working harder than she’d ever thought possible, shedding her supposed frailty. Rafe and she have two surviving children, Loreda and Anthony, and the land rewards the Martinellis with sustenance and a decent living.

Until 1934, that is, when the soil starts to blow away in what would later be called the Dust Bowl. As their lives and dreams crumble to smithereens, the Martinellis struggle to keep their faith in the land—or Rafe does. Loreda, now twelve, merges his discontent with her own, for which she blames Elsa, having precociously arrived at adolescent logic.

Dust storm approaching Stratford, Texas, 1935 (courtesy National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, George E. Marsh Album, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Hannah’s venture into John Steinbeck territory re-creates the hardships, brutality, despair, and occasional acts of kindness that mark The Grapes of Wrath. I like her physical descriptions very much; you can feel the hot wind, taste the grit in your mouth, feel it in your eyes:

All the trees that lined their driveway were dying. The hot, dry years had turned them a sick gray-brown; their leaves had turned into crunchy, blackened confetti and been swept away by the wind. Only three of them were even still standing. The dusty soil lay in heaps and dunes at the base of every fence post. Nothing grew or thrived in the fields. There was not a blade of green grass anywhere. Russian thistles—tumbleweed—and yucca were the only living plants to be seen. The rotting body of something—a jackrabbit, maybe—lay in a heap of sand; crows picked at it.

The Four Winds works best as a panorama of the Dust Bowl, in which story matters more than characterization, though I admire Hannah’s readiness to test her characters and find them wanting. Where the narrative focuses on the hardships, literally grounding the reader in that grit, putting setback after setback in the characters’ way, this story grabs you. It’s also obvious how the novel evokes present-day hatred of migrants.

Rather too obvious, though, which points out the undercurrent of righteousness that mars The Four Winds. The antagonists are 100 percent villains, motivated solely by snobbery, greed, selfishness, or the inability to love. I believe Elsa’s masochism and utter lack of self-esteem, but I don’t believe the over-the-top parents who shaped her that way.

A subtler psychological portrait could have achieved the same result while adding nuance, maybe granting the parents a redeeming trait or two. (I also wonder how in blazes they named their daughter Elsinore; I can’t help think it’s a literary allusion, and if so, it falls flat.) I’m even tempted to say that the novel should start with the Dust Bowl, though the pages leading up to it do turn quickly. It’s just that the wicked queen/stepmother is an old, old trope and too easy by half.

Likewise, the villains belonging to the latter part of the book have no faces, and though their fiendishness is detestable, I can’t see them as people, only symbols. Since that’s precisely how they view the have-nots gathering at their gates, in a sense, Hannah’s perpetuating the sort of misperception based on prejudice that she decries. A similar broad-brush approach hampers the portrayal of the all-important Elsa-Loreda relationship, in which each character seems to play only a single note, shorthand for the dominant trait that defines them—reduces them, actually.

I wish too I found complexity in several scenes meant to convey tenderness or love, where the language suddenly turns generically sentimental, a contrast to the spare, sharp edge that marks the more compelling scenes of the narrative. Especially toward the not-quite-plausible end, emotional transitions carry a Hollywood tone, as though Hannah can’t bear to leave any negative feelings lying around.

The Four Winds is a decent novel, but the sort that fades once you put it down. I’d have liked it better had the author not pumped the pedal marked “Redemption” quite so hard and given her characters more angles to work with, and against.

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

A Houseful of Predators: An Unthinkable Thing

12 Monday Sep 2022

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Review: An Unthinkable Thing, by Nicole Lundrigan
Viking, 2022. 338 pp. $18

Summer 1958 has treated eleven-year-old Tommie Ware cruelly. Not only has someone murdered his beloved Aunt Celia, his guardian and center of his life; within several weeks thereafter, he’s accused of killing the three people who take him into their home.

Set in a barely identified neighborhood presumably in Canada, this remarkably taut tale of psychological suspense unfolds mostly in reverse, peeling one thin layer at a time off Tommie’s recent past in the well-to-do Henneberry household just before the triple murder. I generally avoid child-at-risk narratives, and this one scared the daylights out of me, without a ghost or goblin in sight. The monsters here are human, or pretend to be.

Thomas Mayne Daly, Canada’s first juvenile court judge, 1891 photo. The Juvenile Delinquent Act of 1908 was the country’s first penal reform separating youthful from adult offenders (courtesy Library Archives Canada, PA-025707, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain in both the U.S. and Canada because of its age)

It’s not enough that Tommie’s a child who doesn’t know who his father was or why he didn’t stick around. Even before his Aunt Celia dies, one measure of his heartache is how he realizes she’s promiscuous and scoffs to himself at her claims to have found The One, a “real gentleman.” But his innocent perspective on it gets the reader—or this reader—right between the eyes:

I chewed my cookie and tried not to listen anymore because I knew my aunt wouldn’t recognize a proper gentleman if one jumped up and bit her. Mrs. King [a kindly neighbor] had already explained it all to me. How to charm a girl with flowers or chocolates. Holding open the door. Angling the umbrella so she didn’t get wet when it was raining. But the men my aunt invited up kept their shoes on. Called her ‘dolly.’ Slurped soda through their teeth. One took our Sears catalogue to the toilet after he’d eaten supper and didn’t bother to shut the door. My aunt seemed blind to it.

His mother, Esther, a live-in servant at the Henneberrys’ manse, gave him to Celia to raise but must now take him back. You begin to see why she parted with him in the first place and why his tenure there is untenable, despite her assurances. She cares about her son, but she lacks backbone, and the Henneberrys control her, for reasons Tommie can’t fathom. They control him too, and therein hangs a tale.

Raymond Henneberry, the head of this household, has inherited wealth and a successful dental practice. His philanthropy has kept his less savory side from public view, especially his womanizing and financial shenanigans. He exploits the boy’s presence, which he resents, for his own gain.

That’s partly why his unstable, pill-popping wife, Muriel, takes a shine to Tommie, whose name she can’t always remember. She dragoons him into chores like massaging her feet or joining her on bizarre errands by car, a risky business, given her addiction to drugs that impair her reflexes and sense of judgment.

To Tommie’s bewilderment, Mrs. Henneberry makes much of him, perhaps to annoy her only child, fifteen-year-old Martin, then pushes Tommie in his direction. He’s a most unsuitable playmate, for Tommie or anyone sentient, being a sadist pathologically obsessed with sex.

Were Tommie an adult, he’d have had a bushel of motives to kill the Henneberrys. Ironically, the bits of his trial transcripts that close several chapters reveal nothing of the kind; the victims’ predatory nature is secret. Rather, the testimony paints them as upstanding, tragic figures and young Tommie as cold-blooded, vile, and monstrous, transferring their faults to him. Allegedly, the forensic evidence has him locked in.

I wonder how an eleven-year-old can stand trial, presumably as an adult. I wonder too how the judge seems so variable in his rulings (not as erratic as Mrs. Henneberry, if on the same spectrum). But if you can get past that, you’re in for quite a ride, which doesn’t end until the novel’s final sentence.

Five years ago, I reviewed another fine (altogether different) novel of Lundrigan’s, The Widow Tree, and apparently, she’s written several others. Yet she says An Unthinkable Thing was the most challenging and complicated to write. Without having read the others, I believe her. I admire how she unearths the Henneberry madness grain by grain, in such a way that you understand what Tommie can’t, increasing the tension and your connection to him.

The boy’s passivity is enough to make you scream—I kept wanting to shake him and say, “Speak up, already!” But you also understand how life has undermined him at every turn. I find Esther, and her passivity, less comprehensible. Her opacity serves the storytelling—a drawback, I think—and though she’s on stage far more than her sister, Celia, I feel I know the latter better.

Conversely, Muriel Hennebury is floridly, blood-curdlingly disturbed; no mistaking anything, there. I feel some sympathy for her, but none for her son, who reminds me of a spoiled-brat Fascist-in-training, though that image, if intentional, comes across subtly. The narrative has other political messages, notably the connection between wealth and impunity before the law, and though I’m ready to believe the Henneberrys’ wealth serves to conceal their excesses, I’m skeptical about how far that seems to twist the investigation into their deaths and Tommie’s prosecution for them.

Despite that, An Unthinkable Thing compelled me to finish reading. If you pick it up, I defy you to put it down again.

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

Creation and Destruction: Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds

05 Monday Sep 2022

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Review: Otherlands, by Thomas Halliday
Random House, 2022. 303 pp. $29

Every once in a long while, I come across a book that takes my breath away and makes me glad I learned to read. This one tells the history of our planet through sixteen instances of extinction, as awe-inspiring and dramatic a story as there is, narrated with sheer brilliance.

Halliday, a paleobiologist who has re-created these sixteen snapshots in time based on fossil records, leaps around the globe to illustrate how climate, geography, topography, and geology have changed, supported, and often annihilated life over the past several billion years.

Let’s unpack that summary. Paleobiology combines the study of living organisms with the evidence of dead ones; until now, I didn’t even know that discipline existed. When I say leaps around the globe, for each chapter, the author has to reset where the continents have wandered, because they’re never in the same place as before, and almost never where they are now. Things change over 600 million years.

Mark A. Wilson’s photograph of a bivalve fossil from the Logan Formation, Lower Carboniferous, Ohio (courtesy Wilson44691 at English Wikipedia, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Rather than by chronology, Halliday narrates by ecological theme, as with the development of insect and bird calls, the collaboration between different species, or the advent of seasons, so each chapter presents a mind-boggling panorama. To call these snapshots does them little justice, because they appeal to several senses, not just the visual, and they’re anything but static:

By delving deep into the structure of fossils, we can now reconstruct the colours of feathers, of beetle shells, of lizard scales, and discover the diseases these animals and plants suffered. By comparing them with living creatures we can establish their interactions in food webs, the power of their bite or strength of their skull, their social structure and mating habits, and even, in rare cases, the sound of their calls. . . . The latest research has revealed vibrant and thriving communities, the remnants of real, living organisms that courted and fell sick, showed off bright feathers or flowers, called and buzzed, inhabiting worlds that obeyed the same biological principles as those of the present day.

Halliday writes science from the soul of a poet, only fitting, because of his universal themes. You can’t read Otherlands without realizing how nature is even more infinitely varied and variable than you probably thought, and just how ridiculously late we humans arrived to the party. So much happened before we got here, in such complexity, that I can’t read these stories of empires rising and falling without feeling humbled.

One of my favorite chapters recounts the era when the Mediterranean was a hard-rock basin whose surface was hotter than Death Valley. Tectonic plates closed the Straits of Gibraltar, and mountain ranges blocked off several rivers from emptying into the basin; nothing lived on the baked rock save a hardy form of microbe. The Mediterranean, which later washed the shores of the great “ancient” Western civilizations, held no water—and it gives me pause to read that this arid condition occurred on two separate occasions during our planet’s past.

If there’s a drawback to Otherlands, it’s that there’s so much in it. Even if you read only one chapter at a time, as I did, you can’t retain a fraction of what Halliday says, and often I had to pause to think. Sometimes it’s his use of metaphor that’s arresting, as when he compares a present-day freshwater crocodile to Gothic architecture. Other times, he tosses out an astonishing fact, such as why deer suffer a much lower rate of cancer than other mammals, or why we’re related to dinosaurs (it has to do with laying eggs).

Sometimes, I wanted to know more, but I got why he didn’t linger—he’s got worlds to create and destroy, and that takes pages and pages. Often, I shook my head in wonder, as with his explanation for why the colors yellow and black mark certain insects, or the ingenious adaptations of the simplest creatures that had no brains. If you’re like me, you can’t just run your eyes over that and move on; you have to think. I paused for a while over his single paragraph theorizing about the origin of life, in which he rejects the once-popular idea of lightning striking the so-called primordial soup and embraces the current reigning hypothesis, a hydrothermal vent in the ocean deep.

You can’t read about sixteen extinctions without wondering what that means regarding global warming, an issue that Halliday leaves for an epilogue. Refusing to play doomsayer or argue that we must stop exploiting the planet’s resources, he nevertheless presents a concise, authoritative description of where that exploitation has led us. Further, he stresses how people who have profited the least from that exploitation stand to lose the most from our increasingly destructive climate.

He doesn’t assume that science or engineering will solve our problem, though he does marvel at the two microscopic organisms, a fungus and a bacterium, that can break down plastic. Rather, he holds out cautious hope for international cooperation. His plea, like the rest of Otherlands, deserves a hearing.

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

Song of Worry

01 Thursday Sep 2022

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Here’s another nugget I uncovered while researching my forthcoming novel, Lonely Are the Brave.

After the Armistice in November 1918, Americans worried that exposure to big, bad Europe would change (corrupt?) their boys. A hit song of 1919 addressed that fear: “How ’Ya Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree)?” In the song, which strikes a lighthearted mood, a farmer grins slyly as he tells his wife their boy will come back restless, thirsting for what he’s glimpsed in France.

Albert Wilfred Barbelle’s sheet music cover, 1919 (courtesy http://libx.bsu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/ShtMus/id/725 via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

But you have to ask whether the father’s good-humored acceptance reflects rural attitudes or those of city slickers who wrote popular music.

The slickers in question were composer Walter Donaldson and lyricists Joe Young and Sam M. Lewis; the publisher was Waterson, Berlin & Snyder Co.—Berlin, as in Irving Berlin, who gave us “Easter Parade,” “White Christmas,” “Cheek to Cheek,” and a bazillion other standards.

“How ’Ya Gonna Keep ’Em” appeared on the vaudeville stage and at the Ziegfeld Follies; an early jazz band, James Reese Europe’s 369th Infantry Band, performed the song regularly and cut a hit record. Two well-known singers followed suit.

But not every soldier thought Europe a swell place (or, as Twenties slang later would have it, the gnat’s eyebrows). In April 1919, the Seattle Times interviewed a Washington infantryman who said he was glad to come home to a “real country” and criticized the Belgians for not “dressing like us” and “clinging to their old ways.”

However, if he ever wished to buy an alcoholic drink or a condom, he might have paused to reconsider Europe’s advantages: Both transactions were criminal acts in his home state.