Tag Archives: 1960s

Good, Evil, and Hope: Deacon King Kong

18 Monday Jan 2021

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Review: Deacon King Kong, by James McBride
Riverhead, 2020. 370 pp. $28

Few people even know his real name, because he never uses it. Even the police confuse him with someone else, because he shares a driver’s license with another man, which makes his official record almost untraceable. But to the residence of the Causeway Housing Projects (the Cause) in south Brooklyn, he’s Sportcoat, because of the colorful assortment he wears of that garment.

His finest moment came umpiring the Cause baseball team, now disbanded. These days, the former deacon of Five Ends Baptist Church spends his time high on King Kong, the popular name for a friend’s moonshine, and talks to his late wife, Hettie. Or thinks he does, and nobody can persuade him otherwise.

Except that in summer 1969, Sportcoat shoots Deems, a teenage kingpin of the Cause drug traffic, and his former baseball protégé, at point-blank range. Sportcoat claims not to have understood what he was doing, but nobody believes that, least of all, the police. But he’s the type of character who doesn’t care what anybody thinks, alternately perplexing, amusing, and horrifying everyone else.

From that shooting springs a complicated, finely woven story, involving Five Ends, cheese deliveries, storytelling as an art form, the racism that warps life in the projects, unlikely romances, what constitutes good in the face of so much evil, and how humans dare to hope.

A portion of the Red Hook Houses project, south Brooklyn, as it appeared in 2012 at Lorraine and Henry Streets (courtesy Jim Henderson via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

But I’d be doing Deacon King Kong a disservice if I failed to mention what a rollicking good time the novel is. Pick almost any paragraph, and you’ll find sprawling, delicious sentences like these, oozing with spicy flavor:

Meanwhile Sister Bibb, the voluptuous church organist, who at fifty-five years old was thick-bodied, smooth and brown as a chocolate candy bar, arrived in terrible shape. She was coming off her once-a-year sin jamboree, an all-night, two-fisted, booze-guzzling, swig-faced affair of delicious tongue-in-groove licking and love-smacking with her sometimes boyfriend, Hot Sausage, until Sausage withdrew from the festivities for lack of endurance.

And for those who appreciate snappy dialogue, look no further. What in the Sixties we used to call “rank-outs” or “snaps” appear here in a poetic form guaranteed to prompt laughter. For instance: “But that idiot’s so dumb he lights up a room by leaving it.” Or: “Son, you looks like a character witness for a nightmare.” McBride has a superb ear and inventive pen, which makes the narrative a delightful ride.

For the first two chapters, McBride even goes a little too far, I think, unraveling so many stories within stories, and with such far-ranging flights of verbal fancy, that I worried. I thought reading Deacon King Kong would be like eating an entire tub of caramel pecan ice cream in a half-hour, past my limit. But the narrative settles down somewhat, to the extent that it does, and McBride’s storytelling skills come to the fore.

Every spoonful matters, as details you might have glossed over come back to play important roles. Characters cross paths in natural yet unexpected ways, and points of view transition gracefully from one to other. Sportcoat moves through the novel oblivious to the effect he has on others, the ultimate catalyst — and denies it, if anyone should point it out to him.

Two key themes emerge. One involves how white interpretations of Black life rest on lies that Black people need not — must not — accept, even if they can do nothing else to fulfill themselves. Dignity requires insisting on the truth. Within that, a person finds meaning and hope by taking small actions, even though they won’t change the big picture. That’s all anyone can do.

As historical fiction, the novel gets down to neighborhood level, as in how the influx or departure of certain groups changes the Cause, how the police or certain agencies function differently from the past, or how drugs have taken over, and the horrific damage that follows. That’s what 1969 means here, aside from frequent references to the New York Mets. And though I yield to no one in my love for that team, I do wish McBride had gone a little further. In particular, I’d have liked to hear more about the Vietnam War, for instance, because maybe residents of the Cause had strong feelings about fighting the white man’s war in Southeast Asia.

But Deacon King Kong is a terrific book and a testament to the author’s range and vision.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from bookshop.org, a bookseller that shares its receipts with independent bookstores.

The Marsh Girl: Where the Crawdads Sing

11 Monday Jan 2021

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Review: Where the Crawdads Sing, by Delia Owens
Putnam, 2018. 368 pp. $28

Six-year-old Kya doesn’t know her real name is Catherine, nor has she ever been to school. All she knows is the South Carolina marsh where she lives with several siblings, a drunken, violent father, and a much put-upon mother. But in summer 1952, Ma walks out, after which Kya’s brothers and sisters follow. Little Kya has to raise herself, essentially, because her father’s often absent on a bender, which can be a blessing. Her only friends are wild creatures, whose habits she comes to know intimately; her greatest, sole pleasure.

You see the wild creatures she loves, rendered with insight and deep feeling:

A great blue heron is the color of gray mist reflecting in blue water. And like the mist, she can fade into the backdrop, all of her disappearing except the concentric circles of her lock-and-load eyes. She is a patient, solitary hunter, standing alone as long as it takes her to snatch her prey. Or, eyeing her catch, she will stride forward one slow step at a time, like a predacious bridesmaid. And yet, on rare occasions she hunts on the wing, darting and diving sharply, swordlike beak in the lead.

Kya herself might answer to this description, especially that of the “patient, solitary hunter.” The vivid portrait of nature in a place nobody else wants, whose human inhabitants the inlanders consider trash, provides a superb background. And the tale of how this girl grows up by her own wits (and kindness of strangers), terrified of just about everybody and everything except the marsh, makes remarkable reading.

However, Where the Crawdads Sing doesn’t settle for the unusual coming-of-age story, and therein rests its greatest shortcoming. Jumping ahead to 1969, as many of these short chapters do, there’s a mystery as well. A former high school quarterback, the town Lothario, is found dead in the marsh. You guess right away that the police, utterly incompetent and desperate to find a murderer (they refuse to accept that such a demigod could have died accidentally), will home in on the Marsh Girl, what the locals call her. She’s reputed savage, lustful, and depraved, the townsfolk’s way saying that she’s different from them, therefore expendable.

The All-Star Bowling Alley, Orangeburg, South Carolina, pictured in 2015. In February 1968, police opened fire on Black students protesting the alley’s segregation policy at the time. Three students were killed and dozens injured. (Courtesy Ammodramus, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Granted, the southern-justice narrative provides an instantly recognizable means to raise the stakes. But Owens introduces the death in a prologue and keeps the police procedure front and center, as if the mind-boggling story of a little girl in a marsh weren’t enough. As years pass, there’s also a tender romance with a young man who accepts Kya as she is. I’d have thought all that sufficient and quite lovely, so I ask why we need the mystery. I will say that the murder investigation allows Owens to expound, sometimes cogently, on mating habits and the genetics of survival, linking her protagonist’s story to evolution, a clever conceit.

But much of the novel feels contrived. I never sense that Kya, who undergoes great hardship and takes brutal, yet often predictable, knocks, is ever really in danger. Terrible things happen, but just as the marsh protects her from outsiders who don’t know its waterways or approaches, the narrative cocoons her, in a way.

Start with how a child grows to her twenties in perfect health, without ever having seen a doctor or dentist. But if that sounds like nitpicking, consider the split time frame, which puts you in 1969 right away, undermining the tensions of 1952 and the immediate years afterward. Also, the kind strangers often appear at just the right moment, sometimes bearing a bounty too good to be true. After a while, I get the idea that whatever trouble comes her way, luck will favor her.

Further, Kya’s voice goes all over the map, which jars me and pulls me out of the story. Owens seems eager to get to the age where Kya speaks and thinks like an autodidact biologist offering thoughtful commentary about evolution (itself a stretch), rather than stay with the bewildered, frightened child who doesn’t know where her next meal is coming from, or how to prepare it. Since I want to hear the child and don’t always believe the self-trained scientist, the struggle between the voices is very distracting, especially when one intrudes on the other. The paragraph quoted above, about the heron, supplies an example; Kya wouldn’t know what “concentric circles” means, let alone “bridesmaid” or “lock-and-load.” So who’s watching the heron?

Finally, the year 1969 witnessed turmoil and great events, but I don’t recognize them here, or little about the Sixties, for that matter. The Vietnam War barely makes an appearance, and though Jim Crow seeps around the edges, it’s as if Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement had gone unheard of in South Carolina. Moon landing? Nary a mention, even among the inlanders.

Despite a terrific premise and beautiful prose, Where the Crawdads Sing is one of those novels that would have appealed to me more had the author crammed less in it.

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

Racetrack Mayhem: A Stone’s Throw

06 Monday Aug 2018

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Review: A Stone’s Throw, by James W. Ziskin
Seventh Street/Prometheus, 2018. 295 pp. $16

Ellie Stone, the heroine sleuth of this engaging, clever mystery, is a reporter for an upstate New York newspaper. It’s August 1962, height of the racing season in nearby Saratoga Springs, when Ellie happens on a fire at the abandoned Tempesta Farm, once a quality breeding place for Thoroughbreds. A barn has burned, which should have no particular significance, since it’s been years since Tempesta operated. However, Ellie finds human remains in the ashes and a bit of racing silk that suggests the victim was a jockey. A bullet hole through the head confirms that it’s murder, which leads the police to suspect gamblers as the criminals.

Ellie isn’t so sure, and, as is her wont, she pursues the case from every conceivable angle, like any good reporter; for about a week, she seems never to get any sleep. Knowing nothing about racing, she relies on a good friend to teach her, whereupon she drops the nuggets she’s learned into conversations with gamblers, horsemen, and racetrack swells, often with comic results. Ellie befriends a beautiful, temperamental horse named Purgatorio, and crosses paths with hoods who have no beauty but plenty of temperament. Her allies in the police department worry about her, especially the closer she gets to the truth, and the more heat that results.

Ziskin tells his story with brisk economy, and despite a large cast of characters, he never loses you. That should be a given, but I’ve read many mysteries in which I’ve had to stop and say, “What just happened, exactly?” Yet the clarity never reveals too much, and the solution to the mystery comes as a complete surprise — another quality that eludes some authors.

The prose is nicely seasoned without being cute or cloying, and that helps too:

With all the grace of a punch-drunk prizefighter stumbling to his feet on the count of nine, the coroner pushed himself up off the muddy ground with both arms and a couple of grunts. Vertical once more, he coughed himself red in the face. After several restorative breaths, he wiped his hands on a cloth, which he tossed aside like a soiled tissue. Someone else would clean it up. Or maybe not. In no hurry to answer my question, he retrieved an Old Gold from a crumpled package in the breast pocket of his jacket, flicked his lighter, and puffed smoke into the air.

As for historical flavor, I would have liked more than random details of dress, popular music, or news headlines. To his credit, though, Ziskin involves social issues hovering on the mainstream horizon in 1962. I particularly like how he handles the office politics, which conveys both background and contrast. Ellie has an assistant, an older woman with a developmentally disabled child, who does a lot of the spade work, for little money and no recognition, except from Ellie. The younger woman, educated at Barnard and blessed with the more glamorous, better-paying job, realizes how unfair this is.

However, her status cuts two ways, for Ellie endures the sobriquet of “girl reporter,” symbolic of the hostility she faces on her beat and in the newsroom. Ellie never describes herself physically in her narration, but you get the idea that she’s very attractive, often more of a hindrance than an advantage. When an old-timer at the paper makes a remark about her derrière, she photographs his and posts the prints where other staffers can laugh at them. But it’s not all fun and games, for Ellie faces constant sexual harassment, and she fights an uphill battle to be taken seriously. Luckily, her editor believes in her reportorial skills— but nevertheless, she depends upon a man’s good graces.

Also, Ellie’s Jewish, and Ziskin does a fine job portraying the shades of anti-Semitism she encounters, whether from the Saratoga blue-bloods or the underworld types. The blue-bloods also have no idea how racist they are toward African-Americans, even as they raise money to aid poor black schoolchildren. Properly, Ziskin never mentions the national movements or leaders campaigning for women’s rights or against racial and ethnic prejudice, a low-key approach that avoids earnestness or exaggerated significance.

These are some of the pleasures of A Stone’s Throw, an excellent, satisfying mystery. Even readers who don’t remember the early Sixties will enjoy it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher via Historical Novels Review, in whose pages this post first appeared in different, shorter form.

Cowboy Ethics: As Good As Gone

19 Monday Dec 2016

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Review: As Good As Gone, by Larry Watson
Algonquin, 2016. 341 pp. $27

To an outsider, it might seem as if little of the 1960s have touched Gladstone, Montana. But to Calvin Sidey, an aging, tough-minded cowboy who withdrew from the town years ago to live alone on its outskirts, the world of 1963 has taken over. Even on a brief drive through, he recognizes few landmarks, and mentioning the names of people he once knew raises puzzled looks or brings the news that this one has died, while the other lives in a nursing home.

Bozeman, Montana, city hall, fire station, and opera house, built 1890, demolished, 1966 (Courtesy Historic American Buildings Survey, National Park Service, via Wikimedia Commons)

Bozeman, Montana, city hall, fire station, and opera house, built 1890, demolished, 1966 (Courtesy Historic American Buildings Survey, National Park Service, via Wikimedia Commons)

Calvin wouldn’t have ventured into Gladstone at all, if his estranged son, Bill, hadn’t asked him to watch over the grandkids while Bill and his wife, Marjorie, go to Missoula so that she can have an operation. Nobody likes this arrangement. Bill resents Calvin for abandoning him and his sister after their mother died; Marjorie doesn’t trust Calvin to fulfill his responsibilities; and Calvin would rather bite the head off a rattlesnake than stay in Gladstone or, worse, have to talk to his son. Then again, Calvin hates talking to anybody.

Naturally, plenty will happen during Bill and Marjorie’s absence, putting Calvin and everyone around him under pressure. As Good As Gone would have been better had much less happened, but I like Watson’s premise, which gives his protagonist plenty of scope. I also believe the look and feel of Gladstone, from the dive bars to the stores, the weather, the cooking, the small-town atmosphere, and the social attitudes, the latter rendered with a light touch. The characters sense that they should be more tolerant, but they can’t bring themselves to act that way, and whatever’s happening in the world–civil rights marches, protests–is all Out There someplace, lurking on the edge of consciousness.

While Bill and Marjorie are away, Calvin charges at conflicts rather than step aside, because that’s who he is. When a neighbor’s dog gets into the garbage cans and strews litter all over–a chronic problem, he hears–Calvin tells the neighbor that if it happens again, he’ll shoot the dog. Such is his reputation that the neighbors pick up the trash and keep the dog leashed. Calvin also rushes into action when an irate tenant (Bill’s a real estate agent who owns rental property) barges into the Sidey home to scream about an eviction notice. I don’t have to tell you that the young man stalking Calvin’s beautiful, seventeen-year-old granddaughter, had better watch his step; that confrontation is set up almost from the get-go.

There’s more–the widow next door who takes a fancy to Calvin; his sensitive grandson, Will, bullied by his so-called friends; Marjorie’s operation (a hysterectomy), which goes wrong, or appears to; and Bill’s ache for the father who’s remained out of reach. Six narrators tell this story, of uneven range and strength; except for the widow, the women’s voices seem insubstantial. Moreover, the presence of six narrators implies many subplots to keep spinning, two of which have little or nothing to do with the main narrative.

The myriad threads obscure the fabric of what matters most: Calvin’s grief over his dead wife, which led him to abandon his kids, and how Bill feels about that. Part of the problem is that Watson can’t seem to decide which to focus on, Calvin’s character or Bill’s loss of him. But either way, though the narrative mentions what these men feel and describes them having the feelings, they abruptly leave off grappling with them, and each other. Rather, events represent emotions, and only in that way do the characters take them in.

For instance, Bill fears for Marjorie’s life, and that his mother’s death will be repeated. His fear is irrational, and he knows it, but that’s how deeply he’s been scarred. Life feels fragile to him, and everything he has can be swept away. Unfortunately, Watson fiddles with this very human paradox, as if he can’t bear to let a rational man have an irrational fear; my God, what will the reader think of him? So melodrama takes over: Marjorie slips into a brief coma, and it appears, for awhile, that she might actually die.

In fact, melodrama undoes much fine work in As Good As Gone, for many chapters end just before impending violence, a cliff-hanger technique that resembles the Westerns whose myths Watson wishes to debunk. Calvin’s courage and willingness to act are admirable, but his stubborn refusal to listen to anyone else, his code of vigilante justice, and the way he equates softer, human feelings with weakness leads to trouble. These are compelling themes, and as I read, I couldn’t help thinking of Lonely Are the Brave, a terrific 1962 film starring Kirk Douglas. I only wish that Watson had used his gift for economy to better effect, much as the movie did.

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

Too Much, Yet Too Little: The Last Road Home

14 Monday Nov 2016

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Review: The Last Road Home, by Danny Johnson
Kensington, 2016. 324 pp. $15

As a young North Carolina boy in the late 1950s, Raeford Hurley loses his parents in a car accident. He goes to live with his grandparents, who farm tobacco in Chatham County, not far from Durham. They’re kind to him, and he loves them, but he misses his mother and their brief joyful moments:

We laughed, jumping around and making fools of ourselves, until we had to sit down on the floor. Her happiness would flow out like a circling wind and wrap me up, pulling me into her joy, letting me know it was okay to be alive and be silly. Daddy was the only one I ever saw who could make Momma’s eyes water. I think he would sometimes be mean to her on purpose just to show us life was serious and hard, and not to be wasted being childish. My momma was too gentle to die.

Right away, you understand what Raeford, known as Junebug, is looking for. And where he tries to find it, or, rather, with whom, makes for a gripping premise. Junebug’s only friends are two African-American twins, Lightning and Fancy Stroud, whose sharecropper parents work for white families. By the time they’re fifteen, in the early 1960s, Fancy and Junebug realize their attraction for one another. Despite the threat of exposure and violence in a community where the Ku Klux Klan holds sway, they have a passionate, all-consuming affair.

Evicted sharecroppers, Parkin, Arkansas, 1936 (Courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons)

Evicted sharecroppers, Parkin, Arkansas, 1936 (Courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons)

What’s more, Fancy’s the sexual aggressor, making so many passes at Junebug that there’s no doubt she’s willed them to be together. Hasn’t she been raised to fear such impulses, especially where white boys are concerned? She says she has, yet her romance with Junebug feels inevitable. You know they’ll sleep together; you just don’t know exactly when.

Johnson writes as if Fancy and Junebug were like any two teenagers, who, given time and mutual attraction, will do what comes naturally. There’s naive charm in this, to be sure, but it’s also hard to believe. Surely, they’ve been taught that their relationship is anything but natural, so you’d expect them to struggle against that constraint and get to where they can embrace one another and damn the bigoted world. Instead, the process unfolds externally, based on facts rather than psychological depth–they’ve known each other since they were kids, they find warmth and laughter in each other, and their hormones are overflowing.

Consequently, The Last Road Home feels too self-conscious by half, and the failure to evoke time or place suggests a rootlessness, much as with the orphaned Junebug himself. Johnson excels at interiors; you see the tobacco farm, the chores, the general store in town, and so forth. But you don’t see the town itself, the red dirt by the roadside, or the Confederate flags on the license plates; you don’t smell the tobacco curing when you drive the highway; and the 1960s never emerge, at least not to suggest that the characters live and breathe in their milieu. Even civil-rights protests rate barely a mention, and then only so that a character can predict that the racial landscape will surely change one day.

Rather, Fancy and Junebug exist in a private vacuum. They have no other friends to provide a context or influence their outlook, and Johnson has kept their families small–and, except for Junebug’s grandmother–mostly out of sight. This may seem convenient, because there’s nobody around to upset the grand design, but that’s precisely the difficulty. Rather than explore the interracial love to which other people object, Johnson stuffs the plot with extraneous obstacles, as if blind hatred and the risk of lynching weren’t enough trouble. Without giving anything more away, I’ll paraphrase the jacket flap (too revealing, as is typical). Junebug gets involved in a business deal that goes wrong, leaving him “with a dark secret” he can’t tell anyone. Later, he goes to war, and though the flap doesn’t say where, you know it must be Vietnam.

That’s a lot of heavy lifting just to separate star-crossed lovers. Johnson could have accomplished the same thing had he not restrained the town bigots, who take their time to react and pull their punches when they do. As a result, though The Last Road Home sometimes hits its stride (the Vietnam combat sequences are especially vivid), the novel seems like an explanation rather than a story, a collection rather than a synthesis.

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

Keeping Secrets: Exposure

25 Monday Jul 2016

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Review: Exposure, by Helen Dunmore
Atlantic, 2016. 391 pp. $25

Simon Callington is a decent man, the dutiful Englishman. He’s a devoted husband and father of three, bright but not brilliant, content with modest pleasures, too self-effacing to say no when maybe he should, too slow to realize that others don’t play fair. In other words, Simon is a perfect fall guy. And since this is 1960, when Soviet spies are turning up inside the British government–in fact, his immediate superiors in the Naval Department have been “batting for the other side” for years–a fall guy can be useful.

Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby worked for British Intelligence but was actually a Soviet agent. One of the so-called Cambridge Five, men who attended that institution and spied for the USSR, Philby defected in 1963. This image comes from a 1990 Soviet postage stamp (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Harold Adrian Russell “Kim” Philby worked for British Intelligence but was actually a Soviet agent. One of the so-called Cambridge Five, men who attended that institution and spied for the USSR, Philby defected in 1963. This image comes from a 1990 Soviet postage stamp (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

The story all starts innocently enough. Giles Holloway, an old friend, mentor, and immediate superior, calls Simon at an inconvenient hour to have him rescue a file from a place it should never have gone. Simon agrees, only because he can’t say no to Giles, part of which goes back to their days at Cambridge, when they were lovers. But Simon will have ample time to wish he had said no, because one look at the file tells him that neither man should have seen it, and Giles’s briefcase, which Simon comes across, contains more of the same. Rather than return the file to the office, as Giles wants, Simon brings it home. From there, his life unravels.

With Exposure, Dunmore proves again why she’s among my favorite writers. She’s written a thriller as gripping as any, using Simon’s very ordinariness and decency to devastating effect. There’s no cloak-and-dagger here, no secret that will explode the universe if it falls into the wrong hands, no mole who must be uncovered before he or she compromises national security. Rather, it’s how those who act to protect national security are destroying the decency and moral compass that Simon represents, and they do so without a second thought, certain of their righteousness. So yes, the world is at stake after all, for what happens when decency and moral compass mean nothing?

Consequently, Exposure has to do with how the government Simon serves repays his loyalty, and how they hurt him, his wife, and children. Once suspicion falls on him, he has no friends, and the people he might have counted on for support, like Giles, will gladly sacrifice him to their own interests. Simon’s only ally is his wife, Lily, a woman of great resourcefulness. However, Simon refuses to tell her anything that might compromise her, and Lily, who can be difficult to reach, has a secret of her own that she won’t share.

Dunmore excels here, deriving so much tension from unwillingness or inability to communicate that at times you want to howl. But there are good reasons for it, which, typical of her fiction, come from within the characters. Lily, a German Jew by birth, grew up living “in fear before she knew why she was afraid . . . knowing that people hated her,” and though she escaped her native country, she can’t escape herself. Once Simon is arrested, Lily rebuffs her friends, believing that she mustn’t taint them, and concentrates on protecting her children as best she can.

Another thing I like is how Dunmore contrasts the offhand, charismatic Giles with his mousy, submissive underling. Early on, Giles observes:

We aren’t meant to see ourselves as others see us. In fact it would be a bloody dull world if we did, because no one would ever make a fool of himself again. We might as well accept that we’re put on this earth to make unwitting entertainment for other fellow men, and get on with doing so.

All that sounds very nice, blasé wisdom for the Cambridge common room. But without ever saying so, Dunmore shows what happens when Simon, dull as he may be in comparison with Giles, actually tries to connect with life instead of looking at it as a game. His plight may furnish entertainment for the men who want to sink him, but everyone else is in great pain.

The only false note in this portrayal concerns Simon’s sexuality. If he was homosexual at Cambridge and found it exciting, why has he given it up? He may think of it as a youthful road he no longer prefers to travel, and his marriage is plainly substantial. Yet Giles still exerts a pull over him. Also, Giles’s boss, Julian, though a master of the nasty innuendo and capable of intimidating just about anybody, seems two-dimensional. Almost every time he appears, the adjective cold sticks to him like Arctic ice on bare skin, but that doesn’t satisfy me.

The first book I reviewed for this blog was The Lie, a lyrical, heart-rending tale of rootlessness that’s still my favorite of all those I’ve written about here. Though Exposure deals with a different subject, it’s a worthy companion, and I highly recommend it.

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

Brontë Revisited: The Flight of Gemma Hardy

27 Monday Apr 2015

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Review: The Flight of Gemma Hardy, by Margot Livesey
Harper, 2012. 447 pp. $27

When Gemma Hardy, a plain, shy orphan, loses her kind uncle to drowning, the roof caves in. Her aunt and cousins turn on her as though she were responsible, yet, as the astute young girl quickly notices, she’s the only one to mourn him. Humiliated daily, accused of sins she doesn’t commit, and punished when she pushes back, Gemma comes to believe that anything she loves will be squashed, and that no one will love or accept her.

Offered the chance to go to Claypoole, a girls’ boarding school, Gemma seizes it with both hands. A sympathetic teacher tries to warn her that where she’s headed will feel more like an orphanage than a school, but she’s so desperate to escape–and to learn–that she ignores his advice. On arriving at Claypoole, she realizes that he was right: As a “working girl,” she’s more servant than student and the object of scorn and bullying, in which the faculty take the lead.

No, this isn’t Dickensian London, though at least one adult to whom she manages to reveal her plight invokes the comparison. It’s 1950s Scotland, and the literary ancestor is Brontë, not Dickens. Livesey has set out to retell Jane Eyre, and what a captivating, satisfying job she does. I don’t remember the original that well, but Gemma meets her Rochester–a Mr. Sinclair, who owns a country house in the Orkneys–and their complicated relationship is fraught with untold secrets, none of which involves a madwoman or an attic.

St. Magnus Cathedral, Kirkwall, Orkneys (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the US).

St. Magnus Cathedral, Kirkwall, Orkneys (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the US).

I’d guess that Gemma has more poetry and resourcefulness in her than Jane, and maybe a stronger spirit of independence, though Gemma can more likely afford that, living a century later. Livesey paints the era lightly, in the background, yet it’s there, in the gradual, increasing breadth of opportunity for women not born to wealth or social position.

However, the real story here is of course Gemma’s struggle to find a place–any place–for herself. Her late uncle was a minister, and when she ventures into his study, she comes across his last sermon, left half-written at his death:

We each begin as an island, but we soon build bridges. Even the most solitary person has, perhaps without knowing it, a causeway, a cable, a line of stepping-stones, connecting him or her to others, allowing for the possibility of communication and affection.

Gemma spends the rest of the novel trying to realize these words and to understand what more her uncle might have said about them had he lived. Her journey takes her a long way, not in miles but in insight, and through many a heartache. Her hunger for connection, and her setbacks in finding it, lead her to think, “Not everyone who was fond of me died, but everyone came to harm.” However, she never, ever stops striving.

The calamities come thick and fast, at times, but I never felt the narrative descended into melodrama, because–those of you who’ve read my reviews can guess what I’m about to say–Gemma has a highly developed inner life. Her dreams and desires feel real and earned, and Livesey has taken care to make even Gemma’s worst tormentors real people, invariably because they have their own torments and terrors. The brutes in Livesey’s world behave cruelly mostly because they feel precarious too. That they may also gain by it matters, of course, yet it’s secondary.

Livesey grew up in Scotland, and she renders her native landscape, harsh as it sometimes appears, with such beauty that I feel a stirring to visit the Orkneys. She plays down the Gothic elements, a choice that suits me fine, though they’re there–voices in the wind, legends, a character or two with second sight. Toward the end, Gemma goes through a couple emotional transitions that passed by a bit quickly, maybe with more ease than I expected, and a final scene that comes about rather neatly. But this is a small criticism to make of a terrific novel.

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

A Widow Finds Her Voice: Nora Webster

26 Thursday Mar 2015

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Review: Nora Webster, by Colm Toíbín
Scribner, 2014. 373 pp. $27
When I first started reading Nora Webster, I wondered whether it deserved to be called a historical novel. Now that I’ve finished it, I think that in its masterful subtlety and understatement, the book ranks among the best historical fiction I’ve read in a while.

The flap copy actually undersells Nora Webster, odd as that sounds. Scribner would have us believe it’s a story about a newly widowed Irishwoman in her forties, trying to cope with loss, loneliness, and her struggles to raise four children on her meager savings. But it’s also how Nora, paralleling the feminist movement of the late 1960s–which seeps into the narrative around the edges–literally and figuratively finds her own voice.

Tower in Wexford, Ireland, 2008. (Courtesy Ian Murphy; public domain in the U.S.)

Tower in Wexford, Ireland, 2008. (Courtesy Ian Murphy; public domain in the U.S.)

At the start, Nora’s preoccupied with fending off well-wishers who continue to press her with platitudes about Maurice, her late husband, who died a few months before. In this small town in County Wexford, not only does everyone know everyone else’s business, they consider it their right to judge it, from clothes to hairstyles to whatever they assume is right and proper. Nora suffers intensely from scrutiny, real or imagined, and–in the beginning–curbs herself to try to avoid it, partly by putting up with the intrusion.

As with everything about her, you see many sides, not all of them sympathetic–her desperate need to grieve by herself; her passivity at allowing anyone to interrupt; her anger at herself for it; her self-absorption, which costs her children, especially her two young sons; and the patronizing way her relatives try to fix her life. They even have good ideas, and the money to implement them, which forces Nora to choose between accepting needed help or insisting on her independent authority.

However, there’s much more. She notices, for the first time, how her sisters pay close attention to whatever a man says, never fussing or trying to do two tasks at once while he speaks, as they would if it were only Nora. To these women, she’s not really there, she realizes. Further, when the conversation turns to politics, one sister asks the men what they think, but nobody ever asks her, though she has strong opinions. Maurice never asked her either, apparently, which makes Nora wonder whether she’ll be speaking up more, now that he’s gone.

Oh, yes, she will. Nora can be oppositional and intimidating, so much so that she’s scared her children, who talk more openly with their aunts and uncles. Gradually, however, she turns her strength toward what she wants and believes in, despite what others may say or think. Much is happening in Ireland–killings between Catholic and Protestant, protesters beaten or killed, demands for better working and living conditions, voices raised for feminism. And Nora’s television is always on, bringing news of change into her household. So when she returns to the job she once held before her marriage, she’s no longer the pushover she once was, and even joins a union. Toíbín is too good a novelist to make this transition simple–Nora scuffles with herself, endlessly–but she sheds her reticence and expands her life.

Most significantly, Nora has always had a fine singing voice but never trained or used it. Now she does, taking lessons from a woman whom everyone else finds too eccentric; in fact, all Nora’s new friends have that reputation. It’s the perfect metaphor to describe Nora’s life as a widow: For once, she has found her own voice, and damn the gossips.

Colm Toíbín has written a lovely, moving novel about a woman suffering through heartbreak, but also a novel about the 1960s that feels lived in (and much more satisfying than Cementville, which I reviewed earlier this week). What a story.

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

The Dead Returned from Vietnam: Cementville

23 Monday Mar 2015

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Review: Cementville, by Paulette Livers

Counterpoint, 2014. 275 pp. $25

In May 1969, an American artillery platoon near Phu Bai suffered heavy losses during a night attack by North Vietnamese infantry. Since the platoon originated from a Kentucky National Guard unit, many of the dead hailed from the same county, which threw a community into deep mourning.

The firebase near Phu Bai, overrun in May 1969 (Courtesy Kentucky National Guard).

The firebase near Phu Bai, overrun in May 1969 (Courtesy Kentucky National Guard).

Paulette Livers, a native Kentuckian, has turned this collective grief into a novel, Cementville, named for the fictional county seat that lays to rest seven of its sons. Livers casts her net widely, trying to re-create an entire town, many of whose members are related by blood or marriage, and how they grieve the losses (or don’t). Each has an intersecting story, which gives the novel a mosaic feel. There’s thirteen-year-old Maureen, determined to live an important life, while her mother, Katherine, does her best to keep the apron strings tied, the relationship that interested me the most. But Cementville also has a Vietnamese war bride; a murderous clan, the Fergusons, who live in trailers; Nimrod Grebe, an elderly black man who fought in World War I; a woman who invents reasons not to leave her house, except to visit the library; and many others.

What an ambitious scheme. I applaud the attempt to depict a world split in pieces by love, hate, heroism, patriotism, bitterness, and grief. That’s like reaching for the stars, and not enough novelists do that today. Also, as someone who remembers 1969 very well, I’m always looking for a full-fledged, honest rendition of that time. The jacket flap promises a “microcosm of a society shedding the old order and learning how to live with grief,” so I grabbed Cementville off the library shelf. Further, Livers writes well, beautifully, at times.

But Cementville, though a valiant attempt, remains mostly earthbound for me. For one thing, it’s more a collection of stories than a novel, unlinked by any common thread, except a murder that seems gratuitous, even trivial, next to everything else. Significant characters behave strangely, for no apparent reason, and some of the better-drawn figures, like Katherine and Maureen, need deeper inner lives.

Then too, the town isn’t a microcosm of anything; it’s a pastiche. The narrative mentions that Katherine’s reading The Feminine Mystique, and also refers to possible resentment in the town that a young girl from the Ferguson trailer clan keeps house for Nimrod Grebe, the elderly African-American. But that’s the extent of feminism and race relations here.

I can’t blame Livers for not living up to the hype–authors don’t necessarily write their own flap copy–but I wish she’d provided a true sense of time and place. It takes more than passing references to Led Zeppelin or fish-net stockings to portray an era that feels lived in. Nobody in this novel debates or feels strongly about signs of change, whether campus protests, the moon landing, hallucinogenic drugs, hemlines, haircuts, or any other aspect of that noisy era. Even more astonishingly, nobody discusses the war that has caused such pain, nor do the young men who lost their lives appear as anything but faceless ghosts.

This is a crucial weakness, I think, reflected in how there seems to be only one resident supporter of the war among many critics of it. That rings false, both to the fictional world and what actually happened. In fact, Livers could have used differing opinions about the war, and whether the local boys died in vain, as a driving (and dividing) force. Consequently, it’s not just outside events that fail to echo in Cementville; it’s the disaster in Cementville that fails to shake the place deeply enough.

Dislcaimer: I borrowed my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Playing the Hand You’re Dealt

22 Thursday Jan 2015

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Review: The Hollow Ground, by Natalie S. Harnett
St. Martin’s, 2014. 320 pp. $25

Child abuse is my least favorite subject to read about in fiction. Having reviewed two books this week in which parents systematically reduce a child to emotional rubble, I feel shaken and a bit ambushed, especially because I wasn’t expecting it. The publishers’ synopses said nothing about it, so I guess I’m not the only one who minds.

However, the flap copy for The Hollow Ground does compare the novel’s child narrator, Brigid Howley, to Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, and I have to say, Harnett earns the comparison. The story unfolds in the Pennsylvania coal fields in the early 1960s, vividly and excruciatingly rendered through Brigid’s eyes. She’s the most rounded, complete child narrator I’ve read in years: perceptive, but not unnaturally so; awkward as she should be; struggling to understand the nightmare in which she lives; and, poor soul, trying her damndest to appease the monsters who stage it. Good luck. To top it off, something happened in the mines to her late uncle and her disabled father, which, according to legend, is why her family lives under a curse.

Pennsylvania coal miners. (Courtesy State of Pennsylvania)

Pennsylvania coal miners. (Courtesy State of Pennsylvania)

Meanwhile, the ground is shifting beneath their feet, literally. Subterranean fires have closed the mines, throwing thousands out of work. Many houses have collapsed, whereas others have become uninhabitable, whether from carbon monoxide fumes or the tremendous heat. Wallpaper peels, cold water comes from the tap lukewarm, and vegetables ripen in the dead of winter. It’s as if hell has opened its jaws, ready to swallow them, hence the title.

But the real hell here is the Howleys. With perfect pitch, Harnett portrays their shifting alliances, which exclude Brigid and sacrifice her for her elders’ purposes. If she speaks up, they slap her down, sometimes physically. If she so much as flinches in humiliation, they pour it on. Her pain or discouragement or disappointment are nothing compared with theirs; how can she be so selfish as to suffer visibly? That’s how life is, they say, and she’d better get used to it. And oh, yes, they blame her for not being able to keep the place clean, taking no account of the inevitable coal dust that covers everything.

So unrelenting is this agonizing story that I had to force myself to read on. But I did anyway, because I rarely come across characters drawn with such depth and in such prose:

 

It was early July and warm but cooler than the hot spring had been. Fireflies lit up the dark hollows of the woods and no matter how bad things were, I couldn’t help but look on their glow as something magical. Sometimes late on clear nights . . . I’d take a blanket into the backyard and lie down to star watch. Whenever a falling star shot a powdery white streak through the sky, I made a wish. Sometimes I wished something horrible would happen to Ma for all the hurt she’d brought us through, but mostly I wished we’d just all be together again and as happy as I’d always thought we’d one day be.

All this is quite masterful, yet there’s one terrible, jarring note that nearly undoes the novel for me. Harnett has one character state the theme, that you have to play the hand you’re dealt, no matter how bad it is. No argument there, but the author also seems to say that forgetting the past is the first step. I can’t imagine how such an astute observer of human behavior could even suggest this, or imply that it’s an act of will, especially in the world she’s rendered.

The Howleys never say anything genuine about their conflicts with one another, only mouth off to use it as a weapon. Maybe in that sense, they might as well shut up; but even if they did, they wouldn’t forget. And in that benighted Howley clan, only Brigid cares to listen, so there’s no true emotional exchange, no way they’ll ever break the cycle. Which leaves me wondering how in blazes that poor girl will ever learn to play the cards she’s been dealt–and yet, you sense she will.

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