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Tag Archives: Amy Greene

Happy Birthday: This Blog Is Two Years Old

27 Thursday Oct 2016

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Amy Greene, Andrea Molesini, Barry Unsworth, book review, Chris Cleave, historical fiction, Julian Barnes, literary fiction, Mary Renault, Patrick O'Brian, Paul Goldberg, Pulitzer Prize, Shirley Barrett, Stewart O'Nan, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Winston Graham

Once more, thank you for visiting. Whether you’re a regular reader or just dropping by, I’m glad you’ve come and hope you take away something that stays with you. You’re the reason I do this; without you, there’d be no point.

As I did last year, I’ll briefly recap my favorite books from the last twelve months. They belong to different genres within historical fiction, but from each I’ve taken away something that stays with me.

In no particular order, I particularly recommend these:

Everyone Brave Is Forgiven, by Chris Cleave, tells a marvelously observed, wrenching tale of a love triangle during World War II. Think you’ve been there, done that? You haven’t, until you’ve read this one.

Sacred Hunger, by Barry Unsworth, explores Britain’s eighteenth-century slave trade to depict the human urge that puts profit before morality, decency, or empathy. So many novels have overdrawn, flat antagonists, but this book has two utterly real, compelling villains, one of many facets to this brilliant work of literature.

Stewart O’Nan’s thriller, City of Secrets, set in Jerusalem in 1945, portrays in elegant, tense economy the struggle to liberate Palestine, both against the British and among the Jewish organizations fighting them, with a political romance at the center.

Rush Oh!, Shirley Barrett’s delicate, lovely story about whaling in Australia around the turn of the twentieth century, surprises with its humor, compassion, and home truths about selflessness and its opposite.

Long Man, Amy Greene’s elegy for a dying town in 1936, tells how the Tennessee Valley Authority’s dam building raises issues of blood, land, and power. Greene’s rugged, potent prose and deceptively simple premise deliver a haunting novel.

You don’t have to like stories of wooden ships and iron men to appreciate Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander, the first installment of the famous series about the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. Yes, O’Brian knows so much about the sea, it’s effortless, like breathing, but he shows the same touch with the English language and his main characters’ inner lives.

Andrea Molesini’s Not All Bastards Are From Vienna deals squarely with the First World War’s injustice, cruelty, and stupidity, yet is thoroughly engaging, thanks to the characters’ ingenuity, forcefulness, and mordant wit. They’re larger than life yet wholly plausible, the secret of great fiction.

Mary Renault’s classic, The Bull From the Sea, tells the story of Theseus, in such a way that the well-known myth becomes a deep, thought-provoking manifesto on the use of power and the virtue of forbearance. I wish our politicians were half as sensible.

Winston Graham’s Ross Poldark, the first of many volumes in another famous series, tells about an eighteenth-century iconoclast in Cornwall who tries to reform his life and lands–and then meets a young girl who’s an absolute firecracker.

In The Noise of Time, Julian Barnes re-creates the life of Dmitri Shostakovich, the Russian composer who just manages to escape’s Stalin’s purges and often wonders whether he made the right choice. A riveting, darkly funny story.

Paul Goldberg, in The Yid, also revisits the Stalin years, supposing that the Great Leader was planning a second Holocaust in the 1950s, and that his antagonist is a former actor from the state Yiddish Theater. Fiction doesn’t get any bolder–or more absurdly real–than this.

Viet Thanh Nguyen won the Pulitzer Prize for The Sympathizer, and he deserved it. A riveting-to-the-eyeballs tale about the Vietnam War, told in flawless prose from the vantage point of a Communist mole within the South Vietnamese intelligence service, this novel skewers both sides and everyone connected with them. Superb.

Anything you particularly liked during the last year?

 

Elegy for a Town: Long Man

28 Monday Mar 2016

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

1936, Amy Greene, Great Depression, historical fiction, land heritage, literary fiction, New Deal, rural poverty, Tennessee, Tennessee Valley Authority, twentieth century

Review: Long Man, by Amy Greene
Knopf, 2014. 272 pp. $26

Come August 3, 1936, the east Tennessee town of Yuneetah will cease to exist. On that day, the Tennessee Valley Authority, part of FDR’s New Deal, will unleash the Long Man River, and the dam built at its headwaters will submerge the valley. Most residents have left the land their forebears had settled for centuries, whether because the hardscrabble soil couldn’t feed them or, more recently, they bowed to the government’s eviction notices. But Annie Clyde Dodson, who can trace her lineage in part to the Cherokees who hunted this valley, isn’t going anywhere. She’ll stay, even to risk her life and that of her three-year-old daughter, Gracie, even to say goodbye to her devoted husband, James, who’s found a factory job in Michigan.

TVA sign from the Roosevelt Museum at Hyde Park, New York (Courtesy Billy Hathorn via Wikimedia Commons, 2015; public domain)

TVA sign from the FDR Presidential Library at Hyde Park, New York (Courtesy Billy Hathorn via Wikimedia Commons, 2015; public domain)

From the first words, you see Annie Clyde’s mindset, as she overlooks her limestone ridge at sunset:

She would watch with her knees gathered up as the last light mellowed into dusk, falling down the piney bluffs. Before half the homesteads were razed the lowering sun would stain the tin roofs of houses and barns, deepening the rust to oxblood. Gilding wheat sheaves and tobacco rows, shading red clay furrows. Last summer she might have heard a farmer calling in his cows. . . . But now there was only stillness and silence besides the tree frogs singing as twilight drifted toward night.

Such spare, potent prose brings life to these age-old themes of blood, land, and power. That power comes in two forms. One is the electricity the dam will produce, new to eastern Tennessee, and in which everyone will share. The other is the power to take homes away, wielded by bureaucrats who have nothing but contempt for the people who live in them.

But though Long Man treads perilously close to a self-righteous tale pitting salt-of-the-earth farmers against evil city slickers, Greene takes the high road with her main characters. Annie Clyde, as you may have guessed, is almost fatally stubborn, the type who refuses to listen to anyone. So when James announces his intention to move to Michigan, she cuts him dead, and he tries vainly to fight off the conclusion that she’s never loved him. When he finally gathers the courage to confront her, she won’t discuss it, which only hurts him more. But just as she fears leaving Yuneetah would mean abandoning the best part of herself, what she loves about the land, her property, and her ancestors’ graves–her life, in other words–he has his own story.

It’s not just that James hates farming–eating dust, watching the heat burn the corn, and hoping that the next heavy rain won’t wash away what little topsoil is left. Rather, the valley frightens him, for he watched his father drown in one of many floods that the Long Man inflicts on the long-suffering population. Even if they could stay–if the dam didn’t make that impossible–James wants a life where he need not fear for himself or his family, where earning a living need not be such a struggle, where the hard environment won’t kill them before their time.

Nevertheless, as the deadline looms, James realizes that if he goes to Michigan, Annie Clyde will stay behind with Gracie. But during a heavy rainstorm, Gracie disappears, and suddenly the whole population joins the hunt for a child whose spirit and cheerfulness have made her beloved. It’s as if everyone tacitly believes that if she were to die, there’d be no hope left in the world.

Long Man offers many pleasures, not least the subtle symbolism, which feels almost biblical in scope. It’s like the Flood that will sweep away an old world; but there’s no ark, no Noah, and, most important, no God to watch over anyone. I also like the name Yuneetah, which reminds me of a famous biscuit, an ironic similarity–you need this dam. But Annie Clyde thinks she doesn’t, and she’s betting that the new world the water brings will be worse than the old.

I also like Greene’s characterizations. Besides the two principals, the most memorable is Amos, a drifter from Yuneetah who’s mean, unpredictable, and the definition of passive-aggressive, but who thinks he has the charismatic spirit everyone else lacks–and may be right. However, Greene sometimes interrupts her narrative for backstory about a minor figure, and though I understand her desire to give everyone his or her due, that can go too far. I also find it unbelievable that the only social prejudices belong to the bureaucrats, and that nobody talks about race–this is 1936, after all, in the South.

Still, Long Man is a terrific book.

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

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