Tag Archives: coming-of-age narrative

What a State They’re In: Homestead

13 Monday Mar 2023

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Review: Homestead, by Melinda Moustakis
Flatiron, 2023. 256 pp. $28

In 1956, without even a proper map, Lawrence Beringer stakes claim to 150 acres in the Alaska Territory and is called a tenderfoot for his trouble. No surprise that shortly afterward, he sets eyes on Marie Kubala at a tavern and immediately asks her to marry him. She accepts.

What an arresting, unusual premise, which parallels the main characters’ surroundings. If marriage is a frontier, consider that the Alaska Territory has been lobbying the federal government to grant statehood. But just as Alaska’s residents can’t predict how that change will affect them, neither Lawrence nor Marie have a clue what lies in store, whether it concerns homesteading or each other.

President Dwight Eisenhower signs the Alaska Statehood Act, July 1958 (courtesy U.S. National Park Service via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Lawrence, son of a failed Minnesota farmer who has also failed at managing diners, is determined to succeed. Life has brought him nothing to call his own, but he’ll satisfy the requirements to prove his claim if it kills him.

A Korean War veteran in his midtwenties who received an early, honorable discharge under hazy circumstances, he carries a shameful secret from that experience. But he doesn’t talk about it—or anything—and probably smiles, oh, maybe once a month. However, he knows he wants a dozen children, or thinks he does. That’s a secret too, and, it seems, the reason he wishes to marry.

As for his bride, Marie’s Texas childhood was loveless except from her sister, Sheila, who lives in Anchorage with her husband. The girls’ mother left when they were young, and their grandmother, who took them in, gave them nothing but lectured them on the vast debt they owed her. Marie, visiting Alaska to see Sheila, jumps at the chance to escape. And Lawrence seems physically strong and capable in practical matters.

But her new husband shies away from sex or even affection (though he does make her pregnant rather soon), dislikes conversation, and shows no interest in Marie or her past. He also discourages questions, so that, even after a few months, she thinks she knows nothing about him.

Two flashpoints upset her. As she nears her time to give birth, she asks to do so in a hospital, and he refuses, saying they don’t have the money—only to dream, out loud, about buying costly farm equipment. He doesn’t dare reveal he shudders about being “trapped” in a building where she’s bleeding. (Tough luck, big guy.) Moreover, when Marie asks that when they prove the claim, her name goes on the deed too, Lawrence resents this mightily.

By making Lawrence over-the-top cold, nasty, and ungiving, Moustakis has set up a peculiar dynamic. Luckily, she doesn’t have him undergo an earthshaking (implausible) change. Nor has she written a female fantasy in which woman civilizes male savage and lives with him happily ever after.

Rather, Homestead shows how Marie summons up the courage to ask for what she wants and to push back when Lawrence refuses. I like those scenes, but the groundwork fails to convince me. Where did Marie get the emotional strength, growing up without love, abandoned by her mother and abused by her wicked grandmother? Maybe that’s the part that sounds like a fairytale setup, though focusing on Marie’s efforts and not their result is at least a fresh take.

But Lawrence is the weaker characterization, by far. I don’t see how he can be so self-absorbed, treat his wife like a tool, and act amazed when she resents it, unless he’s psychologically damaged. But he’s not; he’s simply stubborn and criminally obtuse. Moustakis harps on the Korean War trauma, but there’s no evidence he was warm and fuzzy before then.

Even more puzzling, when his father, Joseph, shows up to help build a cabin, you have to wonder whether the son is really somebody else’s child. Joseph’s a kindly, sensitive, generous person—my favorite character—and he tries gently to take his son in hand. Guess how far that goes.

Moustakis writes beautifully, even better without the occasional breathless, Proustian sentences that call attention to themselves and can be hard to follow. But she does render the toil and ingenuity that go into making a homestead with remarkable vividness and precision. I admire those sections and have never read anything like them.

Then there’s Alaska, whose natural beauty can sweep you away:

She should turn back, but above the ridge is a distant glow, as if from another, fuller moon. A soft tick, tick, tick crackles in her ears, the break of a radio. . . .As she crests the top, the air thickens, a charge runs up her spine and hums at the back of her skull, and the nightgown clings, molds to her body. A green blaze is twisting and roping in the sky, a witching spell threading through the stars and coming for her. Waves of light above and below and then all around, pulsing and pressing in on her throat.

Reading this description whetted my latent wish to see the aurora borealis before I die. But whether such passages alone can pull you through Homestead, I leave to you.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book through my work for Historical Novels Review.

Sold!: The Shinnery

09 Monday Jan 2023

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Review: The Shinnery, by Kate Anger
U. of Nebraska, 2022. 253 pp. $22

The year 1894 has been hard for the Campbell family, Texas farmers struggling to withstand drought, losses from sick livestock, and debt. Seventeen-year-old Jessamine (Jessa), the eldest child still at home, finds out she must leave the farm she loves to take up a position as maidservant to the Martins, owners of the mercantile in Rayner, the nearest town. Jessa can’t understand why her stern but loving father would demand this—while brooking no discussion—when she’s his right hand on the farm.

Nevertheless, Jessa goes to the Martins’, where her employers find fault with her about once a minute, and where she learns the humiliating reason Papa shipped her off. However, that’s not half the story, for the pianist who comes to the Martin residence to teach the elder son his scales takes a shine to Jessa. Since Will Keyes (unsubtle name) is twenty-two, good-looking, glib from experience in the world—his main gig is at his elder brother’s saloon—you know he can play Jessa any tune he likes, and she’ll think it’s beautiful. You can also guess the consequences, even if you haven’t read the overly revealing blurb on the jacket flap.

Too bad about that blurb, whose clumsy phrases fail to convey the novel’s drive and fresh aspects, the chief attractions of The Shinnery (so titled for the shin oaks on the Campbell farm). You’d never know how the author twists the predictable, makes it her own, and ratchets up the tension. “No—and furthermore” thrives here, and the pages turn. Part of that comes from how the reader can spot Will as a fake from a country mile off, but Jessa can’t.

Shinnery oak, Quercus havardii, along a west Texas highway. A shrub rather than a tree, the plant is poisonous to livestock during a phase of its growth cycle but also protects the soil from erosion and provides habitat for wild animals (courtesy Dylan W. Schwilk, 2011, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

And when she does pick up currents that seem unjust or threatening, she can’t say so, as when her father tells her she’s heading to the Martins’:

She wasn’t quick with words like her sisters. Feelings and ideas would get stuck on the other side of her voice, no words to carry them across. Or she’d start talking and her words would fail, trail off, evaporate, everyone staring at her, waiting. Papa wasn’t in a waiting mood. He seemed uncomfortable, brushing dust that wasn’t there from his britches.

Unfortunately, the characterizations fall short, particularly those of the numerous villains. Martin’s wife, to name one, has another dimension behind her hectoring, social-climber facade, but her husband, though suitably threatening, has none. Other depictions feel inconsistent, even of the good guys, and the conflicts I’d expect either dissipate or never emerge. For instance, if Jessa’s that starved for warmth and affection, leaving her easy pickings for Will—perhaps too easy—I don’t see how she can connect with her parents as wholeheartedly or deeply as she does.

I can believe she’d redouble her efforts to please them, because emotionally hungry children do. But that longing—and resentment—have to go somewhere, and though Will offers an outlet, I wanted more of her feelings of betrayal kicking around.

That’s why the novel’s resolution, whose events seem mostly credible, still doesn’t quite work for me; I think the characters accept what befalls them too easily, maybe predictably. The story has ugly elements the author wishes to redeem, but that must be earned, and it shouldn’t happen simply to please the reader.

I also sense that Anger wants to explain everything, as though the reader won’t believe the words otherwise, a tic that comes through in the storytelling. Often, a character will say or do something, and the text will provide a reason, when it’s already clear.

To be fair, The Shinnery offers an utterly gripping feminist narrative: men treating women like chattels, even their own daughters. It’s hard to beat that, and to her credit, Anger keeps raising the stakes for Jessa, meanwhile conveying the social and political atmosphere in which the woman’s always to blame. As I read, I compared this university press novel with others I couldn’t finish from major commercial houses, whose mix-and-match hodgepodge of typical characters and situations seems like recombinant DNA.

That said, Anger’s editors could have helped The Shinnery in small but important ways—get rid of the pointless, one-page prologue; do justice to the story with a more enticing, smoother blurb; catch errors like a character’s name changing in the middle of a scene; and maybe deleting the explanatory passages.

Still, this novel tells a bold, original story—not for the faint of heart—and I recommend it.

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

Conspiracy on the Western Front: From a Dark Horizon

23 Monday May 2022

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Review: From a Dark Horizon, by Luke McCallin
Berkley, 2021. 505 pp. $28

As summer parches the despoiled earth of northwestern France in 1918, young Lieutenant Gregor Reinhardt, Seventeenth Prussian Fusiliers, has fought both east and west. A blooded warrior who commands a company of men older than himself, he senses the cause is lost but fights hard because that’s what he must do, and because he’s loyal to his comrades.

Consequently, when a booby-trap explodes at a divisional staff meeting behind the lines, killing several senior officers, and a soldier he recommended for a battlefield commission is blamed for the deaths and quickly executed, Reinhardt can’t sit with this. Receiving tacit permission to investigate from a sympathetic colonel — not that he would have twiddled his thumbs otherwise — the nineteen-year-old lieutenant begins to ask questions.

No sooner has he done so than he falls into a rabbit hole of conspiracy and murder, with blood having blood to eliminate witnesses; sometimes, he’s the target. After all, he served on the Eastern Front, where he came in contact with Russian soldiers infected by defeatist, socialist ideals, and the protégé executed for the booby-trap explosion was known to be insubordinate, radical, and a malcontent. So Reinhardt’s the perfect fall guy.

Participants in the conspiracy, whose goal and breadth he can’t penetrate at first, appear to include very senior commanders, deserters, Bolsheviks, doctors treating shell-shocked soldiers, dissenters, and, pervading all, the frustration and anger at a war that continues to chew up and spit out lives, though there can be no hope of German victory. The narrative therefore makes an unusual coming-of-age story of a young man trying to live morally where few, if any, morals exist. You may also read the novel as a labyrinthine thriller or mystery, with qualities of each, which will keep you guessing until the last page. But from whatever standpoint you approach it, From a Dark Horizon is first-rate First World War fiction.

Start with Reinhardt, who, despite his experience and responsibility, is still just an adolescent, truculent and earnest, occasionally pompous when he spouts principles, a character whose actions don’t always match his good intentions. Human, in other words. Most others around him have their facets too; I particularly like his sergeant, fiercely loyal but also brutally honest, and a mercurial captain who seems wildly unpredictable and who Reinhardt thinks is on his side but can’t be sure.

McCallin also displays an impressive command of the battlefield, rest area, home front, chain of command, you name it. No detail escapes his eye, and everything feels authentic, something rare in First World War novels. Consider this passage, one of many that bring the scene alive while also conveying feeling:

There were convoys bearing food and others bearing straw and hay. There were water convoys, and convoys of medical supplies, and long trains of horses and mules being driven up as replacements for those at the front. Troops hunched forward, each man heavy with equipment, shovels and helmets or metal spikes or rolls of wire clanking on their backs. Officers rode in limousines, and huge steam-driven tractors dragged monstrous howitzers. The noise was deafening, and the air was choked with dust. Sometimes singing would intermittently drown out the neighing of the horses and the clatter of harness and the bone-deep throb of motors, but the songs were few and the men marched to a different, darker tune than they had marched to in the spring of that year.

McCallin, who follows the history faithfully, re-creates the mood of both army and home front. He conveys the weariness for sacrifice that seems to have no purpose, the grumblings of revolution, and the political maneuvering to cast blame once the war finally ends. I admire this panorama very much, both for its historical grasp and adept fictional portrayal.

These German sailors, among others, mutinied at Kiel in November 1918. The uprising, which ignited unrest around the country, led within days to the armistice (courtesy German Federal Archives via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

I like the thriller/mystery aspect as well, though several twists toward the end feel rather convenient, with fortuitous arrivals of powerful characters. One such character in particular, who seems to slide in and out of his ability to process what’s happening around him, is too helpful to the story as well. Even so, “no — and furthermore” bleeds through the pages, for whenever Reinhardt discovers the next link in the chain of conspiracy, that person typically winds up dead.

Enough bodies fall (more from foul play than combat) to staff a platoon, and the Byzantine links among them necessitate frequent recapitulations, usually in the form of Reinhardt explaining what he’s learned, and how. From a Dark Horizon, though its pages turn rapidly, can be talky at times.

This volume marks the last in the wartime series about Reinhardt’s exploits. But in his afterword, McCallin promises that his hero will have further adventures in the 1920s. I’m ready.

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

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.

Seekers: The Wanderers

09 Monday Jul 2018

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Review: The Wanderers, by Tim Pears
Bloomsbury, 2018. 366 pp. $28

In this beguiling, gorgeous, yet frustrating novel, we first meet Leo Sercombe in 1912. The young teenager is on the run through the Devon countryside, bearing the wounds of a severe beating, and near faint with hunger.

The boy stumbled in the night over dark earth. The land was silver. His steps were heavy. At first light in the waters of a stream he cleaned the charred red mud off his boots, and limped on in a kind of crouch that seemed best to allay the pain that racked many parts of his body. He saw where the sun rose and headed in the opposite direction, hunched over like someone with secrets from the light.

Gypsies take him in, but he receives little kindness, and not only because he’s an outsider, what they call a gentile. They sense his weakness, his ache for friendship, and, with few exceptions, treat him cruelly because they can, even after he shows his usefulness. Leo has a way with horses, a valuable skill, and he’s curious, quick to learn, eager to please. Theirs is a hard existence, however, with little room for sentiment, and Leo’s reminded at every turn that he owes them his life and had better not try to run away.

North Devon, near Croyde, 2018

Meanwhile, Charlotte (Lottie) Prideaux has just lost her mother, and she too is rootless, without friends, though in a very different, coddled context. She’s a lord’s daughter, and her father lets her do more or less what she pleases, with one crucial exception. The narrative hints that because Leo and Lottie became too friendly, the boy and most of his family were banished from the estate, which also presumably explains the beating he took. (Since The Wanderers is the second book of a planned trilogy, these events may be more explicit in the first volume, The Horseman.) In protest, for months, Lottie refuses to say anything to her father except, “Yes, Papa,” or, “No, Papa,” and tells him he did wrong to punish the Sercombes.

With great subtlety, Pears shows that Lottie and Leo care deeply about one another, though neither spends much time thinking about it, and both outwardly pretend no connection exists. This understatement makes you want all the more for the two to find one another again. But that’s not how the real world or this novel works, and Lottie and Leo have learning to do.

They’re both empathic, lonely, see beyond surfaces, and love the natural world, about which they have an abiding curiosity. But where Lottie dissects animals to study them and borrows anatomy textbooks from the local veterinarian, Leo helps butcher animals for food and assists a ewe through a breech birth because that’s his job, for which he receives neither thanks nor payment. Pears never underlines the comparison; he doesn’t have to. You only need to watch Leo make his way, suffering physically and emotionally, whereas there’s always someone looking out for the daughter of the manor. Nevertheless, you see Leo gain knowledge that Lottie may never have. I love this juxtaposition, simple and elegant like the prose, which creates a coming-of-age story unlike any other I’ve read.

Yet The Wanderers, though superbly written with brilliant characterizations, lacks a plot to speak of, a climax, or resolution. Having recently torn apart Charles Frazier’s Varina for that failing and others, it’s only fair to ask what Pears does to overcome this deficit, and to what extent he succeeds. He does ask implied, powerful questions, and though nothing happens in the usual way of novels, everything also happens, because it all matters. Partly that’s because Pears offers a view of life on the margins that few writers attempt, but it’s not just the content. Here, the episodic chapters open the characters to the reader, and the small moments establish a constant emotional connection.

Even so, I still feel cheated at the end. I don’t want to wait for the third volume to know what happens, and I’m especially worried that the First World War, to which the novel metaphorically refers as the year 1914 approaches, will deny Leo and Lottie any chance of happiness. Leo in particular is just the type of person to be destroyed in the conflict, and one theme of The Wanderers is how people who embrace violence and dishonesty have a tremendous advantage over everyone else.

So does it matter how many questions Pears leaves hanging? Yes and no. If you’re the type of reader who prefers to have everything wrapped up, then this book may not be for you. If that uncertainty doesn’t faze you, the narrative offers a breathtaking ride.

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