#75: The Book of Fires

The Book of Fires, by Jane Borodale

(New York: Viking, 2009)

Summary:

"It is 1752. Winter is approaching, and two secrets -- an unwanted pregnancy and a theft -- drive seventeen-year-old Agnes Trussel to run away from her home in rural Sussex. Lost and frightened as night descends on the menacing streets of London, she is drawn to a curious sign depicting a man holding a star. It is the home of Mr. J. Blacklock, a brooding fireworks maker who is grieving for his recently deceased wife. He hires Agnes as his apprentice, and as she learns to make rockets, portfies, and fiery rain, she slowly gains the laconic Blacklock's trust. He initiates her into his peculiar art and sparks in her a shared obsession for creating the most spectacular fireworks the world has ever seen.

"But her condition is becoming harder to conceal, and through it all, the clock is ticking -- for Agnes's secret will not stay hidden forever. Soon she meets Cornelius Soul, seller of gunpowder, and she conceives of a plan that could save her. But why does Blacklock so vehemently disapprove of Mr. Soul? And what is Blacklock hiding from her? Could he be on the brink of a discovery that will change pyrotechny forever? A summer storm is brewing -- but Agnes has no idea that her mysterious mentor has been watching her, and hatching plans of his own.

"The Book of Fires vividly evokes a dark bygone world and offers a masterful portrayal of a relationship as mysterious and tempestuous as any the Brontes imagined. Jane Borodale's portrait of 1750s London is unforgettable, from the grimy streets to the inner workings of a household where little is as it seems. Beautifully written, complex and layered, The Book of Fires is a captivating debut of fireworks, redemption, and the strange alchemy that will forever change the fortunes of a young woman once bound for ruin."

Opening Line:

"There is a regular rasp of a blade on a stone as he sharpens the knives."

My Take:

If I've read a few books lately that didn't quite live up to my expectations, I had the opposite experience here. I had only a short time to visit the library and stock up on books before my latest trip so I went through my list and grabbed about the first 8 I could find. Were I been home, this might have been one of those that stayed on the shelf untouched until it was due back ... as it was, I read almost everything I bring along as choices are limited, and I'm glad I did. Agnes is such an interesting narrator, the landscape she inhabits so unusual, and the central conflict -- will Blacklock discover her pregnancy and send her away? -- so well-crafted that I was sad for the story to end. Borodale manages to make the other characters, particularly Blacklock and the other 2 house servants, Mary Spurran and Mrs. Blight, both believable in their time and engaging for a contemporary reader. Likewise, the setting is sufficiently detailed that I felt like I could picture it without being so overly so that it lost me in the descriptions. I'll be on the lookout for other works by this author.

#67: Mohawk

Mohawk, by Richard Russo

(New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1994, c1986)

Summary:

"Mohawk, New York is one of those small towns that lie almost entirely on the wrong side of the tracks. Its citizens, too, have fallen on hard times. Dallas Younger, a star athlete in high school, now drifts from tavern to poker game, losing money, and, inevitably, another set of false teeth. His ex-wife, Anne, is stuck in a losing battle with her mother over the care of her sick father. And their son, Randall, is deliberately neglecting his school work -- because in a place like Mohawk, it doesn't pay to be too smart.

"In Mohawk, Richard Russo explores these lives with profound compassion and flint-hard wit. Out of derailed ambitions and old loves, secret hatreds and communal myths, he has created a richly plotted, densely populated, and wonderfully written novel that captures every nuance of America's backyard."

Opening Line:
"The back door to the Mohawk Grill opens on an alley it shares with the junior high."


My Take:
Was going to go for something fluffy again (Four Blondes, anyone?) but something about Russo's stories of hard luck former boom towns along the old Erie Canal seemed appropriate for my last scheduled week in Boston exile. He usually manages to be both wistful and warm-hearted at the same time. Let's see.

(time passes)

A good choice. As with Russo's other novels, he manages to portray upstate New York's Appalachia-meets-Rust-Belt, seen-better-days small towns and their inhabitants both so clearly, but with such compassion and warmth, that you almost find yourself seeing why it is that folks still live there (though you're not quite packing your own bags, of course). Mohawk isn't my world, but it's not too far away and I've driven through it often enough (this is metaphor, people; Russo's Mohawk isn't a real town, though it may as well be) that it was a good read for a homesick week. Recommended if you like portraits of small town Americana, or even if you just enjoyed Empire Falls and want to get a look at the town 30 years earlier. 

#45: Work Song

Work Song, by Ivan Doig (New York: Riverhead Books, 2010).

Summary:
"An award-winning and beloved novelist of the American West spins the further adventures of a favorite character, in one of his richest historical settings yet. "If America was a melting pot, Butte would be its boiling point," observes Morrie Morgan, the itinerant teacher, walking encyclopedia, and inveterate charmer last seen leaving a one-room schoolhouse in Marias Coulee, the stage he stole in Ivan Doig's 2006 The Whistling Season. A decade later, Morrie is back in Montana, as the beguiling narrator of Work Song. Lured like so many others by "the richest hill on earth," Morrie steps off the train in Butte, copper-mining capital of the world, in its jittery heyday of 1919. But while riches elude Morrie, once again a colorful cast of local characters-and their dramas-seek him out: a look-alike, sound-alike pair of retired Welsh miners; a streak-of-lightning waif so skinny that he is dubbed Russian Famine; a pair of mining company goons; a comely landlady propitiously named Grace; and an eccentric boss at the public library, his whispered nickname a source of inexplicable terror. When Morrie crosses paths with a lively former student, now engaged to a fiery young union leader, he is caught up in the mounting clash between the iron-fisted mining company, radical "outside agitators," and the beleaguered miners. And as tensions above ground and below reach the explosion point, Morrie finds a unique way to give a voice to those who truly need one. "The most tumultous, quirky, and fascinating city in the American West of the last century has finally found a storyteller equal to its stories. ... Ivan Doig brings to life the core of humanity, and a hell of cast, amidst the shadows and sorrows of Butte, Montana -- a city that could say it never slept well before New York made a similar claim."

My Take:
Interesting setting and plot, especially as I'm a sucker for anything having to do with labor issues -- but something about this one just left me wanting more. Maybe it's that I felt like I should have read The Whistling Season first to really "get" the characters of Morrie and Rabrab, which I haven't. As a standalone novel, it's good enough but nothing exceptional.

#26 - The Big Squeeze. Ouch.

So, #26 was The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker, by Steven Greenhouse. A well-written, convincing book that packs a punch, but probably isn't the most uplifting thing to read if you're on the job market. In a nutshell, Greenhouse's thesis is that conditions for the American worker have declined across the board over the last 20 years or so, and workers at all but the very top of the career ladder are working more, earning less, and enjoying far less security. If you're at all interested in labor issues and inequality in contemporary America (yep, this means me), much of what he's written won't be terribly new or surprising ... but the way he puts the data together, extends the argument to include white-collar workers, and uses compelling case studies to illustrate his points without implying that these individual stories are wholly representative makes for a gripping, if somewhat unsettling and depressing, read.

The first few chapters draw heavily on the anecdotal: stories of maltreated workers which are, agreeably, pretty horrific, but fairly easy for the average (read: college-educated, white collar) reader to dismiss as non-representative and/or things that only happen to workers in the lowest-paid, lowest-skill jobs. There's a Wal-Mart security guard who gets fired after he's injured in pursuit of a thief; an exploited call center worker who, repeatedly forced to work without clocking in, ends up paid even less than her already-measly $7-an-hour wage; several Wal-Mart stockers and security personnel who are locked in stores overnight to prevent "shrinkage" (a/k/a employee theft), and threatened with losing their jobs if they open the door for anything less than a fire; and so on -- all scenarios familiar to readers of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed and/or any of the myriad of anti-WalMart books and articles out there. You start to think this is stuff you've seen and heard before.

Where Greenhouse's book stands out, though, is when he discusses the way white-collar workers are getting squeezed as well, and puts the pieces together to convince the reader that yes, we really are in the same boat. Many books on contemporary labor and workplace issues miss this mark (or perhaps never aim for it in the first place); either they go the Nickel and Dimed route, and paint a grim picture of how bad things are for the lowest-paid workers, or they make the mistake that The Sexual Paradox and many other work/life books do, and wring their hands about how stressed and overworked people (usually women) with higher levels of education and more occupational choices are. Greenhouse addresses both groups, and does so equally capably. For example, he argues that globalization hurts workers at all levels: employees in a Carolina slaughterhouse, where a large population of immigrants (mostly Mexican and Central/ South American, many of them undocumented) allow the employer to pay obscenely low wages for what really is a grueling, disgusting job; virtually the whole town of Galesburg, Illinois, where the closure of a Maytag factory that's relocated to Mexico has ripple effects throughout the entire community; and software engineers in Seattle, who are surprised to find themselves un- or underemployed as increasing number of high-tech jobs are exported to highly educated, low-paid workforces in India. He draws similar parallels between the experiences of vastly different workers when it comes to our increased workweeks -- whether that's the hotel housekeeper who's forced to come in early and off the clock just to get a day's work done, or the middle manager who's expected to work 12-hour days and still be available 24/7 by Blackberry. I was also impressed by Greenhouse's delicate navigation of the immigration issue; he calmly breaks it down into several sub-issues, tries to present all sides of controversial arguments, and is firm about laying the blame squarely on the employers who exploit undocumented workers, rather than the workers themselves. Similarly, the chapters on the difficulties specific to younger and older workers makes it very clear that this isn't an "us vs. them" issue -- unless it's one of CEOs vs. the rest of us.

Interspersed with the gloom and doom are several examples of companies which buck the trend. Of these, Greenhouse goes into the most detail about Costco, offering an extensive comparison of their far-more-generous wages and benefits compared to Wal-Mart's, and suggesting that they're able to afford this largely through what they save in employee turnover costs (though I think a bit more attention should have been paid to their comparatively modest executive compensation packages). I would have liked to see a bit more detail about some of the other "good" companies; the book touches only briefly on Timberland and Patagonia, and it would have been nice to see a bit more detail about how other companies in other industries manage to do right by their employees and still remain competitive.

No pithy summary or advice here, but it's an interesting, maddening, and sad book. Read it, but keep something soft nearby to throw when you feel the need.

#24, sort of - Crazy Lady!

'K then, my 24th book of the year was Crazy Lady!, by Jane Leslie Conly. Some might call this cheating on two counts (one, I listened to rather than read it; two, it's a children's book), but this is a blog, dang it ... not a grad-level literary seminar. And this book was really a wonderful find, a forgotten children's book with realistic characters, an engaging plot, and an imperfect but fitting ending.

The narrator and main character is Vernon Dibbs, a boy of about 12 growing up in a working-class Baltimore neighborhood in the early 1980s. Three years after his mother's sudden death, Vernon is floundering. His father is kind but remote, and must work long hours to support 5 kids with only a fourth-grade education, so much of the day-to-day work of running the household falls to his 17 year old sister Steph; big brother Tony is smart, but too caught up in his own studies and aspirations to be much help to his family. This leaves Vern mostly on his own, failing in school, hanging out with the neighborhood guys, and getting into minor-level mischief on the order of swiping candy bars from Woolworth's and heckling Maxine, the neighborhood crazy lady, whenever they catch her out with her mentally disabled teenaged son, Ronald.

Things begin to change when he meets Maxine at the corner store, and she speaks kindly of his late mother. Caught off-guard, he blurts out the truth about his poor grades, and she introduces him to Miss Annie, a retired teacher who agrees to tutor him in English. In lieu of money, she asks Vern to pay her by working odd jobs, usually to help Maxine and Vernon. A surprising friendship develops, and Vern learns that Maxine's bouts of public "craziness" are, in fact, drunkenness -- she's an alcoholic. After meeting Ronald's teacher, Vern comes up with the idea of organizing a carnival to raise money for sneakers, so Ronald can compete in the Special Olympics. In the process, Vern, Ronald, and the entire neighborhood are transformed.

That's the climax rather than the end of the story, and I won't give the rest away -- but our whole family really enjoyed the story. The characters are compelling and mostly likeable, but very much human, with warts and all. The setting, at least for a children's book, is a realistic, working-class urban neighborhood, racially mixed, and with some rough and run-down parts. Even the plot has more to it than I'd initially expected; primarily, it's the story of Vern getting to know Maxine and Ronald as individuals, but it's also about the long, slow process Vern's family goes through to rebuild their lives after his mother's death, and about an ordinary neighborhood coming together to support and take care of its own. It's an excellent car book -- complicated enough to hold the whole family's interest, and interesting to think and talk about afterwards, to boot. (If you're so inclined, several others in the same category we've enjoyed over the years are A Day No Pigs Would Die, by Robert Peck; Number the Stars, by Lois Lowry; Poppy and its sequels/ prequel, by Avi; and Island of the Blue Dolphins, by Scott O'Dell.) It's also worth a read by older elementary, intermediate readers even if you're not in the car.

Coming soon, probably tomorrow: #25, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz. Finished this one today and really loved it -- it won the Pulitzer for a reason -- but that 5-hour car trip was a long one, and I'm 'bout ready for bed now.

#9 - The Maine Event

Sorry, I couldn't resist. As promised, 9 was The School on Heart's Content Road, by Carolyn Chute. Unique, vivid setting; fascinating characters. A bit slow at times, however, with a somewhat unsatisfying ending. The setting will be familiar to anyone who's read The Beans of Egypt, Maine, Chute's first novel, which was published 20-some odd years ago (tangent alert: while I didn't remember much of the book till I reread it a few years ago, I do remember smuggling it under my coat to a babysitting gig while I was in high school, because it reportedly had explicit content and I was worried about what my employers would think). Heart's Content Road is also set in Egypt, a fictitious backwoods town in rural Maine, populated by a patchwork of fascinating characters. An online review describes Chute's characters as "the working poor," which is accurate but doesn't really capture their depth and complexity. This is not some big-hearted novel full of quirky but lovable country folk; many of the scenes are uncomfortable, and the characters certainly aren't all likeable. They are, however, amazingly real -- warts and all. If that means they give you the creeps or make your skin crawl a bit, well, that's on you.

At any rate, Heart's Content Road has a tremendous cast of characters -- so many, in fact, that Chute includes an annotated character list after the end of the novel, though you don't really need it to figure out who the important players are, and I only bothered to skim it after I'd read the rest of the book. The principals are Mickey Gammon, a high-school dropout who gets kicked out of the house by his older brother and is welcomed by a citizens' militia and separatist cooperative; Jane Meserve, a precocious but isolated 6 year old who ends up living with the separatists against her will after her mother is jailed on a drug charge; Rex York, the divorced, taciturn Vietnam vet who captains the militia; and Gordon St. Onge, the charismatic, polygamist separatist leader known as "The Prophet" (though it's not clear if this is really what the separatists themselves call him, or just how he's portrayed in the media).

The plot? It's hard to describe. Certainly some of the characters and circumstances change from the book's beginning to its end, but for the most part, the book has a day-in-the-life feel to it -- it's more a series of sketches of these people's and this community's life over the course of a few months than a linear story. Interspersed with these sketches are short blurbs, some factual ("In the United States of America, 'Land of the Free.' A new prison is being built every week."), some over-the-top satirized sound bites from a TV ("Be afraid. Poor people are lazy and immoral, and violence is on their fingertips for some reason, who knows the reason, it's just their idea of fun. It's always this way; they steal cars drugs money and gunnnnnz! They are filled with sex and rotten teeth and food stamps and Cadillacs and bad English!") -- which at first seem jarring and random, but you soon get the point: the stories Chute tells about her characters stand in sharp contrast to what we typically hear or don't hear about People Like This. Why might some people be drawn to militias? What's so wacky about CSAs or off-the-grid energy or homeschooling, anyhow? (This technique could easily be ham-handed, and fortunately, it doesn't get there; we see less of it the further into the novel we get, by which time we've presumably gotten the point.)

My one complaint about the book is that it seemed both jumpy and plodding in some places. This may be deliberate -- Chute's really writing the literary equivalent of cinema verite here -- but still made it hard to pick up and put down some times. The ending also felt unsatisfying, though I'll admit I tend to like my tales a bit tidier than they come sometimes, and again, it may be part of the point that there really is no clear resolution, no obvious purpose to all this. 4.5 out of 5 bookmarks, though I'm thinking as I write this that it's a lot stronger than some of my other recent reads; it's hard to be consistent with ratings when the books themselves are so different.

On deck: Three Girls and Their Brother, by Theresa Rebeck, because after Heart's Content Road and Blonde Roots, I need to read something fluffy and fun about rich people. After that, probably Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism, by Kevin Phillips. (Gee, if you think my trying to critique middlebrow fiction is pretentious ... )