#88: The Quickening

The Quickening, by Michelle Hoover

(New York: Other Press, 2010)

Summary:
"Enidina Current and Mary Morrow live on neighboring farms in the flat, hard country of the upper Midwest during the early 1900s. This hardscrabble life comes easily to some, like Eddie, who has never wanted more than the land she works and the animals she raises on it with her husband, Frank. But for the deeply religious Mary, farming is an awkward living and at odds with her more cosmopolitan inclinations. Still, Mary creates a clean and orderly home life for her stormy husband, Jack, and her sons, while she adapts to the isolation of a rural town through the inspiration of a local preacher. She is the first to befriend Eddie in a relationship that will prove as rugged as the ground they walk on. Despite having little in common, Eddie and Mary need one another for survival and companionship. But as the Great Depression threatens, the delicate balance of their reliance on one another tips, pitting neighbor against neighbor, exposing the dark secrets they hide from one another, and triggering a series of disquieting events that threaten to unravel not only their friendship but their families as well."

Opening Line:
"My boy, you might think an old woman hasn't much to say about the living, but your grandmother knows when a person does right by her and when they don't."

My Take:
Lovely, lyrical language, but I felt like I missed something here. Maybe it's just that the characters and plot, like the setting and Hoover's writing, is spare -- so much so that it was hard to get much of a sense of Mary or of how the relationship between the two women evolved over time (though Eddie did feel authentic and likeable, at least where I was concerned). I've read books like this before, where we need to draw our own conclusions about characters' relationships based on a handful of events with many years in between, but here it just felt like there wasn't enough to go on to let me connect the dots. Eddie's eagerness to reconnect with her departed daughter and never-seen grandchild is compelling, but not given quite enough airtime (unless it was just too subtle and understated for me to appreciate) to fully draw me in. Might be better on a second reading, or with a group, but for now -- just OK.

#29: The Reserve

The Reserve, by Russell Banks (New York: HarperCollins, 2008).

Summary:
"Twenty-nine-year-old Vanessa Cole is a wild, stunningly beautiful heiress, the adopted only child of a highly regarded New York brain surgeon and his socialite wife. Twice married, Vanessa has been scandalously linked to any number of rich and famous men. But on the night of July 4, 1936, at her parents' country home in a remote Adirondack Mountain enclave known as The Reserve, two events coincide to permanently alter the course of Vanessa's callow life: her father dies suddenly of a heart attach, and a mysterious seductive local artist, Jordan Groves, blithely lands his Waco biplane in the pristine waters of the forbidden Upper Lake. ... [Jordan] falls easy prey to her electrifying personality, but it is not long before he discovers that the heiress carries a dark, deeply scarring family secret. Emotionally unstable from the start, and further unhinged by her father's unexpected death, Vanessa begins to spin wildly out of control, manipulating and destroying the lives of all who cross her path."

Opening Line:
"When finally no one was watching her anymore, the beautiful young woman extracted herself from her parents and their friends and left the living room."

My Take:
Yawn. Based on the reviews I'd read (which, admittedly, were a while back), I expected more from this book. The concept was intriguing -- a rich, somewhat spoiled "wild child" who has some deep dark secrets hidden in her silk-lined mahogany closets -- but the execution "meh" at best. For one thing, the description of Vanessa's physical beauty and the sex appeal of another character's love interest evoked shades of Danielle Steel. You might get away with describing one character as luminous, if you do so convincingly enough that the reader forgets it's a cliche, but two? Within 100 pages of each other? Gag me.

For another, the unanswered questions about how much of what Vanessa believes is real vs. how much is a product of her mental instability (Dr. Cole invented the lobotomy? She was sexually abused as a child?) -- a technique that can be very unsettling and compelling when it's done well -- just doesn't seem to work here. Maybe it's because neither side is really fleshed out well; all we have is Vanessa hinting at events on one hand, and her mother and Jordan saying, "No, that didn't happen" on the other. Ditto the ambiguous ending. It's not clear exactly what becomes of Jordan and Vanessa, which could be interesting in other contexts ... except that I didn't feel like I had enough evidence to even speculate convincingly for one argument or another.

All in all, a fairly quick book and not absolutely horrible, but also not entertaining or provocative enough for me to bother recommend it. Moving along here.

#2 - The Lacuna

The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver (New York: Harper, 2009)

Jacket Summary: "Born in the United States, reared in a series of provisional households in Mexico -- from a coastal island jungle to 1930s Mexico City -- Harrison Shepherd finds precarious shelter but no sense of home on his thrilling odyssey. Life is whatever he learns from housekeepers who put him to work in the kitchen, errands he runs in the streets, and one fateful day, by mixing plaster for famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. He discovers a passion for Aztec history and meets the exotic, imperious artist Frida Kahlo, who will become his lifelong friend. When he goes to work for Leo Trotsky, an exiled political leader fighting for his life, Shepherd inadvertently casts his lot with art and revolution, newspaper headlines and howling gossip, and a risk of terrible violence.

"Meanwhile, to the north, the United States will soon be caught up in the internationalist goodwill of World War II. There in the land of his birth, Shepherd believes he might remake himself in America's hopeful image and claim a voice of his own. He finds support from an unlikely kindred soul, his stenographer, Mrs. Brown, who will be far more valuable to her employer than he could ever know. Through darkening years, political winds continue to toss him between north and south in a plot that turns many times on the unspeakable breach -- the lacuna -- between truth and public presumption."

Opening Lines: "In the beginning were the howlers. They always commenced their bellowing in the first hour of dawn, just as the hem of the sky began to whiten."

My Take: Kingsolver's definitely near the top of my favorite authors list. I read the first few chapters last night and don't yet know what I think. On one hand, I'm not yet chomping at the bit to find out what happens next (and truth be told, I'm more than a little confused about some of what's going on) ... but on the other, I initially had the same reaction to The Poisonwood Bible and ended up being very glad I stuck it out. Stay tuned.

Well, as with Poisonwood Bible, it took some time to get into the swing of this one, but when I did -- wow. This is not a book you can read while multitasking, one eye on its pages while watching TV or offering minimal responses to a young child's enthusiastic if somewhat incomprehensible patter. The Lacuna demands most of your attention, and offers handsome rewards in return.

Most of the story is told through Shepherd's diaries and letters, with pertinent news articles scattered through the text here and there. Born to a Mexican mother and U.S. father who split up long before the novel begins, he receives little formal schooling, yet aches to write almost from birth. He grows to young adulthood in quarters maintained by one, then another of his mother's boyfriends. His earliest memories are of the remote Isla Pixol, where Shepherd and his mother first encounter the howlers mentioned on the first page. It is here that his overly dramatic mother, Salome, tells him, "You had better write all this in your notebook ... the story of what happened to us in Mexico. So when nothing is left of us but bones, someone will know where we went." Shepherd takes her advice to heart, and thus is laid the foundation for the novel's principal themes: the role of art and the howlers, in their many guises, in shaping history -- what and how they record as events unfold, and which pieces are lost.

Shepherd's pivotal first brush with history comes about by accident. Having learned years earlier to prepare the European breads his mother's paramour preferred, he proves a natural at mixing plaster for the Much-Discussed Painter, Diego Rivera. This first job ends not long after, when Salome packs Shepherd off on a train to Washington, D.C. to live with his father and Rivera departs on a separate, unrelated trip to the States ... but eventually, both return to Mexico City and Shepherd returns to work for Rivera. He is quickly promoted from plaster-mixer to cook, and thus finds himself in the midst of the interesting-times whirlwind that is the Riveras' home. The already considerable excitement that comes from living with Diego's flamboyant jewel of a wife, painter Frida Kahlo, and cooking in the tiny kitchen of the boxy, Functional, divided, his-and-hers house is magnified a thousand-fold when two VIP guests come to stay for the duration: Lev Davidovich, nee Leon Trotsky, and his wife Natalya, who've exiled themselves to Mexico in a desperate hope of escaping Stalin's murderous purges.

It is here that he first observes the uncanny likeness of the news media to the howler monkeys that once plagued him and his mother. As Shepherd later muses in his diary, long after Lev has been assassinated and he's made a new home for himself in Asheville, North Carolina, "anyone who rises, any greatness, attracts those who would cut it down at the root. Any fool knows that also." Several years later, Harry Truman's surprising, newspaper-defying re-election offers a brief flicker of hope that the howlers' power is not absolute (says Shepherd's stenographer, Violet Brown, "it's a day to remember. Those news men could not make a thing true just by saying so. It's only living makes life.") The howlers regroup, of course, with their terrifying noise reaching its apogee during the red scares of the late 1940s and early '50s. Ultimately, after being repeatedly punished and humiliated over his years-earlier association with Rivera and Trotsky, Shepherd offers his journal a biting "Universal declaration of rights of the howlers:

"Article 1. All human beings are endowed with the god-given right to make firewood from the fallen tree. Article 2. Any tree will do. If it is tall, it should be cut down. The quality of wood is no matter, the tree asked for it by growing tall. A decent public will cheer to see it toppled. Article 3. Rules of normal kindness do not extend to the celebrated person. Article 4. All persons may hope to become celebrated. Article 5. It is more important to speak than to think. The only danger is silence. Article 6. A howler must choose one course or the other: lie routinely, or do so only on important occasions, to be more convincing."

For a man like Shepherd, who's always held that "Dios habla por el que se calle" (God speaks for those who keep quiet), this corruption and pillorying of the words he's so conflicted about sharing with the world is devastating. As he'd mused years earlier, in a letter to Frida on the eve of his first novel's publication,

"A terrifying miracle. These words were all written in dark, quiet rooms. How can they face the bright, noisy world? You must know. You open your skin and pour yourself on a canvas. And then let the curators drape your intestines all around the halls, for the ruckus of society gossips. Can it be survived?"

He has persisted in his writing, despite the excruciating vulnerability it brings, because he is driven to it, perhaps not realizing until he must stop how painful it is not to write. As he tells the Committee on Un-American Activities in a climactic, almost cinematic speech,

"The purpose of art is to elevate the spirit, or pay a surgeon's bill. Or both, really. It can help a person remember, or forget. If your house doesn't have many windows in it, you can hang up a painting and have a view. Of a whole different country, if you want. If your spouse is homely, you can gaze at a lovely face and not get in trouble for it. ... It can be painted on a public wall or locked in a mansion. ... Art is one thing I do know about. A book has all the same uses I mentioned, especially for the house without enough windows. Art by itself is nothing, until it comes into that house. People here wanted Mrs. Kahlo's art, and I carried it.

"You asked me why I've stayed here so long. I can try to say. People have a lot of color and songs in Mexico, more art than they have hopes, it often seemed to me. Here, I found people bursting with hope but not many songs. They didn't sing, they turned on the radio. They wanted stories, like anything. So I decided to try my hand at making art for the hopeful. Because I wasn't any good at the other thing, manufacturing hopes for the artful. America was the most hopeful place I'd ever imagined. My neighbors were giving over their hairpins and door hinges to melt down for building the good ship America. I wanted to give her things too. So I stayed here."

This speech notwithstanding, neither the Committee members nor the howlers who make him larger than life in their papers nor his fickle readers ever fully understand Shepherd. Frida and Violet Brown come closest, with lawyer Artie Gold not far behind, perhaps, but as he himself has acknowledged for years,

"[Y]ou can't really know the person standing before you, because always there is some missing piece: the birthday like an invisible pinata hanging great and silent over his head, as he stands in slippers boiling the water for coffee. The scarred, shrunken leg hidden under a green silk dress. A wife and son back in France. Something you never knew. That is the heart of the story."

I could write much more about this complex and lovely book, but to do so would almost spoil the joy of reading a novel whose title means "blank space or missing part." Please read it, without delay, and fill in the missing parts for yourself.

#88 - Esperanza Rising

Esperanza Rising, by Pam Munoz Ryan (New York: Scholastic Press, 2000)

Jacket Summary: "Esperanza Ortega possesses all the treasures a young girl could want: fancy dresses, a beautiful home filled with servants in the bountiful region of Aguascalientes, Mexico, and the promise of one day rising to Mama's position and presiding over all of El Rancho de las Rosas.

"But a sudden tragedy shatters that dream, forcing Esperanza and Mama to flee to California and settle in a Mexican farm labor camp. There they confront the challenges of hard work, acceptance by their own people, and economic difficulties brought on by the Great Depression. When Mama falls ill from Valley Fever, and a strike for better working conditions threatens to uproot their new life, Esperanza must relinquish her hold on the past and learn to embrace a future ripe with the riches of family and community."

Opening Line: "'Our land is alive, Esperanza,' said Papa, taking her small hand as they walked through the gentle slope of the vineyard.

My Take: I think this is a first: I read this book because my daughter recommended it. Not surprisingly, I wasn't disappointed -- not because Twig has such impeccable taste (I am, after all, her mother), but because it combines several themes I usually enjoy reading about: coming of age, poverty and inequality, immigration, and even labor issues. It's a young adult novel, and not a very long one at that; I think I polished it off in about an hour last night. Liked the story itself, liked the chat Twig and I had about it on our walk home from church this morning. (Wow, how middle American does that sound?) Some of our favorite parts, to whet your appetite:

• The painstaking efforts made by Alfonso and Miguel (the Ortegas' most trusted servants, who decide to emigrate to California in the wake of Sr. Ortega's murder rather than remain on the ranch to work for his brother) to bring a root ball from the Rancho de las Rosas' signature roses to the labor camp that becomes their new home;
• Esperanza's visceral terror and disgust at having to sit in the peasant car on their train journey;
• The unexpected generosity of Carmen, an egg seller Mama and Esperanza meet on the train. Though she herself is a poor widow with many children to support, she gives Mama two hens of her own on hearing the Ortegas' story -- and goes on to give an even poorer beggar woman food and coins after they get off the train.
• The bathing scene, in which the men folk are sent out of the house so that all the women can enjoy the luxury of an all-too-rare hot bath. Esperanza goes from standing with her arms outstretched, automatically expecting Hortensia (Alfonso's wife and Miguel's mother) to undress and bathe her as she's always done before, to enjoying the camaraderie of the steamy room and personally making sure Hortensia has the hottest water.
• Esperanza and Mama's joy and disbelief at seeing Abuelita again after nearly a year has gone by.

If you are a young adult, have one at home, or just plain like stories like this, do read this one. You won't be disappointed, either.

#14 - Jim the Boy

My 14th book of the year was Jim the Boy, by Tony Earley (Boston, 2000).

Summary: "Tony Earley made his debut with Here We Are in Paradise, a superbly understated collection of (mostly) small-town vignettes. He returns to the same terrain in his first novel, Jim the Boy, setting this coming-of-age story in a remote North Carolina hamlet. The year is 1934, and like the rest of the country, Aliceville is feeling the pinch of the Great Depression. Yet neither Jim nor his mother nor his three uncles -- who have split the paternal role neatly among themselves since the death of Jim's father a decade earlier -- are feeling much in the way of economic pain. Indeed, if you stuck a satellite dish on the front lawn, the story might be taking place in the New South rather than the older, bucolic one.This isn't to suggest that Earley is deaf to social detail. Indeed, there are all sorts of wonderful touches, like the decor in Jim's classroom,with its 'large, colorful maps of the United States, the Confederacy, and the Holy Land during the time of Jesus.' But Jim the Boy is very much the tale of a 10-year-old's expanding consciousness, which at first barely extends beyond the family property. Earley has a real gift for conveying childhood epiphanies, like Jim's sudden apprehension of the wider world during a trip in Uncle Al's truck: 'Two thoughts came to Jim at once, joined by a thread of amazement: he thought, People live here, and he thought, They don't know who I am. At that moment the world opened up around Jim like hands that, until that moment, had been cupped around him; he felt very small, almost invisible, in the open air of their center, but knew that the hands would not let him go. It was almost like flying.' The simple lyricism and anti-ironic sweetness work mostly to the book's advantage. There are times, it's true, when Earley sands his prose down to an unnatural smoothness, and we seem to be edging toward the sentimental precincts of a young-adult novel. But on the whole, Jim the Boy is a lovely, meticulous work--a song of innocence and (eventually) experience, delivered with just a hint of a North Carolina accent."

My reaction, in a nutshell: Appreciated it on a literary level, in that it was well-written with (cough) luminous prose and what have you, and much of the description, both of landscape and emotional states, was understated and lovely. Not enough of a plot for me to really love it, though.

67 - Wet, Wet, Wet

My 67th book of the year was Matt Bondurant's The Wettest County in the World: A Novel Based on a True Story (Scribner, 2008). In short, I enjoyed it -- even if the pacing was a bit slow initially, and the book couldn't seem to decide whether it wanted to be, as the title suggests, more of "a novel" or "based on a true story." What made it worth reading anyhow was Bondurant's stellar writing. He sets a scene like nobody's business, transplanting you to the Franklin County, Virginia of the 1920s and '30s in a manner reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy (of the Border Trilogy and No Country for Old Men era, not the boring and overrated The Road), depicting both the natural and manmade in a way that's stark and beautiful and harsh all at once. The title is a paraphrase of Sherwood Anderson's writings in Liberty magazine in 1935, as quoted at the beginning of Part I:

"What is the wettest section in the U.S.A., the place where during prohibition and since, the most illicit liquor has been made? The extreme wet spot, per number of people, isn't New York or Chicago ... the spot that fairly dripped illicit liquor, and kept right on dripping it after prohibition ended ... is Franklin County, Virginia."

The same chapter heading quotes the Official Records of the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement 1935 as estimating that 99 out of 100 people in Franklin County at that time "[were] making, or [had] some connection with, illicit liquor." The Wettest County is the story of 3 of them -- namely, the infamous "blockading" Bondurant brothers, Forrest, Howard, and Jack. Bereft of their mother and 2 sisters by the Spanish flu epidemic of 1919, the brothers see no path to survival save making and running illicit liquor; their father's general store barely stays afloat during the Depression, and small-scale tobacco farming is a marginal enterprise -- described by the book's quasi-narrator as "the most awful, thankless, and debilitating agricultural work he ever witnessed" -- even at the best of times (which clearly, this ain't).

Contrary to local folklore, which imagines the Bondurants as birds of a feather, all cut from the same bad boy cloth, the brothers are very different men. Forrest, the eldest, is somewhat of a legend, revered and feared in equal parts after a liquor sale gone bad reveals his seemingly inhuman strength. When asked why everyone is afraid to talk about the Bondurants, neighbor Tom Cundiff explains,

"Tell you what ... Man got his head cut off with a razor. Left for dead, not a spoonful of blood left in 'im, you unnerstan'? And what if I told you this man got up, walked ten miles through a blizzard? What would you say to that? ... Would you believe it?" When the inquirer says he wouldn't, "Well, then, Cundiff said, you got nothin' to be scared of, do you?"

Howard, a giant of a man who even his brothers dismiss as "some kind of machine or animal, reacting to the world in an instinctual manner," is haunted by memories of the Great War, and finds solace only in the exhausting physicality of farm labor.

"Sometimes while in the barn moving hay or in his father's tobacco field he would stop listening to the world and just work, concentrating on the basic repetition of movements, the strain and crack of his muscles. Every so often the perfect cycle of motion and strength was found and it was better than effortless, and the sweetness of the moment rang in delicious ripples through his body."

Sadly, this alone isn't enough to provide for his frail wife, Lucy, and their sickly infant daughter, and he's drawn repeatedly back into the far more lucrative business of making moonshine. And then there's baby brother Jack, probably the most well-developed character, who fervently, desperately hopes blockading will be his ticket out of Franklin County and its hardscrabble existence (well, except for maybe that alluring, Dunkard-churchgoing, banjo player, Bertha Minnix). Older and wiser, Forrest has his doubts, asking Jack, "What makes you think ... that after it gets going you will want it to end?"

What ties the brothers together is family loyalty, of course, and a willingness to fight tooth and nail for what they believe, even when it gets very ugly indeed. As Howard explains to Jack,

"Never does turn out like you think, Howard said. When the first swing happens everything is new an' nothin' is the way you thought. ... I'll tell you what, Howard said, you only need to know one thing. Something ol' Forrest knows. That's you gotta hit first, hit with everythin' you got, and then keep hittin' until the man is down, and then you hit him some more. ... Many men, Howard said, like the idea of fightin' but very few likes to get hit. You can make a man wanna quit real quick with that first shot. A good straight left into the nose bone and most will let it be. A man who likes to get hit is the one to watch out for."

This philosophy is put to the test as Prohibition ends, and local law enforcement officials take the opportunity to put some house rules of their own in play: sure, the liquor trade can continue, but they want a piece of the action, too. Eventually, the Bondurants and Cundiff remain the only holdouts against the "granny fees," and their occupational hazards devolve from the occasional still bust-up to ever more brutal violence. With this angle, the story is less a grown-up Dukes of Hazzard rip-off than a meditation on the loss of the working man's individuality and dignity as the south industrialized, and I definitely found myself rooting for the decidedly non-pastoral Bondurants over the greedy good ole boys in charge.

As I noted above, I think the book's weakest point is Bondurant's (the author's, not the characters' -- and no, this isn't a coincidence, though you don't learn the specifics till the very end) seeming indecision as to whether he's writing historical fiction, or a slightly-dramatized retelling of historical events, a la In Cold Blood. Specifically, the presence of real-life author Sherwood Anderson, who comes to Franklin County to cover a major bootlegging trial, and develops an almost-Capote-like fascination with the illicit liquor trade in general and the Bondurants in particular, muddies up the story. In his struggle to understand the truth of Franklin County, rather than the cliches, he functions almost like a Greek chorus:

"Nights at the boardinghouse Anderson sat scribbling at a battered old sideboard table, trying to think of all the things he had seen that day, trying to remember the hands of the men in the fields, the boys in the curing shed, the grim farmwives in the cookhouse, the lines of their faces, the cut of their work shirts, the seams of their shoes. But in all these things he saw very little. It was as if the character of these people encouraged a sort of blank anonymity ... [T]he strange confines of Franklin, its long skylines, rolling hills, left him with a feeling of enclosure and confinement, as if something dangerous was contained there and the minds of the citizens having to focus on not letting it out."

As such, he offers some interesting observations -- but all in all, I found his chapters distracting and slow, and think his role could have been much smaller while still offering the same sense of perspective.