On May 2 at 7p.m., Daniel Orozco will read from his new collection of stories at our Pen World Voices event, together with Sudanese author Leila Aboulela and Swedish author Jonas Hassen Khemiri. Purchase your tickets for that event here. Here's Caitlin Hill with her review of Orientation.
Daniel Orozco’s Orientation and Other Stories
(Faber & Faber, 2011)
162 pages, paper
Reviewed by Caitlin Hill
Orozco’s debut collection unsettled me. I read the collection in one sitting and then sat still for several moments, trying to understand what I had just experienced. My first impulse was to decide whether I liked the collection, before I remembered that is never the point. In this case, however, I had no ready answer, and I became consumed by it. I’m still not sure if I “liked” Orientation, but I am sure I will read it again, I am certain I will recommend it, and I won’t soon forget its stories.
Orientation is in keeping with a long tradition of the American (post-indigenous) form of short-storytelling: subjects and situations we recognize, without a lot of drama or glamour. The settings are often quite simple—office spaces, supermarkets, apartments, loading docks, California—and, more often than not, what happens in the course of the story itself is unremarkable; that is, the plot is nothing extraordinary. The thoughts, experiences, and words that come from Orozco’s characters are so deeply rooted in verisimilitude that, at times, I realized I was pushing through a story very quickly, because I would move through the characters’ responses without second-guessing a thing.
I should clarify: this is not to indicate that Orozco’s stories or characters are merely predictable. On the contrary, his stories, and the people with which Orozco populates said stories, are inevitable. It is the goal of all writers, or should be. I knew what his characters would do or say almost innately. Even while reading something shocking, even while noticing that Orozco hadn’t done what a lesser writer would have done, even while the writer/editor/critic was in the back of my mind unraveling the craft, the reader in me was totally absorbed and comfortably settled in for the ride, assured that everything that was going to happen was perfectly set up and unavoidable. The shocking didn’t utterly shock. The surprising evoked a small euphoria of self-satisfaction that usually only creeps up when I guess the motive, but perhaps not the murderer, in a mystery.
We are repeatedly told to attempt to capture “the human condition” when we sit down to write—especially fiction, especially short stories. I’ve never hung off the side of a suspension bridge, as one of Orozco’s characters, Baby, does in The Bridge; I’ve never worked as any kind of painter, much less a high-risk one, helmeted and cocky. But I’ve been haunted. I’ve been nicknamed against my will. I’ve inflated the importance of lesser things in an attempt to relieve the pressure of the incomprehensible. Who hasn’t felt the precariousness of their perch? How could a man I can’t imagine relating to in any real sense be so clearly a mirror for me? We don’t even get any interiority from Baby, his story is told at a slight remove, but I know that guy.
In my personal favorite story (and I do maintain that I’m allowed to have a favorite story even while still trying to decide if I “like” the collection), Officers Weep, Orozco uses the structure and form of a police blotter to reveal the strange goings on during an officer duo’s shift:
300 Block, Galleon Court. Tall Ships Estates. Criminal trespass and public disturbance. One-armed magazine salesman kicking doors and threatening residents. Scuffle ensues. Officers sit on suspect, call for backup, ponder a cop koan: How do you cuff a one-armed man?
Orozco uses humor throughout, both to alleviate the tension and to lull the reader into a false sense of security, and this story highlights that duality best. Police officers have dangerous jobs; something must give. Yet, even while laughing, you can't actually relax because you don't know what will happen next. The thread of someone stealing a treasured chainsaw and wreaking havoc throughout the area provides a compelling through-line and an “in” for the reader, utilizing a subtle dramatic irony to hold us through the seemingly random events and help us feel like cops ourselves: recognize a pattern, follow the right track (if it were a game of Carmen Sandiego, we’d see a 10-ton weight drop out of the sky and feel the thrill of knowing we were close).
And Orozco brings the story a level further by choosing the predictable: the cops are falling for each other; the cops use humor to de-escalate tense situations; the cops humorously decide to avoid a certain repeated domestic disturbance; the cops revel in beating protestors; the cops are what we expect cop characters to be from all we’ve seen and heard of them. Yet, Orozco’s choices don’t feel cliché. It’s as if he doesn’t say to himself, “Okay, a male and female cop as partners. I can’t let them fall in love, because everyone makes them fall in love.” He knows that the manner in which he chose to write this piece makes it unique, so he’s permitted to indulge in other ways, with care. He writes their story, and if they begin to find one another attractive, hell, they’re only human.
And they are oh so human. All of his characters are, to the point of discomfort.
So, will you like this collection? I don’t know. In point of fact, I rather hope you don’t. How can you “like” it when someone writes down the thoughts you’re not so proud of, the wanton desires and judgments you pass, daily? How can you “like” your weaknesses picked apart on the page? How can you “like” the reminder of how unremarkable we are, how similar in our damage, how typical in our fallibility and fear?
If Orozco’s done his job as well as I believe he has, you will feel his stories slip between your ribs and ingest your gut whole, like a California rattlesnake. With no room for ego, you’ll feel devoid of pain, but certain that you have just experienced something horrifically true and devastatingly real. You’ve finally gone through your own orientation. Welcome to the team. “That’s my cubicle. I sit in there.” See you at lunch.
Showing posts with label Book review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Book review. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Book Review: Andrew Wingfield's Right of Way
Right of Way: Stories
Washington Writers' Publishing House
230 Pages
Published Oct. 15, 2010
ISBN: 0931846943
Reviewed by Jared C. Clark
What happens when a writer moves from Northern California to a changing neighborhood on the outskirts of Washington, D.C.? Well if that writer is Andrew Wingfield, he observes the people around him and writes about it. Wingfield's stories take place in an imagined D.C. suburb, and he maneuvers among the neighborhood's streets and people so deftly that the fictional town of Cleave Springs becomes as real as the neighborhood you or I live in.
The collection begins with "Precious," a story that highlights Wingfield's superb writing skills and attention to detail. In "Precious," Wingfield paints a broad portrait of declining urban life during the brief moment when a man chases a runaway dog, but during this time he also introduces the complicated notion of living in cities in the 21st century and the disparities between rich and poor that often arise. Wingfield writes, "America is a rich country growing poorer all the time in places," and this notion remains central to each of the stories he tells.
Wingfield's attention to detail helps bring Cleave Springs to life, but it's his delicate character development that really helps the places shine. Wingfield carefully constructs his characters in a way that provides multiple perspectives to life in Cleave Springs. The stories of a do-it-yourself white couple who move to town expecting a brighter future in the title story, or the black protagonist in "Goodbye" who reminisces about the days before drugs and crime left him as the only one of his childhood friends still living in the neighborhood, are the reason Cleave Springs feels so real—and so important.
Wingfield creates these characters with the same subtle style he uses to craft each story. He never reveals too much too soon, and many of the characters are haunted by past events and people in ways that only re-reading can really uncover. While Wingfield does resolve each story, he does so in a way that leaves you thinking about the characters and the possibilities in terms of the neighborhood: their future is as uncertain, and their possibilities as endless as the place they inhabit.
Despite the care Wingfield puts into creating Cleave Springs and the diverse residents who live there, at times this diversity does seem forced. In "Right of Way," the new-to-town couple move next door to Ash, a self-raised teenager and charge of a junkie and her drunk boyfriend, and also a nice lesbian couple raising a child on their own. But these instances are rare, and in the case of "Right of Way," the distraction is minimized when the story returns to the main character, Nita, and her struggle to identify with a new place, a strained marriage, and the neglected neighborhood kid with a secret to hide.
Wingfield's collection helps shed light on a changing America and the limitations and possibilities these changes put on residents. At one point in the title story, Nita admonishes her husband, Wright, saying: "You care about your precious neighborhood and what it's going to be like one day when every house is beautiful and the right of way is a sanitized bike path and junkie women and their alcoholic boyfriends and their freaky kids don't live next door. That's what you care about. And it's creepy." Like Wright, Wingfield cares, but it's not creepy; it's elegant and compelling and tells universal stories about the rich and the poor, the old and the new, and above all, about people of every race and background trying to get by in a world that's changing around them.
***
NOTE: Andrew Wingfield will read at The Writer's Center on October 17 at 2:00 p.m. Click here to learn more about the event. Look for Jared Clark's interview with Wingfield on First Person Plural tomorrow.
Jared Clark is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist and English master's student at George Mason University.
Jared Clark is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist and English master's student at George Mason University.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Book Review: Dawn Potter's Tracing Paradise
Tracing Paradise: Two Years in Harmony with John Milton
Reviewed by Kathryn Miles
I begin this review with a confession: I am no fan of John Milton. One of my enduring memories of graduate school was a particularly rough Renaissance poetry seminar in which the professor—a noted Milton scholar—asked what was amiss with our class. After explaining that we had, as instructed, read all of Paradise Lost for that day, she looked aghast. “You’re not supposed to read it,” she corrected. “You’re supposed to skim it.”
This admonishment did little to soften the resistance I’ve felt towards the epic, and so I felt a certain trepidation upon beginning Dawn Potter’s lovely memoir, Tracing Paradise: Two Years in Harmony with John Milton. Potter, after all, not only read Paradise Lost; she also transcribed it.
All of it.
That’s the kind of project that can give a reader pause. But Potter is quick to allay any nervous incredulity her audience might have, and she readily admits that her relationship with Milton has been as fraught as anyone’s.
What, then, would prompt an otherwise reasonable contemporary poet to undertake such a project? For starters, there was the suggestion by her friend and Maine’s former poet laureate, Baron Wormser, that she do so. Equally as compelling was Potter’s own belief that she would be a better writer and thinker by “seriously studying great works that were antithetical to me in some inner personal way.” Paradise Lost, she explains, always seemed too sanctimonious and conscious of its own craft to enter her pantheon of favorite texts. It comes as much as a surprise to Potter as her readers, then, when she discovers both a lyrical and philosophical connection to the massive poem.
Tracing Paradise details this kinship in delightful and unexpected ways. Part literary criticism, part ars poetica, part book of days, the memoir invests Milton with new vibrancy while musing on larger questions of existential sustainability. We learn, for instance, about Potter’s experiments in homesteading and the sacrifices and joys of her life as a parent. Along the way, she also offers gracious insight into the complicated relationships we form with the natural world. At each moment, Potter reveals myriad ways in which Milton enhances and explicates the commonplace.
Consider, for instance, the chapter “Angels, Obedience, and ATVs,” in which a trip to visit the Roman statue of Michael spurs a hilarious meditation on all-terrain vehicles, masculinity, and Milton’s depiction of Adam and Eve. Other treatments of Paradise Lost, such as the one applied to the euthanasia of a family goat, are perhaps more of a stretch. But Potter can be forgiven this occasional looseness. Her aim is not so much thesis-driven argumentation as it is an exploration of affiliations. “Like most twenty-first century American poets,” she explains, “I swim in the warm and shallow waters of the personal.”
Happily, so too do most twenty-first century readers. And there is much of the personal to celebrate in Tracing Paradise, from its distinctly decadent sentences to its unflinching honesty. Just as valuable is the book’s wise reminder that poetry—even canonical, much studied poetry—can still inspire surprise and a sense of wonder in us all.
***
Kathryn Miles is an author and professor of Environmental Writing at Unity College, where she teaches courses in narrative nonfiction, nature writing, and journalism. Her first book, Adventures with Ari, combines backyard naturalism, personal memoir, and canine ethnography. It was named a Bark! Magazine notable book for 2009. Find her online here.
Reviewed by Kathryn Miles
I begin this review with a confession: I am no fan of John Milton. One of my enduring memories of graduate school was a particularly rough Renaissance poetry seminar in which the professor—a noted Milton scholar—asked what was amiss with our class. After explaining that we had, as instructed, read all of Paradise Lost for that day, she looked aghast. “You’re not supposed to read it,” she corrected. “You’re supposed to skim it.”
This admonishment did little to soften the resistance I’ve felt towards the epic, and so I felt a certain trepidation upon beginning Dawn Potter’s lovely memoir, Tracing Paradise: Two Years in Harmony with John Milton. Potter, after all, not only read Paradise Lost; she also transcribed it.
All of it.
That’s the kind of project that can give a reader pause. But Potter is quick to allay any nervous incredulity her audience might have, and she readily admits that her relationship with Milton has been as fraught as anyone’s.
What, then, would prompt an otherwise reasonable contemporary poet to undertake such a project? For starters, there was the suggestion by her friend and Maine’s former poet laureate, Baron Wormser, that she do so. Equally as compelling was Potter’s own belief that she would be a better writer and thinker by “seriously studying great works that were antithetical to me in some inner personal way.” Paradise Lost, she explains, always seemed too sanctimonious and conscious of its own craft to enter her pantheon of favorite texts. It comes as much as a surprise to Potter as her readers, then, when she discovers both a lyrical and philosophical connection to the massive poem.
Tracing Paradise details this kinship in delightful and unexpected ways. Part literary criticism, part ars poetica, part book of days, the memoir invests Milton with new vibrancy while musing on larger questions of existential sustainability. We learn, for instance, about Potter’s experiments in homesteading and the sacrifices and joys of her life as a parent. Along the way, she also offers gracious insight into the complicated relationships we form with the natural world. At each moment, Potter reveals myriad ways in which Milton enhances and explicates the commonplace.
Consider, for instance, the chapter “Angels, Obedience, and ATVs,” in which a trip to visit the Roman statue of Michael spurs a hilarious meditation on all-terrain vehicles, masculinity, and Milton’s depiction of Adam and Eve. Other treatments of Paradise Lost, such as the one applied to the euthanasia of a family goat, are perhaps more of a stretch. But Potter can be forgiven this occasional looseness. Her aim is not so much thesis-driven argumentation as it is an exploration of affiliations. “Like most twenty-first century American poets,” she explains, “I swim in the warm and shallow waters of the personal.”
Happily, so too do most twenty-first century readers. And there is much of the personal to celebrate in Tracing Paradise, from its distinctly decadent sentences to its unflinching honesty. Just as valuable is the book’s wise reminder that poetry—even canonical, much studied poetry—can still inspire surprise and a sense of wonder in us all.
***
Kathryn Miles is an author and professor of Environmental Writing at Unity College, where she teaches courses in narrative nonfiction, nature writing, and journalism. Her first book, Adventures with Ari, combines backyard naturalism, personal memoir, and canine ethnography. It was named a Bark! Magazine notable book for 2009. Find her online here.
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Review Monday: The Way It Was: Walter Lord on His Life and Books
The Way it Was: Walter Lord on His Life and Books
Edited by Jenny Lawrence
294 pages
Published in 2009
Reviewed by Kyle Semmel
The Way It Was is an indispensible introduction into the mind (and work) of one of America's foremost historians of the 20th Century, Walter Lord. Without Lord, James Cameron's Titanic--one of the highest grossing films of all time--would not have been made. It was Lord, you see, who wrote the book on which that film was based. That book, A Night to Remember, is a riveting account of the night the Titanic sank, told in Lord's signature eye-witness style: through various personae on board the doomed ship. As Evan Thomas of Newsweek (whose father was one of Lord's editors) puts it in the preface: "His style of you-are-there-narrative and eye for telling detail, combined with his prodigious researching abilities, made him a model or inspiration for later popular historians, including David McCullough."
Published in 2009 and available on Amazon, The Way It Was serves as a kind of posthumous memoir--and a very personable, enjoyable one at that. Edited by his close friend Jenny Lawrence--a daughter of one of Lord's college friends. (You can read Lawrence's account of Lord in a First Person Plural "Whatever happened to" feature posted last year.) Because of her unique proximity to Lord, she had valuable access to him in the waning years of his life. Though some of the material in the book comes from writings he'd left at various archives in the U.S. and England, the bulk of the material, she writes, comes from interviews she conducted with him at his New York City apartment.
A Night to Remember was Lord's second published book, but already here the seed of his later iconic style was planted, one that humanized the study of history and made engaging narratives part of the story. In Lord's books, the people that populate history are not submerged beneath facts and dates; they are part of the very fabric of the events. Take the passengers of the Titanic as an example:
Space doesn't permit for too much elaboration on Lord's process of writing A Night to Remember here, but suffice it to say that by uncovering the tiny details of that night, as remembered by those who survived, Lord created a truly new and fascinating story that resonated with his readers (the book became a bestseller and he could suddenly devote himself entirely to writing). Read the book today and you get the same reaction. The book is a deeply fascinating account--even more exciting than the film. Yes, that's possible.
Lord's career spanned the decades and The Way It Was covers the books he wrote in a fashion similar to how Bob Dylan's Chronicles covers the production of his early albums. During his career, Walter Lord published books on a wide body of historical topics, from WWII to the Alamo, and he was a master at coming up with great book titles: Day of Infamy (1957), The Good Years (1960), A Time to Stand (1961), Peary to the Pole (1963), The Past that Would Not Die (1965), Incredible Victory (1967), Dawn's Early Light (1972), Lonely Vigil (1976), The Miracle of Dunkirk (1980), and The Night Lives On (1986).
Though it's hard to know just how many of these titles will be remembered a hundred years from now, Lord's impact on the study of history is not in doubt. His use of eye-witness accounts was groundbreaking in its time, and has contributed to the narrative style of writing history that has rejuvenated that field of study. And The Way It Was is a fine contribution to his canon, a great case study for historians and novelists alike.
***
Kyle Semmel is the publications and communications manager of The Writer's Center and administrator of First Person Plural. In addition to his work at TWC, he is a writer and translator (under the name K.E. Semmel) whose work has appeared in Ontario Review, The Washington Post, Aufgabe, The Brooklyn Review, The Bitter Oleander, Redivider, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere. His translation of Jytte Borberg's classic Danish story "Englene" will soon appear as "Angels" in The New Renaissance. His interview with internationally acclaimed poet Pia Tafdrup is in the current issue of World Literature Today. For his translations of Simon Fruelund’s fiction, he received a translation grant from the Danish Arts Council.
Edited by Jenny Lawrence
294 pages
Published in 2009
Reviewed by Kyle Semmel
Published in 2009 and available on Amazon, The Way It Was serves as a kind of posthumous memoir--and a very personable, enjoyable one at that. Edited by his close friend Jenny Lawrence--a daughter of one of Lord's college friends. (You can read Lawrence's account of Lord in a First Person Plural "Whatever happened to" feature posted last year.) Because of her unique proximity to Lord, she had valuable access to him in the waning years of his life. Though some of the material in the book comes from writings he'd left at various archives in the U.S. and England, the bulk of the material, she writes, comes from interviews she conducted with him at his New York City apartment.
A Night to Remember was Lord's second published book, but already here the seed of his later iconic style was planted, one that humanized the study of history and made engaging narratives part of the story. In Lord's books, the people that populate history are not submerged beneath facts and dates; they are part of the very fabric of the events. Take the passengers of the Titanic as an example:
Minute by minute, the reader will live with the ship's company during her last breathtaking hours. The book will pick up several of the most interesting people and follow them straight through. The emphasis will be on those tiny details that will make the night seem to live again. And when he finishes, the reader will go on his way, knowing well that--in the words of the title--here was A Night to Remember.Those tiny details, it turns out, make for really interesting reading. As a history major in college and a would-be fiction writer, I was really absorbed by the world that Lord created. But it's important to note that Lord didn't fictionalize his facts here. While working full-time at an advertising agency--the same one that developed the ad campaign for Brommel, Beau Brommel, and Aqua Velva--he sought out and found survivors of the sinking.
Space doesn't permit for too much elaboration on Lord's process of writing A Night to Remember here, but suffice it to say that by uncovering the tiny details of that night, as remembered by those who survived, Lord created a truly new and fascinating story that resonated with his readers (the book became a bestseller and he could suddenly devote himself entirely to writing). Read the book today and you get the same reaction. The book is a deeply fascinating account--even more exciting than the film. Yes, that's possible.
Lord's career spanned the decades and The Way It Was covers the books he wrote in a fashion similar to how Bob Dylan's Chronicles covers the production of his early albums. During his career, Walter Lord published books on a wide body of historical topics, from WWII to the Alamo, and he was a master at coming up with great book titles: Day of Infamy (1957), The Good Years (1960), A Time to Stand (1961), Peary to the Pole (1963), The Past that Would Not Die (1965), Incredible Victory (1967), Dawn's Early Light (1972), Lonely Vigil (1976), The Miracle of Dunkirk (1980), and The Night Lives On (1986).
Though it's hard to know just how many of these titles will be remembered a hundred years from now, Lord's impact on the study of history is not in doubt. His use of eye-witness accounts was groundbreaking in its time, and has contributed to the narrative style of writing history that has rejuvenated that field of study. And The Way It Was is a fine contribution to his canon, a great case study for historians and novelists alike.
***
Kyle Semmel is the publications and communications manager of The Writer's Center and administrator of First Person Plural. In addition to his work at TWC, he is a writer and translator (under the name K.E. Semmel) whose work has appeared in Ontario Review, The Washington Post, Aufgabe, The Brooklyn Review, The Bitter Oleander, Redivider, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere. His translation of Jytte Borberg's classic Danish story "Englene" will soon appear as "Angels" in The New Renaissance. His interview with internationally acclaimed poet Pia Tafdrup is in the current issue of World Literature Today. For his translations of Simon Fruelund’s fiction, he received a translation grant from the Danish Arts Council.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Review Monday: The Museum of Eterna's Novel (The First Good Novel)
Macedonio Fernández
The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel)
(translated from the Spanish by Margaret Schwartz) with a foreword by Adam Thirwell.
Open Letter
Pub Date: February 23, 2010
Reviewed by Luis Alberto Ambroggio
In this extraordinary literary creation, Borges’ mentor, Macedonio Fernández, masters in the reader's playful engagement to games of the word and of the mind beyond literature and metaphysics. One of the great Argentine writers of the twentieth century, Macedonio (as he preferred to be called), wrote this novel (or anti-novel) with an originality and perversity second to none—way ahead of his time and beyond the avant-guard rupture with previous conventions. He redefined the genre and influenced the great literary geniuses among Hispanic-American writers, including Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Ricardo Piglia, and many others.
“Whoever preceded him might shine in history," Borges wrote, "but they were all rough drafts of Macedonio, imperfect previous versions. To not imitate this canon would have represented incredible negligence.”
The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel) is structured as a challenge to realism, to logic, and to structure itself, as if the author intended to demolish the sense of fluidity of a normal novel and its aesthetic tendency towards realism and the solemnity of style. Instead, we (the readers) are forced (as well as intelectually seduced) to immerse ourselves in continual digressions and discussions on the roles of authors, readers, critics, characters, theories on genres, etc., as if these topics were objects which are acquired and kept in a Museum. This Museum is also, as Adam Thirlwell writes in the foreword, a “laboratory for investigating whether every philosophical question can be observed through the condition of falling in love.”
Museum starts by offering over 50 prologues with a wide range of themes: mortality and eternity; perspective and the viscitudes of the author (including authorial despair); critics; context; non-existence; and so on. Many of these themes have digressions containing dedications, salutations, and narratives on whether readers should accept or reject a chracter in an elaborate effort to playfully frustrate and challenge.
Following the prologues are twenty chapters concerning a group of characters (some borrowed from other texts) who live on an estancia called "la novella." Three sets of lovers (Eterna and the President; The lover—Deunamor—and his anonymous lover; and Maybegenius and Sweetheart) in different settings exemplify or put into practice or reason the so-called concept of “todoamor,"—“totallove"—which overcomes what the world calls death, merely “hiding/ocultación” in Macedonio’s vocabulary. He writes: “I do not believe in the death of those who love nor in the life of those who do not love.”
Thus the only death possible and present in this novel is the academic death of the characters. Critics have suggested that the long process of writing this novel from 1925 until his death in 1952 was Macedonio’s attempt to fight his pain and fear following the untimely death of his wife, Elena de Obieta, in 1920.
The translator, Margaret Schwartz, Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University, has done an outstanding job translating Macedonio’s baroque, convoluted prose, complicated language, and invented words, preserving his unique voice. The quality of her translation no doubt comes from her time spent in Argentina prior to and under a Fulbright fellowship in 2004, her first-hand familiarity with living in the literary circles of Buenos Aires, and her meticulous research on the life and work of Macedonio Fernández. This is more meritorious when, in her own words, she is translating “someone who deliberately tangles his words, uses antiquated language, and who writes at the speed of thought, without regard for syntax and punctuation.” But even more so, I might add, because Macedonio Fernández is a genius like Cervantes and Kafka—who not only created their own language but masterfully caused the unpredictable methamorphosis of the genre.
Luis Alberto Ambroggio, a member of the North-American Academy of the Spanish Language, is Writer's Center workshop leader and an internationally known Hispanic-American poet born in Argentina. He is the author of eleven collections of poetry. His poetry and essays have appeared in newspapers, magazines (including Passport, Scholastic, International Poetry Review, and Hispanic Culture Review), poetry anthologies (DC Poets Against the War, Cool Salsa), textbooks (Paisajes, Bridges to Literature, Voices: Breaking Down Barriers) and award-winning electronic collections of Latino Literature (Alexander Street Press). Recently, another Writer's Center workshop leader, Yvette Neisser Moreno, edited his Difficult Beauty: Selected Poems. You can read a review of that book here.
He can be reached at lambroggio@cox.net
The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel)
(translated from the Spanish by Margaret Schwartz) with a foreword by Adam Thirwell.
Open Letter
Pub Date: February 23, 2010
Reviewed by Luis Alberto Ambroggio
“Whoever preceded him might shine in history," Borges wrote, "but they were all rough drafts of Macedonio, imperfect previous versions. To not imitate this canon would have represented incredible negligence.”
The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel) is structured as a challenge to realism, to logic, and to structure itself, as if the author intended to demolish the sense of fluidity of a normal novel and its aesthetic tendency towards realism and the solemnity of style. Instead, we (the readers) are forced (as well as intelectually seduced) to immerse ourselves in continual digressions and discussions on the roles of authors, readers, critics, characters, theories on genres, etc., as if these topics were objects which are acquired and kept in a Museum. This Museum is also, as Adam Thirlwell writes in the foreword, a “laboratory for investigating whether every philosophical question can be observed through the condition of falling in love.”
Museum starts by offering over 50 prologues with a wide range of themes: mortality and eternity; perspective and the viscitudes of the author (including authorial despair); critics; context; non-existence; and so on. Many of these themes have digressions containing dedications, salutations, and narratives on whether readers should accept or reject a chracter in an elaborate effort to playfully frustrate and challenge.
Following the prologues are twenty chapters concerning a group of characters (some borrowed from other texts) who live on an estancia called "la novella." Three sets of lovers (Eterna and the President; The lover—Deunamor—and his anonymous lover; and Maybegenius and Sweetheart) in different settings exemplify or put into practice or reason the so-called concept of “todoamor,"—“totallove"—which overcomes what the world calls death, merely “hiding/ocultación” in Macedonio’s vocabulary. He writes: “I do not believe in the death of those who love nor in the life of those who do not love.”
Thus the only death possible and present in this novel is the academic death of the characters. Critics have suggested that the long process of writing this novel from 1925 until his death in 1952 was Macedonio’s attempt to fight his pain and fear following the untimely death of his wife, Elena de Obieta, in 1920.
The translator, Margaret Schwartz, Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University, has done an outstanding job translating Macedonio’s baroque, convoluted prose, complicated language, and invented words, preserving his unique voice. The quality of her translation no doubt comes from her time spent in Argentina prior to and under a Fulbright fellowship in 2004, her first-hand familiarity with living in the literary circles of Buenos Aires, and her meticulous research on the life and work of Macedonio Fernández. This is more meritorious when, in her own words, she is translating “someone who deliberately tangles his words, uses antiquated language, and who writes at the speed of thought, without regard for syntax and punctuation.” But even more so, I might add, because Macedonio Fernández is a genius like Cervantes and Kafka—who not only created their own language but masterfully caused the unpredictable methamorphosis of the genre.
Luis Alberto Ambroggio, a member of the North-American Academy of the Spanish Language, is Writer's Center workshop leader and an internationally known Hispanic-American poet born in Argentina. He is the author of eleven collections of poetry. His poetry and essays have appeared in newspapers, magazines (including Passport, Scholastic, International Poetry Review, and Hispanic Culture Review), poetry anthologies (DC Poets Against the War, Cool Salsa), textbooks (Paisajes, Bridges to Literature, Voices: Breaking Down Barriers) and award-winning electronic collections of Latino Literature (Alexander Street Press). Recently, another Writer's Center workshop leader, Yvette Neisser Moreno, edited his Difficult Beauty: Selected Poems. You can read a review of that book here.
He can be reached at lambroggio@cox.net
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Review Monday: Dylan Landis' Normal People Don't Live Like This
by Dylan Landis
Persea Books
Released: September 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0892553549
Reviewed by Caitlin Hill
Is Dylan Landis’ debut, Normal People Don’t Live Like This, a collection or a novel? It’s a fair question, and the book jacket refrains from answering, preferring the ambiguous “debut” where the label would usually be affixed. As this particular work blurs the lines between “novel” and “short story collection,” let’s call it a “novel-in-stories.” Each story can stand, unwavering, on its own two feet, and yet the collection as a whole tells a grander story; one that, when read cover-to-cover, still has a sense of movement, of working towards a greater understanding. What binds this work together is a cluster of women, most notably our main protagonist, Leah—in whose story and perspective we spend the most time—and her mother, Helen.
Leah is introduced in the second story in the book, “Fire.” She’s in middle school, and we are dropped into her world of fairly standard teenage fare. What Landis does well here is crafting individuals: Leah, tapping things thrice whenever she’s nervous; Helen, exhibiting her oppressive concern for her daughter’s well being by scaring her with specific stories of rape and murder: “He used a hammer,” leading Leah to wonder if the hammer was for the rape or the murder; Rainey, a beautiful bully who entrances Leah, even as she’s repelled by her cruelty. When Leah realizes that another bully, Chris, has flaws, Landis doesn’t simply state that Leah’s fear ebbs, she writes: “She thought about these things, and in thinking them she ran a tender finger along the edge of her fear.” It’s no general calming; it’s Leah’s specific experience described as only Landis can. And Leah progresses through the stories. Though she is never devoid of a hunger for connection, never abandons her triple-tap in times of crisis, she is still growing and changing, until the final piece “Delacroix,” in which she leaves us literally under Paris, in the sewers, taking in the world that Leah is still just beginning to understand, but with a promise that she has at least taken her first steps.
In one of the most touching segments, the title story “Normal People Don’t Live Like This,” we get our first section from Helen’s perspective. She confronts a fellow mother, Bonita, with a handful of clothes and sundries that their daughters have pilfered together. The disarray of Bonita’s place—the dirt, the grime, the haphazard arrangement—is a clear reflection of how this house is run: by a slew of teenage girls. Helen is simultaneously revolted and enchanted, and it is in this piece that we really begin to get into Helen as a character, to see her flaws and her yearning, so she is no longer merely a domineering, anorexic mother. She is beautiful and pitiable and perplexing. Each story reveals more about her, and she helps carry us through to her own final section, wherein we realize this book is as much about Helen as her daughter, and that she too has reached a turning point. Landis ends the collection before we fully dive over that edge and into a new life for Leah and Helen, but the promise is somehow enough.
Landis fulfills us. Each story builds off the previous, and builds to the next. Each story is a morsel in itself; it leaves you full, and there’s a whole tableful to gorge on. This is what Landis does, and does so well, and had she written us a standard novel, we might have become fed up and walked away. Instead, we have a contract from the start—we will be given small, digestible stories from multiple points of view, and we will want to come back and read them all—and we allow ourselves to sink into this world, to become immersed in these women, never quite sure where Landis will take us next, but trusting it will be beautiful and haunting. Read it one story at a time. Read it as a novel. Read it out of order. Read it upside-down. Just read it. You’ll see what I mean.
Caitlin Hill is the Managing Editor of Poet Lore and and MFA candidate at American University (fiction). Her fiction has appeared in So to Speak. She loves the Red Sox (even though all they ever do is break her heart).
Persea Books
Released: September 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0892553549
Reviewed by Caitlin Hill
Is Dylan Landis’ debut, Normal People Don’t Live Like This, a collection or a novel? It’s a fair question, and the book jacket refrains from answering, preferring the ambiguous “debut” where the label would usually be affixed. As this particular work blurs the lines between “novel” and “short story collection,” let’s call it a “novel-in-stories.” Each story can stand, unwavering, on its own two feet, and yet the collection as a whole tells a grander story; one that, when read cover-to-cover, still has a sense of movement, of working towards a greater understanding. What binds this work together is a cluster of women, most notably our main protagonist, Leah—in whose story and perspective we spend the most time—and her mother, Helen.Leah is introduced in the second story in the book, “Fire.” She’s in middle school, and we are dropped into her world of fairly standard teenage fare. What Landis does well here is crafting individuals: Leah, tapping things thrice whenever she’s nervous; Helen, exhibiting her oppressive concern for her daughter’s well being by scaring her with specific stories of rape and murder: “He used a hammer,” leading Leah to wonder if the hammer was for the rape or the murder; Rainey, a beautiful bully who entrances Leah, even as she’s repelled by her cruelty. When Leah realizes that another bully, Chris, has flaws, Landis doesn’t simply state that Leah’s fear ebbs, she writes: “She thought about these things, and in thinking them she ran a tender finger along the edge of her fear.” It’s no general calming; it’s Leah’s specific experience described as only Landis can. And Leah progresses through the stories. Though she is never devoid of a hunger for connection, never abandons her triple-tap in times of crisis, she is still growing and changing, until the final piece “Delacroix,” in which she leaves us literally under Paris, in the sewers, taking in the world that Leah is still just beginning to understand, but with a promise that she has at least taken her first steps.
In one of the most touching segments, the title story “Normal People Don’t Live Like This,” we get our first section from Helen’s perspective. She confronts a fellow mother, Bonita, with a handful of clothes and sundries that their daughters have pilfered together. The disarray of Bonita’s place—the dirt, the grime, the haphazard arrangement—is a clear reflection of how this house is run: by a slew of teenage girls. Helen is simultaneously revolted and enchanted, and it is in this piece that we really begin to get into Helen as a character, to see her flaws and her yearning, so she is no longer merely a domineering, anorexic mother. She is beautiful and pitiable and perplexing. Each story reveals more about her, and she helps carry us through to her own final section, wherein we realize this book is as much about Helen as her daughter, and that she too has reached a turning point. Landis ends the collection before we fully dive over that edge and into a new life for Leah and Helen, but the promise is somehow enough.
Landis fulfills us. Each story builds off the previous, and builds to the next. Each story is a morsel in itself; it leaves you full, and there’s a whole tableful to gorge on. This is what Landis does, and does so well, and had she written us a standard novel, we might have become fed up and walked away. Instead, we have a contract from the start—we will be given small, digestible stories from multiple points of view, and we will want to come back and read them all—and we allow ourselves to sink into this world, to become immersed in these women, never quite sure where Landis will take us next, but trusting it will be beautiful and haunting. Read it one story at a time. Read it as a novel. Read it out of order. Read it upside-down. Just read it. You’ll see what I mean.
Caitlin Hill is the Managing Editor of Poet Lore and and MFA candidate at American University (fiction). Her fiction has appeared in So to Speak. She loves the Red Sox (even though all they ever do is break her heart).
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Review Monday: The Lie by O.H. Bennett
The Lie by O.H. Bennett
Reviewed by Rion Amilcar Scott
It’s a story as old as Genesis: With jealousy in his heart, a man kills his brother and, as punishment, faces banishment and is forever marked as a killer.
In the masterful hands of O.H. Bennett—the Virginia author who wrote 2000’s “The Colored Garden”—Cain and Abel’s tale, transposed to 1970s Indiana, the jealousy is not the motivation behind the crime; it’s just another unpleasant and confusing feeling to sort through in the wake of tragedy. With such a fine and nuanced eye on human psychology, Bennett pulls off an affecting—if uneven—story of lies, secrets, race, and ultimately hard fought, yet modest, reconciliation.
The Lie (307 pages, Algonquin Books, $13.95), Bennett’s second novel, begins with teenager Terrell Matheus watching the dead body of his older brother, Lawrence Matheus, as it lies on his front porch. Lawrence has been felled by a single bullet after the two brothers horsed around with a gun, causing it to go off. The neighborhood becomes a tempest with neighbors watching and police questioning. Terrell, the crime’s accidental perpetrator, is also its only witness. It is at this moment of tension and confusion that Terrell— a black teenager—tells the police that a group of white men murdered his brother.
Anyone who has ever told an untruth only to watch it slowly unravel (that would be all of us), can put him or herself in Terrell’s anguished shoes. The reader watches with discomfort as Terrell’s lie rearranges the lives of everyone in this Indiana town. Students stage walkouts at school to protest what they believe to be a hate crime. Terrell’s father becomes consumed in anger, telling his son that he has learned to hate. Local preachers and activists use Lawrence as a symbol. Terrell’s uncle, in an act of vigilante justice, attacks some white men who vaguely fit his nephew’s invented description.
Eventually, Terrell’s lie is uncovered and he faces a fate worse than prison: the same fate that God cursed Cain with after he slew his brother. He’s turned back into the community, marked as a killer and forced to face everyone’s judgment.
Bennett writes with a straightforward and understated lyricism that does a remarkable job of maintaining the tension throughout the first half of the novel. It’s a narrative strategy reminiscent of Richard Wright’s Native Son, a book that shares DNA with Bennett’s work, but also its flaws.
Bennett relies so heavily on tension to keep the narrative in motion that after the other shoe drops and Terrell’s lie is discovered, the novel loses a bit of its immediacy. Parts of the second half of the book seem aimless and this makes an otherwise wonderful narrative feel bloated. For instance, there is a scene in which the author himself directly invokes the story of Cain and Abel. A preacher tells the Biblical tale from behind the pulpit as Terrell watches. The preacher, though not directly addressing Terrell, imagines God’s thoughts on punishing Cain: “‘But, but, but I still have plans for him. Uh-huh. He still can redeem himself. He can still help others. He can repent He can grow as a human being. He is still one of Mine. Do you hear?’”
Much like the long speech of Bigger Thomas’ attorney that mars the end of Native Son, the preacher’s (mercifully) short speech near the end of The Lie seems to be a way for the author to sneak his commentary into the novel. The beautiful restraint in which Bennett tells the story slips a bit without tension to center it.
Even with this, Bennett’s book is an eloquent masterstroke in America’s long conversation about race. Just as Terrell’s dilemma echoes back to the first murder, Bennett’s haunting prose will echo through readers' minds long after the final sentence.
O.H. Bennett will be reading at the Fall for the Book Festival Mason MFA Alumni Reading
When: Wed, September 23, 1:30pm – 2:30pm
Where: M&T Bank Tent, Outside the Johnson Center, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, Fairfax, VA 22030
Rion Amilcar Scott's fiction has appeared or is forthcoming at Bartelby-Snopes, Unlikely 2.0, Boston Literary Magazine, solnoirpublishing.com and other publications. He lives in Hyattsville, MD.
Reviewed by Rion Amilcar Scott
It’s a story as old as Genesis: With jealousy in his heart, a man kills his brother and, as punishment, faces banishment and is forever marked as a killer.
In the masterful hands of O.H. Bennett—the Virginia author who wrote 2000’s “The Colored Garden”—Cain and Abel’s tale, transposed to 1970s Indiana, the jealousy is not the motivation behind the crime; it’s just another unpleasant and confusing feeling to sort through in the wake of tragedy. With such a fine and nuanced eye on human psychology, Bennett pulls off an affecting—if uneven—story of lies, secrets, race, and ultimately hard fought, yet modest, reconciliation.
The Lie (307 pages, Algonquin Books, $13.95), Bennett’s second novel, begins with teenager Terrell Matheus watching the dead body of his older brother, Lawrence Matheus, as it lies on his front porch. Lawrence has been felled by a single bullet after the two brothers horsed around with a gun, causing it to go off. The neighborhood becomes a tempest with neighbors watching and police questioning. Terrell, the crime’s accidental perpetrator, is also its only witness. It is at this moment of tension and confusion that Terrell— a black teenager—tells the police that a group of white men murdered his brother. Anyone who has ever told an untruth only to watch it slowly unravel (that would be all of us), can put him or herself in Terrell’s anguished shoes. The reader watches with discomfort as Terrell’s lie rearranges the lives of everyone in this Indiana town. Students stage walkouts at school to protest what they believe to be a hate crime. Terrell’s father becomes consumed in anger, telling his son that he has learned to hate. Local preachers and activists use Lawrence as a symbol. Terrell’s uncle, in an act of vigilante justice, attacks some white men who vaguely fit his nephew’s invented description.
Eventually, Terrell’s lie is uncovered and he faces a fate worse than prison: the same fate that God cursed Cain with after he slew his brother. He’s turned back into the community, marked as a killer and forced to face everyone’s judgment.
Bennett writes with a straightforward and understated lyricism that does a remarkable job of maintaining the tension throughout the first half of the novel. It’s a narrative strategy reminiscent of Richard Wright’s Native Son, a book that shares DNA with Bennett’s work, but also its flaws.
Bennett relies so heavily on tension to keep the narrative in motion that after the other shoe drops and Terrell’s lie is discovered, the novel loses a bit of its immediacy. Parts of the second half of the book seem aimless and this makes an otherwise wonderful narrative feel bloated. For instance, there is a scene in which the author himself directly invokes the story of Cain and Abel. A preacher tells the Biblical tale from behind the pulpit as Terrell watches. The preacher, though not directly addressing Terrell, imagines God’s thoughts on punishing Cain: “‘But, but, but I still have plans for him. Uh-huh. He still can redeem himself. He can still help others. He can repent He can grow as a human being. He is still one of Mine. Do you hear?’”
Much like the long speech of Bigger Thomas’ attorney that mars the end of Native Son, the preacher’s (mercifully) short speech near the end of The Lie seems to be a way for the author to sneak his commentary into the novel. The beautiful restraint in which Bennett tells the story slips a bit without tension to center it.
Even with this, Bennett’s book is an eloquent masterstroke in America’s long conversation about race. Just as Terrell’s dilemma echoes back to the first murder, Bennett’s haunting prose will echo through readers' minds long after the final sentence.
O.H. Bennett will be reading at the Fall for the Book Festival Mason MFA Alumni Reading
When: Wed, September 23, 1:30pm – 2:30pm
Where: M&T Bank Tent, Outside the Johnson Center, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, Fairfax, VA 22030
Rion Amilcar Scott's fiction has appeared or is forthcoming at Bartelby-Snopes, Unlikely 2.0, Boston Literary Magazine, solnoirpublishing.com and other publications. He lives in Hyattsville, MD.
Monday, December 29, 2008
The Greatest Game Never Played
All the Stars Came out That Night
By Kevin King
Dutton
413 pages
If you're like me, you start missing baseball this time of year. Now that the holiday craziness is behind us. Isn't that right? Well, to prepare for the upcoming season--now only three months away!--I'm going to post my review of a book that came out a couple years back.
***
Those who enjoy baseball novels will adore Kevin King's All the Stars Came out That Night. At the center of this book is, like so many baseball novels, an event that never happened: a legendary game between a Negro League All-Star team and a white All-Star team at Boston's Fenway Park following the '34 World Series. But before we reach that game, King takes readers on a looping and whooping joyride across the country, from Pittsburgh to Hollywood. We meet John Henry and James Atwood, two bumbling would-be criminals who determine to kidnap Dizzy Dean for ransom during the World Series; they fail to kidnap Diz but manage, instead, to get caught up in Diz and Satchel Paige’s plot to arrange the first inter-racial All-Star game. In fact, just about everyone gets swept up in this plot.
What's remarkable about this nifty first novel is how King channels an impressive roster of characters and deftly shifts the point of view between them. We find a regular Who's Who of early twentieth-century American culture: Clarence Darrow, Kennesaw Mountain Landis, Henry Ford, Gus Greenlee, Walter Winchell, George Raft, and Carole Lombard, among others. Add to that list the baseball All-Stars: Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, and Dizzy Dean and the biggest names of the Cardinals’ famous Gashouse Gang; even Shoeless Joe Jackson, baseball's tragic, lost soul, makes an appearance (what baseball novel is complete without baseball's greatest fallen hero?). The sheer number of characters in this novel is incredible, but King manages to present each with astonishing depth and humanity. A drunken Babe Ruth, for example, stinks up the dugout with his gastrointestinal troubles, but at the same time we see him as a man suffering deeply the frailty of his age, his body, and his declining career. He's finished, and he knows it. We laugh, but doing so is a poignant reminder that the Babe was, after all, only a man. His great bellyache is our great bellyache.
Walter Winchell, the gossip columnist, is the “narrator”—a fact you may forget for half the book—and as a result there is a kind of hybrid feel to the story: half tabloid expose, half historical study of major league baseball before the integration of the game. What King elucidates well is the resistance many powerful Americans felt toward inter-racial play during the pre-Jackie Robinson era. At first, baseball commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis and automaker Henry Ford ardently oppose the game, fearing that a Negro win would prove Negro superiority. A loss for the white team, Henry Ford tells his trusted right-hand man, Harry Bennett, would be “a national humiliation”(95). So when Ford finally assents to sponsor the game, he does everything in his power to assure that the white team will win. And just in case the Negro team does win, the game is played under portable lights and with only a handful of spectators so that that the game remains top secret.
Until, that is, Winchell decides to tell this, “his last story.”
If there is a drawback to this book it may be, for some readers, the fact that it is predominantly a baseball novel. For all its power and charm, for all its humor, those who know a little bit—or preferably, a lot—about The Gashouse Gang or the Negro Leagues or baseball history generally will be in a better position to appreciate the gags and the magical baseball images King presents his readers (though for those readers unfamiliar with these things, this book would be a fun introduction to them). Take this gem, for example:
Baseball novels like this are in fact a rare treat for the baseball fan: a story that combines the lush atmosphere of the game we love with the storyteller's art of building a captivating drama. But they're also limited to the playing field, as it were, of the ball diamond. Even a novel as insistent as this one is on proving that it is more than just a baseball story—by inviting a whole slew of interesting characters into the mix—remains in the end a book whose substance is the hard stuff of the country's longest-running sports institution.
While many novels in this niche genre—from Wallop's The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, which is now famously adapted as the Broadway show Damn Yankees, to Malamud's classic The Natural, to W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe and The Iowa Baseball Confederacy—tend to move toward myth and legend, this one, to its credit, does so in moderation. It creates, instead, a much larger social panorama of America anno 1934, by focusing on the dark side of baseball: the game's less than noble history of racial segregation. For those of you who can hardly wait for the next baseball season to begin, this book should provide a measure of comfort to hold you over until opening day.
***
If you're into baseball books, by the way, then you might also enjoy Dennis Lehane's The Given Day. That book, written about frequently on this blog, also features baseball in a fascinating way, with Babe Ruth in a supporting role. Since reading The Given Day, I've read Lehane's Shutter Island. So look for a post later this week on these two books, particularly as they concern genre.
By Kevin King
Dutton
413 pages
If you're like me, you start missing baseball this time of year. Now that the holiday craziness is behind us. Isn't that right? Well, to prepare for the upcoming season--now only three months away!--I'm going to post my review of a book that came out a couple years back.
***
Those who enjoy baseball novels will adore Kevin King's All the Stars Came out That Night. At the center of this book is, like so many baseball novels, an event that never happened: a legendary game between a Negro League All-Star team and a white All-Star team at Boston's Fenway Park following the '34 World Series. But before we reach that game, King takes readers on a looping and whooping joyride across the country, from Pittsburgh to Hollywood. We meet John Henry and James Atwood, two bumbling would-be criminals who determine to kidnap Dizzy Dean for ransom during the World Series; they fail to kidnap Diz but manage, instead, to get caught up in Diz and Satchel Paige’s plot to arrange the first inter-racial All-Star game. In fact, just about everyone gets swept up in this plot. What's remarkable about this nifty first novel is how King channels an impressive roster of characters and deftly shifts the point of view between them. We find a regular Who's Who of early twentieth-century American culture: Clarence Darrow, Kennesaw Mountain Landis, Henry Ford, Gus Greenlee, Walter Winchell, George Raft, and Carole Lombard, among others. Add to that list the baseball All-Stars: Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, and Dizzy Dean and the biggest names of the Cardinals’ famous Gashouse Gang; even Shoeless Joe Jackson, baseball's tragic, lost soul, makes an appearance (what baseball novel is complete without baseball's greatest fallen hero?). The sheer number of characters in this novel is incredible, but King manages to present each with astonishing depth and humanity. A drunken Babe Ruth, for example, stinks up the dugout with his gastrointestinal troubles, but at the same time we see him as a man suffering deeply the frailty of his age, his body, and his declining career. He's finished, and he knows it. We laugh, but doing so is a poignant reminder that the Babe was, after all, only a man. His great bellyache is our great bellyache.
Walter Winchell, the gossip columnist, is the “narrator”—a fact you may forget for half the book—and as a result there is a kind of hybrid feel to the story: half tabloid expose, half historical study of major league baseball before the integration of the game. What King elucidates well is the resistance many powerful Americans felt toward inter-racial play during the pre-Jackie Robinson era. At first, baseball commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis and automaker Henry Ford ardently oppose the game, fearing that a Negro win would prove Negro superiority. A loss for the white team, Henry Ford tells his trusted right-hand man, Harry Bennett, would be “a national humiliation”(95). So when Ford finally assents to sponsor the game, he does everything in his power to assure that the white team will win. And just in case the Negro team does win, the game is played under portable lights and with only a handful of spectators so that that the game remains top secret.
Until, that is, Winchell decides to tell this, “his last story.”
If there is a drawback to this book it may be, for some readers, the fact that it is predominantly a baseball novel. For all its power and charm, for all its humor, those who know a little bit—or preferably, a lot—about The Gashouse Gang or the Negro Leagues or baseball history generally will be in a better position to appreciate the gags and the magical baseball images King presents his readers (though for those readers unfamiliar with these things, this book would be a fun introduction to them). Take this gem, for example:
Then he (Joe DiMaggio) saw him (Joe Jackson). A tall specter with a lubbed-up belly like a house that had poorly settled, and crooked teeth stained with decades of tobacco juice. The Natural. The one who broke molds with a full, powerful, fluid swing that sent balls with stunning frequency off and over stadium walls. Line drives you could hang your wash on (322).
Baseball novels like this are in fact a rare treat for the baseball fan: a story that combines the lush atmosphere of the game we love with the storyteller's art of building a captivating drama. But they're also limited to the playing field, as it were, of the ball diamond. Even a novel as insistent as this one is on proving that it is more than just a baseball story—by inviting a whole slew of interesting characters into the mix—remains in the end a book whose substance is the hard stuff of the country's longest-running sports institution.
While many novels in this niche genre—from Wallop's The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, which is now famously adapted as the Broadway show Damn Yankees, to Malamud's classic The Natural, to W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe and The Iowa Baseball Confederacy—tend to move toward myth and legend, this one, to its credit, does so in moderation. It creates, instead, a much larger social panorama of America anno 1934, by focusing on the dark side of baseball: the game's less than noble history of racial segregation. For those of you who can hardly wait for the next baseball season to begin, this book should provide a measure of comfort to hold you over until opening day.
***
If you're into baseball books, by the way, then you might also enjoy Dennis Lehane's The Given Day. That book, written about frequently on this blog, also features baseball in a fascinating way, with Babe Ruth in a supporting role. Since reading The Given Day, I've read Lehane's Shutter Island. So look for a post later this week on these two books, particularly as they concern genre.
Friday, November 28, 2008
Sam Patch, The Famous Jumper (Book Review)
Sam Patch, The Famous Jumper
By Paul E. Johnson
Hill & Wang Publishers
Published in 2003
Sam Patch, one of the first working-class heroes in American history, was a melancholic and suicidal drunkard who achieved fame by leaping from waterfalls (including the great Niagara, twice).
His career ended on November 13th, 1830, when he made his final leap from atop the High Falls of the Genesee in Rochester, NY. Though less known than its gigantic cousin to the west, the High Falls was and remains a treacherous cataract. Patch’s frozen body was discovered in the mouth of Lake Ontario by a farmer several months later, but by then Patch the man had morphed into Patch the myth. For the rest of the nineteenth century his story would be told in songs, in plays, and in books—many of these stories deliberately or inadvertently falsifying the life that, when it came right down to it, few knew.
In his fine biography, Sam Patch, The Famous Jumper, historian Paul E. Johnson painstakingly examines the record and paints a fresh, if also limited, portrait of the man who was one of the “pioneers” of “modern celebrity." Born into poverty in Rhode Island, Patch was destined to work the mills of Pawtucket, where a poor, uneducated boy could get work and, if he had talent, as Patch apparently did, learn the craft of mule spinning. This was no small achievement: “the spinning mule was among the biggest machines in the world,” and spinning was a craft practiced mostly by English immigrants.
It was a difficult operation, mule spinning, and it “required experience, along with a practiced mix of strength and a sensitive touch,” Johnson writes. “With each cycle of the spinning mule a long, heavy carriage rose out on tracks from the machine, stretching and twisting the carded and roved cotton into yarn.” Young Patch impressed his employers and the older mule spinners, and later he would become one of the first American mule spinners.
When not working at the mill, Patch, along with other Pawtucket boys, made daredevil leaps from Pawtucket Falls. To these boys, this was a craft—one that involved practice and skill. They even developed their own jumping style. “The Pawtucket boys,” Johnson writes, “all jumped in the same way: feet first, breathing in as they fell; they stayed underwater long enough to frighten spectators, then shot triumphantly to the surface." Pawtucket was an impoverished town, dominated by mills and mill workers, and for many of the boys, there was little hope of rising out of the crushing cycle of their lives. Yet leapers were held in high esteem, their courage and skills valued.
So later in the book, when Patch begins to leap for fame and for money, there seems nothing peculiar about his career choice. But it’s here Johnson scoops out the juiciest fruit. Patch’s first major leap was a protest leap in Paterson, NJ, where he had moved. An entrepreneur named Timothy Crane had turned a chunk of forest used by workers into an exclusive reserve for the wealthy. That town, also a mill town, was split by the Passaic Falls. To build a shortcut to his new park, Crane constructed a bridge spanning the falls. On the day the bridge was scheduled to be placed, in September 1827, a crowd gathered to watch. Workers knew that they would soon be forced to pay an entrance fee to get into their former playground, which effectively cut them off from the forest. When Patch leapt from the falls, he disrupted what was to be Crane’s moment in the sun. The crowd roared its appreciation, and a star of the working class was born.
But his stardom was fleeting; from this leap to his last stretched only three years. And he would die, quite probably drunk, at the peak of his fame. Johnson, also the author of a terrific study on Rochester, NY in the nineteenth century, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium, writes in clear and lively prose that makes reading history easy and fun. He depicts, for example, both the promise and the pain of the rugged “frontier” country of western New York as the newly minted Erie Canal brought thousands of migrants to the region. His book is especially enlightening when describing the social stratification of the era, a time when Jacksonian democrats rubbed the nation’s elite raw and a man like Sam Patch could jump to glory. Whether you enjoy reading history or not, you may find yourself attracted to the people Johnson describes surrounding Patch as much as Patch himself. Indeed, Sam Patch disappears for long passages of the book, as if there simply wasn’t enough material to find on him. Working class heroes, no doubt, received little ink in the nineteenth century. Still, Johnson does an admirable job of uncovering a man who leaped to fame—then fell into obscurity.
____________________________________________________
Note: A new children's book about Sam Patch will be published by Holiday House in January 2009. I've not seen the book, so it's impossible to tell whether it will continue the "legendary" elements of Patch's life at the expense of the "factual." Based on the cover that's available on Amazon.com, it seems like it's leaning toward the former.
Kyle
(Got a book you'd like to review? E-mail me.)
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