Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery | The Flood | A Gravestone Made of Wheat
I Was Amelia Earhart | In A Country of Mothers | A Missing Plane
I recall reading something about Jane Mendelsohn's book (can't remember what) and I know I've been tempted by the intriguing title when I've seen it on the bookstore shelf. After this review, it's on my list to read.
Rick writes:
"Jane Mendelsohn's first novel I Was Amelia Earhart has received strong reviews, deservedly so. The first half of this impressionistic, elliptical story tracks Amelia's love of flying until she departs with her drunken navigator, whom she loathes, on an around-the-world trip.
"What actually happened to them is not known. The plane disappeared without a trace. The second half of this novel supposes they landed safely on an uncharted atoll, and charts their struggles with survival, madness, and finally passionate love.
" Mendelsohn does a marvelous job of shifting seamlessly from person to person. One paragraph will be written in the third person, and the next paragraph will be Earhart speaking in the first person in a way that makes perfect sense. I have never encountered this literary device used so extensively, or so successfully."
Carol continues:
"Rick suggested I read this and I agree with everything he has written. However, I do want to add a few comments of my own. Mendelsohn, I think, is also writing about what it means to live and what it means to die. Earhart doesn't seem to become fully alive until she finds herself stranded on the atoll. There she is able to be herself rather than what her husband George Putnam merchandised her as.
"Also, at the end of the book, Earhart and her navigator take off from the atoll in their plane in hopes of making it Australia, although they almost certainly have too little gas. The reader is then left wondering if they have managed to land on another atoll (Rick's interpretation) or in fact crashed and gone on to life in the hereafter as an even better paradise (my interpretation). Mendelsohn makes clear that she has written a book of fiction, but she certainly stoked my fascination with this famous aviatrix."
Of course, Carol is not the only one fascinated by Earhart reality/legend. In March, an aviatrix took off in a replica of Earhart's plane to fly the Pacific route Mendelsohn wrote about. The take off made the news, and the successful completion of the round-the-world flight did get mentioned.Rick also wrote of follow-ups to his rereading of a classic and listening to North Country Public Radio:
"Having written most recently of my youthful reading and later re-reading of Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird , it is certainly timely that I recently enjoyed two novels which clearly evoke that masterwork. Ron Hansen's novel Atticus combines a re-telling of the parable of the prodigal son with a most disturbing murder/suicide mystery. The name of Hansen's protagonist, Atticus, was clearly meant to remind the reader of the lawyer/hero by that name in Lee's work. (Twice in Hansen's book, characters remark that the only other person they know of by that name is Lee's fictional hero). Lee's Atticus was the prototypical 'good man,' beside which Hansen quite intentionally places his title character. The love of Hansen's hero for his profligate, disappointing, and apparently dead son is irrational to anyone who has not been a parent. Is Atticus an unbelievably good man, a 'sucker' for his son's schemes, a 'saint,' or merely a dad who hopes against hope that his boy will come out O.K?
"That Carol Ascher's 1987 novel The Flood evokes the Harper Lee masterpiece is, I believe, unintentional. Ascher's novel is set in 1951 Topeka, Kansas, in a Jewish family of Holocaust survivors. The town, literally and figuratively, is in flood; literally, the consequence of the worst rainstorms in decades; figuratively, as a result of Rev. Brown's efforts to desegregate the public schools. Eva, the ten-year-old narrator, comes face to face with racism and finds herself utterly powerless to respond. As a result of the flood, her family takes in the Willigers, a family of poor, flooded-out whites (in another book, they might be 'Okies' or 'white trash'), who are basically good people, but share the common prejudice of the day against blacks. Eva's black maid, Mrs. Johnson, is the object of this racism, which both baffles and devastates Eva. She cannot understand why, when the Willigers are so mean to Mrs. Johnson, her parents cannot change their behavior, or, at least, throw them out of their house.
"The lesson of The Flood seems to be that we must not let our hatred of other people's (to us) irrational hatreds cause us to deny our common humanity. I would not say that this is a great book, but both the theme and historical setting reminded me strongly of the Harper Lee novel.
"(I read this book as a consequence of North Country (New York) Public Radio's 'book-group-on-the-air' series, and re-evaluated it following the radio discussion and interview with the author. This reminds me again that reading is both a solitary and communal experience)."
Rick's preface to his latest list of recommendations told me what I already know and have tried to say before. When I got in the habit of writing about my reading, the way I read became more satisfying. I thought about what I read. I remembered what I read. Well, the bug got Rick too. But, he did ask me to be an editor and selective with everything he sent along. Okay, but it's not easy since so much of what he reads is attractive and interesting. I'm also regularly astonished by the feedback I get to my words here. Things I work very hard on get little or no reaction; other lines I regard as throw-aways turn out to be gems. I've given up trying to predict. I just write what seems appropriate. Rick wrote about four disparate books that shared a theme:
"A passage in the Bible declares that the sins of the fathers will be visited upon subsequent generations. In John Gregory Brown's novel Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery, there's no getting away from the past.
"Merideth, the young protagonist of this New Orleans novel reminisces about her family history, in which her grandmother, while passing for white, had an affair with her husband's hired man, and her father took her and her twin brother out of their home and away from their step-mother. The themes of broken families and race are interwoven throughout this book.
"Regret, lost opportunities, and secrets pervade this quiet, finely wrought novel of family and place. I recommend this book.
"Steven Ozment's The Burgermeister's Daughter, Scandal in a Sixteenth Century Town continues the theme of family. It recounts the familial and legal disputes between Anna Buschler and her powerful father, the Burgermeister of Hall. Anna is a headstrong and promiscuous young woman, caught by her father having simultaneous affairs with Erasmus (the Erasmus) and a second young man.
"Dad drives her from the house, and then imprisons her when she commences litigation to obtain her share of her late mother's estate. Ozment's articulate and careful study illuminates many facets of sixteenth-century political and social life by placing his tale of a family feud in a larger historical context. The survival of meticulous court and family records makes this careful history possible. As an attorney, I particularly enjoyed Ozment's description of the German laws of property and inheritance, and how they both drove and controlled the family struggle. A similar book, which likewise recounted a relatively minor event in history in a larger historical context is The Return of Martin Guerre by Natalie Zemon Davies (with a nod of thanks to the Carleton library electronic catalog). (A movie was made of this history, starring Gerard Depardieu.)
(One of my all-time favorite books that I mentioned to my cousin Larry, does what Ozment's book does: A Distant Mirror, The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara Tuchman.) Rick continues:"In A.M. Homes' darkly comic (but not always particularly funny) novel, In a Country of Mothers, the roles of mother and psychotherapist are compared and contrasted.
"Jody, an otherwise well-adjusted young woman (mid 20's), makes an appointment with a new therapist, Claire, for a "tune-up" regarding career issues. During the course of therapy, Jody makes it known that she is adopted, and that her biological mother had surrendered her at birth and had never seen her again.
"As a young woman, Claire (now in her mid-40s) gave up a newborn daughter for adoption at the same general time and place Jody described. Claire decides that she 'must' be Jody's mother. Without telling her unfortunate patient of this personal insight, she begins to 'mother' Jody, taking her shopping, calling her at home, offering her personal advice, and generally doing all those things which drive young adults to leave their parents. As a result, Jody deteriorates to where she truly needs professional help, which Claire's meddling does not provide.
"In addition to this skewed child/patient-mother/therapist relationship, Homes also treats the relationship of Jody with her adoptive mother. Here, the woman who has fulfilled the role of Jody's mother throughout her life is somewhat distant, and gives her (adopted) daughter space perhaps more appropriate to a therapist-patient relationship. Again, Jody suffers the consequences. I'm not sure of Homes' 'message' and of course a novel need not have a 'message' to be successful. Perhaps it is that the roles of parent, child, therapist and patient are extremely difficult, and their only chance of success is when the players remain 'in character.' Homes, however, is very unflattering toward Claire. And he ultimately condemns her fundamental dishonesty in behaving like a mother toward Jody while not telling Jody of her suspicions, thereby leading Jody to believe that the whole, very strange, relationship between the two women is somehow 'therapeutic.' I recommend this novel.
I am not much of a fan of short stories. When I sit down to read a piece of fiction, I want something that is long, involved, and deep enough to wrap myself in for a time. Nonetheless, I must recommend Will Weaver's collection of stories A Gravestone Made of Wheat.
"All of these quiet stories are set in small Midwestern farms and farm-towns, and each evokes a marvelous sense of place and characters. The two strongest stories start and end the collection.
"'A Gravestone Made of Wheat' recounts the quiet acts of civil disobedience by farmer Olaf Torvik which began and ended his life with his German-immigrant wife, Inge. In the beginning, the small-town hatred of Germans after the war prevents Olaf from legally marrying her. Ultimately, they simply live together as husband, wife and later parents for many decades. At the end, Olaf again runs afoul of the law which says he cannot bury Inge on the farm which she loved, but must do so in a private cemetery. At last, he buries her in the field, her resting place marked only by the story's title, and hidden from the law.
"'You Are What You Drive' follows the career of a 1969 Buick LeSabre from late model to junker, and in the process tells a most poignant and sad love story of the original owner's daughter and her secret admirer of many years.
Will Weaver wrote Red Earth, White Earth. I liked it a great deal and wrote about here a couple years ago. Now, I look forward to these short stories.If Brian Fagan's book on archaeological technique sounded intriguing, pay attention to what Rick has to say about this next book:
"In the days before Tina Brown, The New Yorker specialized in a certain type of writing: the fact-specific, carefully researched and very long piece of investigative journalism. Susan Sheehan's A Missing Plane is the book republishing (presumably) of three such New Yorker articles from 1986. The 'missing plane' is a WWII B-24 which disappeared in 1944 in the mountains of Papua New Guinea with 22 on board.
"Part One of Sheehan's book describes how the plane was found in 1980 or 1981, and the detailed work of excavation and recovery of human remains.
"Part Two, by far the strongest, recounts how Tadeo Furue, a physical anthropologist at the Army's Central Identification Library, meticulously studied the very incomplete bone and dental remains, compared those remains with existing records concerning the 22 men on the plane, and ultimately identified to whom each of the 22 sets of remains belonged. This is fascinating stuff!! Sheehan's careful, detail-laden prose both illuminates and mirrors the careful, at times plodding, technique of Furue in the laboratory.
"Part Three is a "mini-biography" of the plane's pilot, Robert Allred. Sheehan does a marvelous job in reconstructing a basically ordinary life of this pilot who disappeared in 1944, opening a window for the reader to see life in small-town Iowa and the Army Air Forces in the 1930s and 1940s.
"This sort of writing is not for everyone, and certainly not for readers with short attention spans. (Perhaps this is why The New Yorker, under Tina Brown, rarely publishes the near book-length articles which were common under prior editors.) If you have the time and inclination, however, this is a wonderful book to curl up with in the evening and really learn something. (One small criticism of the Berkeley paperback edition. I found three typos, including two misspellings. I would be willing to bet that the original publication of this piece in The New Yorker did not contain these flaws).
(Do I sense a bit of unhappiness with the current editorial leadership at The New Yorker żla Garrison Keillor, Mr. Hunter?)Thanks very much, Carol and Rick.
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