William Maxwell writes the most marvelous short stories. They are like little novels, everything there, nothing omitted, no feeling of incompleteness William Maxwell writes the most marvelous short stories. They are like little novels, everything there, nothing omitted, no feeling of incompleteness or hanging threads. You feel a sweet attachment to his characters and his settings, equally, and you know you are in the presence of a master artist, one who knows every color and how it should be used for maximum effect.
I completely appreciated every one of the stories in this collection, but The Thistles in Sweden, about a couple living in a brownstone in New York City, the neighbors, their lives, their cat, and their desire for a child was so wonderfully satisfying that I could not believe it was only a short story of some 30 pages.
There is also, The Gardens of Mont-Saint-Michel, a superb story about memory and change, in which an American family visit France. The father, who is excited to revisit the gardens of Mont-Saint-Michel, a town that he knew after the war and remembers as an ideal, finds time has changed everything and his lovely memory is destroyed. Maxwell is very good with pinpointing the feelings of nostalgia and the plight of the tourist.
I loved this quote about Reynold's eleven year old daughter, to which I suppose I could relate all too well. She closes Dante With a note of sadness in her voice, because no matter how vivid and all-consuming the book was, or how long, sooner or later she finished it, and was stranded once more in ordinaryness until she had started another.
What Every Boy Should Know is a coming-of-age story of a pubescent boy. This is Maxwell’s forte, if he has one, because he knows what a boy is like at puberty better than almost anyone I know. This story made me revisit So Long See You Tomorrow, because it shared that flavor and mystique.
The Known world is not, of course, known. It probably never will be, because of those areas the mapmakers have very sensibly agreed to ignore, where the terrain is different for every traveler who crosses them. Or fails to cross them.
Maxwell was an editor for The New Yorker magazine from 1936 to 1975. He edited the stories of some of the best, including John Cheever, John O'Hara, J. D. Salinger, Shirley Hazzard, Vladimir Nabokov, and Eudora Welty. His own writing belongs in the category with these giants of literature. I'm guessing they all learned from him.
What I feel most often when reading a William Maxwell novel is that someone has drawn the curtains back at my neighbor’s house, allowing me to look inWhat I feel most often when reading a William Maxwell novel is that someone has drawn the curtains back at my neighbor’s house, allowing me to look in without any chance of being detected, because he writes about the small things in a relationship that generally happen behind closed blinds. Time Will Darken It is no exception, for when we meet Martha and Austen King they are in their bedroom having one of those domestic spats that most married people can recognize immediately. Martha is pouting and refusing to go downstairs because Austen has invited the Potters, friends of his dead father, and their two children to spend an indefinite portion of the summer at the King home. Austen feels a bit trapped into the situation, and Martha feels blind-sided. It is just a forewarning of how wrong this entire visit is destined to be.
Austen is a bit clueless as to what Martha needs, although I would hardly fault him entirely, since her behavior is most often very childish and immature.
If he had held her a moment longer he would have given her all the reassurance she needed for some time to come, but he remembered the people downstairs, and let go. It was not his failure entirely. Women are never ready to let go of love at the point where men are satisfied and able to turn to something else. It is a fault of timing that affects the whole human race. There is no telling how much harm it has caused.
The Potters have brought with them their daughter, Nora. She is bored and just at that age to wish to be swept away by a slightly older man, and Austen becomes the object of her infatuation. Her bumbling parents present another problem in her life, as she deals with her failures to understand them and her desires to be independent of them.
There is nothing so difficult to arrive at as the nature and personality of one’s parents. Death, about which so much mystery is made, is perhaps no mystery at all. But the history of one’s parents has to be pieced together from fragments, their motives and character guessed at, and the truth about them remains deeply buried, like a boulder that projects one small surface above the level of smooth lawn, and when you come to dig around it, proves to be too large ever to move, though each year’s frost forces it up a little higher.
The Potters are not only a difficulty for Nora and her brother, they bring more trouble to Austen than just an inconvenient visit. Martha's life and her relationship with Austen are impacted, as well. As in any good tragic play, there is a transition for these characters that sees none of them in the autumn as they were when the summer began.
I did not develop any appreciable affection for any of the characters, but I did find them all realistic. Austen’s handling of Nora’s ridiculous profession of love is a study in what not to do, despite his intentions being well-meant. The story revolves around him, and he is far too trusting and almost completely lacking in any innate sense of skepticism or vision. He accepts responsibility in the wrong situations and fails to assume it in the parts of his life that literally demand it.
Maxwell, himself, never appears to be blaming or excusing anyone. He seems, rather, to be putting the story in vivid detail before us and saying, “This is life. It is what goes on behind the curtain. Most people neither know nor seek the truth of it, some do not wish to look behind the curtain at all, but you need not be evil to inflict pain upon one another.” It is this revelatory nature of Maxwell’s writing that lends it its timelessness. Nothing is simple in Maxwell's world. Man is complex--in the midst of a peaceful life he can create chaos, or in the middle of a storm he can find peace, but all too often, that peace cannot be trusted.
The storm had released all the accumulated tension of the long hot day. He didn’t mind being marooned in the barn or the fact that the house was full of visitors. Something inside him, he did not know what, had broken loose, had swung free, leaving him utterly calm and at peace with the world....more
And perhaps that was the great ill of the world, that those prone to evil were left untouched by guilt to a degree so vast that they might sleep throuAnd perhaps that was the great ill of the world, that those prone to evil were left untouched by guilt to a degree so vast that they might sleep through a storm, while better men, conscience stained men, lay awake as though that very storm persisted unyieldingly in the furthest reaches of their soul.
It is post-Civil war Georgia, and the men have come home from the war in various states of mental and physical disrepair. The slaves have been freed, but few of them know how to embrace the new life they have found, and most of the townsmen and previous slave owners do not mean to see them succeed. Disarray is everywhere, loss is everywhere, and the scavengers have control of things.
Two of the freedmen released into the town of Old Ox, Georgia are brothers, Landrey and Prentiss, who make their way onto the land of George Walker and his wife, Isabelle. George is a good man, who recognizes that he and the brothers might fill one another’s needs: his to begin a field of peanuts (a task he is ill-equipped to perform), and theirs to make enough money to leave the town and find their way North to a new life. He has a genuine respect for these men, he pays a fair wage, neither of these facts is considered an attribute by his neighbors.
That this relationship should end in tragedy is almost a given. In fact, there is much these men have in common, but little they understand of one another, and they are all struggling to find their feet in a world that has just turned inside-out. Woven into this tale is another kind of struggle, experienced by two other men, but one that impacts directly the events that follow.
Harris has also created, along with this variety of male characters, a couple of female characters that make the book whole and complete. Isabelle, and her growth during the course of the novel, shows, for me, how truly adept a writer Nathan Harris is. She reacts in ways that I did not anticipate, but never in ways that do not ring true.
There is so much one wishes to say, but too difficult to do so without spoiling some aspects of the book for others, which I always strive to avoid. So, I will simply say this is a powerful read, it deserves the attention and award nominations it has received.
The Sweetness of Water is Nathan Harris’ debut offering, and I hope it is a sign of things to come from this very talented and skillful writer. ...more
This is so sick you almost hate to like it. But it is masterfully written and you cannot deny the skill and genius beLester Ballard is one sick puppy.
This is so sick you almost hate to like it. But it is masterfully written and you cannot deny the skill and genius behind it. It is Cormac McCarthy. Don't read it with a full stomach. Enough said....more
These Thousand Hills is the fourth of A. B. Guthrie’s Big Sky series that I have read. Much to my disappointment this is an okay, but not stellar, booThese Thousand Hills is the fourth of A. B. Guthrie’s Big Sky series that I have read. Much to my disappointment this is an okay, but not stellar, book. It is much in the vein of the cowboy movies we watched as children, Shane and 3:10 to Yuma, the struggle of a good man in a violent world, and it incorporates almost all the standard plot lines of that time.
Lat Evans is the son of Brownie and Mercy Evans, two characters we met in The Way West. He is basically a good man, but he has more than his share of hang-ups, and I would call some of his decisions at the least questionable. After a very slow start, the novel did pick up, but in the end, I didn’t care enough for any of the characters to shed a tear over their fates.
Guthrie’s great strength is his ability to write a scene that comes to life under his pen. He engages all the senses, so that I can see the breath of cold air, hear the coyotes, envision the stretches of white falling mile upon mile. As here:
In the distant darkness a squaw wailed for her dead, and dogs chimed in, joined by coyotes on the hills. They sent a shiver up the spine, of chill and lonesomeness and dread and hope of things to come.
Or as here:
It had been cold before but not close to this. This was as cold as cold ever could be. Even the campfire at night was only a whisper of warmth, a promise of heat somewhere in the world, maybe far off in Texas; but here in itself was the whole world, lapped white from skyline to skyline, with no end to be seen and none to be hoped for.
I highly recommend the first three books of this series. The Way West won a Pulitzer, and well deserved it. But, when you have finished Fair Land, Fair Land, you are done with the story. This book was not a continuation, it was another story altogether, not as fine a tale, and not as well told. ...more
There is there all right, until a man gets to it. Then it ain’t there. It’s here, and here is what you wanted to get away from in the first place.There is there all right, until a man gets to it. Then it ain’t there. It’s here, and here is what you wanted to get away from in the first place.
In the third installment of A.B. Guthrie’s Big Sky series, Guthrie continues the story of Dick Summers, mountain man and wagon train guide and, now, a man searching for a way to face life in a changing west. Setting out to revisit the wild places of his youth, Summers and his friend, Higgins, stumble across Teal Eye, an Indian girl from Summers’ past.
Perhaps the tales of how the West was won have become cliches, but the plight of the Indians and the destruction that came with the taming of the West are very hard to witness in the hands of a skilled storyteller. I mourned for their way of life, disappearing before their eyes, and for the inability of the army and settlers to recognize them as human beings and offer any respect or concern.
There is a new character, a Methodist preacher named Potter, who contributes another view of the well-intended, but sorely misguided, missionary. I loved his goodness and his philosophy concerning God. Too few of those around him heeded his advice.
“I worship a glad lord,” Potter told him. “We have set our faces against sin, as indeed we must, but in doing it I fear we have lost sight of joy. Joy, Brother Summers, delight in what we are given. Often I think God not only wants us to be good but to be radiant.”
Dick Summers will go down in my ledgers as one of the most wonderful characters ever written. In a preface, Guthrie tells us this book was written much later than the earlier ones and was intended to fill a gap that had been left. I, for one, am so glad he decided to fill that gap. I would have hated to have left this part of Dick Summers’ story untold--to have just seen him wander off, seeking wilderness, at the end of The Way West, and never to have been heard of again.
So many good men who have lived have been forgotten and carried all they knew and loved to the grave. In fact, that is the case with most men, but, even unremembered as individuals, they may have had a huge impact on the shaping of a country and the lives that came after them.
“Live and Learn, they say, but don’t say all the while you’re learnin’, you’re forgettin’, too, until maybe at the last it’s just a big forgettin’. ...more
The Big Sky is the first in A.B. Guthrie’s series of novels about the settling of the American West. It is the story of three men, Boone Caudill, Jim The Big Sky is the first in A.B. Guthrie’s series of novels about the settling of the American West. It is the story of three men, Boone Caudill, Jim Deakins, and Dick Summers, each of whom braves the unknown and difficult life in the cold mountains west of civilization, for his own unique reasons. It is a portrait of what a mountain man was and what it took to be such an adventurer.
There is nothing sugar-coated in this book. It is often raw and coarse and startling.
They were a heap better than squaw meat, which men had been known to butcher and eat, probably after bedding with the squaws first.
This is a hard, cruel and unforgiving life, and the men who live it are sometimes little more than animals. Boone Caudill, fleeing an already hard and abusive life with his father, becomes a kind of savage survivalist. Dick Summers, in many ways the most skilled and intuitive of the three men, is only half a mountain man. He has altered his life, but not his soul. He likes to get to town and doesn’t mind the idea of farming, and he is the only one who still manages to fit into the world of white men.
One of the main characters of The Big Sky is the West itself. Guthrie paints it the way Ansel Adams photographed it, large and beautiful and powerful.
From the top Boone could see forever and ever, nearly any way he looked. It was open country, bald and open, without an end. It spread away flat now and then rolling, going on clear to the sky. A man wouldn’t think the whole world was so much. It made the heart come up. It made a man little and still big, like a king looking out.
This is God’s country, but even the men who love it and choose it, question what kind of God rules in such a wilderness. Jim Deakins contemplates his relationship with God and what God expects from him fairly frequently, and I particularly enjoyed his thoughts, because I think having such close connections to nature, but also experiencing its cruelties up close, would raise doubts and wonder.
These men are like the wildness of the country they inhabit, they are being worn away, being lost, becoming the last of their kind. The country is on the cusp of westward expansion, the buffalo are being slaughtered into extinction, Greeley is about to urge young men to go west, and the young men are going to take young women with them and build and plow.
It was strange about time; it slipped under a man like quiet water, soft and unheeded but taking a part of him with every drop--a little quickness of the muscles, a little sharpness of the eye, a little of his youngness, until by and by he found it had taken the best of him almost unbeknownst.
A historical picture of life in 1830s Montana, The Big Sky is also about change--the change in the country and the change in the people who populate it. There is no room for the Indians in the society that is coming, and there is no room for the mountain men either. Both are dying breeds. Both are living on borrowed time.
I must note that the portrayal of the Indians in this book seems remarkably accurate to me. They are seen as both victim and aggressor, but neither the noble savage nor the devil’s spawn. The attitude of the white men toward them is primarily one of exploitation or dread, and only a few, like Boone and Summers, come to really know anything about them individually. There is a graphic chapter that deals with the devastating effects of smallpox on the Indian population, that is one I will find it hard to ever forget.
Wallace Stegner wrote the foreward to the volume I was reading. If you would truly like to recognize the importance and meaning of this novel, you need do nothing more than read it.
Boone Caudill is “both mountain man and myth, both individual and archetype, which means that the record of his violent life is both credible and exhilarating.” Don’t think anyone could have said it better than that. ...more
I had a friend who used to say, “life’s a bitch, and then you die”. To some extent, that is what I felt while reading this book. It is one woman’s talI had a friend who used to say, “life’s a bitch, and then you die”. To some extent, that is what I felt while reading this book. It is one woman’s tale, but it is really an observation of the harshness of life for a whole class of people and the cyclical nature of that life as they pass it down from one generation to the next, virtually unchanged.
Ellen is born to Henry and Nellie Chesser, the only surviving child of seven. She is a hard worker and a big dreamer. She wants simple things, a bureau drawer to put something in, a bright colored dress to put there, but they are so far outside her own experience and reach that she might as well be dreaming of a castle to live in and a servant to wash her feet. Nellie, her mother, is past dreaming. She knows what life has to offer and it is a constant roaming with a man who moves from farm to farm as hired labor and a string of dead children that tug at your heart until it turns cold. She is lackadaisical and unmotivated, and the bulk of the work and worry that isn’t associated with earning a living, a task that falls to Henry, ultimately descends onto Ellen.
This is where Ellen is when we meet her, and we follow her through her life, her encounters with men, her heartbreaks and betrayals. There is barely a moment in this chronicle when you could not cry for her plight. There is little of what is fair or just in the world she occupies. By the end of the book, I felt her a very old and worn woman, although my calculations tell me she is only in her late thirties or very early forties.
The book is written in a very early, semi-stream of consciousness style. Much of the story is told following the random thoughts of Ellen, so that we see not only the events but how they are affecting her heart and soul. The writing is much easier to follow than the stream-of-consciousness that we think of attached to writers like Virginia Woolf, and I think that is because the style is not sustained throughout the narrative, for the omniscient narrator steps in from time to time and gives us an outside view.
Several other writers came to mind while I was reading. The content conjured up The Grapes of Wrath for me, although this was set in a slightly earlier time frame. The atmosphere was very Faulknerian in places, but this book predates most of Faulkner’s novels, so there is no question of his having influenced her at all. That parallel, in my mind, speaks to the accuracy of her settings and the authentic nature of her characters–telling that both these authors drew on the same observations of what life in the South was like.
Without throwing any aspersions on this book or its writer, I was surprised that it elicited very little emotional response from me. Coming from such an intimate point of view, I felt somehow surprisingly detached from Ellen. Sorry for her, of course, admiring of her strength at times, understanding of her rage at others, but never, even in the saddest moments, feeling a prick of tears.
I am glad to have read this. It has been on my radar for some time. If it had touched my heart instead of just my mind, it might have been a 5-star read....more
I have made countless treks into the Blue Ridge Mountains, growing up in North Georgia and having people in Tennessee. To my shame, I don’t believe I I have made countless treks into the Blue Ridge Mountains, growing up in North Georgia and having people in Tennessee. To my shame, I don’t believe I ever gave a thought to how many people were displaced by the establishment of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, how their land was taken from them, or the personal heartache that was suffered in order to give the land over to the enjoyment of the population in general. That is, I never gave it a thought until I stumbled across Wayne Caldwell’s Cataloochee.
Requiem by Fire is the continuation of the Cataloochee story and deals directly with the establishment of the Park and the almost cruel way in which people were evicted from their homes to make it happen. Caldwell is one of the most even-handed writers I have ever encountered. He does not draw black and white pictures, he paints in color. He lays all the facts and feelings before you and he lets you decide. After all, these are human beings and there are all kinds of motivations and emotions that go with that. I understood the desire to protect the area and build the Park, but I mostly felt the anguish of the men and women who had already invested lifetimes into this soil and these mountains, being told they might not even be allowed to be buried next to their kin in their own family cemeteries.
The mountain flavor here is genuine, the dialog perfection. Silas Wright, an old timer, says these words to Jim Hawkins, the newly minted warden who also happens to be born and raised in Cataloochee himself:
”What’s fine at seven in the morning can be awful at midnight. Seven in the morning, a man’s got some small reason to hope he’ll have a good day. Come dark, he knows he ain’t had one, and he’s got eight more hours to put up with whatever ghosts his mind might care to entertain.”
For me, this rang so true.
There is a way of life being lost, and as the older Cataloochians reminisce, we realize it was a way of life already abandoned in the valley, years ago. I became very attached to several of these characters, Silas, Mary Carver, and Jim; I cringed at at least one of them, the despicable Willie McPeters, and pitied the young ones, riding off to the city, who would never know what they had lost.
Wayne Caldwell is an amazing writer and a consummate storyteller. I hope to see many more gripping tales penned by his hand before he is through. I know he admires Wendell Berry, he quotes him in his opening to this book, and he is one of a rare handful of writers who might be able to fill his shoes. ...more
I absolutely loved A Parchment of Leaves, so I went into this novel with great expectations. I was disappointed. It was not a bad novel, but there werI absolutely loved A Parchment of Leaves, so I went into this novel with great expectations. I was disappointed. It was not a bad novel, but there were flaws and I had some difficulty connecting with the two main characters. I have sisters, five of them, and I have had just about every kind of sisterly relationship you can have, I did not find theirs believable.
The end of the novel saved it to some extent, because it became about something more than this strange relationship between these women. But, that was quite late in coming. I did not, right up to the last page, understand what drove Anneth. Little that she did made a bit of sense to me.
I had really looked forward to this novel and will still read his third, Clay's Quilt. I hope it will at least fall between this one and the 5-star novel I began this series with.
For those who loved this novel, and many did, I am happy it worked for you in ways it did not work for me. I gave a lot of thought to how I was left feeling at the end and realized a large portion of the novel was almost DNF material for me and it was only saved by the last quarter. Can’t win them all. ...more
Why is John Ehle so sparsely read? Is it because his books are hard to come by? This book has 330 ratings and 31 reviews, which is shameful, because iWhy is John Ehle so sparsely read? Is it because his books are hard to come by? This book has 330 ratings and 31 reviews, which is shameful, because it is marvelously written and packed with everything you want from Southern/Appalachian literature. A dynamite story, fear, tension, terrific character development, and descriptions that are heart-stopping.
If you have ever stood and looked out over a stretch of the Blue Ridge, you cannot help perfectly visualizing this scene:
He saw Young. He was leisurely walking toward the north. Now he paused to consider streaks of gold in the east. A holy morning, suitable for worship. Wayland walked over to the edge of the divide, to an overlook, with the North Carolina mountains stretching to the horizon. This morning clouds had slept late, were still filling in the valleys around the peaks, so that the peaks resembled toes of a prone giant.
There was a single hawk on the wing, bathing in sunlight, now it dipped down into the clouds to moisten its wings. Now it rose into sunlight again.
I was standing on that mountain in the first paragraph, but IMHO, the addition of the hawk was a bit of genius that made me want to reach out and touch that sky. At the end of Chapter Five, I could honestly say I have been on a bear hunt. By the end of the book, I had an ache in my chest from holding my breath.
Collie Wright is living alone in a cabin with her 6-month old baby. She has refused to tell anyone who the father of the baby is, and her brothers and father are nervous and anxious to know. Wayland Jackson comes down out of the mountains, where his car has stalled, with his teenage daughter in tow, and finds himself standing at Collie’s door.
We know immediately that this is going to get complicated. There are factions in the mountains, the Wrights, the Campbells and the MacGregors barely existing as neighbors and anything, like a stranger who is a clockmaker moving in with a woman and her child, can set a spark to the flame.
A vital nerve had been touched, old and buried, almost forgotten animosities had been laid bare; mindless were days like this one, and the fears rose out of the bowels, not the mind, and were vital, close to the quick. One death caused others.
This is my second Ehle, and not my last. He can truly spin a tale, as my grandpa would say.
A brilliant essay by Henry David Thoreau, and proof that the struggle to define the American destiny has been going on since its inception.
This AmeriA brilliant essay by Henry David Thoreau, and proof that the struggle to define the American destiny has been going on since its inception.
This American government--what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity?
Thoreau was deeply aggrieved of the American government and its politicians, who were dancing about the issue of slavery. He states, and rightfully so, that a moral issue such as this cannot take a backseat to any political allegiance to a government, and that the individual must not bend to an immoral demand simply because it is exigent.
I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave’s government also.
This people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people.
I can think of a number of issues on which I feel the moral position and the government position could not be further apart. Thoreau refused to pay his taxes in protest of being made to be party to the State’s position by doing so. I am not that brave, but I would often like to scream to the skies how can anyone believe in this position of government and still count themselves as a moral human being.
I was taken by how much the political hypocrisy resembles some of what we encounter in our own political arena. And, the old adage that you must “follow the money” holds true then and now.
Practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in Massachusetts are not a hundred thousand politicians at the South, but a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here, who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity, and are not prepared to do justice to the slave and to Mexico, cost what it may.
One last comment that impressed itself upon me was the following.
to be strictly just, it must have the sanction and consent of the governed. It can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it. The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual.
I’m afraid a “true respect for the individual” might be something our government has completely lost, but I hope it is not something we, the people, are willing to concede.
Always amazing to read something written 171 years ago and find so much there that will apply to life in 2020....more
This book might be as close as you will ever come to knowing what it was like to leave Independence, Missouri in 1836 and make your way by wagon alongThis book might be as close as you will ever come to knowing what it was like to leave Independence, Missouri in 1836 and make your way by wagon along the Oregon Trail to the wilderness that was Oregon. Lije Evans, his wife Rebecca, and his son Brownie are one of a group of families who sign on with a wagon train to make the journey, and they represent, in my eyes, the perfect depiction of the kind of strong individuals who carved out this new land into civilization. During the journey, Lije discovers himself as a leader and we discover that a good man can be a strong man; that a quiet man can make all the noise that is needed.
There is one more member of the Evans family that I have not mentioned, but for whom I developed a great attachment, the dog, Rock. At the outset of the story, there is a move to kill all the dogs, many thinking they would be a nuisance on such a long trip. Evans figured he would have some business with the man who came to shoot Rock. That was the moment I knew I was going to love Lije, no going back.
My favorite character, by far, however, was Dick Summers. A seasoned mountain man who has been farming in Missouri, he signs on to pilot the group as far as the Dalles. I recognized right away that without men like Dick, none of the others would have ever survived to do the settling. In fact, they would hardly have known how to get where they were going. What I loved the most about him, however, was his open mind; never thinking the world should be like him or give him any particular homage.
He didn’t blame the Oregoners as he had known old mountain men to do. Everybody had his life to make, and every time its way, one different from another. The fur hunter didn’t have title to the mountain no matter if he did say finders keepers. By that system the country belonged to the Indians, or maybe someone before them or someone before them. No use to stand against the stream of change and time.
I felt I got to know Dick Summers in a way that I could strangely relate to. Of course, his lost youth was danger and mountains and the capability to survive, but wasn’t he longing for what most of us older people long for?
At the nub of it did he just want his youth back? Beaver, streams, squaws, danger--were they just names for his young time?
When I went back to review the passages I had marked while reading, almost all of them were Dick. His was the voice that spoke to me.
Guthrie shows us the physical hardships of the journey, which would surely be enough to defeat most of us, but which we could all fairly well imagine; but he also shows us the emotional toll that such a choice entails. Makes you wonder how anyone ever had the courage to set out, particularly with children in tow. The thought of the women, visibly pregnant, prodding the oxen while walking the trail, wore me to a bone. Guthrie’s men are both strong and weak, as are the women, and he seems to know both sexes well...what makes them the same and what makes them different, and how much both were needed to make such an undertaking work at all.
She wondered if he felt the same as she did. Did any two people ever feel the same? Did ever one soul know another, though they talked at night, though sometimes in hunger and in isolation they sought to make their bodies one, the all-mother in her loneliness trying to take back home the lost child-man?
I could picture these people, a mix of quite different backgrounds and incomes, growing closer and more understanding or more leery and wiser as the migration became a way of life. I could feel how tired and weary they felt at the end of even a good day. I could see the young faces becoming withered and crusted by exposure to wind and sun, and the older faces becoming hardened and set. At the same time, I could feel the yearning they all shared to start a new life, find a new adventure, see something they had never seen before. If they were still heading trains West, and if I were thirty years younger, I could see myself being convinced by Guthrie that the travails would be worth it; that Oregon could be home, and that a sturdy wagon and a good man might be all you would need. ...more
Maggie is a child of the mountains, but she has been away from the mountains for a time, going to college and then working in Columbia, embracing the Maggie is a child of the mountains, but she has been away from the mountains for a time, going to college and then working in Columbia, embracing the big city as a newspaper photographer. When a young girl drowns in the Tamassee River and is trapped there, her parents want to bring the body up at any cost, environmentalists fear the cost will be the destruction of the river itself. The stage is set for a battle, and Maggie finds herself in the middle, with a lot of personal baggage on both sides of the issue.
The story is a tad predictable in spots and over before you wish it to be. There is a cliche romance, but it does not dominate the story. These elements keep it from being great, but there are moments when it comes mighty close. Even though the environmental side cited Wendell Berry, which ought to have landed me solidly in their camp, I could see this through the eyes of the parents as well, you would want your daughter’s body. It would seem inconceivable that you would just go home and leave her there. In fact, what I admire most about Rash’s treatment here was that it was not preachy but realistic, right down to including all the players who come on the scene just to gain a political edge, money or recognition.
The river itself becomes almost a character, with a voice and a will that cannot be manipulated by a mere human.
Wolf Cliff is a place where nature has gone out of its way to make humans feel insignificant. The cliff itself is two hundred feet of granite that looms over the gorge. A fissure jags down its gray face like a piece of black embedded lightning. The river tightens and deepens. Even water that looks calm moves quick and dangerous. Mid-river fifty yards above the falls a beech tree thick as a telephone pole balances like a footbridge on two haystack-tall boulders. A spring flood set it there twelve years ago.
The characters make poignant arguments:
It's nice to know there is something in the world that’s uncorrupted. Something that can’t be bought and cut up into pieces so somebody can make money off it.
I particularly loved this example from a character who wished to leave the body where it lay:
…the girl’s body is the Tamassee’s now…the moment she stepped in the shallows she accepted the river on its own terms. That’s what the wilderness is – nature on its own terms, not ours, and there’s no middle ground. It either is or it isn’t.
The Appalachians are still a distinct and different region, with some of the best of what is old-fashioned intact, like community and loyalty. There is also a wisdom there that comes from the harder life and knowing nature in a way city-folk simply find it hard to comprehend. Perhaps because most people raised in a city don’t even realize that they cannot see the stars at night the way God meant them to be seen.
This is an early work for Ron Rash, and if you have read any of his later books, you will recognize the immaturity here, but there is also that hint of great things to come. After a rocky start with Serena, which I simply could not bring myself to love, I have read enough of Ron Rash to become a dyed-in-the-wool fan. As my Daddy would have said, “he is a t.c. huzzy”. It’s a compliment...means a very special one of a kind.
I have finally put Rabbit to rest, and I must admit some relief in doing so. I cannot say these are enjoyable books, and they aren’t even ones from whI have finally put Rabbit to rest, and I must admit some relief in doing so. I cannot say these are enjoyable books, and they aren’t even ones from which you learn much that you didn’t already know, but there is something there that pulls you in and keeps you reading. Perhaps it is just that feeling we have of wanting to peek into the secrets of someone else’s life in hopes that it will help us understand our own. Perhaps it is that as much as we don’t want to find anything of ourselves in Rabbit, we do.
This final book (at least for me) brings Rabbit into middle-age and all the health issues and family struggles that often accompany the aging process. He looks around and compares himself to his friends and associates, hoping he is faring at least as well and maybe better, but he knows, as do we all, that the time is shorter and the cliff could loom ahead, just beyond our vision.
Rabbit has always been a self-centered bastard, but he is now forced to confront problems that are not his own. There is the always dissatisfied son, Nelson, to deal with and the sharp-edged Janice, who is no one’s idea of a good wife, and the granddaughter who has his heart whether he wishes that way or not. In looking at Rabbit’s life, I could not help wondering what it was for, and I think Rabbit is asking himself the same question. It is gone by so quickly, and the boy who was the star of the basketball court is gone with it.
The book comes full-cycle. This is a life we have seen. Complete. Messy. Ugly. Sad. I couldn’t help thinking back to the original book and wondering what Harry Angstrom might have been if he had just stayed on that midnight journey away from Brewer and the life he had started, away from the mess it was to become, and perhaps found some better man inside himself–another, better Rabbit.
A delightful follow-up to 84, Charing Cross Road, in which Helene Hanff finally makes her way to London. It felt very much like I had finally made it A delightful follow-up to 84, Charing Cross Road, in which Helene Hanff finally makes her way to London. It felt very much like I had finally made it there myself. I was so caught up in her travels and all the people she met. I loved shopping with her at Harrad’s and dining at the Savoy. Mostly, I loved the genuine way she delighted in all the small things that I know would thrill me as well. That sense of wonder.
I mean I went through a door Shakespeare once went through, and into a pub he knew. We sat at a table against the back wall and I leaned my head back, against a wall Shakespeare's head once touched, and it was indescribable."
I laughed aloud, knowing I would be just as foolish. I’m not a celebrity worshipping kind of person, unless, of course you get me back past 1850.
Speaking of 1850, imagine how surprised I was to find Hanff did not admire Dickens. Her first mention: the porter will show you the room where Dickens wrote Great Expectations. Doesn't seem the time to tell her I found Great Expectations very boring. Yikes, she just panned not only one of my favorite writers but my very favorite book. She managed to mention her disdain for Dickens twice more before the end of the book. It was almost the end of our relationship, but I have a hard and fast rule to tolerate differences of opinion in regard to literature. :)
Her unique sense of humor added an element of joy that would have been missing with a straight narrative. She is a New Yorker, and that theme also appeared. For instance, when people on the street hovered when she was having her portrait painted:
what New Yorkers call the Sidewalk Superintendents. In London you shoo them away by talking to them. In New York talking to them would just get you their life stories.
This is a story about dreams coming true; about waiting much of your life for an event you live vicariously, over and over again. And, it is a story about how sweet realizing that dream can be. No disappointment, just fulfillment at last. I needed that....more
A boy, before he really grows up, is pretty much like a wild animal. He can get the wits scared clear out of him today and by tomorrow have forgotten A boy, before he really grows up, is pretty much like a wild animal. He can get the wits scared clear out of him today and by tomorrow have forgotten all about it.
Of course, everyone my age knows this story. The Wonderful World of Disney, introduced by Mr. Disney himself, fed a whole generation with delights of this sort; just put on the TV at 7:00 on Sunday night and watch something wonderful, but don’t forget because there is no DVR, so if you miss it, you are waiting for summer reruns.
Because I knew the story and what to expect, I thought I might not have a really emotional reaction to the end, but alas the two boxes of tissues I bought came in handy. Some of the tears were for the story and the characters and Yeller, of course, but some of them were for that little girl who sat frozen to a flickering TV screen in the living room of a four room house, with her three sisters and her precious mother and father, making a memory that would last all her life. ...more
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story, set in pre-revolutionary America, is one of a country lad, named Robin, who comes to town to seek his fortune by way of hNathaniel Hawthorne’s story, set in pre-revolutionary America, is one of a country lad, named Robin, who comes to town to seek his fortune by way of his connection with a distant kinsman, Major Molineux. In this clever tale, in which Robin seeks to locate the home of the Major, the lad is exposed to the vices and threats that a town represents to a naive country boy. Confronted by greed, prostitution, pride and unnamed evil, Robin finds himself unable to understand what is occurring about him and his inability to locate his kinsman.
Contrasting both innocence and worldliness, good and evil, knowledge and ignorance, and the value of independence over dependence, Hawthorne sets the stage for an ending that surprises both Robin and the reader. The story is highly symbolic and complex, with layers of meaning that encompass both the coming-of-age maturation of a single character in Robin and the maturation of a nation in the fledgling USA.
I remember studying this story when in high school and find it holds up marvelously after so many years.
Nothing is far and nothing is near, if one desires. The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing--desiNothing is far and nothing is near, if one desires. The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing--desire. And before it, when it is big, all is little.
Have you ever thought about true artists, like Vincent Van Gogh, who pay such a high price for their art? Men and women who have devoted half of their waking hours to the practice and perfection of their musical talents so that they can perform in an opera or become a concert pianist? Too often we think of this kind of achievement as innate talent, and of course some of it must be, but there are many talented and gifted people who never reach that level because they cannot or will not scale the wall.
In many ways, that is what this novel is about. Thea is a natural talent, and many around her recognize her abilities, but she cannot just step into the world she wants without a lot of sacrifice and loss. We trade things, always, to reach our dreams. I’m not sure Cather questions whether what Thea loses is worth the sacrifice, I think Cather thought it was, in fact, I think Cather thought of herself as being in Thea’s shoes, but I thought about whether it was worth it, and I would have said “no”.
I loved the first half of this novel, the part where Thea was a girl and trying to identify her talent and the thing that spurred her forward. I liked the quirky characters of Moonstone, the people of the country, Ray Johnson, the railroad worker who loves her from afar; Dr. Archie, who sees her as something too fine for the world she occupies; Professor Wunsch, her drunken piano teacher who discovers her talent and nurtures it; and Spanish Johnny, a Mexican musician who shares the music of the soul.
Cather is in her usual form with her writing. She can describe a scene and make you step into it.
Winter was long in coming that year. Throughout October the days were bathed in sunlight and the air was clear as crystal. The town kept its cheerful summer aspect, the desert glistened with light, the sand hills every day went through magical changes of color. The scarlet sage bloomed late in the front yards, the cottonwood leaves were bright gold long before they fell, and it was not until November that the green on the tamarisks began to cloud and fade. There was a flurry of snow about Thanksgiving, and then December came on warm and clear.
These were wonderful aspects of the book, but the second half let me down in some way that is hard to describe. I began to see Thea as rather selfish and self-centered. Although I don’t believe Cather meant her to be seen in this way, I saw her as using her friends and admirers as stepping-stones. She maintained friendships with them, and they all seemed happy to serve her as a talent fully beyond their reach, but it seemed she somehow felt entitled to anything they laid on her altar and owed them nothing in return. No doubt it was the extraordinary talent we were meant to see being worshiped, but I kept seeing Hollywood and someone who believed the talent itself made her “more” than others. I found her cold, and I wondered if she hadn’t lost that little girl somewhere along the way, even though Cather kept telling me she had not.
Finally, there is, at the heart of this book, a desire to make the reader understand and value art itself. Cather explains this to us again and again, almost too often, but I do think she nailed it here:
What was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself,--life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose?
For the most part, this book worked for me, but it was not quite as satisfying as My Ántonia. It landed at 3.5 stars, but after some deliberation, I am rounding down. ...more
Leif Enger stole my heart with Peace Like a River, holding me captive from the first page to the last. I was afraid he could not pull off that trick aLeif Enger stole my heart with Peace Like a River, holding me captive from the first page to the last. I was afraid he could not pull off that trick again, but he did. After the first few chapters, in which I was beginning to doubt, this book took off and sailed, dragging me along in its wake. It is not serious or wrenching like Peace Like a River, but it is endlessly entertaining, and who wants an author to write the same book twice?
There are three superb characters, offered up for our enjoyment. They populate the dying West, where the desperados are old, as are the lawmen chasing them. Monte Becket, a man who knows nothing of the West except the imaginings he has put into his surprisingly successful novel; Glendon Hale, a man with a past that he wants to atone for; and Charlie Siringo, a less than scrupulous Pinkerton man, find themselves locked into each other's lives and swept across the rapidly changing 1915 landscape from Minnesota to California . The book is a wild ride, with these three reminding me of the lost art of bronco busting, where winning or losing is always determined by who hangs on the longest.
The West here is a dying culture, where the only cowboys are in wild west shows, and names like Butch Cassidy are beginning to fade with the memories of the men who knew him. It is, also, a tale about redemption; a tale about finding out who you are, or who you can be, before it is too late.
You can’t explain grace, anyway, especially when it arrives almost despite yourself. I didn’t even ask for it, yet somehow it breached and began to work. I suppose grace was pouring over Glendon, who had sought it so hard, and some spilled down on me.
Many of the events of the book would seem ludicrous in isolation and perhaps even in afterthought, but I believed this story and every event in the reading. I was there. I saw it, vividly. I pictured Hale and Siringo with weathered faces and western drawls that identified them as different, as relics, but with a kind of magical character that would be missed in the future from which they would shortly be missing.
I am so glad I took the time out of my planned reading to work in this delightful book. I was sad to relinquish these characters in the end, but I have no problem imagining where they are now, beyond the confines of the book, because the end is never truly the end in this one. ...more
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