ANOTHER FINE MESS (Bless Your Heart #2) is the kind of fun supernatural urban fantasy I miss

ANOTHER FINE MESS (Bless Your Heart #2)
LINDY RYAN
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available tomorrow

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Making sure dead things stay buried is the family business...

For over a hundred years, the Evans women have kept the undead in their strange southeast Texas town from rising. But sometimes the dead rise too quick–and that’s what left Lenore Evans, and her granddaughter Luna, burying Luna’s mother, Grace, and Lenore’s mother, Ducey. Now the only two women left in the Evans family, Luna and Lenore are left rudderless in the wake of the most Godawful Mess to date.

But when the full moon finds another victim, it’s clear their trouble is far from over. Now Lenore, Luna, and the new sheriff—their biggest ally—must dig deep down into family lore to uncover what threatens everything they love most. The body count ticks up, the most unexpected dead will rise–forcing Lenore and Luna to face the possibility that the undead aren’t the only monsters preying on their small town.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Silly Southern fantasy. It's cozy, and fun...the undead in Lufkin/Port Arthur country? I am not only in, I'm pretty convinced it's factually correct...and resonant with the East Texas matriarchal culture I know well.

I haven't read Bless Your Heart, the first in the series, but I felt the ringing curse in its bones on first reading the title. The subtext of those three words is brutal in my childhood culture, and not obvious to non-Southerners. It sets up perfectly the basis of the series: These women, the Evanses, are restoring ma'at, are guarding the rightness of the world against Evil and evildoers. That's a story I always enjoy reading.

As is so often the case in families, there are a lot of secrets in the Evans line and some that never made it to those who need them most now. There are undead beings to slay and, unfortunately, no one alive who knows for sure how to do the slaying. The present duo of survivors must thus root around and find out what they need to know on their own. Their support system is robust. They learn both to expand family and how to let others help them heal from last book's events.

There is gore, there is a dread in the atmosphere, and a lot rides on the Strigoi (Romanian undeadies, see Eliade's Miss Christina for some background) not staying risen for one instant longer than can be managed. It's the kind of fun I had with True Blood, with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and all transposed to a part of East Texas I know well enough to feel the story in my water.

If fun's the aim, and gore's not a deal-breaker, here's a good read. Expect the storytelling to mirror the characters' perceptions of events, ie not everything is linear and none of it is spoon-fed to you. This was an enhancement to me after I settled into the rhythm of the story, but that took some time. I can't quite say I bought into the ending's motivating factors but it was certainly of a piece with a series on this kind of supernatural-inflected topic.

I'll offer a solid four stars with a push to anyone in Southern culture to check it out.

THE PONDER HEART, light-hearted, fun-loving, and just a bit darker than you think

THE PONDER HEART
EUDORA WELTY
Mariner Books (non-affiliate Amazon link, since the publisher's website is not responding)
$11.49 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Daniel Ponder is the amiable heir to the wealthiest family in Clay County, Mississippi. To friends and strangers, he’s also the most generous, having given away heirlooms, a watch, and so far, at least one family business. His niece, Edna Earle, has a solution to save the Ponder fortune from Daniel’s mortifying philanthropy: As much as she loves Daniel, she’s decided to have him institutionalized.

Foolproof as the plan may seem, it comes with a kink—one that sets in motion a runaway scheme of mistaken identity, a hapless local widow, a reckless wedding, a dim-witted teenage bride, and a twist of dumb luck that lands this once-respectable Southern family in court to brave an embarrassing trial for murder. It’s become the talk of Clay County. And the loose-tongued Edna Earle will tell you all about it.

“The most revered figure in contemporary American letters,” said the New York Times of Eudora Welty, which also hailed The Ponder Heart—a winner of the William Dean Howells Medal which was adapted into both a 1956 Broadway play and a 2001 PBS Masterpiece series—as “Miss Welty at her comic, compassionate best.”

THIS IS MY ENTRY INTO THE 1954 CLUB...reviews of books published in 1954.

My Review: This magical moment of Southern history was first published in The New Yorker magazine, with the whimsically funny line drawings in my Kindle edition, in 1953. How I wish I had been there, that I'd seen it in that form...I was, obviously, unable to attend the 1956 Broadway performance of the play adapted from this book (being still as yet unborn) but I certainly saw the PBS Masterpiece Theater production with Peter MacNicol and JoBeth Williams as Uncle Daniel and Edna Earle Ponder. It was...fine. Not a patch on the read, but...fine. Like 2001 itself, it was no patch on 1953, or 1956.

The reason this novella marches on, I think, is that it is the perfect length and in the precise emotional register for Miss Eudora Welty's powers to come full bore on it. I am certain that its long-term popularity is down to Miss Edna Earle Ponder and her absolutely amazing narrative voice:

I used to dread he might get hold of one of these occasional travelers that wouldn’t come in unless they had to—the kind that would break in on a story with a set of questions, and wind it up with a list of what Uncle Daniel’s faults were: some Yankee.
–and–
Miss Teacake Magee lived here all her life. She sings in the choir of the Baptist Church every blessed Sunday; couldn’t get her out. And sings louder than all the rest put together, so loud it would make you lose your place.
–and–
The Peacocks are the kind of people keep the mirror outside on the front porch, and go out and pick railroad lilies to bring inside the house, and wave at trains till the day they die. The most they probably hoped for was that somebody’d come find oil in the front yard and fly in the house and tell them about it.

It's the voice that I sense in all Miss Eudora's very best writing, the voice of a certain woman whose presence in every Southern matriarchy is inevitable: The "excellent woman" of Barbara Pym's stories with a different accent and a slightly more acid tongue. In Miss Edna Earle, I do believe the type reached her apotheosis. She narrates the whole sorry saga of Grandpa Ponder's attempts to corral his son's bizarre, generous heart within the Institution of Marriage. After all, the mental institution couldn't even hold him a week. The problem is, you see, Uncle Daniel Ponder isn't crazy. Isn't, in fact, much of anything except smilingly delighted to be alive, and willing to do whatever it takes to give that same joy to others. And Miss Edna Earle, being a true-born Ponder and a lot sharper than Uncle Daniel, sees Grandpa's point...helps him as best she can...and, when the marriage "didn't hold out," she accepts Uncle Daniel's just going to need watching so he doesn't give away the whole of the Ponder fortune.

Nobody thought to worry about the dear soul finding another wife.

This time, though, as one might expect, Uncle Daniel finds the wrongest wife possible: A silly little girl of seventeen from a family of no-count nobodies. The shock of it! Why, Grandpa Ponder finally succumbs to this shock to "the Ponder heart" and now where is Miss Edna Earle going to get help dealing with Uncle Daniel? Especially now that his little child bride is all of a sudden dead....

What follows is an absolutely side-splittingly funny murder trial, a startling bunch of revelations about Uncle Daniel (not really) and a juicy trial for the gossips to chew over til Kingdom Come (that bit's true). There is, as always, The Welty Touch over every square inch of this magical little farce. There's the occasional nasty epithet, but never from Miss Edna Earle or Uncle Daniel; there's not one single sign of modernity in the story, in the structure or the tale of it. This is the way Southern women of a century ago told their stories to anyone who desired to listen.

I desired to listen.

ONE WRITER'S BEGINNINGS, an oral memoir/lecture by a major Southern literary light

ONE WRITER'S BEGINNINGS
EUDORA WELTY
Scribner (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$11.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Eudora Welty was born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi. In a "continuous thread of revelation" she sketches her autobiography and tells us how her family and her surroundings contributed to the shaping not only of her personality but of her writing. Homely and commonplace sights, sounds, and objects resonate with the emotions of recollection: the striking clocks, the Victrola, her orphaned father's coverless little book saved since boyhood, the tall mountains of the West Virginia back country that become a metaphor for her mother's sturdy independence, Eudora's earliest box camera that suspended a moment forever and taught her that every feeling awaits a gesture. She has recreated this vanished world with the same subtlety and insight that mark her fiction.

Even if Eudora Welty were not a major writer, her description of growing up in the South--of the interplay between black and white, between town and countryside, between dedicated schoolteachers and the public they taught--would he notable. That she is a splendid writer of fiction gives her own experience a family likeness to others in the generation of young Southerners that produced a literary renaissance. Until publication of this book, she had discouraged biographical investigations. It undoubtedly was not easy for this shy and reticent lady to undertake her own literary biography, to relive her own memories (painful as well as pleasant), to go through letters and photographs of her parents and grandparents. But we are in her debt, for the distillation of experience she offers us is a rare pleasure for her admirers, a treat to everyone who loves good writing and anyone who is interested in the seeds of creativity.

My Review: The unassuming, delight-filled, unsparingly un-self-indulgent prose of Miss Eudora's fiction is surpassed in this expansion and revision of her Massey Lecture in the History of American Civilization, delivered at Harvard in 1983. For anyone unacquainted with Miss Eudora's literary output, I recommend starting with short fiction ("The Bride of the Innisfallen" is a good starter, followed by "Why I Live at the P.O."), moving on to her chef d'ouevre, the novel The Ponder Heart; this memoir, all 104pp of it, should come after one knows whether one is able to appreciate the particularities and glories of Miss Eudora's work. While I think she would appeal to any able-minded reader, I know from experience that her beautiful sentences sound like preciosity to some readers: eg, "Over a stronghold of a face, the blue hat of the lady in the raincoat was settled on like an Indian bonnet, or, rather, like an old hat, which it was." (from "The Bride of the Innisfallen")

This, to me, is equaled in English by Nabokov's terse clarity, and by little else; but it has been cited to me several times as unendurably cutesy or simply overwritten. I so completely disagree that it's hard to credit the opinion-havers with a shred of taste; however, there are tastes, and there are tastes, so I move on from my digression.

One Writer's Beginnings is told in a narrative voice much like her fiction; it is constructed like the linear tale that a life is when it is reflected on at leisure; and there are so many things in her history, from 1909 and her birth until her last entry in the lecture, a trip by train to New York during the Great Depression as a WPA junior publicity agent, that clearly formed a consciousness of time and place and rightness of things that she uses to such telling effect in her stories. An anecdote early in the book of her parents' morning routine of whistling and humming back and forth up and down the stairs phrases from "The Merry Widow Waltz" illuminates for me the means by which this shy, never-married lady "got" the signals of relationship that are so necessary to the parties in happiness. Another moment, the discovery of two nickels preserved in a hidden box, teaches me that Miss Eudora never felt any unmixed emotion (I won't tell that story, it must be read to be understood) and that is why The Ponder Heart is such a landmark in Southern ficiton.

The death of Miss Eudora's beloved father in 1931 is simply too painful for her to go into; she elides the details and leaves us to infer her pain. It fits with her lifelong lack of interest in talking about herself, but it leaves the reader without an anchor in what had to be a turbulent passage in her life. I can't fault the lady for her reticence, but in this as in several other areas, it would have behooved Miss Eudora to have let others guide her in preparing these talks so as to answer more questions:

It is our inward journey that leads us through time – forward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiraling. Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. As we discover, we remember; remembering, we discover; and most intensely do we experience this when our separate journeys converge. Our living experience at those meeting points is one of the charged dramatic fields of fiction.

Well, and therein the rub: It was the last thing she ever wanted to do, answer questions, and it's also why she wrote such marvelous stories, to answer them all unasked:

Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.

Miss Eudora Welty, thank you for all of it, and a safe journey into the future for your gifts to us who follow along behind you.

Book-A-Day meme #9, a character you love to hate: DELTA WEDDING

DELTA WEDDING
EUDORA WELTY
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
$15.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A vivid and charming portrait of a large southern family, the Fairchilds, who live on a plantation in the Mississippi delta. The story, set in 1923, is exquisitely woven from the ordinary events of family life, centered around the visit of a young relative, Laura McRaven, and the family’s preparations for her cousin Dabney’s wedding.

My Review: The Doubleday UK meme, a book a day for July 2014, is the goad I'm using to get through my snit-based unwritten reviews. Today's prompt, the ninth, is to discuss your favorite character in a novel to hate.

Dabney. Hands down, Dabney. What a self-centered nightmare of a spoiled brat! She's marryin' 'neath her, that no-count Troy is just scramblin' for a place in the Fairchilds! But Dabney, she knows:

"I will never give up anything!" Dabney thought, bending forward and laying her head against the soft neck. "Never! Never! For I am happy, and to give up nothing will prove it. I will never give up anything, never give up Troy - or to Troy!" She thought smilingly of Troy, coming slowly, this was the last day, slowly plodding and figuring....

And still, there's something deeply Southern in Dabney's greed, something that life in the lush heat of the land down by the water just puts in you, makes you part of it:

The eagerness with which she was now going to Marmion, entering her real life there with Troy, told her enough - all the cotton in the world was not worth one moment of life! It made her know that nothing could ever defy her enough to make her leave it. How sweet life was, and how well she could hold it, pluck it, eat it, lay her cheek to it - oh, no one else knew. The juice of life and the hot, delighting taste and the fragrance and warmth to the cheek, the mouth....

Dabney's complete inability to see the other person as real makes her a monster, that familiar monster, The Southern Belle. She hasn't got room for anyone but herself in the movie of her life:

Life was not ever inviolate. Dabney, poor sister and bride, shed tears this morning (though belatedly) because she had broken the Fairchild night light the aunts had given her; it seemed so unavoidable to Dabney, that was why she cried, as if she had felt it was part of her being married that this cherished little bit of other peoples' lives should be shattered now.

Things, the stuff that surrounds people like the Fairchilds from cradle to grave (and they'd take it on as grave goods if only people still did that), *those* evoke tears and memories. Not the people, not the little damn-near stranger in the Fairchild midst, little motherless Laura whose presence is unwished for but accepted because she is Family.

And in the end, that's where we end up in this novel, in the Family. Like every family, the Fairchilds have codes and shortcuts in their communication that seem designed to exclude others. That includes the reader of the novel, in fact. But it's not that the Fairchilds don't want you to understand them, or that Miss Eudora failed to give you the keys to a roman à clef. It's this very experience that's the point of the novel. Either you like that experience, or you don't, but this is the point:

Indeed the Fairchilds took you in circles, whirling delightedly about, she thought, stirring up confusions, hopefully working themselves up. But they did not really want anything they got - and nothing, really, nothing really so very much, happened!

Now that said, what makes this book fall short of four stars for me, an ardent Eudoraist? Novels aren't like short stories in that the introduction of a character or inclusion of a detail must be part of the essential nature of the book. There are about a squillion voices in this chorus, and that's just way too many. WAY too many. So there isn't a long-term investment in the current carrying us to...to...wherever it is we're going and we don't quite get to. Miss Eudora could've pruned the voices to Dabney, Uncle George, and Laura, and been able to tell the same big, noisy story. But this is a novel, and writing novels was not Miss Eudora's métier. That was the short story, a form of which she was a mistress.

In the end, as much as I loved to hate Dabney and her cut-rate Scarlett-ness, I was only slightly less appalled by the sheer feckless ridiculousness of George, Dabney's uncle and the Fairchild Golden Boy, and the cult surrounding him. His morganatic marriage to Robbie is summed up by Aunt Ellen, one of his groupies:

t seemed to Ellen at moments that George regarded them, and regarded things - just things, in the outside world - with a passion which held him so still that it resembled indifference. Perhaps it was indifference - as though they, having given him this astonishing feeling, might for a time float away and he not care. It was not love or passion itself that stirred him, necessarily, she felt - for instance, Dabney's marriage seemed not to have affected him greatly, or Robbie's anguish. But little Ranny, a flower, a horse running, a color, a terrible story listened to in the store in Fairchilds, or a common song, and yes, shock, physical danger, as Robbie had discovered, roused something in him that was immense contemplation, motionless pity, indifference...Then, he would come forward all smiles as if in greeting - come out of his intensity and give some child a spank or a present. Ellen had always felt this about George and now there was something of surprising kinship in the feeling.

That gets to the heart of my dislike and discomfort with George. He's so spoiled, so cossetted and babied, that only a severe adrenaline jolt (at someone else's expense) will do to fetch him up among the living.

It's not hard for me to appreciate this novel for what it is, but it's not at all the beau ideal of a novelist's art. I like it, I understand why others don't, but goodness me give me the lush, rich, deeply felt beauty of Welty's prose any old way it comes.

Revisiting ONE WRITER'S BEGINNINGS, Eudora Welty's Charming Memoir

ONE WRITER'S BEGINNINGS
EUDORA WELTY
Harvard University Press
$18.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Eudora Welty was born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi. In a "continuous thread of revelation" she sketches her autobiography and tells us how her family and her surroundings contributed to the shaping not only of her personality but of her writing. Homely and commonplace sights, sounds, and objects resonate with the emotions of recollection: the striking clocks, the Victrola, her orphaned father's coverless little book saved since boyhood, the tall mountains of the West Virginia back country that become a metaphor for her mother's sturdy independence, Eudora's earliest box camera that suspended a moment forever and taught her that every feeling awaits a gesture. She has recreated this vanished world with the same subtlety and insight that mark her fiction.

Even if Eudora Welty were not a major writer, her description of growing up in the South--of the interplay between black and white, between town and countryside, between dedicated schoolteachers and the public they taught--would he notable. That she is a splendid writer of fiction gives her own experience a family likeness to others in the generation of young Southerners that produced a literary renaissance. Until publication of this book, she had discouraged biographical investigations. It undoubtedly was not easy for this shy and reticent lady to undertake her own literary biography, to relive her own memories (painful as well as pleasant), to go through letters and photographs of her parents and grandparents. But we are in her debt, for the distillation of experience she offers us is a rare pleasure for her admirers, a treat to everyone who loves good writing and anyone who is interested in the seeds of creativity.

My Review: The unassuming, delight-filled, unsparingly un-self-indulgent prose of Miss Eudora's fiction is surpassed in this expansion and revision of her Massey Lecture in the History of American Civilization, delivered at Harvard in 1983. For anyone unacquainted with Miss Eudora's literary output, I recommend starting with short fiction ("The Bride of the Innisfallen" is a good starter, followed by "Why I Live at the P.O."), moving on to her chef d'ouevre, the novel The Ponder Heart; this memoir, all 104pp of it, should come after one knows whether one is able to appreciate the particularities and glories of Miss Eudora's work. While I think she would appeal to any able-minded reader, I know from experience that her beautiful sentences sound like preciosity to some readers: eg, "Over a stronghold of a face, the blue hat of the lady in the raincoat was settled on like an Indian bonnet, or, rather, like an old hat, which it was." (from "The Bride of the Innisfallen")

This, to me, is equalled in English by Nabokov's terse clarity, and by little else; but it has been cited to me several times as unendurably cutesy or simply overwritten. I so completely disagree that it's hard to credit the opinion-havers with a shred of taste; however, there are tastes, and there are tastes, so I move on from my digression.

One Writer's Beginnings is told in a narrative voice much like her fiction; it is constructed like the linear tale that a life is when it is reflected on at leisure; and there are so many things in her history, from 1909 and her birth until her last entry in the lecture, a trip by train to New York during the Great Depression as a WPA junior publicity agent, that clearly formed a consciousness of time and place and rightness of things that she uses to such telling effect in her stories. An anecdote early in the book of her parents' morning routine of whistling and humming back and forth up and down the stairs phrases from "The Merry Widow Waltz" illuminates for me the means by which this shy, never-married lady "got" the signals of relationship that are so necessary to the parties in happiness. Another moment, the discovery of two nickels preserved in a hidden box, teaches me that Miss Eudora never felt any unmixed emotion (I won't tell that story, it must be read to be understood) and that is why The Ponder Heart is such a landmark in Southern ficiton.

The death of Miss Eudora's beloved father in 1931 is simply too painful for her to go into; she elides the details and leaves us to infer her pain. It fits with her lifelong lack of interest in talking about herself, but it leaves the reader without an anchor in what had to be a turbulent passage in her life. I can't fault the lady for her reticence, but in this as in several other areas, it would have behooved Miss Eudora to have let others guide her in preparing these talks so as to answer more questions.

Well, and therein the rub: It was the last thing she ever wanted to do, answer questions, and it's also why she wrote such marvelous stories, to answer them all unasked.

Miss Eudora Welty, thank you for all of it, and a safe journey into the future for your gifts to us who follow along behind you.


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