Another Beautiful Title: THE OPTIMIST'S DAUGHTER

THE OPTIMIST'S DAUGHTER
EUDORA WELTY
Vintage Books
$13.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The Optimist's Daughter is the story of Laurel McKelva Hand, a young woman who has left the South and returns, years later, to New Orleans, where her father is dying. After his death, she and her silly young stepmother go back still farther, to the small Mississippi town where she grew up. Alone in the old house, Laurel finally comes to an understanding of the past, herself, and her parents.

My Review: This is the novel that won Miss Eudora a Pulitzer Prize. She deserved all the awards going, but to select this one of her novels for an overdue honor...? Not that it's bad or anything, it's just...well...beautiful writing telling an ordinary woman's ordinary experience of coping with, understanding, death and aging. Evergreen themes to be sure, and again I stress the beautiful writing bit:

“Up home we loved a good storm coming, we’d fly outdoors and run up and down to meet it,” her mother used to say. “We children would run as fast as we could go along the top of that mountain when the wind was blowing, holding our arms right open. The wilder it blew the better we liked it.”

Yes. All of me knows that's true, and my inward ear rejoices in the music of it. But why it comes where it does, well, it's to make or re-make a point that's made.

Fine in shorter fiction. Gets tedious in longer fiction. This is *barely* over novella length and it coulda been shorter. Maybe even shoulda been.

But then there's, “At the sting in her eyes, she remembered for him that there must be no tears in his.” Oh. My. GOODNESS. Or this piece of gorgeousness, a tossaway line: “She was sent to sleep under a velvety cloak of words, richly patterned and stitched with gold, straight out of a fairy tale, while they went reading on into her dreams.” I could faint right now, saying it over and over, absorbing the *exactly*perfect* choice of words, savoring the rhythm, the heartbeat of it.

But the most frequent cry I hear against Miss Eudora's work is, "But NOTHING happens!" That's nonsense. Things happen, things that as we grow older we see clearer, things that don't involve fires and floods, or car, plane, boat trips to places near and far. Things that change the bone and meat of you, not the skin:

And perhaps it didn't matter to them, not always, what they read aloud; it was the breath of life flowing between them, and the words of the moment riding on it that held them in delight. Between some two people every word is beautiful, or might as well be beautiful.

And that, that right there, is my personal definition of what a marriage should be. I'd say "don't settle for less!" but there'd be more single people than there are places to house them.

So yes, things happen, yes, things and people change and grow and learn, but it takes a quiet and reserved readerly touch to see it, find it, winkle it out from the words. Action? Little. Characterization? Lots, maybe too much for some characters' ability to sustain our interest (Fay!). Discovery? Well.

At their very feet had been the river. The boat came breasting out of the mist, and in they stepped. All new things in life were meant to come like that.

In you step, now, and mind the gap.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Book-A-Day #13: A great novel title, HILL WILLIAM

HILL WILLIAM
SCOTT MCCLANAHAN
Tyrant Books
$15.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Beginning to read Hill William is like tuning into a blues station at 4:00 a.m. while driving down the highway. Scott McClanahan's work soars with a brisk and lively plainsong, offering a boisterous peek into a place often passed over in fiction: West Virginia, where coal and heartbreak reign supreme. Hill William testifies to the way place creates and sometimes stifles one's ability to hope. It reads like a Homeric hymn to adventure, to the human comedy's upsets and small downfalls, and revels in its whispers of victory. So grab coffee, beer—whatever gets you through the night—and join Scott around the hearth. Lend him your ear, but be warned: you might not want it back.

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, lucky number 13, asks us to discuss a novel with the best title. I think this is about it.

Now surely y'all remember my review of Crapalachia: A Biography of Place from 2013, right? How I warbled myself hoarse over its 4.5-star glory? Sure! Okay then, go take a quick peek at it and get back in the head of appreciating hillbilly noir or hick lit or whatever we've decided to call it.

And here he is again, Scott McClanahan, to make the fat and oblivious mainstream look, really look, at life among those who don't have much, and that includes hope. This time it's explicitly labeled fiction, so no one's going to run up to McClanahan on stage at a reading and demand to know if Event X happened and when.

Yeah, right.

The reason that's still going to happen is simple: Scott McClanahan inhabits this book the way a djinn inhabits a lamp. He's on your bookshelf. He's lookin' paper-pale, somebody feed the boy some vitamin D-for-decoding! We vivify the writer as we read the writing.

I couldn't stop. I couldn't stop because it felt good.

Just like right now I find myself getting ready to do it.

I hit myself.

I feel the blood surging to my head.

I hit myself.

I feel my jaw tightening.

I hit myself.

It feels like a prayer.

I hit myself.

It feels like something strange.

I hit myself.

It feels like something beautiful.

And that's before the page count gets to double digits. Now, some several of you aren't liking this too terrible much. It's not your favorite thing, it's not going somewhere you're interested in going...yes yes, I get it, it's challenging your definition of entertainment. It did mine, too.

Go on the trip. Yes, it's off your route, past your exit, beyond your slip. Fiction, fact-ion, roman à clef, metafiction, whatever tidy label you need to smack on the package, smack it on and open it up and settle in for an afternoon with someone who doesn't speak Cultured like a native because he isn't.

In a world that celebrates the bland venality of getting and spending, a moment like this...a scant two, maybe three hours' read for most of us serious bookheads...is uncommon and worthy of note and celebration. This isn't bland, and it's less venal than venereal. It won't lull or cosset you, but Hill William (isn't that a great title?) will not send you to bed wondering what you read that day. If anything.

An excellent summer read: CRAPALACHIA by Scott McClanahan

CRAPALACHIA: A Biography of Place
SCOTT MCCLANAHAN
Two Dollar Radio
$12.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: When Scott McClanahan was fourteen he went to live with his Grandma Ruby and his Uncle Nathan, who suffered from cerebral palsy. Crapalachia is a portrait of these formative years, coming-of-age in rural West Virginia.

Peopled by colorful characters and their quirky stories, Crapalachia interweaves oral folklore and area history, providing an ambitious and powerful snapshot of overlooked Americana.

My Review: Memoir...I remember...that's what makes this book so damn good, Scott remembers and he tells us that he remembers, wants us to remember with him. I've never lived in West Virginia, I've only driven through it in my expensive car and thought, "ye gods and little fishes, is this for real?!" and pressed a little harder on the gas to get the fuck out of there. I've never even spent a night there. I drove an extra hour out of my comfort zone (6 hours behind the wheel is enough for me) so I wouldn't have to.

But I remember with Scott McClanahan. I'm 20 years older than he is. I've lived the entirety of my life in upper-middle-class assurance of comfort and joy. When I haven't had any money, I've had friends and loved ones and even random strangers who shared with me. And it never, ever looked like the pictures Scott paints in my head.

It's beautiful, this picture, these pictures, but it's not pretty. It's warty and cold and shaped funny. But oh how much there is to celebrate in the life of a kid who knows where home is and what his family is made of and scoops up the mud he's standing on to make something new of something old.

She hobbled along some more and I walked behind her.
She said: "This is the grave I wanted to see. This is the grave."
I asked: "Whose grave is it?"
I walked in front of the stone and I saw it was her grave. It was the grave of Ruby Irene McClanahan, born 1917 died...
Then there was a blank space--the space where they would put the date of her death.
She touched the shiny stone and explained...her really good deal on the tombstone. She told me I should start saving. It was a good investment.

The tales of this Crapalachian boy are muddled and mixed, of course, as all memories are, and as honest as they are, they aren't always factual. In the appendix to the book, Scott tells us the places he knows he mashed things up and rearranged them, since after all he was writing a story and stories have their own needs. But he never violates, not once in this book, the one Commandment of Memoir: Condescend not, lest ye be caught and pilloried. (See: James Frey.)

I wouldn't write about how people stared at {Uncle Nathan} when I pushed him down the road. They stared and shook their heads....
I knew I would never write about Nathan's light-blue eyes--eyes as blue as Christmas tree lights.
I knew I would never write about his soft heart. The softest heart I have ever known.

I knew he believed in something that none of us ever do anymore. He believed in the nastiest word in the world. He believed in KINDNESS. Please tell me you remember kindness. Please tell me you remember kindness and joy, you cool motherfuckers.

Why read some thirtysomething kid's memoirs? What kind of philosophical point can someone that young make? I wonder, is it even necessary to make a point? Can it be enough to read a book like this, about a young life seen from middle age (can't be much under 35, this kid, and that's spang in the middle of life), and eat the textures and smell the regrets of someone new to the idea that The End applies to him, too? He has children, he tells us so. He tells us that he went from place to place in the world leaving dirt from West Virginia there, giving the dirt to strangers and leaving it in the soil of New York City and Seattle and suchlike. So his children, no matter their wanderings, would have something of their, his, his grandmother's home waiting.

I don't know that I believe him.

"Oh lordie, I'm feeling horrible," she said. Then she clutched her chest. "I'm having chest pains." I kissed her cheek and I said, "I'll see you next week." She told me my grandfather Elgie used to have nightmares begging for the whistle to stop.
She wasn't dying.
She was lonely.

So I left and I heard Ruby shouting again, "Oh lordie, I'm dying." I didn't turn back. I wasn't sure we were even born yet. We were all inside of a giant mother right then and we were waiting to be born. Just like tomorrow, at dawn, we will be held in the arms of a giant mother. We will find warmth and maybe even war there.

I want us all to be ready.

Ready? We're none of us ready, ever. As his kids grow up he'll find that out.

And then there's the story of the little girl and the locket. It's near the end of the book, it's a memory from adulthood. It made me cry for a half-hour, angry and hurting and so so sad, helpless in the face of a world we've made with action, inaction, consent, and indifference (driving faster to escape someone else's reality ring a bell?).

But hey, Scott? I remember. I'm with you.

Book-A-Day meme #12: OUTERBOROUGH BLUES, a book that gives me a sense of place

OUTERBOROUGH BLUES
ANDREW COTTO
Ig Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$11.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.9* of five

The Publisher Says: A beautiful young French girl walks into a bar, nervously lights a cigarette, and begs the bartender for help in finding her missing artist brother. In a moment of weakness, the bartender—a lone wolf named Caesar Stiles with a chip on his shoulder and a Sicilian family curse hanging over him—agrees. What follows is a stylish literary mystery set in Brooklyn on the dawn of gentrification.

While Caesar is initially trying to earn an honest living at the neighborhood watering hole, his world quickly unravels. In addition to being haunted by his past, including a brother who is intent on settling an old family score, Caesar is being hunted down by a mysterious nemesis known as The Orange Man. Adding to this combustible mix, Caesar is a white man living in a deep-rooted African American community with decidedly mixed feelings about his presence. In the course of his search for the French girl's missing brother, Caesar tumbles headlong into the shadowy depths of his newly adopted neighborhood, where he ultimately uncovers some of its most sinister secrets.

Taking place over the course of a single week, Outerborough Blues is a tightly paced and gritty urban noir saturated with the rough and tumble atmosphere of early 1990s Brooklyn.

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, number 12 in the series, is to discuss the book that gave you the best sense of place.

I moved to Manhattan in the 1980s, when it was still dirty, stinky, vice-ridden, and a boat-load of fun. Now it's clean and sanitary and there's a damn Disney store where there used to be hookers, drugs, and other useful things. Yuck.

Anyway, the same thing happened to Brooklyn about ten years later. This development is called "gentrification" and it's a double-edged sword. Nicer middle-class neighborhoods, no place for the poor to live...well, can't make an omelette....

Cotto's reluctant sleuth, Caesar, came to be in this country because of his great-grandmother:

My mother's mother came to this country in the usual way--she got on a boat with other immigrants and sailed from Sicily. She wasn't one of them, however: neither tired nor poor or part of any huddled mass. Instead, she traveled alone, with her money in one sock and a knife in the other, coming to the new world with an old world motive--to murder the man that had left her for America.

Such a fine, upstanding family! Things don't get a lot better in succeeding generations, and Caesar is running at top speed to get the blood-feuding nightmare of his family away behind him. So why does he agree to help the waifish French lassie, Colette, find her brother Jean-Baptist (sic)?

Because he wants some. Because the bar where he works is closing in on him. Because. He starts to search for the boy, an artist, and he gets himself tangled with some people who are where they are because it's where they want to be:

The lady in the liquor store sold me a fifth of whiskey and the landlord’s name without taking her eyes off the book she was reading.

It's clear that Cotto knows his folks well, and has their collective number. It's also clear that Caesar is walking streets deeply familiar to Cotto:

In the open sky above the hushed streets, the moon was a porcelain plate on a black table as I walked home. A breeze raised the collar of my jeans jacket as I sliced through the silvery silence, past unlit buildings and quivering trees and cars idle by the curb. The air felt like glass. I crossed empty corners under the mauve light of overhead lamps.

A more perfect, more poignant recreation of a fall night's walk in the seaport of New York I haven't read. Something that people who live here forget is that this is a seaside place, it was a port for centuries, it is spang doodle on the Atlantic Ocean, and that means the seaside is all around:

The full moon rose above the harbor as brightly lit tour boats skimmed along the black water, the brilliant cluster of lower Manhattan piled like stacks of coins from a treasure chest in the distance. Up the river, bridges arched across the wide water all the way up the east side, while the Brooklyn side was marked by soft, round lights, like a string of pearls.

I've stopped for that view any number of times in the past, and it never failed (or fails) to render me immobile with a blazing bolt of homecoming joy.

So, Caesar and his quest kick into high gear, several associates of his prove to be more than what they seem, and the more questions he asks about Jean-Baptist (sic) the more trouble he gets into. Beatings. Threats. Some sex. Memories blast our guy at every turn, all the crap he's wanted to escape from bubbles up as he searches the druggier parts of Brooklyn for Colette's foolish artist wannabe brother:

Gypsy cabs jostled and honked...Dollar vans lined the sidewalk and people piled in and out. As I walked down the slope, the buildings grew smaller and squalid. Trees vanished...and the heat picked up. Beyond the brick wall of the Navy Yard, the silver skyline of Manhattan glimmered in the distance like a mirage. The industrial remains of the flats were low and decrepit and mostly abandoned, though a few beeping forklifts unloaded trucks here and there. The storefronts were shuttered except for a bank busy with Orthodox Jews. The funk of a chicken processing plant contaminated the air.

I walked along the high brick wall that separated the Navy Yard from the street, frequently stepping over pulverized vials that sparkled like jewels on the sidewalk. There was no shade. I blinked away the dust.

Yep, been there. The Navy Yard, by the mid-1990s, was a cheap warehousing area, and the publisher whose office work I did had his books stored there. Not a super-nice place to walk at night. Fascinating history, and very different now, but this passage nails the sensation of blasting heat and stinking blight that permeated the place then.

More stuff about the search for Colette's brother turns up nasty secrets involving everyone Caesar knows, information that he uses to get a ghost from his own past laid to rest, and then *clap clap* the mystery's solved.

This made me mad. I don't like being taken on a ride and then dumped outside town, told I'm there, and left.

But you know what? Homecoming means more than how you traveled to get there. I liked the people I met on the trip. I liked the evocative landscape descriptons. I liked the sense of Caesar's working through so much about his past wasn't going to Make Shit Better, because landing him in more trouble later means more of this:

Past the projects, the land opened up and water came into view. The breeze carried rain and salt. Jetties and barrier walls supported the shore, which was stacked with crumbling brick warehouses. Out in the channel, the Statue of Liberty stood alone on her little island, her corroding flame held high in the air as the sun set over the industrial shoreline and skyways of New Jersey. Across the narrows, the bluffs of Staten Island wavered in the smoky light of dusk that turned the Verrazano into bronze. Faint light burnished water into busy with freighters and tug boats. A lone sail boat flitted in the distance. On the near shore, on a slip of water between a jetty and the land, a blood red barge bobbed on the tide.

And that, laddies and gentlewomen, is good.

LET HIM GO, eleventh Book-A-Day meme read

LET HIM GO: A Novel
LARRY WATSON
Milkweed Editions
$9.99 ebook editions, available now

2020 UPDATE The 6 November 2020 film has a really intense trailer!

Rating: 4.9* of five

The Publisher Says: "With you or without you," Margaret insists, and at these words George knows his only choice is to follow her.

It’s September 1951: years since George and Margaret Blackledge lost their son James when he was thrown from a horse; months since James’s widow Lorna took off and remarried that thug Donnie Weboy. Now Margaret is steadfast, resolved to find and retrieve her grandson Jimmy—the one person in this world keeping her son’s memory alive—while George, a retired sheriff, is none too eager to stir up trouble with Donnie Weboy. Unable to sway his wife from her mission, George takes to the road with Margaret by his side, traveling through the Dakota badlands to Bentrock, Montana, in unstoppable pursuit. When Margaret tries to convince Lorna to return home to North Dakota, bringing little Jimmy with her, the Blackledges find themselves mixed up with the entire Weboy clan, a fearsome family determined not to give the boy up without a fight.

With gutsy characters and suspense-filled prose, Let Him Go speaks to the extraordinary measures we take for family and the overpowering instinct to protect those we love. From the award-winning author who gave us Montana 1948, Justice, and American Boy, Larry Watson is at his storytelling finest in this unforgettable return to the American West.

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 is the eleventh in the series, discuss a book that made you cry.

Um.

Long past the moment when her neck begins to stiffen and ache, she continues to stare into the darkness, even though none of the human secrets she needs to know are to be found in the stars but rather closer to the earth her boots stand upon.

So, yeah. This book's plot is readily available to anyone who can read. You know that Margaret Blackledge lost her only son, her no-count trollop of a daughter-in-law found her a pretty face on top of a hard body and lit out for the fleshpots of Montana. Good riddance, Margaret would think, were it not for the fact that her one remaining treasure, her grandson, got swept away in the leaving. And the life that boy will be living will be full of no-count people who are no better than the law requires, and most of the time not even that. No. Margaret will not have that, not after all she went through to raise her boy up right. She has to have his son back, so she can do it all again.

A four-year-old has so little past, and he remembers almost none of it, neither the father he once had nor the house where he once lived. But he can feel the absences – and feel them as sensation, like a texture that was once at his fingers every day but now is gone and no matter how he gropes or reaches his hand he cannot touch what’s no longer there.

And those textures, those memories, they're going to be of her and her husband George, not some petty, small-time criminals like his mama fell in with.

Margaret Blackledge is a force of nature. She is a tall woman with no give to her, and believe you me, she has never given anything. She suits her country beautifully. Margaret just flat hates summer, she went a little crazy one summer from it and...well, that's a piece of story you'll find out. Summer makes a person crazy, and so Margaret waits to pack the Hudson full of her life's stuff and then tell George he's comin' or goin' but the time is now until it's September:

Autumn has come to northeast Montana. The vapor of one’s breath, the clarity of the stars, the smell of wood smoke, the stones underfoot that even a full day of sunlight won’t warm- these all say there will be no more days that can be mistaken for summer.

And I don't blame her one itty bit.

George now, he's been a sheriff for Dalton, North Dakota, and he's had to win elections before...in spite of a little drinkin' problem, in spite of being reserved, in spite of never slittin' a lip unless it was necessary:

The limitless, lowering sky, the long stretches of motionless empty prairie, the silence, complete right down to the absence of birdsong -- who knows what decides a man to leave most of his words unspoken?

But when we meet George, he's no lawman anymore, he holds boards for other men to hammer. He's done. He's been more than he wanted to be, and he's done. George has been Margaret's husband for a long time, and he's done right by her and their twin kids (Janie, the other twin, features in this story only in her absence). But now, with this trip, George is done:

Now no sign, no scorch or char, marks the place where George built the fire. Remarkable, earth's strength to restore itself and erase human effort. But memory, stronger still, can send flames as high as the roof, and shift the wind and choke George and sting his eyes with smoke...

Memories might consume him, but no one outside his skin will ever know which ones, or what he thinks of 'em. He does not give anything away, not after running a ranch he inherited from his father and mother, not after making a life in the hardscrabble grab it from the earth way of the American West, and not as long as Margaret is beside him making do, wearing out, mending up, doing without.

I think he loves Margaret, and I think he knows that his only way to show her she's loved is to do for her. So he does. And the story is George, lawman and drunk and closed-up shop, doing his all for the woman who gave him his life. It had its price, this life, but it was theirs, and they're looking at the end:

When night comes on in a room lit by kerosene, any flicker of the flame can give the sense that darkness is about to triumph.

And that's the story's unspoken edge. These two people are coming to the end, and they...she more than he...want to put something into their grandson that his soft, vapid, pointless mama won't and can't. They want to give him a sense of purpose, a purposeful life-path that won't shame him or his own kids.

Suffice it to say that the conflict between these rock-ribbed, self-contained, competent people and their shiftless opponents isn't going to play out slowly. The end comes, in fact, a bit abruptly and with a B-movie full-circleness that is *exactly* what I wanted.

But in that satisfaction comes the disappointment of getting what you want handed to you, no questions, no effort required. This beautiful story and its handsomely carved characters never launched into the glorious orbit of Montana 1948, and never plumbed the deep-downs of White Crosses. It is excellent, and it is beautiful. It should be on your shelf. It should also break into the myriad frighteningly sharp shards here:

A gust of wind doesn't suddenly bang a door open. A clock doesn't chime. The phone doesn't ring. Yet in the next instant the stillness breaks as if it is crystal.

That it never quite does makes me cry.

Tenth BOOK-A-DAY prompt..PICNICS?! Uh oh

THE FLY TRAP: A Book About Summer, Islands and the Freedom of Limits
FREDRIK SJÖBERG
Particular Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
Out of print; various prices

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Warm, funny and insightful, The Fly Trap is a meditation on collecting; be it hoverflies or fine art. A fascinating web of associations, it begins with Sjöberg’s own tranquil experience as an entomologist on a remote island in Sweden, and takes in heroic historical expeditions to Burma and the wilderness of Kamchatka. Along the way, Sjoberg pauses to reflect on a range of ideas – slowness, art, freedom, – drawing other great writers, like D.H Lawrence and Bruce Chatwin, into dialogue. From the everyday to the exotic, The Fly Trap revels in the wonder of the natural world and leaves a trail of memorable images and stories.

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, tenth in the series, is to choose a book with a memorable picnic in honor of some ridiculous teddy bear thing.

Now seriously. Anyone who's known me ten minutes can be excused from the room for a laugh break. A picnic! The clambake on the beach in Professor Diggins' Dragons, a chapter book I read in 1967 or so, then the famous allusion to a picnic in Lolita...was there some talk of a picnic in a Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew book? Can't remember...anyway, I am not the sort of hairpin of a guy who reads books with picnics in. And I need to keep the pace going with this meme! What to do, what to do....

Then it hit me: Picnics are outdoors customarily, aren't they, so a book about the outdoors will work! And I just read a doozy: The Fly Trap, a Swedish weirdo's reminiscences (some would say maunderings) of his life in the cutthroat world of hoverfly expertise.

Since I had no idea what the hell a hoverfly was, I wiki'd it up and spent a good half-hour marveling at gems like, "About 6,000 species in 200 genera have been described." Described! Dear and glorious physician, someone down through the ages has always not had a life, of course, but the amount of wasted drinking, reading, and screwing time that describing "about 6,000 species in 200 genera" represents just boggles my mind.

And this guy's a nice-enough looking man, he doesn't appear to have any cognitive defects, and he's Swedish, so getting dates can't have presented that much of a problem for him that he had to give up and start collecting flies. He explains why he chose to write his memoir, and a bit of why he's in the fly game at all:

The hoverflies are only props. No, not only, but to some extent. Here and there, my story is about something else. Some days I tell myself that my mission is to say something about the art and sometimes the bliss of limitation. And the legibility of landscape. Other days are more dismal. As if I were standing on queue in the rain outside confessional literature’s nudist colony, mirrors everywhere, blue with cold.

So I get it, Mr. Man, you're not Eric Northman and you'd like folks to pay you some attention. Check! Do it in art. Write lovely sentences, people will pay attention to you. Chalk up a win for the fly guy!

And then there's the stuff he finds out as fly-hunting takes over his world. There was, apparently, a Swedish guy named René Malaise (!) whose wildlife-hunting expeditions to places like Kamchatka, on the Pacific fringe of Russia, led to his invention of the Malaise Fly Trap. (This is not a goof, I looked it up.) A piece of this book reads like a failed start on a biography of Malaise (what a horrible name! "Reborn Misery" yuck), which was really very intriguing. Emulating this monadnock of the fly-guy world, Our Hero takes off and travels around the world to see what he can see. The important part of his bring-back was this:

When the days are numbered, everything seems clearer, as if the time between preparation and departure possessed a particular magic. The endless stretch of time on the other side always struck me as evasive and treacherous. But the very limited period between now and then held a liberating peace and quiet. This allotment of time was an island. And the island became, later, a measurable moment. For a long time, this discovery was the only truly unclouded dividend that I took from my travels.

I think I was the only person in the USA who watched the film The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, but I did and I loved more than anything the line Peter Weller speaks as Buckaroo: "No matter where you go, there you are." Sjöberg clearly gets that, and decides to come home to the place where everybody speaks his language. No more wandering for him...he'll settle down in Sweden, near Stockholm, on an island!

Now there is very little in this world that is better at focusing one's attention on the practical realities of life than living on an island. I live on a really big one, but part of living here is knowing how and when to get off the island. And if one can't, what are the options? I meditate on these matters, always coming back to the realization that island = Atlantic Ocean, and that's a BIG piece of water, and there are storms out there pretty much all the time...

It’s said to be the same all over the world, in all seven seas. Islands are matriarchies of a kind seldom seen on land. The men – as Iceland’s president Vigdís Finnbogadóttir remarked on one occasion when the subject arose – the men flee to their own preferred landscape, which is the sea.

Interesting. I'd never really noticed before that all the world over the word for "person who goes out into the water and brings back fish" is male in gendered languages, and not even the most ardent gender-equality advocate has yet proposed an alternative to "fisherman." There appears to be no need for it.

So what does this have to do with flies? Got me. But it's in Sjöberg's book, like so much else that isn't instantly obviously contained within the title The Fly Trap. And that's why I enjoyed the book so much. I dislike summer because summer, and I am not a huge fan of outdoorsy life because mosquitoes, but I am always up for a stroll with an interesting companion whose passion and joy is shared eloquently and elegantly with me, allowing me to make a mental shift in my own ever-narrowing scope of activity. Tomas Tranströmer, Nobel Laureate poet, blurbed this book in large part (I believe) because of moments, lovely limerant moments like this one:

Every summer there are a number of nights, not many, but a number, when everything is perfect. The light, the warmth, the smells, the mist, the birdsong – the moths. Who can sleep? Who wants to?

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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.