American Fiction

As I was listening to a Minnesota Orchestra concert broadcast recently, a concert primarily of American music, I learned that when Osmo Vanska took the position of music director he began looking for American classical music to program.  He’s taken the orchestra’s Composer Institute to new heights, nurturing up-and-coming composers.  But I had not known that he’d purposefully begun a search for American classical music to conduct on subscription concerts.  I was impressed.  And pleased.  That evening, the orchestra performed works by Jennifer Higdon and Howard Hanson.

What American fiction would I recommend enthusiastically to a non-American?  (Besides my own, of course.)  I started thinking of classic American fiction, but then wondered what criteria I needed to use for my recommendations.  That the novel is written by an American or that it also conveys some truth or insight into Americans and their lives?

The first novel that popped into my mind was To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.  Set in 1930’s Alabama, this story reveals two sides of American prejudice — the racist side and the non-racist — as seen through the eyes of a young girl, Scout Finch, during one memorable summer.  Scout’s voice questions, observes, and states in a powerful cadence.  The story endures and entertains.

After that, I was stumped until I thought of recommending only fiction I’d read myself.  This eliminates John Updike, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth from my list, which doesn’t mean these guys aren’t worth reading, but only that I’m not comfortable putting them on my list because I haven’t read them.

I’ve read Madison Smartt Bell, though, and I’d highly recommend his work, especially The Year of Silence,  a story of a suicide, which sounds depressing but it’s not.  I thought of this story when I read it as a main character and her life in the middle of a series of concentric circles of other characters and their lives.  Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier for a lyrical path into life and love in the Civil War South.  The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner who wrote truths about the way we classify each other in our “classless” society.  Staggerford by Jon Hassler for a glimpse at life in Minnesota and American small towns.  Willa Cather’s My Antonia for life on the prairie in the 19th century.  Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes for the horrors of a carnival in small town America — this book scared me more than anything else I’ve read whether in the horror genre or not.  Ursula LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness or The Dispossessed, which explore human rights.

I started to feel guilty about not including Roth, Bellow and Updike, so I turned to Ernest Hemingway whom I think of as a muscular American writer.  He explored the American abroad but my favorite Hemingway novel is The Old Man and the Sea.  Of course, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby which I’ve read four or five times in my life, but I’d personally recommend by the same author Tender is the Night.  And then there’s Edith Wharton whose powerful character-driven stories, such as Ethan Frome or The Age of Innocence, offer portraits of a specific time and place created by the people inhabiting them.

One American writer focused on the dark side of human experience and behavior, revealing American character in criminality.  I absolutely love Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels and recommend The Talented Mr. Ripley to open the door to Tom Ripley’s world.  These novels have inspired me quite a lot as I’ve  worked on my Perceval novels.   Evan Quinn owes a lot to Tom Ripley.

Lastly, the American short story: Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville, The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oates, A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor, and A Gravestone Made of Wheat by Will Weaver…..

Reading as a Writer: “Street Portraits”

Richard Carr enjoyed an amazing year for publication in 2008: four poetry books.  Two of these books, Honey and Mr. Martini, I’ve already written about here.  And now the third book, Street Portraits.  This book might be considered as the source of several characters that inhabit the other three books, including Honey, Ace, Mr. Martini.  The title is vague for a collection of poems about specific moments and people.  From the first two lines (“The quiet boy sits very still on the bench,/one sleeve rolled up — or the other fallen down.”) Carr establishes anticipation and curiosity — what will happen next?  Who will we meet next?  (Full disclosure: I know Richard Carr.  He’s a neighbor.) 

The language Carr chooses for his descriptions create startling images that evoked memory of specific moments in my life.  For example: “Her thoughts snap and blow like a street map in the wind,” immediately brought a clear image to mind, followed by a memory of a sunny, windy afternoon on the way to Cape Cod and the map snapping in my mother’s face from the wind blowing through her open car window.  Some other examples:

• “She is chipped  and smudged like the painted brick facade.”
• “…the thick liquid/of daydream.”
• “his feet sinking into the floor like monuments in tall grass.”

In this collection, I noticed a preoccupation with eyes, watched or watching, described also in original ways:

• “His eyes make small movements,/intermittent,/like raindrops striking leaves.”
• “…–just the orbs of the eyes –/gone blurry in the chloroform of halted time.”
• “The Bee in a Boy’s Eye” (a title)
• “her eyes like sleek trains/speeding back and forth across the bay.”

Two poems stayed with me for some time: “Madman” and “Self-Portrait in a Public Toilet.”  I thought they were outstanding.

Another poem moved me for its ordinariness: “The Usual.”  Who hasn’t seen an old guy at a breakfast counter, whether on the road or some Sunday morning in summer?  The poems in this book heightened my awareness of the street and the people I see on it every time I go out.  These poems give those people their individuality and humanity.  Which is not to say the professional panhandlers no longer annoy me….especially the ones with cell phones.

One Thursday evening not long ago, I stopped reading on the bus to listen and watch a conversation occurring between two men, and I tried to imagine how they might appear in Richard’s “Street Portraits.”  One guy held a cane and large cardboard sign that read “Brain trauma, was in coma for 3 weeks,” but his speech was normal and his movements appeared normal.  He wore a baseball cap, plaid shirt and jeans with beat-up sneakers.  The other guy wore a white T-shirt tucked into khaki pants with a black belt, his apple-shaped body a contrast to his pointed nose, small mouth and eyes.  He said, “So you were in a coma?  Can you think?”  The baseball cap guy replied, “No, not really.” 

I wasn’t fooled….

Reading as a Writer: “Honey”

During the last week, I’ve had the pleasure of reading Richard Carr’s second book of poetry to be published this year, Honey.  Unlike Mister Martini, this collection reads like a road trip with someone well versed in the psychedelic.  The language and images are so rich and layered, I needed to parcel out the poems so I wouldn’t experience mental and sensory overload.  And wow, what a collection.  (Full disclosure: Richard lives in my neighborhood and is a friend.)

As I read, I had to remind myself that the “I” is not Richard, and it seems to change as a character from one poem to the next.  Other characters that pop up and become comments on life and the world: the Poet, the Boy, the Bearded Lady, and the Hapax Legomenon.  I thought of a road trip, also, because each poem of the one hundred is a location in and of itself, and yet it is part of the whole journey.  The language is delicious, full of beautiful incongruities and startling images.

Some examples:

• “…the flash and tonnage/of the shrapnel cathedral –”
• “Her logic is washable in cold water only.”
• “The land is leaking away.”
• “His happiest thoughts stand in the rain/at a lawn party.”
• “…sleep,/the liquidation of all assets,”
• “An idea rattles in a jammed turnstile.”

Bees play a prominent role on this poetic journey, buzzing here and there, alighting on a pungent word or two.  A reader might be tempted to sample the poems out of order, but I’d encourage a reading from the beginning through to the end, no skipping around.  Each poem builds on the tone and language and emotion of the one before. 

This collection is one I’ll be keeping, and I’ll return to it again.  An enjoyable and provocative reading experience, and an excellent reason to read poetry every morning….

Reading as a Writer: “The Road”

In 1983, President Reagan ordered missiles sent to Europe to protect the NATO countries and the USSR reacted rather badly to what they perceived was a direct threat.  We learned later that our two nations had been as close, if not closer, to a nuclear exchange as we were in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. 

During this extraordinary and tense time, a question loomed in the sky for many: what would you do?  I live in a metropolitan area known to be on the USSR’s nuclear missile target list.  If someone had pushed the button in Moscow, we’d have had approximately 30 minutes left to life as we knew it.  What would you do if you knew you had only 30 minutes left to live?  This question blazed through most conversations.  The one answer that has always stuck with me came from a scientist, a biologist, who stated emphatically that he’d drive to where the projected ground zero would be.  He could not imagine the world after a nuclear attack, nor would he want to live in it.

Cormac McCarthy, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road, has imagined America after some sort of widespread catastrophe that occurred several years before.  His descriptions of the landscape and weather suggest a post-nuclear winter.  Desolate, burned-out and cold.  He tells the story through a third person personal point of view, homing in on the experience of a man and his young son walking on the road.  They travel south, but this road trip is far different from any other road trip I’ve seen, read or experienced.  McCarthy explores how human beings would survive, what the landscape would be like, the weather, availability of food and water, and how human beings would interact.  The young boy asks about their status as “good guys” and who the “bad guys” are — McCarthy proceeds to give them the experiences to show who each are. 

McCarthy’s prose pulls the reader down into the maelstrom of this primitive world with what a poet friend called “Anglo-Saxon words.”  They are strong words, hard-sounding words, unusual and old.  He described a man’s teeth as being “claggy,” dawn as “chary,” hands as “claws scrabbled.”  I kept a notepad and pen next to me as I read in fascination both of the story and the use of language which supported the world he described.  Some other favorites:

1. “The plaster ceiling was bellied in great swags….”
2. “Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”
3. “…a sound without cognate….”
4. “Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts.”

And some interesting words: granitic, meconium, rachitic, colliculus, seawrack, pampooties, pipeclayed, swale, chert, wimpled, torsional, middens, knurled, stoven…. 

His use of prepositions also interested me.  Instead of camping on land, they camped in it.  Instead of standing on the floor, they stood in it. 

The man has a pair of binoculars at the beginning, and McCarthy describes him as “glassing” the landscape or road when he looks through them.  The man “laved up the dark water” when getting water for them to drink.  The prose also has an off-rhythm feel to it, like it’s somehow off kilter but definitely not flowery.  These are two males he’s writing about in this story, and there are only one or two women that they meet, never under happy circumstances.  But then all the people that they meet are strangers.  The man and his son are friends to each other because they have no one else, “each the other’s world entire.”

I was prepared for a depressing book when I first picked it up, and a violent one because I’d heard that McCarthy’s stories can be brutally violent, but I wasn’t prepared for the horror at their experiences or the fear I felt for these two characters or for the despair I felt in my heart for humanity.  I understood why that scientist had responded the way he had back in 1983.

This novel will haunt me for the rest of my life, much as A Canticle for Liebowitz (by Walter M. Miller, Jr.) has since I read it in high school or the movie Testament.  I recommend it strongly, but also with the warning that it’s not for those who want fun entertainment or for the faint of heart.  This story will change you.