Day 711: Mother of Pearl

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Cover for Mother of PearlSet in the 1960’s but seeming more appropriate to decades before that, Mother of Pearl is a sort of Southern Gothic mashup. It features a love affair between near relations, a half-Indian seeress, the town slut, a self-educated African-American man, and some other stereotypes. It is energetically written but sometimes so floridly that I wanted to put it down. Still, it captured my attention enough to give it a mild recommendation. For a novel that starts out dark and unusual, it ends up being surprisingly sentimental and unlikely.

Even Grade is an African-American factory worker. He recently helped his older neighbor Canaan after a teenage white boy hit him in the head with a bottle. His deepest sadness comes from the knowledge that his mother abandoned him as a baby and he was raised in an orphanage.

Valuable Korner, a white teenager, was also left by her mother, the town slut. Her mother disappeared after her birth and left her to be raised by her grandmother Luvenia, returning just before Luvenia died. Since then, Valuable has shared the house with her mother and whichever man she is with.

Barely in puberty, Valuable is about to turn her life-long friendship with neighbor Jackson into a full-blown love affair. What neither of them knows is that they are half brother and sister. The adults who are aware of this seem criminally oblivious, except one.

That one is Joody Two Sun, a half-Indian healer and seeress who lives in a hut by the creek. She and Even are lovers. When Valuable and Jackson come to consult her, she can immediately see their relationship and fate but chooses to say nothing.

Joleb, a friend of Jackson, lives with his father, who is as dumb as a post, and his older brother Burris, who tries to see God by standing on a railway trestle as the train approaches. Their mother also lives with them, but she has been in a vegetative state since Joleb was born. He feels closer to Grace, an African-American woman who cares for his mother and nursed him when he was a baby, than he does to his own family.

I had some problems with this novel, mostly involving the unlikelihood that Valuable, with her attitude toward her mother’s affairs, would plunge into her own love affair as soon as she hits puberty, especially as naive as she is. But then again, if she didn’t, there would be no novel. In addition, I can say no more, but the ending of the novel is very unlikely, ignoring legalities, for one.

Still, I enjoyed this book, especially liking the African-American characters, who seem better defined than the white ones. Valuable’s Aunt Bea, who with her lesbian lover Neva takes her in when her mother finally leaves town, seems to have no personality at all. Neva definitely has one but it is mostly destructive. Joleb, although he gets more interesting, seems like a cartoon character at times. And frankly, the two star-crossed lovers are pretty much cardboard figures.

I was interested particularly in Even and Grace. Joody is too much over the top at times, and Canaan only seems to be there to anchor Grace.

Readers commented that they were not taken with the book until about 100 pages in. That was my experience as well. In fact, if I hadn’t read those comments, I may not have kept reading the book.

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Day 710: The Kept

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Cover for The KeptBest Book of the Week!
The Kept is a mysterious and darkly moody novel that I found compelling from the first sentences. Elspeth Howell arrives home on a snowy winter day in upstate New York near the turn of the 19th century. She has been away for months working as a midwife. But when she reaches home, she finds that her husband and all of her children that live in the house have been murdered. Only her 12-year-old son Caleb, who has taken to living in the barn, is alive, but he has been hiding in the pantry for days, and when she opens the pantry door, he shoots her in terror.

Caleb spends the next few days alternately trying to take care of his mother and dispose of the bodies of the rest of his family. He cannot bury them in the frozen earth, but in his attempt to burn them, he accidentally burns down the house. He ends up caring for his mother in the barn.

The Howell’s home is isolated and difficult to find. As a young girl, Espeth was driven from her home for having spoken to Jorah, the man she later married, because he was Native American. But there are other reasons for the family’s isolation. In any case, Elspeth thinks the murderers must have sought for their house.

When Elspeth is barely healed, she and Caleb set forth to find the three men who murdered their family, men whom Caleb watched from the barn. They stay briefly with an old couple who have been terrorized by the same three men and who point them in the direction of a town on Lake Erie with a terrible reputation. There, with Elspeth disguised as a man, they go to search for the men.

Beginning as a straightforward revenge novel, the book goes on to explore deeper themes. One of them is that of unintended consequences, as Caleb finds that their troubles result from Elspeth’s own actions years before.

This novel is well written and packed with atmosphere. It is vivid and brutal and beautiful.

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Day 709: Family Furnishings

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Cover for Family FurnishingsBest Book of the Week!
I felt it was about time I read something by Alice Munro, having only ever encountered a story or two in a magazine. Now, I only wish I’d read her earlier. A note in Family Furnishings explains that the stories were selected to cover the entire time of Munro’s writing career, although it also refers to two volumes. So, I assume this volume is from the latter half.

I am usually more a long fiction person, because I like to get thoroughly involved in what I’m reading, and short fiction doesn’t usually accomplish that. But in this case, I found myself completely absorbed in story after story.

Early on in the volume, I thought I detected a pattern of Munro telling how the different characters formed their families, sometimes in unusual ways. Later, I thought I might have imagined this pattern, or it may not fit all the stories. In any case, the stories are spell-binding, often toward the end revealing something that happened earlier than the timeframe of the story and illuminating some truth. Some of the stories appear to be autobiographical and some may be about Munro’s ancestors.

“The Love of a Good Woman” at first seems to be two unconnected stories, one about three boys discovering a car in the river with a body in it, the other about a nurse discovering tender feelings for a man she knew in high school while she is nursing his dying wife. Yet, it turns suddenly into a murder mystery. But Munro somehow makes this a banal and everyday event.

In “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,” we seem to be reading about a swindle. An old man’s servant suddenly runs off with his dead daughter’s furniture to live with his ex-son-in-law. But halfway through the story, we meet two adolescent girls, Edith and Sabitha, who are actually controlling this situation through a prank.

“The Bear Came Over the Mountain” is the touching but even more complex source of the wonderful movie Away from Her, about a man helplessly observing his wife’s growing loss of memory from Alzheimer’s. In “The Children Stay,” a young woman walks away from her family during a vacation on Vancouver Island to leave with her lover.

Several of the stories are about Munro’s own childhood—how her father began raising animals for fur too late to make a success of it and had to go work in a foundry, how her mother suffered for years from Parkinson’s, how the truth of a story long told about a crazy neighbor’s behavior when Munro was a baby suddenly was revealed years later when she saw a poem in a newspaper.

All of these stories show us the complexities and depths of human interactions. They are minutely observed and beautifully written. I’ll soon be looking for more to read by Alice Munro.

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Day 708: At the Water’s Edge

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Cover for At the Water's EdgeMaddy, Ellis, and Hank make a riotous threesome as they party and caper their way through Philadelphia high society. It is World War II, but both Ellis and Hank are classified 4F. In any case, taking upon any adult responsibility doesn’t seem to be in their plans. Maddy and Ellis Hyde are married, but they live with Ellis’ parents. Hank has a girlfriend but has shown no interest in marrying Violet.

After a particularly drunken New Year’s Eve, Ellis’ father throws Ellis and Maddy out of the house to fend for themselves and cuts Ellis’ allowance. To get back into the good graces of Mr. Hyde, Ellis and Hank come up with a hare-brained scheme. Long ago, Mr. Hyde went to Loch Ness to look for the monster. He claimed to have found it and circulated photos. But they were revealed as fakes. Ellis thinks if they can find the monster and take legitimate pictures of it, he can revive the family name and make his family proud.

But getting to Scotland during wartime poses problems. Hank finally gets them on a freighter, but when their ship rescues some men whose vessel was torpedoed, Maddy begins to understand the horrors of war. Arriving at their destination, she is the only one of the three who seems to understand how ridiculous their presence as tourists is during this difficult time. The three know nothing of ration cards, air raids, or war casualties. And the men’s boorish attitude about the lack of conveniences at the inn doesn’t help.

Maddy settles in and gets to know the villagers, but she is soon disturbed by how much Ellis and Hank are drinking and how many of Maddy’s “nerve pills” Ellis takes. Maddy herself has only ever taken one.

link to NetgalleyAlthough dealing with another period and setting, Gruen is covering some of the same ground as in Water for Elephants. She clearly enjoys the wives in distress theme. Still, after I experienced an initial distaste for all three main characters, Maddy grew on me with her evolving sensitivity and efforts to help the villagers. I enjoyed this novel and think it makes a good light historical romance. Gruen periodically gives us details of the war and does a fair job of evoking the atmosphere of a small pub, where everyone nightly listens to the war news.

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Day 707: Don Quijote

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Cover for Don QuijoteI know. This is not the spelling of “Quixote” most people are accustomed to seeing, but it is the one used in my Norton Critical Edition, translated by Burton Raffel. And a sprightly translation it is.

Don Quijote is the story of an old man who has studied the popular chivalric romances so much that they have addled his brain. He declares himself a knight errant and takes to the road seeking adventure. Accompanying him is a neighboring farmer, Sancho Panza, who he has convinced to come with him as his squire in exchange for a share in certain rewards. In particular, Sancho has his heart set on the governorship of an island.

Don Quijote doesn’t just look for adventure. In the first book, he hurls himself at every passer by, convincing himself that windmills are giants, a barber is a knight, an inn is a castle. Above all else, he worships his lady, the beautiful Dulcinea, whom he has never met but whom Sancho remembers as a muscular peasant girl.

Don Quijote is both a parody of the chivalric romances and a satire against the Spanish conquistadores. Its most important distinction is that it is considered the first modern novel. I found volume one to be amusing in a sort of slapstick style, as Don Quijote’s adventures always go wrong and end up with him and Sancho Panza being beaten up.

Volume two was a little too much of the same, though. In a bit of metafiction, Cervantes lists some of the things readers criticized from the first volume and then attempts to avoid them. So, for example, the two adventurers are not beaten up as often. However, both volumes contain long disquisitions on such topics as marriage, poetry, chivalry that don’t all translate well into modern times.

Finally, after Don Quijote had himself lowered into Montesino’s Cave to see its wonders and then fell asleep and dreamt a bunch of nonsense and never even saw the cave, I had to stop. Quijote was in the midst of recounting his ridiculous dream, which he took for reality, and it seemed to go on and on. I leafed ahead, looking for the end of it, never found the end, and finally lost patience. I fully believe, since apparently someone else published a book about our hero after the first volume came out, that Cervantes only brought Quijote back out on the road so that he could kill him off at the end.

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Day 706: The Devil’s Backbone

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Cover for The Devil's BackboneThe Devil’s Backbone is a western adventure tale related in an unsophisticated vernacular style in both first person and third person. It is an unusual novel but reminds me most of, perhaps, True Grit or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The third person narrator is barely there but relates the first person story his father told him. The book is illustrated by Jack Unruh.

Papa, as the third-person narrator calls him, is a young boy growing up in the Texas Hill Country when his father Karl kills a horse after a dispute about it with his wife Amanda. Amanda saddles up her horse Precious with the concho-decorated saddle her father gave her and leaves. After Karl has gone off for a few days and returned, a neighbor, Miz Choat, arrives to tell Karl that she has promised Amanda to send the boys to school, so she takes Papa and his older brother Herman back with her. But after Herman has attended school awhile, he takes off.

Papa enjoys his time with the Choats, but after a few months his father arrives to take him back. At home he has installed another woman, Miss Gusa, who is pregnant.

Papa has clearly been brought home as a cheap source of labor. Eventually, Karl’s brutality makes Papa decide to leave and look for his Mama. On his journey he encounters outlaws, a dying Indian, a prematurely born baby, a family of Mexican migrant workers, and several loyal friends, including the cowboy Calley Pearsall.

I enjoyed this tale. At first, I thought it might become a series of tall tales, but nothing happens in it that seems wildly exaggerated. However, it does have the flavor of a folk tale. The only thing I found a little irritating was the double narration. We learn nothing at all about the narrator, so I don’t really see the purpose of that approach, which leads occasionally to such confusing constructions as “I said, Papa said.”

Although this novel may sound like children’s fiction, I don’t think I would recommend it for younger children because of some of the events. Older children would probably like it, as it has lots of adventure. Some of the subject matter may be inappropriate, however, as there are events such as murders and death in childbirth, so use your discretion. This book was a choice of my book club, all adults, and we all enjoyed it.

I have been on the Devil’s Backbone (pictured on the cover). These days it is a narrow two-lane highway across a ridge with spectacular views on each side. I heard it had been widened, but to think it was once so narrow is amazing.

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Day 705: The Spinning Heart

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Cover for The Spinning HeartDonal Ryan achieves a remarkable feat in The Spinning Heart. In this very short novel, he manages to depict the effects of the recent Irish financial collapse from the viewpoints of 21 different small town residents. (My caveat: I didn’t actually count them. I am relying for the number on an article about the novel.)

First we hear from Bobby Mahon, who is absorbed in his contempt for his father Frank and his betrayal by his employer. Frank drank away his own inheritance, his father’s farm, and as soon as it was gone, stopped drinking. This all because Bobby’s grandfather said that at least Frank, at that time a teetotaler, wouldn’t drink away the farm. Frank himself was so verbally abusive that Bobby and his beloved mother stopped talking to each other to avert his wrath. That pretense eventually grew into an actual estrangement.

Bobby was the foreman of a crew for a successful construction company until the downturn, when the company folded and the boss, Pokey, disappeared. Now, Bobby and the other men have found out that Pokey did not pay in for their government benefits, instead pocketing the money, so none of them will get unemployment or their pensions.

Josie, Pokey’s father, laments his decision to turn his company over to Pokey and feels sorry for the men left without an income. He blames himself for loving Pokey’s other brother more than Pokey.

Vasya, a contract construction worker from the Caucasus, has even fewer options than Bobby and his men. He relates how Pokey gave him a ride and lied to him about work the last time he saw him, on Pokey’s way out of town.

And so the novel goes, written in many different voices in Irish slang. As the novel moves forward, tensions rise, finally ending in violence. A well-regarded young man is accused of murder. A small child is kidnapped.

Using an unusual technique, this novel conveys the perspective of an entire small community and the impact the economic calamity has had on all their lives. Surprisingly, considering the subject matter, the book is rough and funny, as well as poignant.

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Day 704: Henry VI, Part I

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Cover for Henry VI, Part 1Henry VI Part I is my book for the latest Classics Club Spin! Enjoy the review.

The only one of Shakespeare’s history plays I’ve ever read previously is Richard III, although I once saw Peter MacNicol perform Richard II in Central Park (with Martin and Charlie Sheen two rows down in the audience). Henry VI Part I is Shakespeare’s first play as well as one of his Wars of the Roses plays, of which Richard III is the last.

As a history play, Henry VI Part I is more about the events at the beginning of Henry’s reign than about Henry’s life. In fact, he is very young through much of the play and only appears occasionally. The play depicts the discord among the powerful men surrounding Henry, culminating in the Wars of the Roses (although the seeds of the discord can be traced back earlier, to when Henry of Bolingbroke (later Henry IV) deposed Richard II). Henry IV and Henry V, in their turns, have held the country together, but Henry V’s young son shows no such ability. Although Shakespeare himself (and many historians) seems to be disposed toward the Yorkists, it is clear by the end of the play that the Lancastrians will prevail during Henry’s reign.

Painting of scene
The choosing of red and white roses, a scene from the play

The other main event of the play is the war in France. I should not have been surprised to find Joan of Arc (referred to in the play as Jean La Pucelle) the villain of this plot, since the English burned her, but it was a shock nonetheless. The gallant Lord Talbot is the hero, while Jean fights with the aids of demons.

The play is not as dramatic as some others, but it has its moments. I thought it was most interesting as showing the Tudor view of this great series of conflicts.

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