Tag: Florida

Review 2608: The Night Ocean

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At first, I thought this novel was going to be about H. P. Lovecraft. Then, I thought it was a sort of homage to 30s and 40s science fiction and horror writers. But having finished it, I don’t know quite how to describe it.

Marina Willett’s husband Charlie is missing or dead. A writer of insightful profiles, Charlie began working on one of H. P. Lovecraft. During his research, he became interested in the story of a book purportedly written by Lovecraft’s much-younger deceased friend Robert Barlow that alleged a homosexual affair. This book was debunked as a fraud perpetrated by Lovecraft fan L. C. Spinks. However, Charlie becomes convinced after visiting Spinks that he is actually Barlow, having faked his own death and taken Spinks’ identity. He publishes a book telling this story and immediately becomes a literary celebrity.

But then, evidence comes out about facts that are incorrect, and Charlie himself is believed to have perpetrated a fraud. After checking himself into a mental hospital, he disappears, his clothes found next to a lake.

Marina is not satisfied. She decides to revisit the research that Charlie conducted, in the hopes of figuring out what happened. Since the last thing he did before checking into the hospital was revisit Spinks, Marina goes to see him.

Most of the rest of the novel becomes a series of stories beginning with Spinks’ first interview with Charlie. These stories name-drop 30s and 40s science fiction and horror writers and other prominent figures like crazy. This technique of the strange tale is one familiar to horror readers and a nod to Lovecraft.

If I were a bigger Lovecraft fan, I’d probably recognize more allusions besides the obvious ones—his fanboy-cum-writers themselves dropping his made-up words into their conversations, for example.

I think that Lovecraft fans will appreciate this novel more than I did, but the novel leaves Lovecraft behind about halfway through, and becomes more about Barlow. Myself, I got a little tired of the structure of story after story.

The novel is ultimately about identity, search for community, and reinvention.

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Review 2471: Literary Wives! Their Eyes Were Watching God

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Today is another review for the Literary Wives blogging club, in which we discuss the depiction of wives in fiction. If you have read the book, please participate by leaving comments on any of our blogs.

Be sure to read the reviews and comments of the other wives!

My Review

Their Eyes Were Watching God is another reread for me. I looked over my original review and still agree with it. I can make one more comment. This time around I really tired of the dialect and was happy that it became less as the work went on. Writing novels in dialect was popular between the late 19th century and the early 20th, but it is sure hard on the reader. You can find my original review here.

What does this book say about wives or about the experience of being a wife?

Janie’s journey is a search for both love and selfhood, and it involves three marriages.

When she is a naïve 16, Janie’s grandmother arranges a marriage for her with Logan Killick, a much older farmer. Janie believes those that say married people learn to love each other, but very soon she finds this isn’t always so. Keeping house isn’t enough for him. He wants her to do heavy work around the farm. The last straw is when he announces his intention to buy a second mule so that Janie can plow, too. For Logan, a wife seems to be someone who can save him from hiring a farmhand. Janie puts up with a few months of this and then walks off with flashy Joe Stark.

Joe is a guy fall of ideas and ambition who becomes a powerful force in the all-black town of Eatonville. (On a side note, I didn’t understand until I read Dust Tracks on a Road what a big deal this town was.) Unfortunately, a trait Joe shares with Logan is that a wife should do as she’s told, so he doesn’t allow Janie to take part in any of the pleasures of living there. She must bind up her beautiful hair, mind the store but not take part in the conversations in it, and act stately, because she is the mayor’s wife. Both these husbands treat Janie more like a symbol of what they want than a person. There is also the issue of Joe’s verbal and sometimes physical abuse of her.

After Joe dies and she’s been a widow for nine months, she takes off with the much younger Tea Cake. She’s in love. When he takes her $200 and loses it gambling, she is only worried that he left her. He does consult her on plans and lets her do what she wants, and certainly he provides opportunities for fun, but he is also jealous and beats her once just for show. It’s a different culture and time, but I was fairly appalled at everyone’s reaction to the beating.

In the Afterword, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., points out that Hurston wanted to show characters who are real, not all good, not all bad. I guess that’s my way to understanding why Janie remains so in love with Tea Cake. And he does treat her as a person. But it seems to me that in the search of love and selfhood, Janie only gains selfhood once Tea Cake is gone.

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Review 2312: Bright Young Women

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Bright Young Women is a novel centering around the true story of a famous serial killer, whose last killings took place in a sorority at Florida State University in Tallahassee in 1978. Apparently, Knoll believes as I do that men commit such acts at least partially for the attention so she calls the killer The Defendant throughout the book instead of his name. So will I.

The novel is narrated by two different people in three different time frames. In 1978, Pamela is the president of a sorority and is about to become an important witness. In 2021, she is still trying to track down evidence that will lead to the body of one of his earlier victims.

That victim is Ruth, the second narrator, who in 1975 had the misfortune to meet The Defendant at the beach in Issaquah, Washington.

This novel doesn’t want to focus on The Defendant so much as on the girls he was after. The novel sticks with Pamela from the day before the crime through the days after she sees a strange man fleeing the sorority house, but it focuses on Pamela’s self-development afterwards. At the beginning, she is living an expected life as head of the sorority with the brightest girls on campus, engaged to Brian and planning to attend law school, only an inferior school even though she was accepted to Columbia because Brian couldn’t get in. Pamela is obviously in shock after the event because she doesn’t realize for hours that two of the girls are dead. But she clearly tells the sheriff that although she at first thought the man she saw was Roger, her best friend Denise’s boyfriend, she realized the man was a stranger. Nevertheless, the sheriff focuses on Roger, and this is only one instance of the incompetence of the law enforcement work on the case. Pamela is disregarded and patronized time and again in this novel.

One of Knoll’s themes is her idea that The Defendant, having performed poorly at college and not having been accepted into law school, was picking out successful, attractive women to kill. Then the media fed into his own view of himself by depicting him as smarter and more handsome than he was, despite his ridiculous performance when he eventually defended himself. Basically, they admired the killer while denigrating his victims.

Ruth’s self-evolution takes her from a lesbian woman dominated by an unloving mother who doesn’t want the neighbors to know her “shame” to a confident, lovely girl who has found a place for herself, largely because of the help of her friend Tina. It is Tina who later comes to Pamela and tells her she thinks The Defendant murdered Ruth as well as the sorority girls. Although Tina is right about everything, law enforcement disregards her and warns Pamela against her.

Knoll’s late 1970s certainly sound more like the 60s to me. In Michigan, I didn’t know any girls who were interested in sororities or still used hair spray or dressed as described in the novel anymore. Then again, it was Florida.

I found this a fascinating novel with a strong feminist message. I am looking forward to what Knoll does next.

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Review 2226: Dust Tracks on a Road

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Dust Tracks on a Road is Zora Neale Hurston’s lively memoir, which I read for my Classics Club list.

Hurston was raised in what was essentially in the wilderness at the time in Eatonville, Florida, the first town in the country, she alleges, founded and run by Black people. She was an energetic and imaginative child, and though her family was poor, she seemed to have an idyllic childhood (if you don’t count being whipped, and she didn’t) until her mother died when she was nine. (Other accounts say four, but she says nine.) Not long thereafter, her father remarried and her stepmother soon ran her and her older brother out of the house. (If, when I read Their Eyes Were Watching God, I had realized she was writing about the founding of Eatonville, I think I would have paid more attention to the information about the town.)

I found it interesting that Hurston had a series of visions as a child and that all of them came true. The first was her mother’s death, the second years of wandering from home to home. Having to go to work at an early age cut into her schooling, but such was her determination to get it that after trying to earn enough at various jobs, she finally just returned to high school, ending up with degrees in anthropology and ethnography from Howard and Barnard Universities.

Hurston relates her life in a lively way with lots of anecdotes, folk stories, and even songs and poetry. Although many of the recollections of her earlier life are very particular, the closer the memoir gets to when she was writing it, the more general it becomes, so we don’t find out much after her first ethnographic studies and novels are completed. Instead, Hurston finishes with a series of discursions on her opinions, which I found less interesting than the story of her childhood and young adulthood.

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Review 1845: The Nickel Boys

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The Prologue of The Nickel Boys is chilling in and of itself. The novel is based on investigations into the Dozier School for Boys in Florida, which turned up evidence of mistreatment, torture, and even murder of young boys.

Set mostly in the early 60s, the novel follows Elwood Curtis, a black boy who has been taught to do what is right and who has been inspired by the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. His attitude seems to be working. He is doing well in high school, he has a job with a good boss, and his presence at some demonstrations for equality has earned him an invitation to take college courses.

He is on his way to college for the first night of classes when he accepts a ride from a stranger. Next thing he knows, the car has been pulled over as stolen and he’s been sentenced to the Nickel Academy for Boys.

On his second day, still trying to make sense of things, Elwood steps in to stop some bullying and ends up being beaten senseless by the Director. He spends some time in the infirmary, where the doctor only prescribes aspirin no matter what the problem is.

When he gets out, Elwood is befriended by Turner, who tries to show him how to get by. Turner gets him on Community Service detail, where Elwood observes all the food for the school being sold to restaurants, boys being sent to homes of the board members to do yard work and painting, and other signs of graft and corruption. Elwood writes them all down.

This novel is a searing record of the recent racial history of our country as well as being a story of friendship. It’s a powerful book. It makes me wonder why I haven’t read any Whitehead before.

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Review 1373: The Queen of the Caribbean

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I was intrigued enough when I wrote my Classic Author Focus article on Emilio Salgari for The Classics Club that I ordered one of his books. Salgari was an early 20th century adventure novelist whose work inspired other writers and film makers.

Unfortunately, I didn’t really do my homework and ended up picking a book with an appealing cover and title. The problem was that it is the second in Salgari’s Black Corsair series. Unlike many old adventure series—I’m thinking of, for example, Tom Swift—The Queen of the Caribbean depends heavily on its predecessor, The Black Corsair, which I had of course never read.

I was a bit taken aback when I opened the book to find a modern map of Southern Mexico and Central America labeled “West Indies, 1600.” The only concession to the 1600’s was a hasty label “New Spain.” Panama, which wasn’t even a country until a couple of years before the book was published in 1905, was delineated. Apparently, Salgari or his publishers (assuming this was a map that appeared in the original publication and not a creation for the republished copy) chose to use modern place names, some of them even in English.

Other than that, Salgari appears to have some knowledge of pirates, sea-going, and the flora and fauna of Mexico and Florida. Unfortunately, he sometimes stops the action dead in its tracks to tell us about some plant or animal. In a way, this book reminds me of those of W. H. G. Kingston, which I had a small collection of that never reappeared after our move. However, Kingston was better at working his facts into the story.

The Black Corsair is pursuing his enemy, Van Guld, who betrayed his followers in battle. Later, after the Black Corsair and his brothers turned pirate in pursuit of their enemy, Van Guld was responsible for the deaths of the corsair’s brothers. All this apparently happened in the first book. In The Queen of the Caribbean, this pursuit leads them to attack Vera Cruz, an event that actually happened. During the search in Vera Cruz for Van Guld, the Black Corsair hears rumors that his lady love, who he thought was dead, may be alive.

Although the Black Corsair behaves nobly, he doesn’t seem at all disturbed by the mayhem wrought upon innocent people by his pirate friends. Perhaps Salgari was attempting to portray pirates more realistically than is usual in adventure fiction. He seems, however, to have an admiration for what are essentially bloodthirsty cutthroats. I don’t think I’m applying my 21st century standards here, because I’ve managed to enjoy many other adventure novels, including ones about pirates. The characters in this one are cardboard figures being put through their paces.

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Day 1231: The Tiger Rising

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Last year I gave my ten-year-old niece three books by Kate Di Camillo, and her face lit right up. This year, I got her The Tiger Rises and read it to see what was so great about Di Camillo.

Rob is an unhappy 12-year-old, used to being bullied on the bus and not allowed by his father to mention his dead mother. One day when he is exploring the woods near the motel where he lives, he finds a tiger in a cage.

The next day, he meets Sistine, a new girl in school. Sistine is angry since the breakup of her parents’ marriage. Rob takes her to see the tiger, and she immediately decides they should let it loose.

I am sure there are elements in this novel that would interest children, but it doesn’t have much to offer adults. It provides a shocking but unconvincingly easy solution to the characters’ problems. And really, what kind of a good solution is going to come from a tiger in a cage?

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Day 1080: Moonglow

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Cover for MoonglowMichael Chabon’s newest novel is supposedly inspired by his grandfather’s stories before he died. But I don’t think we’re supposed to take that literally, if only because he also says the novel was inspired by the stories of his mother’s uncle. In any case, it is a wandering, fascinating story of a complex life.

Grandfather’s stories begin with that of his arrest, when he was fired from his job to provide a place for Alger Hiss, newly out of jail, and attacked the corporation’s vice president. He was left with a hospitalized mentally ill wife and their teenage daughter. But the story wanders back and forth in time from his grandfather’s childhood in Philadelphia, his experiences searching for German scientists at the end of World War II, his work in the space industry. And always, there is his interest in the moon and space travel.

As always, Chabon manages to tackle some weighty topics while entertaining us like crazy. In this novel, he tackles German atrocities during the war and the stain they put on our own space program. Still, Grandfather’s life reads very much like an adventure story.

I really enjoyed this novel, much more so than I did Telegraph Avenue. Sometimes I enjoy Chabon more than other times, but I always find the journey interesting.

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Day 780: A Place We Knew Well

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Cover for A Place We Knew WellI was a kid during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and I don’t remember it as having much effect on our lives. I do remember the ridiculous duck-and-cover exercises and the display of model fall-out shelters, but I only remember one family that had one. I grew up in Michigan, not Florida, though, where things were apparently different.

Wes Avery realizes that something is up early on Friday, October 19, 1962. He is a former air force gunner, who took part in bombing raids over Japan during World War II. When the nearby McCoy Air Force Base begins a build-up, he notices right away.

The rest of his family is absorbed in other activities so at first doesn’t notice his concern. His wife Sarah is depressed and traumatized over a hysterectomy that was performed on her without her consent a couple of years before, after a miscarriage (sadly, all too common at that time). Her doctor is treating her with far too many pills. Charlotte, their daughter, has been picked for the Homecoming court. She is worried that she will be the only girl without a date until Wes’s employee and best friend Steve suggests that another employee, Emilio, a Cuban refugee from a good family, take her.

Emilio and Charlotte are happy about this solution, but Sarah tries to talk Charlotte into waiting, knowing that other boys whom Sarah considers more suitable will ask her. Wes has to field arguments from Sarah, who obviously thinks he tries too much to please everyone. Added to all this tension, as everyone’s awareness of the situation with Cuba grows, is a family member’s reappearance, which makes West feel disloyal to Sarah.

link to NetgalleyThis novel is effective at building tension and sympathy for Wes in the situation in which he finds himself. Despite what has happened to Sarah, it is not as good at evoking sympathy for her. Although her preoccupations turn out to have a deeper basis, if only in her own mind, they seem trivial compared to the possible immanence of war and the difficulties Wes finds himself in. I think we should feel more deeply for Sarah, but for some reason, we don’t, perhaps because her concern over Charlotte’s first date and her apparent snobbery seems so ridiculous. (Of course, there is a reason for that.)

However, overall I think this novel does a great job of evoking time and place. I think the closing chapter, a letter written in present time, is a little too didactic, though, and serves as an anticlimax even though we want to know what happened to the characters.

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Day 636: Their Eyes Were Watching God

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their-eyes-were-watching-godTheir Eyes Were Watching God was my selection for Classics Spin #8 for the Classics Club! Here is my review.

I had a complex reaction to this novel. On the one hand, I liked its protagonist, Janie Crawford, and was interested in her struggle to define her own identity. On the other hand, I didn’t much like any other characters in the novel. On the one hand, Janie’s struggles to define herself make the novel a landmark feminist book; on the other hand, Janie defines herself through her choice of husbands and her relationships to them. On the one hand, I don’t usually like tales in the vernacular; on the other hand, both the educated omniscient narrator and Janie’s vernacular third/first-person narration have moments of entrancing imagery. And speaking of that imagery, for a book written in 1937, the novel is occasionally startling in its sexuality.

A woman in her 40’s, Janie has recently returned home without Tea Cake, the man she left with. Having departed in some scandal, a well-off widow with a much younger, penniless man, she is figuring in a lot of talk. So, when her friend Pheoby comes to see her, Janie decides to tell her the story of her life.

Janie was raised by her grandmother in West Florida after her mother had her as a result of rape and then disappeared. Janie is a light-skinned black woman with long beautiful hair, and her appearance features in much of her story. When she is still an extremely innocent 16-year-old, her grandmother marries her off to a much older man, trying to give her stability. Janie thinks that marrying will make them love each other, but she is soon disillusioned and finds he is inclined to treat her like a work horse.

Then she meets Joe Stark, a flashy well-dressed man who seems to be going somewhere, and is. She leaves with him and they settle in an all-black town in “the new part of Florida,” where Joe soon becomes the mayor and store owner. But he defines his marriage by what he gives her and expects her to maintain a certain decorum as his wife, not allowing her to participate in many of the small town amusements. Also, he treats her with disrespect, publicly ridiculing her.

After Joe dies, under circumstances that have already started talk, Janie meets Tea Cake and eventually leaves with him to work in the Everglades. Although Tea Cake is in some ways an improvement over her other two husbands, there are some events that disturbed me. First, he steals her $200 and comes back with $12, but she is only upset when she thinks he has left her. Next, he earns it back but makes her put it in the bank and promise to live off what he can provide, a classic play for dominance that ignores the fact that she soon has to go to work next to him, manually in the fields. Finally, he beats her up once, not because of anything she does but because he wants to show everyone that she belongs to him.

Hurston was a trained ethnographer, and her fiction details a way of life in small-town Florida of her time. I found many of the details interesting. A fascination with skin color and Caucasian features is one theme that comes up several times. In fact, when Tea Cake beats Janie, instead of provoking a discussion of the fairness of the beating, the people are more fascinated by Janie’s skin being fair enough that they can see the bruises, which makes the other men envious.

Janie is often viewed harshly and unfairly by others. But it is part of her growing self-awareness that she doesn’t care. Although to me she sometimes seems too passive in her relationship to men—her gentle response to Tea Cake’s beating is seen as a good thing—she is otherwise a strong and resourceful heroine.