We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year's Day.
-- Edith Lovejoy Pierce
Still processing election results over here-- and very well may be doing so until the next highly contentious, deeply divisive, jaw-dropping, foot-stomping, finger-pointing, tweet-storming, eye-rolling, name-calling, Russian-hacking, rally-crying, system-rigging, wiki-leaking, orange-tinting, FBI-probing, quadrennial presidential election. Since electoral fact has proven far stranger than any fiction, and as someone of my particular demographic profile is wont to do, I thought it might prove patriotic and somewhat therapeutic to conduct a survey of favorite American fiction, unconventional literary wisdom to consider on this last day of 2016, through the next four years, and as far along the timeline of American history as I am blessed to travel. And, as someone of my particular idiomatic bent is wont to do, I decided to name this list Reading America, Cover to Cover. Arranged alphabetically by author. Also my wont.
If I clambered the wooden ladder to the attic, rummaged through a cardboard box labeled Misc. College Stuff, and resurrected my Twentieth Century American Literature notebook, I bet I'd find a scribbled marginal notation: Sherwood Anderson employed pioneering narrative structure in Winesburg, Ohio. And this, I suppose, is why the short story cycle resonates today: story-by-connected-story unfolds, chronicling the maturation of protagonist George Willard while capturing the hopes, fears, dreams, and despairs of Winesburg's other residents. It's a message from a century-ago time and place-- from pre-industrial middle America-- to an age of fly-over states and coastal urban agglomeration.
Long before I was old enough to cast a ballot or read a grown-up book, I remember seeing a copy of My Antonia in Grandma W's Central Pennsylvania bookcase. Many election cycles and many pages later, I hold a copy of this quiet historical drama close to my reading heart. Narrator Jim Burden's reminiscence of his orphaned boyhood in late-nineteenth century Nebraska and of his relationship with Bohemian immigrant Antonia Shimerda is romantic rumination and rich storytelling. But then again, it meditates on something more: the strength and forbearance of women, our nation’s immigrant experience, the desire for community and connection. And perhaps most movingly, it offers an elegy to the once-upon-a-time American frontier… wild, windy plains spread beneath infinite open sky.
I availed myself of Mom's mass-market paperback copy of Ragtime late one seventies summer and found my teenage self transported to an early twentieth-century America inhabited by historical characters (magician Harry Houdini, financier J.P. Morgan, anarchist Emma Goldman, socialite Evelyn Nesbit) and fictional characters (a Harlem pianist, an immigrant peddler, a generic family-- Father, Mother, Mother's Younger Brother, Little Boy). In the course of that transportation, my teenage self was moved by Doctorow's mingling of historical fiction, socio-political engagement, and wistful patriotism. Ragtime opened my reading eyes to inherent restiveness in our American story, a constant of change observed by Little Boy: It was evident to him that the world composed and recomposed itself constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction....
This was college-assigned reading that I approached with the figurative foot-dragging and literal page-thumbing recalcitrance of a white, sophomoric English Literature major yanked unceremoniously from her comfort zone into a Brave New World of Important Books with Essay Implications. At first, I reduced it all to mathematical calculation: number of pages in book divided by days until blue book exam equaled how much I had to read every evening in a hushed fourth-floor library cubicle to answer the question and get the grade. Despite this initial silliness, I found myself engrossed by the nameless African-American narrator's existential journey across a simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar American landscape. Invisible Man is a novel about race, yes. It's also a provocative, passionate, witty, and absurd novel of humankind.
It is incumbent upon one who has lived and learned and loved all of her life north of the Mason-Dixon Line to take periodic reading road trips through the Deep South; hence, my decades-ago arrival in Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County in rural Mississippi. Here I encountered, over the course of fifty-nine chapters: fifteen characters streaming in a cacophony of consciousness, a chaos of dysfunctional family perspectives, and an ambiguous plot line riddled with grief and poverty and human frailty. There is modernism at work in Yoknapatawpha County, experimental narrative techniques revealing rawness and humanity that is at once regional and far-reaching. As I Lay Dying is dark and often disturbing-- a gothic tragio-comedy-- and that's why it's all the more surprising that this Southern literary swing ends up being invigorating and life-affirming.
This is the book I was reading on election night, a fiction-non-fiction contemplation of a mountain meadow along the Colorado-Wyoming border. Worthwhile reading, to be sure: as polls closed and results began trickling across the television screen, however, I bookmarked my page and turned full attention to the United States map filling in with bi-color ballot drama from sea to shining sea. And in the wee hours of November ninth, as I stared bleary-eyed and disbelieving at a high-def electoral map, it high-definitely appeared that The Meadow straddled a red state and a blue state: somehow fitting, and somewhat comforting as I resumed reading about land unconcerned with politics and unsympathetic to politicos, pundits, and yammering heads. Returning to reading was returning to the land-- the sprawling, varied terrain where our life stories unfold.
Technically, I read this book once; in reality, it amounted to two times, three times, four times... re-reading poetic passage after poignant passage again and again and again. Set on an insular island off the Washington coast in the mid-1950s, the story unfolds in flashback, revealing equal amounts of prejudice and pride, conflict between heads and hearts, and the terrible legacy of war. Journalist Ishmael Chambers, a World War II veteran who bears physical and psychic wounds of combat, covers the trial of a Japanese-American accused of murdering a local fisherman-- and recollects his long-lost, star-crossed love for Hatsue, the fisherman's wife. As the trial progresses, a snowstorm descends on the town, removing all from time and the outside world, exposing a hushed, anguished history, and forcing a moment of reckoning with a painful chapter in our American story.
At first blush, a mid-nineteenth century author's masterwork appraisal of Puritan ancestors' guilt and sin and repentance and revenge and forgiveness and fortitude seems pedantic, passé even, in an age hell-bent on Keeping Up with the Kardashians, in days when romantic rumination amounts to rapid-fire left-or-right swiping on Tinder. On second blush... a mid-nineteenth century author's masterwork appraisal of Puritan ancestors' guilt and sin and repentance and revenge and forgiveness and fortitude may do us all an ounce of good! Frankly, there's a not-so-latent part of me that admires passé Puritan impulses: efforts at self-control, attempts at good works, moderation in most things... grudging appreciation for skilled embroidery and straight-back, rough-hewn wooden chairs. Keeping Up with Hester Prynne, so to speak.
When I got around to reading this, I couldn't escape the feeling that I should have read it years ago, that somebody somewhere should have added this voice from the Harlem Renaissance to a syllabus-or-two in the course of my formal education. Granted, the literary stock of both author and book have fluctuated across the decades, perhaps as we've been more or less comfortable with Huston's uncompromising realism dealing with issues of race and gender, with the novel's scrutiny of our limitless capacity for cruelty and kindness, with the juxtaposition of pernicious racism and resilient human spirit. In any case, this soulful work following an African-American woman's search for love and fulfillment in early twentieth-century Florida is relevant and readable right now, cover to cover.
It takes a village to shatter to smithereens the sentimental myth of idyllic American small town life and to replace it with a big fat wall of provincialism, pettiness, conformity, conventionality, gossip, greed, backwardness, and bigotry. The village in question is Gopher Prairie, a myopic Midwestern hamlet created by social satirist and editorial realist Sinclair Lewis, viewed through the eyes of a free-spirited, liberal, college-educated, culture-craving young woman who marries a doctor, follows him to Gopher Prairie, and encounters dullness of spirit, smug conservatism, narrow-mindedness, and uninspired life choices; in short, a fictional basket of possibly deplorable, potentially defensible behaviors that at once repel and ring true with a girl born and bred in nonfictional small town America.
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.... The title novella in this small, slim volume is set in the Rocky Mountains in the early decades of the twentieth century. It is a very American story about family bonds and generational change, about fathers and sons and, of course, about fly fishing. Maclean's prose is autobiographical, pensive, affecting, speaking to our connections to each other and to our wild, untamed land: We can love completely without complete understanding. Not bad for a guy who began writing fiction at age seventy.
Good Lord, what have we here? For starters, imaginative history, slapstick comedy, rip-roaring adventure, and exploration of appearance versus reality, race and identity--all delivered with a Twain-like tone. And Good
Lord, we have two unforgettable characters in brink-of-Civil-War Kansas territory: young slave Henry Shackleford and controversial abolitionist John Brown. An opening-pages argument between Shackleford's master and Brown turns
violent and, before one can murmur shades of Huckleberry Finn, Henry is on the run
with Brown—disguised as a girl and nicknamed Little Onion—across a socially-strained landscape, toward calamity at Harper’s Ferry. The book doesn't resolve my confusion about Brown, but Little Onion’s narrative voice
gives him flesh-and-blood humanity, and the storytelling is full of wisdom and humor.
The Western is an underserved demographic on my bookshelf; however, I've cleared a home on the literary range for this Pulitzer Prize winner... a cinematic adventure, a big-old-beautiful love story, a sweeping epic of the American frontier lost and found. Two former Texas Rangers, peripatetic Augustus McCrae and irascible Woodrow Call, abandon their ramshackle ranch in dusty little Lonesome Dove, Texas, to lead cattle and cowboys to the promising wilds of far-away Montana. It ain't dying I'm talking about, it's living, Augustus says. I doubt it matters where you die, but it matters where you live. Part flesh-and-blood romp, part nostalgic dream, this laugh-out-loud-one-minute-break-your-heart-the-next story is the real deal, darlin'.
I've returned to this iconic historical romance several times since a first exuberant teenage reading. With each successive visit, the novel's outmoded social perspectives, steep historical biases, and serious stereotyping issues have become more obvious, and yet I embrace it over and over again as reading treasure. So, unbuckle the swashes and re-lace those whalebone stays! Here we have one-thousand-plus pages of saints and sinners, swooning and simpering, states rights and sieges, Scalawags and sawmills... and feisty femme fatale Scarlett O-Hara. Perennial belle and serial bride, her fiddle-dee-dee spirit never fails to fascinate; her untamed Irish heart carries us across the Mason-Dixon Line and sweeps the timeline of American literature.
This hefty volume takes me back to happy, heady days of misspent youth, days spent binge-reading my favorite shrill, strident, Russian-born objectivist provocateur and suspiciously scanning South-Central Pennsylvania bridge overpasses for spray-painted WHO IS JOHN GALT? queries... a sure sign that the much-anticipated literary apocalypse is upon us! For in this big-fat-novel-that-could-substitute-as-building-material, the United States is faced with the prospect of economic and social collapse as the nations's finest industrialists and innovators-- who've had it up to here with collectivism and political correctness-- go into implausible, completely compelling hiding. Ayn Rand is not a literary genius. Ayn Rand is irritating. She is forceful. She is ambitious. She is long-winded. And opinionated. She is thought provoking, and she is so much fun to read.
A man's prospects in life were determined by luck and politics.... As luck would have it, Miles Roby, called home from college on family business years ago, falls into a decades-long rut and never leaves his blue-collar hometown in Dexter Country, Maine. Empire Falls has seen better days: the townscape is a vista of blighted real estate, abandoned textile mills, belly-up logging buildings, and empty churches. As luck would also have it, the awakening of Miles Roby and the machinations of Empire Falls mirror many of America's highest hopes and lowest impulses-- notions that resonate in the wake of an election season that raised truth-twisting to artform, in a strange new world of fake news and wee-hours-of-the-morning mean tweeting. If making things seem prettier than they are is a lie, then making them seem uglier must be another. As politics would have it.
Growing up in the wilds of South-Central Pennsylvania or, if you like, Pennsyltucky (a charming sobriquet bequeathed upon the region by amusing political demographers), we took many a weekend road trip to Gettysburg National Military Park. This was one my family's favorite things to do in a packed woody station wagon, second only to spotting deer on winding country roads on bitterly cold late-November Pennsyltucky nights. But I digress! Dad, a Gettysburg College alumni, gave us personal driving tours of the battlefield: Devil's Den, Little Round Top, The Wheatfield, Cemetery Ridge... so much history, so much history. The Killer Angels, a close historical fiction re-telling of the Battle of Gettysburg, covers the same hallowed ground as Dad's station wagon tour. We hear the Union and the Confederate points of view; we learn of plans and preparations; we hear the bullets, witness the bloodshed; we feel the clash of armies, the conflict of dreams... an accounting of what was won and all that was lost during four sweltering days in July of 1863.
On a farm near Denby, Iowa, Walter
Langdon and his wife Rosanna live their lives and raise their children. They
are engaged in time-honored lifeways, enveloped in traditional values, and
ensconced on a densely-populated family tree. In the
beginning and in its heart throughout, this is a family story and a farm story. In time, however, the Langdons radiate ever-outward from the homestead,
traveling the American landscape and tripping the historical timeline. Each
chapter of Some Luck covers a year-in-the-life from 1920 to 1953, from the twilight of World
War I to the gray days of the Great Depression, through the darkness of World
War II, and into the anxious first light of Cold War America. Year by year,
chapter by chapter, page by page, moment by moment, we share births and deaths,
long lives, and lives cut short, love and loss, passion and betrayal,
celebration and despair, innovation and inertia, stories told and untold—all set
against broader social, economic, and political twists and turns in our
national story. Some Luck is the first installment of a century-long trilogy, so read on... and on.
The
whole United States ain’t that big… There ain’t room enough for you an’ me, for
your kind an’ my kind, for rich and poor together all in one country, for
thieves and honest men. For hunger and fat. Whyn’t you go back where you come
from? Once, twice, three reads over the years, I've followed the Joad family from their Oklahoma homestead on an arduous migration to the promised land of California during the Great Depression. I sift fine storytelling through my page-turning hands: a majestic moral vision, a powerful naturalistic epic narrative of hardscrabble Okies confronting Dust Bowl-ravaged landscapes during the worst hard times.
Remember the exhilarating days of the Republican primary race and the absolutely riveting brouhaha over New York Values? Well, here we have Old New York Values on glorious, gold-plated display. Lily Bart, the well-born and genteelly impoverished orphan of a New York merchant, embarks upon an ill-fated campaign to marry for social and financial security, runs smack-dab into the heartless and soul-less uppity-upper crust, and finds herself reeling on a spiraling descent from privilege to pauperdom, from marriageable to marginalized. Wharton's storytelling is so tightly-wound, so stifling, so stylish... a meticulously rendered portrait of late-nineteenth century New York City.
Out with Old Values and in with New New York Values: Flash forward one hundred years from Wharton's wicked city, and we meet Sherman McCoy, a yuppie investment banker with a social x-ray wife, a sassy mistress, and a mega-room apartment in Manhattan. After an oh-so-wrong turn on a Bronx highway and a freakish hit-and-run accident, Sherman runs smack-dab into a panoply of corrupt-slash-corrupting urban institutions: law enforcement, politicians, journalists, clergy, activists, the hustler class-- and finds himself on spiraling descent from Master of the Universe to abject failure in a city that is morally and physically reeling from racial conflict, crime, and malignant greed. Wolfe's storytelling is sharp, stylish, darkly comedic... an acerbic depiction of late-twentieth century New York.
We read on. We read the homemade campaign sign, TRUMP stenciled in red paint on plywood, propped against a roadside hay bale in central Pennsylvania. We read the special-order MOMS FOR HILLARY signs neatly spaced along tree-lined streets in suburban New Jersey. We read between the lines on a father's furrowed brow as he pauses outside the kitchen door, searching for words that will break it to the family gathered inside that he has lost his job. We read the wordless worry behind the eyes of a mother each and every time her son walks out that door, onto streets that may well misjudge him because of the color of his skin. We read, Heaven Help Us, all those tweets, with the understanding that our story cannot be reduced to one-hundred-and-forty oh-so-odd characters. We read the ticker on one cable news channel, and then turn to another channel and read another ticker, apprehending that our stories are packaged and prepared from many different perspectives. We read with malice toward none, without prejudice, reading things that we end up agreeing with, as well as things that we inevitably and vehemently disagree with. We read the writing on the wall. We read about the Wall. We read the big stories and read the footnotes. We read the fine, fine print. We read the riot act, read their lips, read it and weep, read it and laugh out loud. We read and read and read some more.
And then we reflect. And we recognize that while we are all not always on the same page, we are indeed part of the same magnificent, multifarious, maddening, sometimes mucked-up, sometimes heartening, sometimes heart-breaking epic story. We will hope and pray and search for the good, call out the bad, scan the pages for common themes and common ground, and keep filling our heads and our hearts with stories of US. Reading our America, loud and clear, cover to cover.
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| United States- Shaped Bookcase by Ron Arad. |
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