pagesofjulia

It felt right to follow the outstanding Soil with Trace, which my father recommended some years ago. I wondered if this might be one of the books Dungy was looking for. It’s not in fact “radically domestic” enough, I think, to fill the void Dungy located–she did so well to write the book she wanted to see in the world. But Trace has its own special offerings that are equally rare and needed.

I am inclined to read this as a collection of closely linked essays, rather than chapters in a memoir or nonfiction monograph. It combines human history, natural history, studies on race, memoir, and nature writing; it ranges across the United States but always interrogates from a personal perspective what it means to be a non-white American in the natural world. [The author is Black and Native American.] Savoy is a gifted and lyric writer, to boot, investigating literal landscapes as well as figurative ones, keeping metaphor handy. I loved her consideration of the book’s title, which is a word that recurs.

The landscapes she travels and studies include the Grand Canyon’s Point Sublime; the Canadian Rockies; Oklahoma’s “Indian Territory”; a Wisconsin island; Washington, D.C.; Arizona’s border with Mexico, and more. She interacts with a wide range of literary voices, including Victor Frankl, Aldo Leopold, Homer, Thoreau, and Louise Erdrich. The front cover offers a New York Magazine reference to John McPhee meeting James Baldwin in Savoy’s voice; I was reminded of Eula Biss in how she pulls seemingly disparate threads together (those places and voices) to make exactly the point she needs to make. It’s impressive, precise, gorgeously written, and smart. She’s a professor of environmental studies and geology, well equipped for this exploration. A few of the ideas that really resonated with me I’ve collected here:

If the health of the land is its capacity for self-renewal, then the health of the human family could, in part, be an intergenerational capacity for locating ourselves within many inheritances: as citizens of the land, of nations even within a nation, and of Earth. Democracy lies within ever widening communities.

How a society remembers can’t be separated from how it wants to be remembered or from what it wishes it was–that is, if we believe stories of ancestors reflect who we are and how we came to be. The past is remembered and told by desire.

There’s a lot here that I’m still thinking about.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: nature, nonfiction, race, sense of place |