Mink River by Brian Doyle (audio)

Posted on March 17, 2016 by pagesofjulia

mink riverMy second Brian Doyle novel (following Martin Marten, which was one of the best I read in 2015) was also outstanding. Mink River shares much of the subject matter and setting: it takes place in a rather larger small town on the Oregon coast, with a cast of delightful people and animals, all of whom make up a web and community of life and values in which human and nonhuman creatures carry equal weight. It covers an enormous swath of life experiences, truly profound in that sense, but also humble in its small physical scale: a few families and friends form the core of this novel, which is both quaint and all-encompassing.

Centrally, Worried Man and Cedar are the two members of the Department of Public Works in the fictional town of Neawanaka. Worried Man has a wife, Maplehead; a daughter, No Horses; an son-in-law, Owen; and a grandson, Daniel, whose hair forms three braids, of red and black and brown. Cedar does not know his personal history. He remembers nothing before the day Worried Man and Maplehead pulled him out of the river where he was drowning. They make a motley family circle, of which Cedar and Owen are as much a part as the other, blood relations. There is also a mean old man who beats his children, now just the younger two boys, as the elder boy and girl are adults who fish for a living. A young couple learning about each other. An upstanding policeman and his wife, who struggle to express their feelings for one another. The doctor; the old nun; and of course Moses, the crow, whom the nun taught to speak and who is capable of carrying on quite complex philosophical discussions with his human friends. (Crows are very smart, you know.)

The family at the center provides a lovely blend of cultures – the indigenous Salish people represented by Worried Man and Maplehead, and the Irish, by Owen. Worried Man and his son-in-law each speak some of their people’s respective dying tongues, and both pay homage to what that represents; both make efforts to pass their knowledge along. Both cultures also offer a legacy of love of stories, which Daniel inherits. As Owen relates, while telling of his grandfather who survived the Hunger in Ireland:

You can eat stories if you have to. A good story is a very good thing to eat. If you have a true story and some good water, you’ll be all right, he would say…

Sometimes, he would tell stories about stories. The stories of children are green, he would say, and the stories of women are blue, and the stories of men are red…

You can eat an infinite number of stories. No one can ever eat too many stories.

A lovely quotation, and of course fitting for a novel about everything in life.

As well as these human cultures, like Martin Marten, this story addresses the bond between human and nonhuman cultures, as best embodied by Moses the philosopher-crow. Bears and birds and the river itself are given voices and agency, although not strictly personified: the bear is not a person at all, but a bear.

Doyle continues to exhibit spellbinding, lyrical language, and his sentences can flow and flow and flow on, as if they will eventually reach the sea. This book was very enjoyable to listen to, read by narrator David Drummond. It was a trade-off: probably I missed some nuance and detail in favor of that lovely sound. But I felt this was a worthwhile trade-off. Sound is one of Doyle’s great strengths – but so is story. He has it all. Loveable, complex, diverse characters, realistic setting, sweeping large plot, philosophy, and poetry, all in one. Absolutely recommended as ever.

Rating: 8 shared bottles of beer.

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Maximum Shelf: Smoke by Dan Vyleta

Posted on March 15, 2016 by pagesofjulia

Maximum Shelf is the weekly Shelf Awareness feature focusing on an upcoming title we love and believe will be a great handselling opportunity for booksellers everywhere. The features are written by our editors and reviewers and the publisher has helped support the issue.

This review was published by Shelf Awareness on February 24, 2016.

smokeSmoke is set in England, “a century ago, give or take,” a familiar yet strange land where, when the wicked lie, or sin in thought or deed, they release Smoke: thin, white wisps, or oily black and oozing, or yellow or green, depending on the crime. They might smoke through their mouths, or the pores of their skin. “One notices it at the shoulders first, and where the sweat has plastered the nightshirt to his skin: a black, viscous blot, no bigger than a penny. It’s like he’s bleeding ink. Then the first wisps of Smoke appear, stream from these dark little spots, leaving gritty Soot behind.” It is a remarkably convenient way to judge people. Or so it seems.

With this premise, Dan Vyleta (The Crooked Maid) introduces a world of action, intrigue and challenge. Smoke opens in a boarding school for upper-class boys, where they are taught, using the stringent and often painful methods of Discipline, to smoke no more. It is fitting of their class that they show no flaws; being without Smoke or Soot marks one for the aristocracy, and it is taken for granted that the lower classes will “show”: “[their] kind are meant to.” And the teachers always know: when a boy smokes, it leaves Soot on his clothing, which can be removed only by intensive cleaning with lye. The stain is seen in the laundry, and this evidence results in a boy being called before the Master of Smoke and Ethics–or, worse, a tribunal.

Charlie and Thomas became friends upon their first meeting, when Thomas arrived at the school at a later age than most. Charlie is the golden boy who hardly ever releases Smoke; he has money and breeding, and everyone likes him. Thomas is mysterious, and not well-liked. His Smoke is not under control, and his history involves a shame better kept hidden. Julian, the head boy, seems determined to cut him low.

At Christmas, Charlie had thought to bring his new friend home to his estimable family estate for the holiday, but the orphaned Thomas gets a surprising invitation–or is it a summons?–from an uncle he hardly remembers. The headmaster pressures Charlie to accompany Thomas, and requests a report when they return: Charlie, apparently, is to spy on Thomas’s family reunion.

All of this takes place in the first of six sections of Smoke, entitled “School.” Charlie and Thomas remain fast friends, but they will confront many new and frightening realities, and enemies, and even meet newly discovered relations–some friend, some foe. Within just a few weeks, the two schoolboys are forced to reckon with more than a schoolyard bully and the standard methods of Discipline. A lovely young woman aspires to blamelessness: her mother scornfully calls her a nun and a prude. A madman is strapped to his bed. A lady challenges the very order of their world, calling into question the role and the value of Smoke itself, aiming to recruit the Soot of the most evil men and women for a mysterious purpose. And still the plot twists, thickens, roils–dark like Smoke. To pursue truth and good, the boys, now joined by a third companion, will have to venture into the darkest of places: London, a city of criminals, dim and choking with the evidence of their wrongdoing.

Smoke is many things: a fast-racing, heart-thumping adventure tale of good and evil paced with formidable momentum; a collection of lovely characterizations; a series of questions about children and adults, passion and reason, trust and corruption; a marvelous world of mind-bending unreality that simultaneously echoes our own; a philosophical puzzle and an entertaining whirlwind of a tale. Seemingly a plot-driven novel, it nevertheless poses existential problems: If one’s Smoke is imperceptible, as in a coal mine, does one really smoke at all? Which is greater, emotion or rationality? And can one be human without Smoke?

Smoke is told from many perspectives, and as the plot continues to expand, the cast expands as well, eventually spanning social classes to include religious fanatics, compassionless scientists, imitators of virtue, good-hearted working-class misfits–and, possibly, the truly evil. Readers and characters are confronted with revelation after revelation, eventually including the very nature and meaning of Smoke. At a little over 400 pages, Smoke feels both longer and shorter than it is. It begs for a single-sitting read, such is the momentum of the plot. On the other hand, its world-building is so massive and engrossing that the experience feels much larger than a mere novel. Indeed, the scope of what began as a story of individual people and a fantastical premise swells into something both larger than life and intrinsic to life itself.

For moralists, or those who question them; for those pondering the difference between good and evil, or whether such a dichotomy even exists; and, especially, for readers who appreciate a wild and large-scale story of action, adventure, risk and destiny: Smoke will entertain and provoke thought. Thinking and feeling readers alike will be left wanting more.

Rating: 9 sweets.

Come back tomorrow for my interview with Vyleta.

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The Rarest Bird in the World: The Search for the Nechisar Nightjar by Vernon R. L. Head

Posted on March 14, 2016 by pagesofjulia

A master birdwatcher lyrically describes his quest for the first scientific sighting of a little-known species.

rarest bird

“Searching enquiringly, steeped in a willingness to learn, we felt a connection with biodiversity and an appreciation of species.” This recurring concept of inquiry, combined with a sense of wonder, dominates Vernon R.L. Head’s poetic musings in The Rarest Bird in the World: The Search for the Nechisar Nightjar. A conservationist and lifelong birdwatcher, Head was entranced by the findings of a 1990 scientific expedition to the Nechisar plains in Africa’s Great Rift Valley: among many specimens, the team collected a single wing of a bird that turned out to be unknown to science. After some discussion within the ornithological community–can a species be defined by a single body part?–it was named the Nechisar Nightjar, Caprimulgus solala (“solala” meaning “only wing”). “The new species was announced, and birdwatchers like me began to dream.”

Decades later, Head and three elite birdwatching buddies trek to the Plains of Nechisar in Ethiopia to search for this elusive, prized, nearly mythical creature. In an awestruck tone, he describes their journey, interweaving the story of the 1990 discovery, reflections on humanity’s place in the natural world, memories of other birds, and thoughts on taxonomy and naming. Head is appreciative of metaphor and playful with words: he coins the collective “an incantation of ibises,” calls Addis Ababa “a eucalyptopolis,” sees a cliff of striated rock as a “shelf of books to the past.” This fanciful mood defines much of the book, although Head does turn somber in contemplating the future of many rare birds. After slower paced sections, as in recalling the birdwatchers he travels with, the adrenaline increases as they draw closer to meeting the Nechisar Nightjar.

Head’s story of birdwatching and its relationship to conservation is also a meditation on extinction and an ode to the natural world. He is unafraid of wandering within these subjects, and his passion for this work is clear: “Each name [on a birdwatcher’s list] is a story of an interaction, a time of connection with the pristine, a collection of memories, an understanding of our place in the system of natural things, and a hope for the future of that place.” The skills involved in spotting rare species approaches magic, even as it references science. This combination of reverence and scientific history is attractive as both a work of literature and an illumination. The Rarest Bird in the World is an alluring view into birdwatching and multiple rarities.

This review originally ran in the February 22, 2016 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 eyeshines.

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Portrait of Hemingway by Lillian Ross

Posted on March 11, 2016 by pagesofjulia

Portrait of HemingwayLillian Ross originally wrote her ‘Profile’ of Ernest Hemingway for The New Yorker, where it was published on May 13, 1950. In book form, it becomes a ‘Portrait,’ and other than the addition of a delightful preface, I’m not sure what the difference is; the opening pages of my first edition note that Portrait originated as Profile, but there is no indication that the text of both is not the same.

The dust cover offers context.

When Miss Ross wrote this Profile, she made several literary innovations, one of which was to compose a portrait entirely in terms of action… She attempted to put down only what she had seen and heard, and not to comment on the facts or express any opinions or pass any judgments… In her writing for The New Yorker she has raised this severely objective method to an art.

We’ll examine that premise shortly.

The Portrait runs 42 pages: long for a magazine article, but perfectly lovely as a brief glimpse in this format. Let me start where the book does, though. I date the preface to 1961: that is the publication date of this first edition printing; the preface does refer to the reception to her Profile in the magazine, and it refers to Hemingway’s death of July 2 of that year. In it, Ross explains how she got to know Ernest Hemingway and his fourth and final wife, Mary, how they corresponded with each other as friends, and how the profile came about: on a brief stay in New York City on his way to Italy, Hemingway invited Ross to come and hang around with him on various errands, over the course of three days. She wrote up those experiences, and gave Mr. and Mrs. H. the chance to mark up her manuscript before she submitted it. She then describes the responses to her profile. Most readers loved it, she said, but some “reacted violently, and in a very complicated fashion.” Some of these disliked Hemingway’s personality (not an uncommon reaction to the man) and thought the piece backed up their views. Others didn’t like the man as represented in the piece (also understandable), and thought “either Hemingway had not been portrayed as he was or, if he was that way, [Ross] shouldn’t have written about him at all.” She assumes that Hemingway’s death has corrected some of these disapproving interpretations, which I found a little odd, but no matter. Finally, she continues the work of profiling Hem by describing the kind of letter-writer and friend he was. The preface introduces the profile nicely because it gives context to the relationship between writer and character.

And the profile (portrait) itself is indeed wonderful, and as promised, follows Hemingway closely: from arriving at the airport, to the airport bar, to the hotel, where the Hemingways order up caviar, champagne and Marlene Dietrich, who visits with photos and stories of her grandbaby. Then it is late in the next morning, and Ross is awakened by an antsy Hemingway who demands she come over and listen to him talk; more champagne, and she accompanies him on his errands while Mary goes on hers. They buy Papa a coat and other small items at Abercrombie & Fitch. The next morning again, Patrick (the middle Hemingway son) has joined the party, which goes to the Met to “look at pictures” for a few hours, followed by lunch back at the hotel with Charles Scribner (Hemingway’s longtime editor). The story ends mid-lunch.

Ross relates this series of anecdotes as scenes, blow by blow, in real time. It is true, as promised, that this is a portrait “in terms of action,” but I wouldn’t call it “severely objective.” For starters, there is the question of what you put in and what you leave out – because obviously Ross didn’t report every cough and sigh and rustle of a pant leg that took place in three days. She writes, “Patrick told me that he’d just as soon spend the whole day looking at pictures.” And a couple of pages later, Hem gets tired and asks Patrick, “don’t you think two hours is a long time looking at pictures?” and “everybody agreed” and the party moved on. Choosing to put in these contradicting statements says a lot about both Hem and Patrick, and I don’t believe for a moment that that was a mistake.

Too, word choice is always telling, I think. In the nature of this excellent piece my mother sent me the other day, consider the sentence: “He moved in and took the room.” Who can objectively say that Hemingway took the room? No, Lillian Ross is communicating something outside of objectively observable events here. I’m not saying I don’t like it: I do, in fact, very much. But I don’t think it’s entirely accurate to claim that the author is not present in her work – here, or ever.

That’s just a quibble with the dust jacket, though. This vignette is packed with great representative moments. I’ve already shared a few (here, here). Or how about this for a Hemingway speech:

…I was ashamed because I had not written any novels. So I wrote ‘The Sun’ when I was twenty-seven, and I wrote it in six weeks, starting on my birthday, July 21st, in Valencia, and finishing it September 6th, in Paris. But it was really lousy and the rewriting took nearly five months. Maybe that will encourage young writers so they won’t have to go get advice from their psycholoanalysts. Analyst once wrote me, What did I learn from psychoanalysts? I answered, Very little but hope they had learned as much as they were able to understand from my published works. You never saw a counter-puncher who was punchy. Never lead against a hitter unless you can outhit him. Crowd a boxer, and take everything he has, to get inside. Duck a swing. Block a hook. And counter a jab with everything you own. Papa’s delivery of hard-learned facts of life.

Seriously, he’s sort of simultaneously a genius and a walking cariacature. I understand perfectly why those readers thought Ross was making fun of Hemingway; this kind of speech reads that way. I also believe he spoke it. And I like him even while recognizing that he was a blowhard, could be a jerk, and struggled to contain his overcompensating machismo. But I get why others don’t. This is sort of in line with that post I wrote.

I had a wonderfully fun time reading the essence of Hemingway in this perfectly pitched profile. Very enjoyable, and a quirky piece of journalism. Do look it up.

Rating: 8 glasses of champagne.

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The Heart by Maylis de Kerangal, trans. by Sam Taylor

Posted on March 10, 2016 by pagesofjulia

The story of a heart transplant, from life to death to final outcome, is viewed through the varied perspectives of some of the people involved.

heart

Maylis de Kerangal’s The Heart, translated from the French by Sam Taylor, spans just 24 hours but covers some of the most profound material imaginable. Simon and his two friends leave the beach after a pre-dawn surfing session and crash off the road. In the hours that follow, Simon’s parents are asked to make decisions about the removal of his organs. A woman with three sons waits for the heart transplant that will, hopefully, prolong her life. De Kerangal follows these and other players–doctors, nurses, family and friends–as the drama unfolds: of Simon’s heart, life and death and definitions, the meaning of generosity and what we love.

The Heart delves deeply into its subjects: the transplant operations are described in precise detail. The anguish of parents losing a child is explored at some length in its various incarnations–aggression, confusion–and compared to that of shipwreck survivors, or of a man who has just been in a fight with “some guy who was asking for it.” Characters are complex–the nurse who met with a lover last night, “sober and ravishing”; the soccer-obsessed surgeon with the violent girlfriend; the man from the Coordinating Committee for Organ and Tissue Removal, whose job it is to convince the parents to approve the transplant and who is passionate about music and his Algerian goldfinch. Through these and other points of view, an extraordinary and shocking story is revealed. Taylor’s expressive translation renders a sensitive, stark and entirely engrossing novel.

This review originally ran in the January 19, 2016 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish news.

Rating: 7 minutes.

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Arcadian Nights: The Greek Myths Reimagined by John Spurling

Posted on March 8, 2016 by pagesofjulia

Classic Greek myths starring Herakles, Theseus and more are reborn in vivid, funny, fresh forms.

arcadian

From his home in a hillside Peloponnesian village, John Spurling (The Ten Thousand Things) charmingly retells some of Western literature’s best-known stories. He balances careful attention to the originals with his own humorous voice, honoring well-loved classics with a fresh eye.

Each section focuses on a hero: Perseus, Herakles, Apollo, Theseus and the ill-fated Agamemnon. Chapters begin and end with Spurling’s own Arcadian vista, on the Gulf of Argos, which inspires his imagination. Through these lenses, Arcadian Nights (re)familiarizes readers with the curse on the House of Atreus, the Twelve Labors and the complexly intertwining genealogies of mortals and immortals in a storied era somewhere between history and myth. Spurling notes commonalities with other cultures’ and religions’ fables, and infuses the established legends with added detail: imagined dialogue lends well-known characters extra personality, and Herakles gets a perfectly apt new piece of apparel. The occasional modernization enlivens the tales, as when the newly dead line up to cross the River Styx into Hades–it “was a little like going through security in an airport today”–but this is no clumsy 21st-century resetting of Aeschylus. Rather, Spurling’s gentle, clever wit complements the originals’ themes of heroism and romance, and their reminders of the importance of hospitality, humility and memory.

Spurling’s passion and enthusiasm and the best of Greek myth shine through this new version, equally appropriate to introduce new readers or reinvigorate the appetite of those who already honor such names as Zeus, Achilles, Athena, Poseidon and more.

This review originally ran in the February 16, 2016 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish news.

Rating: 7 golden apples.

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The Vegetarian by Han Kang, trans. by Deborah Smith

Posted on March 7, 2016 by pagesofjulia

A South Korean woman’s decision to become a vegetarian has surprising and memorable consequences.

vegetarian

Yeong-hye was an ordinary woman–a trait her husband appreciated–until she made the shocking decision to become a vegetarian. In South Korea, this is unusual and socially scandalous; her family reacts by railing and trying to force her to eat meat. “I had a dream,” is all she says in explanation. Han Kang’s novel The Vegetarian recounts Yeong-hye’s choice and its consequences.

Three sections tell the story from different perspectives: Yeong-hye’s disgusted and frustrated husband; her brother-in-law, a video artist whose work and every thought become fixated on Yeong-hye and her “vegetal” nature; and finally, her older sister, in the late stages of the extreme situation brought about by a seemingly simple decision. Their different relationships to the protagonist reveal more of her personality, but they cannot understand her. Vegetarianism is only one stage in Yeong-hye’s extreme plan for metamorphosis, as it turns out. As her story unfolds, this single decision brings increasing disgrace, violence and subversion, and her limited control over her own life diminishes.

This is a dreamy story with depth and mystery, translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith with nuance and a tone of growing wonderment. Yeong-hye is a confounding and almost mystical character, never seen through her own point of view. In the end, The Vegetarian asks questions about mental illness and the significance of personal choice. Yeong-hye’s story is disquieting, thought-provoking and precisely formed.

This review originally ran in the February 12, 2016 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish news.

Rating: 7 trees.

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Bottomland by Michelle Hoover

Posted on March 4, 2016 by pagesofjulia

Following World War I, a German American family in the Iowa plains faces the usual deprivations of farm life compounded by wartime prejudice and the mysterious disappearance of two children.

bottomland

In Bottomland, Michelle Hoover (The Quickening) tells the story of an immigrant family’s experience in the Midwestern plains with empathy, understanding and an eye for detail.

Julius and Margrit Hess arrived in Iowa in the 1890s, determined to make their bottomland there support a family. Four daughters, two sons and years later, the story opens with Nan, the eldest child, straining to hold her household together following Margrit’s death. The two youngest girls, Esther and Myrle, have disappeared in the night, from behind locked doors, leaving no note or sign of struggle. In the anti-German frenzy of World War I, the neighbors and townspeople began to harass the Hesses, and good relations have never been established since. Nan and her siblings fear that this local animosity has finally culminated in the fate of the two girls. How does a family negotiate such a loss? “Deaths are commonplace. But a disappearance–it has the scent of murder in it.” The Hesses are now only Nan; her bitter and gnarled brother Ray and his wife, Patricia; brother Lee, well-meaning but easily confused; quietly supportive sister Agnes; and near-silent Father, who ceased his full participation in life when Mother died. They search for Esther and Myrle across the countryside and even as far as Chicago, the city that “sounded like spitting.”

Bottomland is told in alternating first-person perspectives. Nan has sacrificed to keep the Hess family fed and in one piece. Julius brought his wife to a dusty claim, with a dugout to sleep in, to start a family. Lee, the younger and larger of the two boys, was always a little slow, but his injury in the war did him further harm. And finally there are the perspectives of Esther, the unruly child, and then the baby, Myrle. These are the personalities most revealed in the novel, and each of the Hesses is developed expertly, each dealing differently with the rock-hard and dirt-poor life they lead, with the prejudices of their neighbors, and of course with the missing girls, empty seats at the table and the question of food for the winter: “Hope, it was a terrible expense. We couldn’t let anything go to waste. And we couldn’t risk the extra we might set side only to spoil” if the girls did not return.

Hoover offers a lovely feat of exposition, bringing to life the immigrant experience, the hard work of homesteading, the deprivations and bigotries of the war years, and the workings of family, how its members cope and hold onto one another. Bottomland covers a large terrain, with characters who feel warm and close. Readers will be drawn in, and moved.

This review originally ran in the February 12, 2016 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 accidents.

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Maximum Shelf: Tuesday Nights in 1980 by Molly Prentiss

Posted on March 2, 2016 by pagesofjulia

Maximum Shelf is the weekly Shelf Awareness feature focusing on an upcoming title we love and believe will be a great handselling opportunity for booksellers everywhere. The features are written by our editors and reviewers and the publisher has helped support the issue.

This review was published by Shelf Awareness on February 10, 2016.

tuesday nights
It is New Year’s Eve, 1979. In Buenos Aires, a woman named Franca is raising her son alone. The country is in the midst of the turmoil called the Dirty War; kidnappings are on the rise, and Franca is frightened: she has been baking cakes for an underground group that records the names of the “disappeared.” In New York, a man named James Bennett has had a harder time than most finding his way in life: his synesthesia always made him exceptionally strange, as he refers to colors, sounds and smells no one else sensed. But he’s finally made it, as an art critic for the New York Times. Also in the city, Raul Engales works night and day at his art, painting in poached studio space at New York University, a school he does not attend. He knows his work is better than any of what’s being sold in the big galleries. If he could only get someone important to look at it.

Molly Prentiss’s striking first novel, Tuesday Nights in 1980, covers one year, from December 31, 1979, through the final days of 1980. Says an art dealer with more influence than she perhaps deserves: “I’ve always found Tuesdays so charming, haven’t you? I do everything on Tuesdays.” The action tends to take place on Tuesdays, which sounds like a cumbersome and effortful device, but in fact flows smoothly and almost invisibly, following the lives of a few individuals in a city and an art scene big enough to swallow them. Tuesday Nights in 1980 is a sweepingly large and profound story about art, love and actualization, cleanly and beautifully composed.

The lives of Engales and James form the two main threads of story, with their fortunes rising and falling as precipitously as anything in 1980s’ New York. James’s success is born of the impressions other people’s work makes on him: de Goya and Picasso’s blue period both sound a bold, steady drumbeat; Bill Rice gives him a “nocturnal mood” and a headache; the paintings of Louise Fishman smell strongly of shampoo. “He felt gushes of wind and crawling ants, tasted burnt sugar and gazed at skies’ worth of stars.” Marc Chagall’s work gives him a hard-on. Writing these impressions for a public audience gives him immense satisfaction and a little money, and helps him to accumulate a legendary and sought-after collection of “the pieces that made him hear beautiful music.” Meanwhile, Engales sees the glimmering beginnings of the attention his work deserves. He finds a community: the grouchy woman at his art studio, the fellow creatives at “the squat” where he spends his free time and finally, crucially, a muse. Lucy is an innocent from Idaho who believes in omens, who steps out of a taxicab into a world of promise and finds what she thinks she is looking for in the artist. Then James and Engales each suffer a drastic, shattering loss that changes their respective abilities to create. And a small boy from Argentina appears in their lives, offering new varieties of pain, love and responsibility.

Tuesday Nights in 1980 portrays the arts scene as inspired and genius, and fraught with tension between creativity and the question of “selling out.” James’s weird and enchanting perceptions allow Prentiss to paint the visual arts colorfully, as well as fragrantly, noisily, brilliantly, tenderly and roughly. A central theme is the beauty of damage. “Wounds and deformities and cracks and boils and stomachs: this was the stuff that moved Engales… He could hear his father saying: The scratches are what makes a life.” This is not a concept invented by Prentiss, but her characters struggle with and embody it in moving, new ways.

While always told from a third-person perspective, the focus changes from chapter to chapter among Prentiss’s diverse cast: primarily James, Engales and Lucy, but supported by a number of equally fascinating and colorful associates. James’s wife, Marge, is a woman who presents to him as a deep and glorious red, whose own creative career has been sacrificed to enable his. Arlene is a curmudgeonly painter friend to Engales, given to unconventional sartorial choices: a “long fish skirt and a coat that was somehow both puffy and flowy” or “a flowy dress with an outrageous pattern on it… eccentric cowboy boots and a trench coat of sorts, with many, many pockets.” Prentiss’s talent for characterization is prodigious, and matched by her delightful turns of phrase. The art collector who loves Tuesdays has “the kind of hair that was popular that year, a curtain revealing only the first act of her face: a queenly nose, confusingly colored eyes (were they violet?), cheekbones for days” and “a voice as simultaneously regal and flighty as her hair.” She laughs “like a pretty horse.”

A plot with multiple storylines involving so many characters is easily followed, because the people and events who form them are so memorable–but not to the point of caricature. No, James Bennett and Raul Engales and the rest are only as bizarre as their time and place, which Prentiss evokes perfectly: SoHo on the brink of devastating gentrification; artistic genius on the brink of commercialization or self-destruction, or both; and the insane, everyday choices made by regular people seeking love, identity and community but fearing to make the wrong move. Tuesday Nights in 1980 is a beautiful, poetic novel of ambitiously profound considerations, a large-scale drama in a series of small, perfectly rendered moments.

Rating: 8 shades of astonished gray.

Come back tomorrow for my interview with Prentiss.

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Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research by John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts

Posted on February 29, 2016 by pagesofjulia

It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.

sea of cortezIn a word, Steinbeck is as wonderful as ever. (I don’t have an idea of how strong a role Ricketts played in the writing of their shared story.) This unique work, a blend of travelogue, science writing, humor and wide-ranging philosophy, has all the Steinbeck voice and attitude that we love.

Steinbeck, as we know, was a prolific novelist, attached to the central California coast. Ed Ricketts was a marine biologist, and the model for the character Doc in Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. They were good friends. In 1940, they chartered a fishing boat called The Western Flyer to take them from Monterey, California, down around the tip of Baja California, and up and down the Sea of Cortez (also known as the Gulf of California), on a scientific collecting trip. With a small crew and a large (but not large enough) supply of collecting equipment, they toured the coast, visiting small settlements and making notes on local culture, fishing for their meals, drinking more than a little beer, and collecting. The littoral zone they examined yielded enormous numbers of creatures: crabs and fishes, anemones and sea cucumbers and sea hares and shellfish and snails and starfish, on and on.

This is a fat book. My copy of Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research runs 598 pages. But the narrative or journal part forms only half that (and, as it turns out, is contained in The Log From the Sea of Cortez at 320 pages). The second half of the book is composed of “A Note on Preparing Specimens”; photographs, drawings and charts, of select collected species; and an “Annotated Phyletic Catalogue” (plus references, abbreviations, glossary, index). I confess I read only the narrative, and the introduction to the “Annotated Phyletic Catalogue”; browsing the catalogue itself told me that it was hundreds of pages of descriptions of littoral sea creatures, a significant contribution to science but not something I needed to spend my time on.

This is in part why, as the back-of-book blurb puts it, “Sea of Cortez is one of those rare books that are all things to all readers… science to the scientist, philosophy to the philosopher, and to the average man” (ahem, woman) “an adventure in living and thinking.” There is plenty of good science in this book, including much in the narrative itself, which the authors make accessible and interesting; I didn’t need the list version. I purposefully bought the long, full copy of this book, when it turns out I could have gone with just The Log.

The philosophy referred to in that blurb is no small thing. My only struggle was a chapter of about 20 pages arguing the merits of teleological versus non-teleological thinking, which I found fairly mind-numbing in its abstraction, and about 17 pages too long. Other philosophical musings are more enjoyable, as in discussing the habit of both people and other animals of getting “soft” when the going is too easy, or our yearning for the magic and mystery of the unknown: “Men really need sea-monsters in their personal oceans.” There is a common question, in our world, of whether people still living more “primitive” lives – in this case, Mexican Indians whose chief concerns are food and shelter – are happier than more “civilized” people who worry over

tremendous projects, great drives, the fantastic production of goods that can’t be sold, the clutter of possessions which enslave whole populations with debt, the worry and neuroses that go into the rearing and educating of neurotic children who find no place for themselves in this complicated world…,

etc. This question is as well stated here as anywhere, and sensitively approached, I think, which is to say not entirely answered. After much musing on political concepts and the meaning of life, Steinbeck-Ricketts returns to the immediate question at hand: “our own interest lay in relationships of animal to animal.”

It almost goes without saying that descriptions are lovely and filled with sensory detail that make one want to see this land this sea, or return there.

The sweet smell of the land blew out to us on a warm wind, a smell of sand verbena and grass and mangrove. It is so quickly forgotten, this land smell. We know it so well on shore that the nose forgets it, but after a few days at sea the odor memory pattern is lost so that the first land smell strikes a powerful emotional nostalgia, very sharp and strangely dear.

On a personal note, I was delighted to find reference to places I have been: Loreto, Mulege (where they did not stop, because of the infamous malaria), Coronado Island.

I suspect, as I have before, that Steinbeck is at his best when describing parties. No one has ever written so convincingly, lovingly, entertainingly about people drinking together. And he does it with a sort of formal tone, so that we see his eyes twinkling at us over his real meaning, as when he’s told of an earlier collector who left “large families” of his offspring behind in local communities – “a whole tribe of them” – and the voice of Steinbeck-and-Ricketts notes, “We honor this man for all his activities. He at least was one who literally did proliferate in all directions.” A delightful passage beginning “There is nothing more doleful than a little cantina…” is a perfect capsule tale, that I will reread with pleasure, and if he lets me, read out loud to Husband. See also the party when The Western Flyer leaves the dock in Monterey.

Steinbeck-Ricketts’s discussion of the nature of diplomacy, as their little party prepared to sail into Mexico in a time of international tensions, employs this same tone of formal language poorly disguising sparkling satire. I never loved Steinbeck so much. In this spirit, in praise of clarity, comes a discussion in chapter 10 (March 18’s entry) of the common dullness of scientific writings. “We have not known a single great scientist who could not discourse freely and interestingly with a child.” And so here is Sea of Cortez, a perfect example of a non-dull piece of science writing. Who says creative nonfiction is a new invention?

I have trouble attributing the loveable qualities of this book to one man, or two. It seems obvious on cursory glance that one man is the writer and the other the scientist, but what do I really know of their shared writing process? Ricketts had to have been a fun and full personality, in part because Steinbeck would have required it, I think, and in part because Doc was. There are several anecdotes told in which “one of us” does something or the other, and we are left to wonder.

Perhaps the authors’ best quality is the overall tone of wonder and playful humor in observing the everyday. I especially enjoyed the ongoing joke of the Sea Cow, a motor attached to a little skiff used to leave the boat and go collecting. The Sea Cow is personified as a being with a malevolent will of its own, determined to thwart: it works on beautiful, sunny days for short distances (“in a word, on days when it would have been a pleasure to row”) but never in bad weather, over long distances, or after dark. The Sea Cow figures as a large personality throughout the book.

Their scientific knowledge is not boundless, and they are honest about this fact. Their purpose in this collecting expedition is to collect, that scientists may then study. When encountering a strange islet: “It is nearly all questions, but perhaps someone reading this may know the answers and tell us.” Acknowledgment of what is not known or understood is so rare, and refreshing.

As the back-of-book blurb (quoted above) indicates, this book is many wonderful things in one package, and that package of Steinbeck design: what more could we ask? A delightful true story of travel, of Mexico, of the wonder of really looking around at one’s world, of camaraderie, of joie de vivre. Recommended, of course.

Rating: 8 Sally Lightfoots.

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