final review: Light in August by William Faulkner (audio)

Posted on July 4, 2013 by pagesofjulia

augustI am challenged by Faulkner. I already began to share my frustrations in an earlier post that you might want to check out.

So then, the second half of the book. The short story is I still don’t understand what this book is about. It opens with a pregnant country woman, traveling on foot in pursuit of the missing father of her child. He left her when he found out she was pregnant, promising to send for her when he had a household set up; everyone Lena talks to, and I the reader, understand that he’s no good and this is a lie, but she is dogged. She succeeds in tracking him down, this man she knows as Lucas Birch, to all our surprise, and he is indeed no good (and also now goes by Joe Brown). And then the story shifts to that of a companion of Birch/Brown’s, a man named Joe Christmas. We learn his entire life story. He was an orphan, living mostly as a white boy/man but occasionally outed as being part black. (Note that there are lots of n-words in this book. Something to keep in mind in the audio format, if you’re driving around with your windows down.) There is also a Byron Bunch, who cares for Lena while she gets close to having her baby; and a man named Hightower, a former minister who advises Byron Bunch. We learn pieces of their stories, as well. We don’t learn terribly much about Birch/Brown himself, despite in some ways him being the hub around which these spokes rotate. And I’m torn between wishing we knew more about Lena, and being frustrated (and therefore satiated) by what I do know of her.

The bottom line is that I still do not understand what this book is about. On one hand, that makes it really a pretty good candidate for what I’m doing with it, which is listening to it to prepare to to listen to a lecture explaining to me what the heck it’s about and what Mr. Faulkner was trying to do with it. On the other hand, it has not aided my enjoyment of this book. I’m confused. Why do we care about these people? I never learned to care about these people. Are we concerned with Lena? Or are we concerned with Christmas? Are we concerned with Byron Bunch?

I found it strange that certain characters make very long, descriptive speeches, when they’re meant to be simple people. When they speak, I hear Faulkner, not Lena, or Mrs. Hines or whomever. I’m not a fan of the author speaking through the dialog of his characters.

My audio edition concluded with an interview – of all people – with James Lee Burke. This is strange because he’s one of my favorites (and stranger still because I just days ago finished his new book, Light of the World – sorry, the review won’t post til the book is published in late July). It turns out that he puts Faulkner right up there with his top four greatest writers of all time: Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare and Keats. I am baffled. I won’t try to re-hash this interview for you, in which Burke touches on the gifts of Faulkner; suffice it to say it’s the first time I failed to “get” James Lee Burke. [If you’re interested, it’s the Brilliance Audio production of 2011, read by Will Patton. The interview with Burke is conducted by an awesomely-named James Atlas.]

I think that maybe Faulkner transmits on a frequency I don’t receive. I understand vaguely that this is a work of allegory. Perhaps the Yale University class lectures that I plan to listen to eventually (you can find them here on iTunes U) will illuminate things; possibly they will not. This is a non-review, I know. I’m sorry. I don’t get Faulkner.

Next up in my audio collection is The Sound and the Fury and I don’t think I’m brave enough. Jason’s recommendation of As I Lay Dying was encouraging, but I’m still a little gun-shy; plus my local library doesn’t have that one on audio. For now, I will take a break from Faulkner. Maybe I’ll even start with some of the Yale lectures and see if I’m inspired and educated.

Rating: requires discussion.

When trying to come up with a numbered rating for this book, I think: I did not like this book. But whose fault is that? Is it partly my fault? Do I share some blame for being unable to appreciate or follow? I give Light in August a 3 for my enjoyment level, but to acknowledge my complicity in our minds’ failure to meet, Faulkner’s and mine that is, I will assign a very generous 5 grumbles and hope for either better, or no, future Faulkner reads.

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Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean

Posted on July 1, 2013 by pagesofjulia
EDIT: more of my notes on this book available here.

Black Larry told me I should read this book, and I’m so glad I did. Thank you, sir.

young men and fireI struggle to tell you how good this book is. You know I loved Maclean’s A River Runs Through It. This, though lesser known, is better.

Young Men and Fire is the true story of the Mann Gulch fire in Montana in 1949, in which 13 smokejumpers of a crew of 16 were killed. Maclean was in the area in the days after the deaths, and was moved – as any of us would have been moved, but more intimately, because he had worked with the Forest Service and fought fires himself, and had one particularly frightening close call. He hiked out to see the still-smoldering forest as the Mann Gulch fire died out, and he knew even in 1949 that he would tell the story of those 13 men and what happened there.

He started his research and writing in earnest in his late 70’s, years later, after the publication of A River Runs Through It that made him moderately famous, and which too he had written after retirement. But Mann Gulch had always been on his mind.

As I said in my book beginning post, I learned quickly that this was a posthumous publication, a cooperative effort by his publisher and his son to put together as faithfully as they could what he had been working on. He died in 1990 and the book was published in ’92. In my observation, it must have been very nearly finished, and/or their editing work is seamless, because it feels decidedly like a finished work to me, and it all feels like Maclean.

It begins with a story, Black Ghost, about Maclean’s visit to the scene of the tragedy while the fire still sputters, in which he compares it to his earlier experiences. This short story sets the background of Maclean’s continuing fascination with the Mann Gulch fire. Then the bulk of the book is divided into three parts. They are untitled, but I saw a clear method of division; I’ll share my impression here, and note that it’s my own and from memory. Part One is about the events of 1949, told narrative-style with what information Maclean has and relatively less commentary than we’ll find later on; it relates the events of the days on which a fire was spotted, men raced towards it, the fire blew up, men ran, and men died and their bodies were found. Part Two relates Maclean’s research: it’s the story of his life since 1949, in which he thinks and muses, travels, researches, draws diagrams, visits with the two survivors, and climbs the steep gulch repeatedly to examine minutely the remaining evidence. Part Three is a brief 9 pages in which he tries to say what the Mann Gulch fire really was, and what young men might have felt and thought in their final moments. Throughout, and concluding in Part Three, Maclean discusses the meaning and power and definition of tragedy in life and in art. There are also plentiful religious allusions. I’m not clear on Maclean’s own relationship to a church – he doesn’t make it abundantly clear – but he does make very clear that he was raised by a Presbyterian minister (which we know well from A River Runs Through It), and his religious training comes through, not least with many references to the stations of the cross.

Briefly, the Mann Gulch fire looked routine to a team of Smokejumpers from the air (and to the pilot and spotter who released them), although there were some especially challenging elements of wind that required men and equipment to be spread out over a larger area than usual, which cost them time in regrouping. Also, the team’s radio did not survive its “jump,” which would come to be significant. Once on the ground, their very experienced fire foreman went off to investigate and quickly concluded that they had better head the other way; while heading his team one way, they found fire suddenly in front of them as well as behind; and thus began what Maclean calls their race against fire. In minutes, a fire of such ferocity and speed that they could not understand it had overtaken the team and… the details are ugly. Five men survived the fire, two so badly burned that they died around noon the next day, which appears to have been a mercy. One of the remaining three survivors was the foreman, who would receive a lot of flak for the deaths of his mean; the other two were the youngest and most inexperienced of the crew, one of whom had lied about his age and was still not old enough to actually be jumping out of airplanes into forest fires.

To say that this is a powerful story is both understatement and unnecessary. Sixteen men, the majority of whom were just boys really, thought they were going to do a routine job; they were brave, but their bravery was born of confidence rather than a comprehension of what they were up against. The Smokejumpers were a brand new part of the Forest Service – established in 1940, and slowed during World War II by the bulk of them going overseas to jump out of planes for other purposes – and the boys themselves were young, too, “still so young they hadn’t learned to count the odds and to sense they might owe the universe a tragedy.” It doesn’t work to accuse them of hubris. Simply, a whole lot of just rotten luck, a failure to understand fire, a lack of experience (both personally and institutionally), and a confluence of events that created a perfect storm of fire, caused these young men horrible suffering and created an event that rocked the lives of many. Obviously, their families & loved ones were effected; also the Forest Service, which reacted very defensively and was sued by several families; and ramifications were felt in the burgeoning scientific understanding of forest fires and how they work, all of which Maclean explores.

This is a beautiful eulogy to 13 men, and an eloquent and compassionate chronicle of a significant event. It’s also a story personal to Maclean, about his fascination with this fire and the fate of those 13 men, and the telling of this story as his “homespun anti-shuffleboard philosophy of what to do when I was old enough to be scripturally dead” (meaning, he’d lived his three score and ten). I love that the process of researching the story and writing it is the story itself; they are inextricable in Maclean’s version, and that feels right. Of course, as a reader, writer, and lover of books and stories, that makes perfect sense to me.

Maclean’s version is beautifully written, complete and complex, with a respect for all the nuances, unknowns, and conflicting version and conflicting points of view. He examines the accusations made against the foreman who saved himself by setting an “escape fire” and was unsuccessful in convincing his men to join him – which might have saved them, too – and thereby invented a technique which is now a part of fire defense. He examines the different impressions of events by the two survivors and the ranger who was one of the first on the scene after the deaths (and who took copious notes and was a meticulous observer). In fact, he examines everything available to him in exhaustive detail, and justifies his conclusions and questions with a base in science: geography, weather, and what we know about fire (which is more than we knew in 1949, thanks in part to those 13 deaths).

The title derives from Maclean’s discussion of the four elements, earth, air, fire, and water, of which the Smokejumpers interact with three in their normal line of work: earth, air, and fire; by the end of the book he makes reference to the elemental nature of young men. Thus the title: the action of this book is at the intersection between the elemental forces of young men and fire.

Young Men and Fire is a work of art and of poetry, and so much more. It’s definitely one of the best books I have read or will read this year.

Rating: a rare 10 feet downgulch.

Further thoughts…

My personal tragedy now is that Maclean only wrote two books and I have now read them. I do see, though, that The Norman Maclean Reader includes “previously unpublished materials with incidental writings and selections from his two masterpieces” (says the University of Chicago Press), so I have that to look forward to. Also, I just learned that Maclean’s son has written a parallel work about a later fatal wildfire, Fire on the Mountain: The True Story of the South Canyon Fire, and my copy is on its way to me now.

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The Doll by Taylor Stevens

Posted on June 26, 2013 by pagesofjulia

The latest international exploits, daring escapes and rescues of Taylor Stevens’s heroine for hire.

doll
In The Doll, Taylor Stevens (The Informationist) brings mercenary Vanessa Michael Munroe back to eager readers for another round of full-speed international intrigue. At the start, Munroe is tranquilized, kidnapped and forced to deliver a Hollywood starlet overseas as part of a human trafficking ring. Munroe’s boyfriend, Bradford, and the associates at his security firm are hot on the case, but the task of rescuing Munroe is complicated because all the other people she loves most in the world have also been kidnapped as collateral against her cooperation. Additionally, “the doll” turns out to be a spitfire with past trauma of her own, determined to give Munroe a run for her money.

With her near-savant linguistic skills, almost obsessive love of and skill with weapons and androgynous appearance, Munroe is a formidable tool in the hands of the “Doll Maker,” the mastermind behind the trafficking trade. But he hasn’t figured on her unpredictability. Even faced with difficult decisions and with her loved ones held hostage, Munroe might be capable of anything.

Stevens again crafts a lightning-swift plot that races across continents and inflicts extreme trauma upon characters she’s taught us to care about. Intelligent action and pacing are a bonus, and other characters like those on Bradford’s team are engaging and provide banter; but it’s Munroe herself who stars, with her wondrous and myriad abilities and her surprisingly soft heart.

This review originally ran in the June 11, 2013 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 7 borders crossed.

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an interim report on Light in August by William Faulkner (audio)

Posted on June 24, 2013 by pagesofjulia

augustI am nearly halfway through Light in August, and I need to get some things off my chest.

The lack of physical descriptions in this book is bothering me. Race is clearly a major issue, and yet I am often left confused about who was of what race. In some stories that would be a strength – that neutrality – but considering that I suspect it is so darned important here, I would like to know who is who. Rarely do we get a physical description. And then, out of nowhere, I get this:

She was a waitress in a small, dingy, back street restaurant in town. Even a casual adult glance could tell that she would never see thirty again. But to Joe she probably did not look more than seventeen too, because of her smallness. She was not only not tall, she was slight, almost childlike. But the adult look saw that the smallness was not due to any natural slenderness but to some inner corruption of the spirit itself: a slenderness which had never been young, in not one of whose curves anything youthful had ever lived or lingered. Her hair was dark. Her face was prominently boned, always downlooking, as if her head were set so on her neck, a little out of line. Her eyes were like the button eyes of a toy animal: a quality beyond even hardness, without being hard.

This is both lovely and, in some ways, bothersome to me. I love that she was not short, but rather “not tall.” And then that “smallness… not due to any natural slenderness but to some inner corruption of the spirit” comes along and I wanted to sarcastically retort, “you mean like a cocaine addiction is an inner corruption of the spirit”? Her face “always downlooking, as if her head were set so on her neck” is quite amazing and evocative; it makes me pause to picture this. But I can’t quite tolerate the “quality beyond even hardness, without being hard.” Come off it, Faulkner.

My impatience with his writing makes me question myself. I am often a little scornful of what strikes me as pretentious Literaryness; but then I’m so often appreciative of lyrical writing, so where do I draw the line? Am I letting my prejudice against (or to be more honest, my fear of) Faulkner get in the way of an honest appraisal? How to account for taste – even my own? It remains a puzzle. As I’ve written before, I think we all should attempt – as I am trying to do – to own our own reactions and tastes, and not apologize for not liking those who are called literary greats (Henry James, T.S. Eliot, I’m looking at you). Why don’t I like Faulkner? Take in a sentence like this:

I do not know yet that in the instant of sleep the eyelid closing prisons within the eye’s self her face demure, pensive; tragic, sad, and young; waiting, colored with all the vague and formless magic of young desire.

I’m sorry, but this reminds me of the abstract art that us philistines can’t tell from a kindergartner’s work. Speaking of vague and formless – this reminds me of The Waste Land, or Gertrude Stein, for goodness’ sake. If I keep reading this, I may go crazy.

On the other hand, I took in Jason’s lovely, helpful comments on the book beginning I posted, and I am somewhat encouraged. Some of this will just turn out to be a matter of taste; Jason can have Faulkner and I can have Hemingway, who some people abhor and that is fine, etc. etc. But perhaps I can continue with Faulkner and find more to like, too. Jason, I’m still looking forward to As I Lay Dying. I am trying; don’t lose patience with me yet. 🙂

And for now, I continue, but wish me luck.

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Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father by Alysia Abbott

Posted on June 20, 2013 by pagesofjulia

A daughter’s tender memoir of her father’s life as a single gay man in 1970s Haight-Ashbury.

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When Alysia Abbott was two years old, her mother was killed in a car accident. Her father, Steve, moved her across the country to raise her alone as a gay man and single father in 1970s San Francisco–a pioneer in several senses. Alysia’s childhood and teen years took place against the backdrop of a magical Haight-Ashbury district filled with creative, adventurous people like her father (a poet and political activist), recreational drugs and minimal supervision.

Their father-daughter relationship was loving but rocky. When Steve develops AIDS and his health begins to plummet, he calls 20-year-old Alysia home from her studies in Paris and New York City to nurse him, a full-circle caretaking demand that she resents at the time.

Fairyland is foremost a daughter’s memoir of a much-loved parent. She continues to become acquainted with him through her research, most notably in reading copious notebooks filled with his poetry and journal entries. She colorfully renders an iconic epoch in San Francisco, together with the city’s gay culture and politics, and the early days of the nationwide gay rights movement. Alongside beautiful characterizations (often morphing into eulogies), Alysia paints a stark image of the AIDS epidemic and the Reagan administration’s non-response to it. As a personal story and as a portrayal of an era, Fairyland is powerful, loving, authentic, and contains Steve’s artistic legacy in its lyricism. It acknowledges Steve’s impact on Alysia–and both their shortcomings–with gratitude and grace.

This review originally ran in the June 7, 2013 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 9 brightly colored t-shirts.

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You Are One of Them by Elliot Holt

Posted on June 19, 2013 by pagesofjulia

A haunting debut novel that combines a young girl’s coming-of-age, a lost friendship and the chill of the Cold War.

oneofthem

Elliott Holt’s You Are One of Them opens in 1980s Washington, D.C. Sarah Zuckerman is a troubled child, haunted by those who have left her behind. Her mother, obsessed with the threat of nuclear war, never leaves the house; her father has moved back to England and remarried. When Jenny Jones moves in across the street, Sarah is enchanted: the Joneses are a perfect American family, loving and happy, and Jenny is the perfect best friend. It’s Sarah’s idea to write a letter to the Soviet premier, asking for peace, but it’s Jenny’s letter that gets published and answered with an invitation to visit the Soviet Union. After the Joneses return, world-famous Jenny doesn’t have time for Sarah any more. Then Jenny is killed in a plane crash, her body never recovered.

Ten years later, as Sarah graduates from college, she gets a letter from a Russian woman who suggests she may know something about Jenny’s eventual fate. Their correspondence prompts Sarah to move to Moscow, and as she makes new friends in this strange foreign city, it seems that everyone has possible ties to the KGB. Could Jenny really be among these mysterious Russian women? And how far is Sarah willing to go to reclaim her friendship?

You Are One of Them is part thriller, part elegy, part study of place, as Moscow comes alive and Holt explores themes of lost and missing loves, within its echoes of the real-life story of Samantha Smith and the broader mystique and paranoia of the nuclear era.

This review originally ran in the June 7, 2013 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 7 conspiracy theories.

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She Got Up Off the Couch by Haven Kimmel

Posted on June 17, 2013 by pagesofjulia

couchHavel Kimmel aka Henrietta Krinkle, you are still my favorite.

This book follows A Girl Named Zippy, and I adore Kimmel’s explanation in her Preface: that she would definitely never write a sequel to Zippy, but that people kept on asking her if her mother ever got up off the couch; and here we are. This is an extension of that first memoir, then, with the focus being not on the girl called Zippy (Haven Kimmel herself) but on her mother, who in that first volume was a somewhat shapeless woman who mostly inhabited the couch and read a lot, talked on the phone, watched television, and didn’t worry too much about her children. This is told not unlovingly, but as fact. Zippy’s childhood is on balance awfully joyful and fun, and although a critical adult’s eye might point out lots of points of minor neglect, she clearly loves her family very much. This tone is continued in She Got Up Off the Couch. The family and each of its members is still, realistically, flawed, but lovable and well-loved. Kimmel’s brother is now mostly absent, with a family of his own; her sister marries and has two babies; her father finds work as a sheriff’s deputy (or similar job title); but her mother’s is the great change of this second memoir. This was, what, the late 1970’s I suppose, in a tiny Indiana town of a few hundred people. Zippy’s dad, Bob Jarvis, holds the keys: her mother Delonda doesn’t know how to drive. This will work as a fine metaphor (and indeed is part of the literal action), as Delonda calls a phone number on a television commercial to look into going to college. She wrangles a ride into the next town over for an entrance exam, which places her out of fully 40 hours of college credits. Under Bob’s clear disapproval – he says of the woman who takes Delonda to her test, “time was, a woman wouldn’t have gotten in a man’s marriage that way” – she persists in attending classes, studying, reading, talking to new people, and in 23 months, graduates summa cum laude – and continues on to graduate school. Eventually she earns a Master’s degree in English and becomes a high school teacher. This is all a stunning change. Along the way, to get to school and back, she learns how to drive and purchases a vehicle that is, in itself, a good joke.

She Got Up Off the Couch also follows the format of A Girl Named Zippy: chapters jump around, more as connected anecdotes than as clear narrative. Each chapter stands alone admirably as a hilarious or heartfelt – usually both – nugget of tears, joy, preadolescent confusion, and filial love. [In fact, as soon as I finish writing this review I’m off to read my favorite chapter out loud to Husband, if he’ll let me, while he smokes a brisket in the backyard. If you’re curious, it’s called “Treasure,” and is about a hippie college student hiking cross-country who camps out in the Jarvis backyard for a few days. It’s hilarious and heart-wrenching.] It’s a great structure, this anecdotal style. If I ever write my own mother’s biography, which I keep dreaming about, I have something similar in mind. Yes, there are odd characters that the reader of just one chapter would wrinkle her forehead at; but this is true of the whole book, too. Zippy has had an odd and happy life, and that’s exactly why we enjoy reading about it.

Zippy herself, naturally, also grows and changes in this book. Delonda is our star and makes the most life-changing journey. Kimmel writes in her preface, “I will never do anything half so grand or important,” and I know exactly what she means: the decision of Delonda and other women of her time who broke out of where they were told they belonged have done something for the women of my generation that we are now saved from having to do, if that makes any sense. It is something I’ve long felt about my own mother. But I was saying that Zippy continues to grow up: we see more of her engaging and eccentric friends, Rose and Julie Ann, and we meet a new friend, Jeanne Ann. And when she gets a nephew and then a niece, Zippy becomes hopelessly devoted. The blizzard that sweeps through when her niece is long overdue and panics the family is, again, funny and riveting at the same time.

I’ve now read everything that Haven Kimmel has written except for every single one of her blog posts, and that one children’s book. I hope she is getting to work right now on another book – fiction or non, more Haven Kimmel, stat.

I love it. Funny, true, humble, real.

Rating: 9 cherry-red polyester suits.

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The Silver Swan by Benjamin Black (audio)

Posted on June 13, 2013 by pagesofjulia

swanThis is book 2 in a series, because I couldn’t find book 1; so be it. You know I don’t bother too much with these things, anyway.

Set in Dublin, and thus very enjoyable as an audiobook with those Irish accents – various Irish accents based on region, of course. I’m no connoisseur of dialect but I can hear the different effect coming through and I appreciate it. Having visited there now, too, I think I might call an Irish accent the most musical and pleasant to listen to that I know.

Our protagonist (I started to call him a hero; but I think the jury is out) is named Quirke, and he’s a pathologist, meaning he performs autopsies. The scene is set when an old friend – hardly more than an acquaintance – from school calls up to request that Quirke forgo cutting open his recently dead wife, Deidre Hunt, professionally known as Laura Swan. (No, not what you’re thinking. She’s a beautician.) Deirdre is an apparent suicide. Quirke goes poking around where he doesn’t belong. He behaves awfully like a detective, but of course he isn’t; although it is hinted at that in the first tale of his adventures, Christine Falls, which I missed, Quirke likewise tried to do the cops’ job for them, and it didn’t turn out well for him. Ah well, these hard-boiled types never learn, and Quirke goes looking into Deirdre’s life and habits. He discovers a former lover with an angry wife, and some financial troubles, but none of that is as interesting as Quirke’s own family drama. Apparently he had a daughter who was passed off as his niece until just a few years ago; so he has a “new”, adult child; and she becomes embroiled herself with Deirdre Hunt’s life and menfolk. Oh, and Quirke has the classic characteristic of being a reformed or reforming alcoholic; there are scenes where he hangs out in bars (to talk to his informant) and yearns for a drink. No real new ground there.

As a mystery, there were a few odd elements here. Quirke behaves very much like a detective, which is tolerated surprisingly well by everyone, including the detectives; yes, there’s a little complaining, but no efforts to limit his actions. On top of that, I thought the husband was a fine suspect from the very start – that is, once we’ve established that Deirdre was murdered, which is a conclusion danced around for much of the book. The husband then requests that no autopsy be performed; and yet Quirke never really does get around to suspecting him. I was left feeling that I had missed something; and maybe I did, but I think in that case at least some of the blame falls on the story.

I enjoyed this read somewhat, but frankly, I think most of my enjoyment lay in the lovely Irish voices telling the story. Other than that, it was just fine.

Rating: 5 very neutral shrugs of my shoulders for this one.

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Junius and Albert’s Adventures in the Confederacy by Peter Carlson

Posted on June 12, 2013 by pagesofjulia

Adventure, suspense, and a dash of romance make for a highly readable–and absolutely true–Civil War story.

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Peter Carlson’s Junius and Albert’s Adventures in the Confederacy opens with the capture of its titular subjects near Vicksburg in 1863, then rewinds to show how they landed in such a predicament. Albert Richardson, an enterprising journalist for the New York Tribune, had decided to travel south as an undercover correspondent, and naturally chose his best friend and fellow newspaperman Junius Browne to accompany him. The stakes were high if they were discovered–the Tribune was reviled as a liberal abolitionist paper–but the two young men were game for adventure. After their capture, they spent nearly two years in a series of Confederate prisons before escaping, half-starved and freezing, to trek overland toward Union lines in December 1864.

Despite the serious and frequently tragic nature of Albert and Junius’s story, the book’s title signals the often playful tone that Carlson (K Blows Top) employs. The descriptions of Confederate prisons like Libby, Castle Thunder and Salisbury are horrific, but there is also the occasional scene of mirth–as when prisoners put on a variety show to celebrate the 4th of July. Besides Junius and Albert, the other colorful personalities in Carlson’s history include a larger-than-life “Union pilot” skilled at guiding refugees over the mountains to freedom, and a beautiful young Southern horsewoman who rescues them during a perilous moment. With eccentric and likeable characters like these, Carlson’s history successfully masquerades as an entertaining adventure story.

This review originally ran as a *starred review* in the June 4, 2013 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 7 weary months.

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A River Runs Through It, and other stories by Norman Maclean

Posted on June 6, 2013 by pagesofjulia

riverNorman Maclean is a poet and a genius. Annie Proulx’s foreword, and Macleans’ own acknowledgements, had me spellbound from the first moments; even before I began the first of three stories, I had to put the book down and meditate on what I’d read. Consider the final lines of the acknowledgements:

This, then, in summary, is a collection of Western stories with trees in them for children, experts, scholars, wives of scholars, and scholars who are poets. I hope there are others also who don’t mind trees.

This is Maclean’s first book, published when he was already an old man. It includes three pieces I have a little trouble categorizing. Short stories? Well, they’re not particularly short, not consistently: the first one is over 100 pages and therefore more properly a novella; the second is 20 pages; the third, 90. They are also nonfiction, which makes calling them short stories or novellas also problematic. Take that as you will. They are very fine, whatever they are.

I am going to write this review much like I did yesterday’s, heavy on the quotations because this writer is such a Writer.

“A River Runs Through It,” the title story and the one best critically received, begins:

In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ’s disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman.

We meet a young Norman and his brother Paul, briefly as boys to establish their personalities and their relationship with fishing (every bit as reverent as those opening lines suggest), and then we delve into their lives in their early thirties. They fish together. Paul is a gifted fly fisherman. They have a noncommunicative (stereotypically male) relationship, but they worship together at the river, hone their craft, share special moments; their world is intruded upon by the unpleasantness of Norman’s brother-in-law, who is (gasp) a bait fisherman. Paul also likes to fight, and he comes to a young and violent end. All these years later, the Maclean who writes this story might be seen as exorcising a youthful trauma; lucky for us it is as thoughtful, wise, delicate, and beautiful as it is.

…I could never be talked into believing that all a fish knows is hunger and fear. I have tried to feel nothing but hunger and fear and don’t see how a fish could ever grow to six inches if that were all he ever felt. In fact, I go so far sometimes as to imagine that a fish thinks pretty thoughts.

Again I see Derrick Jensen here: fish are people, too.

What a beautiful world it was once. At least a river of it was. And it was almost mine and my family’s, and just a few others’ who wouldn’t steal beer. You could leave beer to cool in the river, and it would be so cold when you got back it wouldn’t foam much. It would be a beer made in the next town if the town were ten thousand or over. So it was either Kessler Beer made in Helena or Highlander Beer made in Missoula that was left to cool in the Blackfoot River. What a wonderful world it was once when all the beer was not made in Milwaukee, Minneapolis, or St. Louis.

If you don’t see Hemingway’s legacy there, I don’t know what I can say to help you. Maclean was born just three years after Papa, but Hemingway had been dead over a decade when this, Maclean’s first book, was published, so at least in literary terms they are a generation apart. No one can write prayerfully about fishing and the beauty of a trout stream without channeling that man.

I sat there and forgot and forgot, until what remained was the river that went by and I who watched. On the river the heat mirages danced with each other and then they danced through each other and then they joined hands and danced around each other. Eventually the watcher joined the river, and there was only one of us. I believe it was the river.

Again, talk about prayerful – a word he uses several times, actually, and appropriately. I won’t quote the famous final line of this story for you. Go find it out for yourself. I cannot argue with the accepted notion that “A River Runs Through It” is Maclean’s masterpiece.

Next is “Logging and Pimping and ‘Your Pal, Jim'”, a story of Maclean’s work as a young man on a logging camp, during the summers while he’s not in school becoming an academic. The man who signs his letters as in the story’s title is a mystery, and the fact that Maclean leaves him unexplained felt a little strange but, of course, very real. It’s an entertaining and rather disturbing little tale, worth the time, but nothing compared to River.

And then there is “USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky,” almost as long as the first story and less well received critically, but in my opinion very striking. It focuses on just a few weeks during the time Maclean spent working for the Forest Service, yes, in 1919, when the world was a little different place:

We were fairly representative of early Forest Service crews as I came to know them – maybe not even that good, because the war had ended less than a year before and many of the best men had not yet returned to the woods, and the earth was still pretty much in the care of the old with corrugated skin and tiny steps and young punks looking for a fight and gassed Canadians and anonymous lookouts who had to be there but can’t be remembered. Not one had ever seen the inside or the outside of a school of forestry. But, as Bill said, we were a pretty good crew and we did what we had to do and loved the woods without thinking we owned them, and each of us liked to do at least one thing especially well – liked to swing a jackhammer and feel the earth overpowered by dynamite, liked to fight, liked to heal the injuries of horses, liked to handle groceries and tools and tie knots. And nearly all of us liked to work. When you think about it, that’s a lot to say about a bunch of men.

The first line introduces our narrator:

I was young and I thought I was tough and I knew it was beautiful and I was a little bit crazy but hadn’t noticed it yet.

And there is wisdom about nature:

…the mountains of Idaho, poems of geology stretching beyond any boundaries and seemingly even beyond the world.

And work:

The unpacking was just as beautiful – one wet satin back after another without saddle or saddle sore, and not a spot of white wet flesh where hair and hide had rubbed off. Perhaps one has to know something about keeping packs balanced on the backs of animals to think this beautiful, or to notice it at all, but to all those who work come moments of beauty unseen by the rest of the world.

And as a historical moment in time, I found it only a hair’s breadth less impressive than River. I like to read about the Forest Service, and I can’t wait to get into Maclean’s Young Men and Fire, about the Mann Gulch forest fire of 1949, in Montana, where a bunch of young smokejumpers were killed. (My fascination with forest, and fire, holds over from Fire Season, obviously.)

I am reeling from this book. Especially having read A River Runs Through It back-to-back with The Solace of Open Spaces, and with the two set side-by-side (or, top to bottom) in Wyoming and Montana, I feel swept away. Sometimes our reading happens this way, that a set of books come together to effect more than the sum of the parts. So, like Ehrlich’s lesser-known work, I will say that Maclean’s is… wise, compassionate, lyrical, and so important and beautiful in its honoring of a dying version of our world. Highly recommended.

Rating: 9 beads of sweat.

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