Jerry Gabriel’s “Drowned Boy”
May 11, 2010
A few weeks ago, author Donald Ray Pollock recommended Jerry Gabriel’s Drowned Boy on All Sides Weekend/Books (WOSU NPR 820), a monthly talk show I participate in with host Christopher Purdy. At the word “drowned,” my thoughts went to Jim Grimsley’s 1997 novel, My Drowning. In that split second confusion, I heard only a little bit about Gabriel’s book because my multi-tasking mind was recalling that other, disquieting book about family hardship and abuse, in a setting of poverty among the cotton fields and tobacco beds of North Carolina.
Now, dial ahead to the Ohioana Book Festival this past weekend. I was walking among the tables of books attended by their authors, and a friend, who heard the April 16 All Sides/Book show, said to me, “Jerry Gabriel is here. You know, Drowned Boy.” Curiosity from the radio discussion (which my subconscious must have absorbed while my thoughts entangled themselves over the wrong book) visited me like a sonic boom. Or maybe it was the lights flashing over something my literary instinct was saying I shouldn’t overlook.
Drowned Boy won the 2008 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. It was selected by Andrea Barrett, whose unforgettable collection of stories, Ship Fever, won the National Book Award in 1996. This is Gabriel’s first work of fiction, linked stories that take place in Moraine, Ohio, where brothers Nat and Donnie Holland come of age. (Pollock’s stories in his first book also take place in small-town Ohio, the now widely known Knockemstiff, Ohio.)
In her foreword to Drowned Boy, Barrett tells readers: “These stories are filled with boys, poised between one state and the next: not just Nate and Donnie but a runaway boy, a lost boy, a beaten boy, a clever boy — and, of course, the drowned boy of the excellent title novella. He remains offstage, leaving Nate, newly out of high school, and a classmate named Samantha, to vibrate to the consequences of his death. But although we never meet him, his drowning resonates metaphorically through the collection. In Moraine, Nate’s entire generation seems to be in danger of sinking beneath the water.”
A signed copy of Drowned Boy is now on my reading table. The draw on me to read it is the power of place, that which can stand out in fiction as profound and memorable as a character. I hope to get to the collection’s eight stories sooner rather than later. “Later” as in Tolstoy’s War and Peace later. To all those TLC readers who heard me at New Year’s resolve to read the Russian tome in 2010, I opened it this weekend. I mean that literally. It’s lying open on a table in the living room to the first page. Beside it is Drowned Boy.
Moraine, Ohio, and Moscow, side by side. Books take us everywhere. I love that.
Lost in the coliseum
November 15, 2009
On Friday, we went. My “booking” friends LS, AB and I go every year at this time to the Dayton Book Fair where we get lost hour after hour in the searching — fingers running over the titles — and discovering of books to purchase, let alone the remembering of books once read. “More than 250,000 items” is what the fair advertises. (CDs, cassettes, LPs, DVDs, comics, puzzles and specialty magazines are also sold.) This is an event where shopping carts are supplied because books range in price from $1 to $3, give or take 50 cents.
The mother lode for me is novels, but this year I came away with a cookbook I couldn’t resist: Encore: The Favorite Dishes of the World’s Most Famous Musicians. The book was published in 1958, so the musicians are of or before that time, for example: George Szell (filet of sole), Rise Stevens (chicken paprika), Isaac Stern (cheese dip), Robert Merrill (beet borscht), Yehudi Menuhin (Indian rice) and Lily Pons (macaroon jubilee).
I also purchased first editions to round out my library, such as Frances Sherwood’s Vindication (1993) because I had only the galley. (I was surprised today to discover it’s signed by the author.) Same for Bobbie Ann Mason’s An Atomic Romance (2005). I purchased Michael Dirda’s An Open Book (2003) because I read a library copy and didn’t own it. Other authors I purchased: Kaye Gibbons, Martin Amis, William Styron, Joan Didion, T. C. Boyle, Ward Just and Thomas Pynchon.
Ian Frazier turns 40. Huh? Make that 58.
May 26, 2009
The New Yorker, May 18, 2009, published a poem by Ohio author Ian Frazier claiming he’s turning 40 “in just a couple of days.” Of course, Frazier, a humorist, is spoofing the reality of 58. He was born in 1951 and graduated from Harvard in 1973. “What does it feel like, old bones?”
Frazier wrote an article about his Midwestern roots for The New Yorker in their January 10, 2005, issue – “Out of Ohio: How the Midwest made me.” He lived in Hudson, Ohio, from when he was six years old until he was eighteen.
The article captures his nostalgia for those years and the reasons for leaving his hometown. Here’s an excerpt:
“Why did Hudson enchant me? Why was life, there and then, so sweet? I think a million reasons happened to come together, none of which we grasped at the time. We had plenty of leisure. We had cars to drive. Gasoline was still so cheap it was practically free. Our parents, to whom the cars we drove belonged, had leisure, too. In their case, they were inclined to take long vacations, and indulge us kids. Fathers (and a few mothers) had steady jobs, pensions, health insurance. The economic difficulties that would later take a lot of those away and that I still don’t understand had not yet visibly begun. Vietnam was winding down. The draft had just ended, removing a load from all our minds. Et cetera.”
The New Yorker’s contributor bio for Frazier says his new book, Travels in Siberia, will be published next year.
Got goosebumps?
April 30, 2009
You may be feeling the imminent arrival of R. L. Stine. He’s coming to Columbus for the 3rd annual Ohioana Book Festival on May 9.
R. L. Stine is the famed Ohio author of the Fear Street and Goosebumps book series for kids. He’s also authored many other scary books, including the Rotten School series.
R. L. Stine’s website claims The Cuckoo Clock of Doom as his favorite in the Goosebumps line-up, hence its place on my Currently Reading list. I’m having a conversation with this prolific, scary writer @ 1:00 pm during the festival.
Come join us! And check out the many other activities – panels, readings, book signings and more. Get the full details on the festival site.
Forgotten Pulitzer-winning novels
April 26, 2009
NPR’s All Things Considering offered a list of novels that won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and likely would provoke a perp
lexed “huh? who?”
Here’s that list. It includes three Ohio authors: Louis Bromfield, Josephine Johnson and Conrad Richter.
Johnson’s novel Now in November is not forgotten by me — it’s one I’ve given as a gift, a powerful story about a farm family struggling in the heart of the country during the 1930s drought and Great Depression. It’s written with poetic/seductive language and narrated by the memorable second of three daughters — a stunning work along the lines of best Willa Cather, totally worthy of a Pulitzer.
His Family by Ernest Poole, 1918
Early Autumn by Louis Bromfield, 1927
Scarlet Sister Mary by Julia Peterkin, 1929
Laughing Boy by Oliver Lafarge, 1930
Years of Grace by Margaret Ayer Barnes, 1931
The Store by T.S. Stribling, 1933
Lamb in His Bosom by Caroline Miller, 1934
Now in November by Josephine Winslow Johnson, 1935
Honey in the Horn by Harold L. Davis, 1936
In This Our Life by Ellen Glasgow, 1942
Journey in the Dark by Martin Flavin, 1944
Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens, 1949
The Way West by A.B. Guthrie, 1950
The Town by Conrad Richter, 1951
The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters by Robert Lewis Taylor, 1959
The Edge of Sadness by Edwin O’Connor, 1962
Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson, 1978
Read the NPR article. ABE books also compiled a list of Top 10 Forgotten Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novels (that also includes Now in November).
A super son nevertheless: Michael Dirda
April 15, 2009
Michael Dirda reviews Jayne Anne Phillips Lark and Termite in the current New York Review of Books (April 30, 2009). His exceptional analysis of this dreamy, multi-narrated novel unravels the complexity that IMO makes the story less accessible to all readers.
Anyone who’s already read the novel or who plans to read it will find Dirda’s review providing helpful revelations about Phillips’ recurrent themes, the novel’s structure and what Dirda describes as Phillips’ “meaningful meandering.”
It’s impressive when Dirda connects a remark by the character Leavitt - saying he used to perform the song “My Funny Valentine” – to Phillips’ mention later in the book that Chet Baker is playing on the jukebox. Dirda points out that Baker’s signature song was “My Funny Valentine.”
I heard Dirda read from his book Classics for Pleasure, and his mind is a steel trap for literary detail. His references to characters, scenes, plots, authors and more are astonishing for books read years in the past. Oh the envy.
BTW, Classics for Pleasure offers a great reading list written by “Dirda as passionate reader” rather than “Dirda as passionate critic.” His insights and summaries drove me to make a list that include Georgette Heyer’s Civil Contract and The Grand Sophy; W.H. Auden’s Letters from Iceland and his Selected Poems edited by Edward Mendelson; and Akhmatova’s early love poems. Even, as an adult, to reread The Secret Garden.
Dirda grew up in Lorain, Ohio. He is a writer and former senior editor for The Washington Post Book World. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism in 1993. His memoir about growing up in Lorain is An Open Book: Coming of Age in the Heartland.
Here’s a fun glimpse inside An Open Book:
“Though my father had encouraged early reading by taking me to the library, he never wanted a bookworm in the family. Instead he envisioned a Super Son, adept with every known hand tool and eager to transform 1031 West 29th Street into an edifice that even Frank Lloyd Wright might envy or, alternately, a son so financially savvy that he would be hired at age eleven to manage J. Paul Getty’s investments. Having read a news story about Michael Rockefeller’s disappearance in Borneo, he commanded me to write to the Rockefeller family and offer myself as a replacement son. He wasn’t kidding. Not a bit.”
