A sisterhood of lonely hearts
August 11, 2011
Sweet was my discovery this summer of Break the Skin. While it’s Lee Martin’s seventh novel, it is the first Martin novel I’ve read, and I regret having missed his other six. That after being entranced by his writing – seductive in its warmth and intimacy – and by the women who populate Break the Skin — Laney, Miss Baby, Delilah and Rose — whose desperate need for love drive them to make life-changing mistakes.
And then there’s Martin’s deep dive into the culture of small Midwest towns, in this case, New Hope and Mount Gilead, Illinois. His characters work the midnight shift at Wal-Mart, live in double-wides or small box houses surrounded by open fields and, on a Friday night, head to a tavern filled with shift workers from the poultry plant where a local band likely will play ”Stairway to Heaven” and other songs from the 1970s. You can almost smell the open fields and hear the pickups driving down the road and feel the resigned contentment that this is as good a place as any to live one’s life.
Only things aren’t so good for Laney Volk. The novel opens with the local police escorting her to the station for questioning about a murder. She decides to tell them everything about her friendship with the tough, 35-year-old Delilah Dade from Shady Acres Trailer Park and the conniving young Rose MacAdow, a friendship that became deceitful and vengeful due to Rose and Delilah’s mutual love for a musician named Tweet, a.k.a. Russell Swain. The fierce competition for his love stirred up a mess of trouble and put 19-year-old Laney in the middle.
Martin creates the irrational thinking of these women, who will do anything for love, with remarkable insight. He knows just how much of their overwhelming need to allow into the narrative without creating a melodramatic burden that would trigger a snappy response of “get over it.” He writes so well, so credibly, about them we know they can’t get over it, and he keeps us hooked into their emotions by skillfully drawing us into the suspenseful consequences.
Meanwhile, Laney’s boyfriend Lester disappears and shows up 700 miles away in Denton, Texas. As an Iraq war vet, he suffers from post-traumatic stress syndrome that causes him occasionally to forget who he is or where he’s from. He has no idea he loves Laney, or that he advised Delilah about finding a silencer for her five-shot pistol. Betty Ruiz, a.k.a. Miss Baby, a Denton tattoo artist, takes advantage of his amnesia and convinces Lester he’s her husband.
Miss Baby is another member of the sisterhood of lonely hearts. She’s also the strongest character in this novel with a voice you won’t soon forget. (The novel alternates between her and Laney’s first person voices.) Like Laney, she gets caught in the middle of her loved ones’ troubles, notably her brother’s misadventures stealing cattle. And then, Miss Baby hears a TV newscaster say Lester’s wanted for questioning in a murder in Mount Gilead, the same murder the police believe Laney may know something about.
All the deceit and blindness for the sake of love, both in Texas and Illinois, unravel at this point, and I couldn’t put the book down. In Break the Skin, simple lives needlessly go sour with powerful consequences. As Laney explains to the police, “It was the idiocy of people so starved for love they didn’t have a thought in their heads of how easily their lives could spin out of control.”
The Devil made them do it
July 5, 2011
When you choose to read Donald Ray Pollock’s fiction, you enter a moral wasteland in southern Ohio where people live moment to moment motivated by self-serving perversion. Such is the reading experience of his acclaimed short-story collection Knockemstiff, published in 2008, and also of his new novel released this month. The Devil All the Time takes place for the most part in Meade, Ohio, under the acrid smell of the paper mill, and also in nearby Coal Creek, West Virginia. The time is the 1940s through the 1960s.
Be forewarned: this novel is for readers who like their fiction dark. The behaviors of the delusional preachers and sexually deviant serial killers who come to life in the novel’s vivid scenes are offensive. Disgusting as their lives may be, one cannot deny the exceptional talent Pollock brings to portraying depravity with his keen, unflinching grip on human nature. These morally blind people aren’t simply created for shock value. Pollock’s raw style — void of spectacle and focused on authenticity — creates the sense they are who they are and, although cloaked in fiction, so would they be in real life.
There’s Willard Russell, who’s returned from fighting in the Word War II Pacific theater, damaged by what he witnessed, including a Marine skinned alive by the Japanese. That gruesome image sets the tone for what’s to come – Willard performs bloody animal and human sacrifices over a prayer log in the Ohio woods. He hopes these efforts will divinely heal his sick wife. When she dies, Willard commits suicide, and his son Arvin goes to live with his grandmother in Coal Creek.
By this time, we’ve been introduced to Lee Bodecker, Meade’s corrupt sheriff concerned about his 16-year-old sister, who’s “inclined to go along with whatever anyone asked her to do.” We’ve also met the spider-eating preacher Roy Laferty and his crippled guitar-strumming cousin Theodore. These two crank evangelists take their holy-roller beliefs too far when Roy thinks he can bring the dead back to life, and they murder Roy’s wife to test the belief.
That’s part one of the novel. In part two, we meet serial killers Carl and Sandy (Bodecker) Henderson. Sandy is now 25 and an accomplice to her husband, who likes to pick up male hitchhikers, photograph them in sexual acts with his wife and then kill them.
As the stories evolve in the novel’s seven sections, occasionally it’s hard to keep track of the passing years. That’s because it’s not always obvious what year it is when we transition into a new section, or how much time has passed. There’s a lot going on here with Arvin in Coal Creek, Roy and Theo on the lam in Florida and Sandy and Carl hunting the highways, and without an exact feel for how the timing unfolds, it creates some minor confusion.
The strongest parts of the book, and there are many, engage us fully, such as a very compelling story about Roy Laferty’s daughter, Leonora. She gets in trouble with a seductive new preacher in Coal Creek and takes her own life as a consequence. There’s a gut-wrenching moment when she’s midway through the suicide attempt and changes her mind, but it’s too late.
Pollock demonstrates expert control of his pathetic characters and concludes with an impressive convergence of their lives. Among the lot, it’s the misguided, squalid Roy, hitchhiking his way home to Coal Creek, who explains why people living sordid lives can’t stop their evil ways. From the backseat of their car, he says to Carl and Sandy: “It’s hard to live a good life. It seems like the Devil don’t ever let up.”
A father’s decline, a son’s devotion
June 19, 2011
One of the most powerful books I’ve read about dementia is Out of Mind by J. Bernlef. It was originally published in Dutch in 1984 and then translated into English and published in the United States by David R. Godine in 1988. It opens with the narrator Maarten Klein looking out his living room window and wondering why the local children with their schoolbags and shrill voices aren’t scrambling down the street, as they do every morning. His wife walks into the room, serving tea, and reminds him it’s Sunday afternoon.
More than 20 years later I remember this brilliantly created novel because of its unforgettable rendering of an erosion of memory. One realizes from Maarten’s vivid internal world, this must be what it feels like gradually to lose one’s memory. This past week, reading John Thorndike’s memoir of his father’s Alzheimer’s disease, I learned what that erosion looks like from a son who becomes his father’s caretaker. Written in a journal-like style, The Last of His Mind is an insightful, forthright and open-hearted dive into the ravages of rapid onset dementia.
Thorndike moved into his father’s house on Cape Cod in 2005 when the frail, confused 91-year-old Joe Thorndike could neither dress himself nor find words to express himself. This was a man who, in the late 1940s, worked at Life magazine as its managing editor, under the renowned publishing tycoon Henry Luce. He engaged with such writers as John Kenneth Galbraith, John Dos Passos, James Thurber and Winston Churchill, whose WWII book Joe helped distill into excerpts that were published in successive issues of Life in the spring of 1948. Joe Thorndike eventually left Life to become one of the founders of American Heritage and Horizon magazines.
As John Thorndike dresses and bathes his father, serves meals and daily tries to elicit reactions, often taking Joe on drives to the beach, he tries to find ways to interact with his father, rather than impose controlling structures that would make his own life easier. He also painfully and desperately tries to get his father to talk about his career and their family history, wrestling with his father’s disconnected memories. The house is filled with archived photos, letters and articles in boxes and filing cabinets, and these John explores, painfully resurrecting his mother’s romantic affairs and giving us a peek inside their privileged family life.
One of the shining glories of this moving father-son portrait is that it squashes the fear conjured by Alzheimer’s and shows us how the debilitating process suffered by a loved one can be accepted and embraced. Consider, from the last month of his father’s life, when John Thorndike writes, “All year I’ve been one with my father. Of course I’ve been sad at times, even miserable when he was miserable, but not once have I been depressed. I’ve been engaged, I’ve been involved, and that is happiness to me.”
The Last of His Mind: A Year in the Shadow of Alzheimer’s was first published in 2009 as a hardcover edition. The paperback came out in March this year.
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.
