Shoemaker Book Launch in Northport Next Month

 

Sarah Shoemaker of Northport, Michigan, author of the critically acclaimed Mr. Rochester, has a new novel coming out this fall. Children of the Catastrophe, set in the city of Smyrna in the early 20^th century, is, as the author herself describes it, a story of family, love and loss, crisis and survival. The book’s release date is September 6, the day after Labor Day, and Shoemaker will be at the Leelanau Township Library that evening to meet and greet the public. Dog Ears Books will be on hand, as well, to sell books to those wishing to purchase, which the author will be happy to sign. 

 

In her new work of historical fiction, Shoemaker goes behind the bare facts to imagine two families over the course of years leading up to a tragic real event in history. Early in the novel a marriage is arranged within Smyrna’s Greek community. The bride is one of four sisters, the groom an only child. Parents of the two (especially the mothers) have traditional concerns about qualities they wish to see in a partner for their respective children, but happily for the bride and groom in this case, they are attracted to one another from the start, and soon a new generation of Greeks is growing up in a happy home in Smyrna, little suspecting that their world is about to be utterly destroyed. 

 

There are, Shoemaker said in a recent interview, 27 million refugees in the world today, and every one of those people represents “a family, a community, a way of life that is forever lost to them.” In large world events – every catastrophe, especially – it is easy to lose sight of particular individuals and families. Yet every war, every famine, every horrendous headline event changes the world forever for people who were up until then, most of them, living very ordinary lives. 

 

What must it be like to have almost everything and then suddenly to lose it all? How does this affect families, and what differences are there in the responses of different family members? Different generations? These are questions Shoemaker sought answers for in her novel.  

 

Shoemaker has lived in Greece and also for two years in Izmir, Turkey, the present seaport city on the former site of Smyrna. She knew the history and heard the personal story of one survivor whose entire family was lost in the Great Fire (1922), also known to Greeks as the Catastrophe. So, all in all, she felt this was a story she could write. 

 

“Every time I see pictures from Ukraine,” Shoemaker said to her interviewer, “our most recent world events that impact people’s lives – seriously -- I see those people now, having written this book, differently, because I see them as individuals who’ve had lives.” She observes that it’s easy to lose sight of individual lives when we see masses of refugees in events not happening to us. But – “This could be us sometime. Or this could be somebody I care about sometime.” What tragic events do to real people’s real lives is what Shoemaker wants readers to take away from her novel. And in this aim, she succeeds brilliantly. 

 

As a reader, one comes to live inside the story, to live inside houses inhabited by people one comes to know. One hundred years later in time and far distant in space, while reading we inhabit the world of early 20^th-century Greek Smyrna and feel connected to the characters’ hopes and dreams, sympathetic to their problems, concerned for their lives. In the end, we realize that their tragedy is our tragedy, in that it is a human tragedy, and we are all human beings, despite our differences.

-- Can you tell I am excited about this book? It is going to be an excellent choice for book clubs, too! 

Tuesday, September 6, 7:30 p.m., Leelanau Township Library, Northport, MI: Sarah Shoemaker and Children of the Catastrophe

P.S. You can hear the complete interview with Sarah Shoemaker on the Library Love Fest podcast from Harper Collins, publisher of Children of the Catastrophe. Sarah Nelson, vice president and executive editor of Harper Collins, introduces and interviews Sarah Shoemaker in the podcast.

 

Book Review: IF THE CREEK DON'T RISE

Everybody, it seems, is reading Hillbilly Elegy, the recent memoir by J. D. Vance. I read it myself and thought he did a good job of conveying his background story. I’m very curious to see where his life will go next – and I’m not alone in that. Right after reading the Vance memoir, I turned to Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America and am making my way slowly and carefully through this excellent, eye-opening, carefully documented piece of work that will surely be a classic of American history for as long as the United States of America lasts. I’ll have much more to say about this book in the near future.

That I received the other day an advance reader copy (ARC) of a novel set in Appalachia, among “the forgotten folks” of Baines Creek, North Carolina, in 1970 – that was purely coincidental, but like so many coincidences in a reader’s life, it was serendipitous, given what I’d already been reading. The characters in this novel by Leah Weiss are unschooled and hardscrabble poor. They live high on a windy ridge, where the air is thin, and so is the soil. As if the Civil War ended only last week, they still despise Yankees. The very people Vance in his memoir and Isenberg in her history described, Weiss brings to life in her fiction.

She’s not an opportunist riding a hillbilly bandwagon, either. Her mother grew up with fourteen siblings in an unpainted house without electricity or plumbing, and the first chapter of If the Creek Don’t Rise began as a short story entered in a writing contest in 2011. Weiss worked on the novel through 2014 and put it in the hands of an editor in 2015. The interview at the end of the book made me happy: here is a writer who not only understands but loves the hard work of revising and rewriting, which she calls “polishing the silver.”

But, how about the story?

Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge inspired the novel’s structure and enriches it in ways that are impossible to exaggerate. The book opens with pregnant teenage bride Sadie Blue, beat up again by her husband of fifteen days, moonshiner Roy Tupkin. Roy himself has a turn at narrating, but not before we’ve heard from Sadie’s grandmother, an aunt by marriage, the community preacher, the preacher’s sister, the new teacher enticed to the mountain by the preacher’s entreaty (teachers come and go fast in Baines Creek, and no one expects this one to last any longer than the others), and a boy who lives in the woods by hunting and fishing. Kate Shaw, outsider and new teacher, also has a guardian angel in the person of an herbalist midwife neighbor some might call a witch, and Birdie gets to tell her story, too.

Character names beg the reader to pronounce them aloud. Along with Sadie Blue and Roy Tupkin are Gladys Hicks, Marris Jones (proud to be named for the famous Mary Harris “Mother” Jones), Eli and Prudence Perkins (brother and sister), Tattler Swann, Billy Barnhill, and Birdie Rocas. Pharrell Moody looms large in the preacher’s story of his calling. Weeza Dillard is one of Kate Shaw’s little pupils. The store proprietor is Mooney – and only “Mister” if he’s in trouble with the law.

An important gain in having multiple narrators is that we see all of them not only as they see themselves or even as an author might wish to portray them, out of sympathy or lack of it, but as other characters see them. For example, Birdie Rocas at first looks like an urban homeless woman to Kate Shaw, but when Birdie has a chance to tell her story we learn why she wears so many wool skirts at once. Eli Perkins hints at his sister’s excessive martyrdom, her bitter devotion to living poor than she needs to live, but only when we look through Kate Shaw’s eyes do we see Prudence’s dirty neck and fingernails, clothes like rags, and shoes tied together to keep the soles on. The most unlovable characters in the book, we learn, have their own secret heartaches and pain.

Kate Shaw is far from perfect herself. “Book smart and mountain dumb,” is the way Sadie Blue puts it. But what I really appreciate about this book is that Kate Shaw does not come into the community as Sadie’s savior, nor is she shown up as an incompetent fool with all her book learning. Kate recognizes that “the mountain” has a lot to teach her and that the mountain people are not the only ones with needs. She needs a purpose and a place to belong as much as the Dillards need food, Eli needs intellectual companionship, and Sadie needs to find her way to a better life.

If the Creek Don’t Rise country is rich with homemade quilts and watermelon pickles, herbal remedies and colorful stories. It is also home to wife-beating, near-starvation, falling-down houses, and mine accidents that can take breadwinners out quick as snuffing a candle. Leah Weiss captures the rhythm and wit of Appalachian speech without resorting to incomprehensible spellings and a blizzard of apostrophes, and the reader is drawn eagerly and easily into a world that is, for most of us, as remote in experience as the mountain where its characters live is far from the rest of the country.

You’ve probably heard something about studies showing that reading fiction increases empathy. Well, a lot of Americans these days are having a hard time feeling empathy for one another, aren’t we? Feeling bruised ourselves, we rush to judge each other rather than trying to see the world from another’s point of view. If the Creek Don’t Rise just might be the novel to provide a breakthrough perspective to many. Already I can hear lively book club discussions as members exchange opinions on different characters, why they are the way they are, and if they can or should try to be different!

The book is not scheduled for release until late summer, but put it on your list now, or let me know if you want to pre-order a copy.

If the Creek Don’t Rise

by Leah Weiss

Sourcebook Landmark

Paper, $15.95

Available August 2017

My Retreat From the World

Our intrepid Ulysses reading group is getting together next week to discuss Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous but much neglected novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. We don’t usually meet in “high season” but decided to have a couple summer sessions this year. 

It isn’t easy -- scheduling an evening in July or August when eight people are all free. Somehow we managed it last month to talk about Steinbeck’s East of Eden, despite the perennial Up North summer truth, which is that everyone is busy. Working people are employed seven days a week, some of them barely sleeping, and retired people and summer folks have streams of company, some of them barely sleeping. Musicians’ calendars are full. Groups of writers have annual retreats, authors go on book tours, and then there are all the family reunions, fairs, festivities, celebrations, concerts, and parades. And bookstore events! I have had three already this month, have another on Sunday, and just scheduled a fifth for the last Thursday of August!

And yet, despite the nonstop pace of summer life – or maybe in part because of it – our little band decided to clear a space during this high season for our literary “support group.” A reading group (or book club, if you prefer that term), like a group of writers meeting over a long period of time, develops an intimate character with the years. We miss each other when we don't get together. Along with conversation and goodwill grounded on discussion of books, an emotional depth has developed that goes beyond books while always remaining rooted there. Speaking openly, sharing opinions without fear, agreeing and disagreeing, we have come to trust and rely on one another. 

It doesn’t happen overnight. Like marriage, there’s no shortcut to a long relationship.

One thing our group has never been is organized for the long-term future. Whether we spend only one evening or eight sessions on a particular work, at the end we look around at one another expectantly, asking, “What should our next book be?” This time, one participant suggested, we should each come to the session with at least one recommendation. Good idea!

Okay, so what haven’t we read yet? Besides works in English, our group has read translations from French, Italian, Spanish, and Russian, covering a lot of the Western canon, but we have read no German classics, I realized uneasily, and since the omission mirrors a lacuna in my personal reading history, I somewhat reluctantly resolved to remedy the neglect for myself, even if the group voted to choose something different.

And so, for myself, I took home Magister Ludi, by Hermann Hesse, otherwise known as The Glass Bead Game. It was the latter title that intrigued me. A foreword by Theodore Ziolkowski confirmed me in choosing Hesse’s final novel, Ziolkowski noting that

...Joseph Knecht [the main character[ ends by defecting from Castalia, a conclusion that was far from Hesse’s mind when he first dreamed of this new version of the spiritual kingdom.... At least two factors contributed to change Hesse’s attitude toward the ideal which he had been striving to portray in so many works for almost twenty years. First, the sheer reality of contemporary events—the disintegration of the Weimar Republic, the rise of Hitler, the horrors of Nazism—opened Hesse’s eyes to the failure of the intellectuals and convinced him of the futility of any spiritual realm divorced wholly from contemporary social reality. ... Secondly, Hesse’s growing uneasiness regarding an absolute spiritual kingdom was substantiated by his study of Burkhardt’s writings.

Knecht’s life as presented in The Glass Bead Game, then, according to Ziolkowski, “represents the radicalization of the intellectual....”

As a novel, The Glass Bead Game moves slowly. The author is “telling” rather than “showing,” even through his use of a narrative voice not his own. Halfway through the book, as I am now, I still sometimes have the feeling that I’m reading a prologue. That is to say, I don’t know if our reading group would cotton to this book at all or if I even want to suggest imposing it on them. But I’m glad I’m reading it.

You know the whole “slow food” movement? Years ago I suggested something similar in reading, i.e., “slow books.” The Van Wyck Brooks works on American literary history qualify as slow books, as does – of course! – Remembrance of Things Past. A slow book is one in which one becomes immersed, one which alters time, transporting the reader to another, more leisurely age. Conflicts arise in slow books, but we view them from a distance, rather than experiencing them immediately. Does this sound paradoxical? That one is transported and immersed and yet viewing the past from a distance? Very well, I contradict myself.

Slow books, I want to say, are peaceful reading. They are like a day of gentle rain, an opportunity to breathe more slowly, to stop doing for a while.

I will have more to say in future about this Hermann Hesse book. My point for today is simply that amid the bustle of summer, the time I spend reading Magister Ludi early in the morning and before falling asleep is a retreat from the busy, nonstop world of summer. It’s a quiet preview of fall.

Making Time, Taking Time

Years ago I found a birthday card for one of my sisters that said, on the outside, “Time flies....” Inside it said, “whether you’re having fun or not.” How many times over the years have those words come unbidden to my thoughts? It’s a good reminder, though. None of us has more than twenty-four hours a day. Sleeping and working and life’s little maintenance chores take up a lot of time, and if you let them, those activities could absorb all your time.

It had been almost two weeks since I’d spent any time “hanging around with” (as David says) my fictional characters, and I was missing the Wild Man and the Dog Wife, whose story has been evolving in my novel-in-progress since last winter’s sabbatical in the Southwest, so Wednesday morning I carved out some free time, and we got together again. Bruce opened the bookstore for me, and I did not go in until almost noon. That felt good.

But it also felt good later to be at the bookstore, especially on Wednesday afternoon, when a gratifying number of people made time for poetry. 

With my helper Bruce still on duty at the sales counter, I was able to take time myself to sit in the audience and enjoy the event. Jennifer Clark read work from her published book, Necessary Clearings, as well as a couple of the 56 poems she has written on John Chapman (Johnny Appleseed) and that era of American history, but before her reading began, she was already in conversation with early arrivals over questions about poetry in general and her writing process in particular, and questions and discussion picked up again following her presentation. The questions were excellent, the conversation stimulating. Jennifer was happy, and so was I. Others were, as well. One e-mail I received this morning warmed my heart:

Pamela, I really enjoyed your event yesterday and thank you so much for presenting Jennifer Clark.  I don't know if I ever would have met her and her work without an introduction from you!  A delightful woman and a wonderful collection of poems.  I am now her fan.

Thank you, Deb, and everyone else who attended Wednesday’s event, for making time for poetry in your life this summer, and thanks from all of us to Jennifer Clark for being our lovely, lively guest! You can read more about Jennifer and her writing here. 

Then last night our intrepid Ulysses reading group gathered at the home of our Fearless Leader and his wife to discuss East of Eden. It isn’t easy for eight people to find room in busy summer schedules for an evening of literary conversation, but we managed it and, flushed with triumph, have agreed to meet again in August and to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin between now and then. It’s the first year we’ve tried to make time to get together between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Clearly, we all find the effort worthwhile.

This morning I took time to have my first cup of coffee outdoors, where I could sit back and enjoy my garden flowers to the accompaniment of birdsong. When I opened the front door, Sarah rushed out to chase a rabbit into tall grass but gave up the chase in less than a minute and contented herself with taking up chipmunk patrol in the shade near my lawn chair. Chipmunk patrol for Sarah is lying in the grass and watching, not obsessively but casually. Sometimes she doesn’t even bother to move when a chipmunk appears.

I think Sarah on chipmunk patrol is giving herself permission to take time out and soak up the delicious atmosphere of Michigan summer. I know that’s what I’m doing when I take the time to make the time for reading or writing or -- listening to someone else read to me. Ah-h-h! 

Who Decides Who “Belongs”?

Summer bookstore flowers on Waukazoo Street

Lots of bookstores have book clubs. Mine doesn’t. Over the years I’ve been asked if Dog Ears Books had a book club, received suggestions about what kind of book club various people might enjoy, and have considered the possibility from many angles. Repeatedly. Over and over (to be redundant, as “repeatedly” already said “over and over,” didn’t it?)

So why don’t I have a bookstore book club?

Wouldn’t it be a good idea? Wouldn’t it (1) give people encouragement to gather here, (2) to buy books from me, and (3) wouldn’t it add to the culture of our little village?

There are the pesky suspicions that probably arise in some minds when I mention our “intrepid Ulysses band,” the small group that first came together to read James Joyce and has been meeting irregularly ever since--why weren’t other people invited to join? and what about that other group that met for a few years before the five women the group comprised couldn’t even manage to find five times a year when their schedules were compatible? what kind of exclusive little clique was that?--so let me get the suspicions out of the way first. The Ulysses group and the erstwhile five-woman group were not my book clubs, nor were they bookstore book clubs. I didn’t start either one of them, and neither one met at the bookstore. Also, after a while, as those in book clubs or reading groups know from experience, a bonding among members can make it difficult to enlarge the circle. A shared history has grown up among group members. Besides, the group that’s still going meets at the same home every time, and our Fearless Leader and his wife feel that we are pretty much at capacity now for seating.

For a while, I tried to keep up with three groups, these two small ones and the larger, drop-ins welcome group at the township library. Once, during the library’s remodeling, the library group met at Dog Ears Books, but that only happened one time, and it happened before the new wall went up between Dog Ears Books and Red Mullein, making it more challenging to accommodate a large number of chairs. But, as I say, the smallest group fell apart, and I haven’t kept up with the library group.

Part of the explanation for the last sentence of the paragraph above is the same as the explanation for why there’s no Dog Ears Books book club. I can’t do everything. I have been blessed beyond my just deserts to have Bookstore Bruce as a regular part-time volunteer for well over a decade (without him I would never have a day off), but, like me, he’s getting older, too, and I can’t ask him to take on more than he already shoulders. Other bookstores have paid staff. Libraries have paid staff, plus whole armies of volunteers. Dog Ears Books is basically a one-person operation.

This morning can serve as an example. After bank and post office errands and the tacking up of a few posters around town, back at the bookstore, among the storm of e-mail messages (I hadn’t checked in since early the day before) were inquiries from an author about when her book review would appear in a local newspaper; from a book publicist asking if I would write a review of a book sent to me last week; from authors contacted by the publicist about reviewing, wondering who she was; from someone in a local book club urging me to have an author event for a writer who had recently been the guest of their group; from a couple more people wanting to reserve copies of Ken Scott’s ICE CAVES book (order e-mails are always welcome!); and a whole flurry from the Ulysses group people, trying to figure out when we can meet next and what we should try to read and discuss. And that was just e-mail. There is also the telephone, the UPS delivery, and – bless their hearts! – customers in the bookstore! You are the best, folks: you’re why I’m here, and you keep me in business!

Ordering new books, looking at collections to buy, in-store sales, stocking shelves, inventory management, shipping orders, publicity, advertising, bookkeeping, correspondence – I mean, not to make this “all about me” but those jobs are me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me. In-store events? Me again. Book clubs, like other in-store gatherings, don’t happen by themselves. They need to be planned. They need to be organized. Word about them needs to get out. Preparations need to be made. As much fun as it all is, there’s a lot of work involved. That’s not a contradiction: parties are fun, too, but it’s a lot of work to get one together.

One summer someone thought it would be fun if people simply came and brought books they’d been reading and shared them with others, rather than having everyone read the same book. I think that would be great for a group of friends to do, but a bookstore book club needs to be selling books to members if it’s going to function as part of the business, i.e., to keep the bookstore alive.

When someone says to me, “I’d love to be in a book group,” I say, “Why not start one?” And now I'll say that if anyone would like to start one and have it meet regularly here, all I’d ask is that members order their books through my bookstore. Organizing, choosing books, scheduling meetings, refreshments – all that and whatever else people would want included would have to be the responsibility of the person starting the group, but there’s no reason why it can’t happen.

I’m here. I’ll be here all summer. And I do try to make everyone who comes in the door feel welcome. You are all my friends, old and new.

Winter evening, back in time

David Is Doing My Homework!

Upright, angled, falling and on the ground

Book clubs, reading groups—call them what you will, they tend to become (especially the smaller ones, I’m sure) very tight-knit little fellowships as years go by. The reading group I’ve been in the longest—I’d say it’s been at least six years, maybe more, that we’ve been getting together as time permits—meets only five times a year. There are five of us in it (all women), and busy schedules make even our five meetings difficult to schedule, but we persevere, and so it happens that sometimes we meet even when all five of us have not completed the book under discussion. Not reading the whole book? Isn’t that heresy?

Here I must say, not so much boasting of a virtue as admitting to a compulsion, that so far in our history I have always come to meetings having started at the beginning and made my way completely through the book in question, but my perfect record is headed for the dustbin this month. I have been so busy with Dante and with book reviews and with proof-reading and with being outdoors (both with Sarah and without), keeping up with multiple blogs and wrapping up year-end bookkeeping, that when, of three possible dates for us to meet, the very earliest was fixed upon (not my preference, you may be sure!), my heart sank. “I’ll do my best” was all I could promise.

My outdoor companion, always ready to go

Then on Monday, having read only the first three pages, I handed David the book so he would have something to read while I visited a friend in the hospital. I told him he would find the story “gripping.” Understatement! When I got back to the car I don’t think he’d even realized I’d been gone, and he has been engrossed in his reading ever since. Now and then he puts down the book to give me a report on what is happening “now” to the main character. He has also been telling all his friends about this fabulous book.

What can I say in my own defense? David is not writing a paper for me. (If he wrote anything I would publish it here under his name, not mine.) He won’t be taking a test for me. (There is no test, or I would be reading the book right this minute!) And, really, would it not be unkind to separate him from a story he is enjoying so very much, just so I can complete an “assignment”?

Don’t you want to know what the book is? It is Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption. And there’s another copy at my bookstore in Northport, if Bruce didn’t make off with it today after David’s rave review!

Sarah in the late afternoon sunshine

Reading Group Going to HELL!

I mean it. No kidding. Six of us met the other evening and came to a momentous decision: the next book we read together will be Dante’s Inferno. 

Our merry band originally formed to read James Joyce’s Ulysses, which a couple members said they could never hope to get through without support, and we were emboldened by our success (due largely to Steve’s leadership) to go on to read plays by Shakespeare, Molière and Beckett, then Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina. I was the wimp on the last round, sitting out Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, pleading too many other commitments for the fall season.

But now—Dante! We launched ourselves into the mood by looking at Steve and Lauran’s photo albums of their trip to Italy and by hearing about Marilyn’s more recent Rome-to-Florence adventure. The rest of us were nonplussed when Marilyn said that Dante’s name was originally Durante. Like Jimmy? Imagine that!

More serious consideration on our first Dante evening was to decide which edition to read and whose translation. In the end we agreed that we didn’t need to worry much about everyone reading the same English words with this particular work, as we can refer to a canto by Roman numeral and, within cantos, to numbered lines. So it is that four of us are committed to Mandelbaum’s translation, while Steve will be using his trusty Binyon, which features a synopsis of each canto immediately preceding it, rather than endnotes, and the sixth member will rely on an audio version. It will be interesting to experience more than one version of the work in our discussion.

If all goes well when we meet in January, we may proceed to the other sections of The Divine Comedy in the spring. But maybe not, too. As someone scrawled in the back of my paperback copy of Paradiso:

Is it easier to describe sin, horror and death? Satan in Milton the most interesting angel--the tortures in Inferno very creative, graphic, in terms of earthly bodies that we would understand--Paradise just a bunch of lights.

Well, that's one person's anonymous opinion. How do you see it? Are sinners most interesting than angels? And where would you put saints on that continuum?

Assigned Reading: Bits and Pieces

Somehow I became responsible for two different reading group assignments that have discussions within a week of each other, so what with the groups and making preparations for the Jerry Dennis book launch and Fall Festival, it's a busy time. No pictures today. Sorry!

For the small group reading Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, I sent these questions:

I suggest we focus for this work on the poet's voice. What do you think of the way Whitman portrays America? How does the poet come across as a man? What did you like and/or dislike about Whitman based on this book? Do you feel that his poetry was sincere?

To another small group meeting to discuss Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone, I suggested we begin with these:

(1) The twin theme opens and closes the story. What did you think of the way it was developed? What did it add to the novel? Did any aspects of the author's development of the twin theme delight/surprise/disappoint you? Why?

(2) Who was your favorite character and why?

(3) The cultures of Ethiopia, America and India take distant second place to the culture of medicine as presented in this novel. Do you think this is true for surgeons? What other groups might it also be true of? [Obviously I was too lazy to rewrite this sentence to avoid the preposition at the end!]

(4) Some people think this book would have been stronger or better if it had been shorter. What do you think? If you were the editor, would you have asked the novelist to make cuts--and, if so, where?

Years ago one of these groups chose to read read Wangeri Maathai’s memoir, Unbowed. Now I see that Nobel Peace Prize winner Maathai has died, age 71. One thing is certain: while alive, she did her work. What is your most important life's work? What is mine? Are we doing it?

THE HELP Discussion (and Disagreement) Continues

I’ve decided to begin a new post to continue discussion on discussion (yes, that’s what I mean) of The Help, by Kathryn Stockett. I did go back and add into my last post a link (here it is again) to a review of the book, not only for the review itself but, much more, for the very lengthy train of comments that follows the review, comments left by American and British readers, native-born and immigrant Americans, black and white readers, women (mostly), men (a significant number), Northerners and Southerners both, and that’s where I want to begin today. Reading these comments held me enthralled for hours on Thursday morning, and I recommend the experience, especially if you are ever tempted to think that any one group of people, however that group is defined, will respond en bloc to any book written. If you visit the site and have the time and patience to read through all the comments (which I cannot recommend strongly enough), eventually you’ll come to a point where commentators are coming back to respond to comments made in response to their earlier comments, and that’s where the conversation becomes more difficult but, I believe, all the more worth pursuing for that reason. One of the black women who became a major voice in the conversation has her own website.

Whatever you thought of the book (if you read it), in my opinion the cross-racial, cross-gender, cross-generational, etc. conversation is much more riveting. We do need to talk to each other, to people who have had different experiences from ours, to people whose opinions do not agree with ours. Only if we can stay in the conversation, even when tempers flare, voices rise and tears start up--we can’t control others and can’t always control ourselves--is there hope for our country and for our world. I believe that.

So now, having opened up the can of worms with the question in my previous post (Can this white author portray the experience of black women?), I’ll stick my neck out and put my opinion of the book on the line, first making clear what I’m not saying. I’m not saying writers of fiction can only succeed in offering the experience of their own lives, i.e., that fiction should be given up and only autobiography written and published. Neither am I saying that a writer has no “right” to imagine a character of the opposite gender, of a different race or ethnicity or religion or sexual orientation or what-have-you. But just as freedom of expression exists for writers, it exists for readers, too. Not only reviewers and critics and academics but every ordinary reader, too, has a right to evaluate the success of a work of fiction according to her or his standards, however personal those standards may be.

Now, backtracking:

I approached the book with trepidation. I was wary. My defenses were up. I wondered (this is a point several people made in comments and reviews) why the black characters’ dialogue was spelled out in dialect but not that of the white characters, and all I could think was that maybe a white Southerner like the author doesn’t hear herself as speaking with an accent. A minor point, but it kept my defenses up, so that I questioned other authorial decisions all the way along, and by the time I reached the end of the book I still wasn’t sure what to think about it. I had entered into the story to a degree but not completely. The fate of the characters concerned me, but at the same time there were plot devices I could not fully buy. My resistance, not overcome by the novel itself, was not overcome by the library discussion group, either. Am I just stubborn, or what?

Then I found the California Literary Review site and realized I was not alone and that opinions about this book range all over the map! Reading those comments helped. They also took me into a much larger world of literary and social discussion, and I was moved and enlightened and encouraged by the willingness of readers to share their opinions and to disagree.

So here’s where my thoughts have taken me so far (for convenience and clarity I’ll number the few points I want to make):

1. In general, any writer attempting the point of view of a character with experience way outside the writer’s own has greatly multiplied the difficulties, already considerable, of producing believable fiction. No writer—in our country, at this time in history, at least—is barred from making the attempt. It does take chutzpah and invites more than the average amount of criticism. I have often heard it said of a male novelist, “His women characters aren’t real,” and certain novels by female writers are dismissed by men, either without comment or with a disparaging remark that “Men don’t talk like that.” It isn’t that men are not allowed to create female characters or that women aren’t permitted to create male characters, but that whenever we know the gender of the author we subject the characters of the opposite gender to closer scrutiny in the work. Hence the many female mystery writers who use initials rather than first names. (Fascinating studies have been done with subjects reading short pieces and not knowing the gender of the writers; when gender was revealed, most felt they should have been able to pick up clues to gender, even where they failed miserably. I don’t know if similar race-blind reading/writing studies have been done but would like to know of any out there.)

2. Anyone can say, or any work of fiction, “I don’t believe it.” Years ago I had an acting teacher who told our class that just as we didn’t have to be hens to recognize rotten eggs, anyone could criticize acting, simply by saying it didn’t ring true. The same holds for fiction. If you believe it, it succeeded for you; if not, it didn’t.

3. So what does it take for fiction to succeed, for characters to be believable to readers? As far as I’m concerned, the characters I’m reading about don’t have to be “like me” (how much would I learn if that were the case?), but I do need to feel that the writer has gotten inside the characters, so that I have at least the illusion that I am encountering a person rather than a type. Here the standard I keep coming back to over the years, because my first reading of this novel was such a watershed experience for me as a reader, is James Baldwin’s Another Country. I maintain that anyone coming to this book with no knowledge of the author’s identity would not be able to say with certainty that the writer was black or white, male or female, gay or straight, because Baldwin was able to inhabit all of his characters with sympathy. They were not simple characters, either. Betty Smith, author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, working with the material of her own life, had a similar ability. You don’t necessarily fall in love with all of Baldwin’s or Smith’s characters, but because of the depth given them by their authors (and here the word ‘author’ takes on its great creative power!), you realize at least part of why they are the way they are, and you grow in understanding.

4. So, finally, I’ll allow that I was disappointed in Stockett’s novel. Characters were recognizable, yes, but for me the third and fourth dimensions were lacking. Why did Minnie put up with physical abuse from her husband? James Baldwin would have given us some insight. Why was Miss Leefolt so cold to her own little daughter? Betty Smith would have let us see a little way into the mother’s hard heart and how it had gotten that way. I can imagine Minnie understanding how demoralizing life is for a black man and knowing that only at home can he have any power, and I can imagine that Mae Mobley’s mother might be unhappy in her marriage or doesn’t have pride in anything she herself has ever done, but I have to do all this imagining on my own, because the author hasn’t done it for me. These are limitations in characterization, and most of the characters are similarly limited. Besides this flaw, along with the very believable general circumstances (historical fact, many of them), there were other plot contrivances that I found unbelievable and/or forced.

So that’s what I think of the book. I’m not arguing with anyone who enjoyed reading it. I enjoyed parts of it myself. It isn’t a book I would recommend, however, given all the other, much better novels that deserve to be read.

What I think of the discussions it has sparked is something else again. The discussions I’ve found online I find very exciting! I left my own comment, saying that this, all these different people from different backgrounds with different opinions—this is the movie (probably documentary) that I want to see, not a film version of the book. “But if there is so much deep discussion because of it, doesn’t that mean the book had to be pretty good?” Someone posed this question to me, and it’s a good question, but my answer is no, I don’t think the quality of discussion depends on the quality of the catalyst.

I can, however, be grateful to the catalyst. Kathryn Stockett had a lot of chutzpah to write the book she did. She is a successful story-teller, with a best-seller under her belt, and now she will have a lifetime to grow as a writer. Meanwhile, for now, the controversy continues.

Reading--and My Rebellious Nature

Junior high, high school, college, graduate school—that’s a lot of years of assigned reading, so while I love book discussions, sometimes the “assignment” nature of a book club or reading group crosses swords with the rebel in me who says, “No more assigned books! I’ll read whatever I want to read!” I was comforted to hear our township librarian say she sometimes feels the same way.

It helps me that two of the groups I’m part of are very small, and none of the groups meets every month of the year. The intrepid band that formed to read Ulysses is currently reading Anna Karenina together, a much less daunting assignment. It’s long but goes along at a good clip, and we're meeting every other week to discuss two (of the eight) parts at each meeting. Another tiny group (only five women) probably won’t meet again until May, and only two of us have finished the book our May hostess suggested, A Suitable Boy, which may be the longest book I’ve ever read.

The book discussion group that meets at the township library is open to anyone, and different people drop in and out as the spirit moves them. This month’s book is Cutting for Stone, which I have not read (though I read and loved Verghese’s first book, a memoir entitled My Own Country), but I’ll probably go to the meeting and listen to what others have to say. I asked, and the librarian told me I would be welcome without having read the book. That took the pressure off. Bookseller and librarian, we feel the weight of our reading responsibilities keenly, but we can no more read everything than can anyone else, and we have to read selectively, difficult as that sometimes is.

Then there are the tasks I assign myself. A general one is to list every book I read here on the blog but only books I read from beginning to end, which can lead to a feeling that any book I begin I must read in its entirety. But no, that doesn’t work. Halfway through The Book of Salt, for example, I rebelled, feeling like a hostage to the character’s interior life. He would say that he’d met a man on a bridge in Paris, for example, and I wanted to know which bridge, but he wouldn’t tell me! I wanted to be in Paris, not a prisoner in this young man’s head! As you see, this is not a criticism of the novel at all. It was just not where I wanted to be. Now I’m some chapters into An Accidental Autobiography, by Barbara Grizutti Harrison, and for a while I thought I wouldn't keep going, but so far, as I reach the end of each chapter, I begin the next. We’ll see how long Ms. Harrison and I continue together. The punctuation drives me a little nuts, but her way with words and her understanding of memory as neither chronological nor hierarchical has me captivated. For now.

And then there is Dante, lying neglected but not completely forgotten on the top of my dresser. It isn’t that I lost interest in the story, but the translation wasn’t doing it for me. Where is the lyricism I expected of the poetry? Whose translation should I be reading instead? Well, maybe I will, and maybe I won’t! That “should” word in my own question has already roused the rebel spirit who sleeps with one eye open!

What a coincidence! Writing of my neglect of Dante, I went to visit Lifetime Reader's blog and found a topic that made me smile, "Books We Have Hated." Are there books you were assigned to read and absolutely hated? Do you still hate them?

This and That

Not having a lot to say tonight, I'm making the picture big. Also, something tells me that today was the peak of our Leelanau color: storms predicted for tonight and on through the week will no doubt strip many trees of their leaves.

Blogging is something like talking on the radio, as I recall it from my high school days as a volunteer take-a-request telephone answerer and radio announcer. Sometimes no one would call in, and we would make up requests. "The next song is for Nancy from Glenn, who can't wait to see her tomorrow in social studies." Stuff like that. We wondered if anyone was out there listening. I mean, how would you know? If anyone is out there reading tonight (or in future, whenever you might happen across this, by accident or design), and if you belong to a book club, I'd appreciate hearing from you with a list of books your group is reading. I'll be speaking at the Kalamazoo Public Library in the spring on the subject of book clubs and what they read and would like to have as diverse a list of lists as possible. Thanks in advance!

Obviously, I haven't resolved the problem of Blogger not liking the Mac/Safari combination, which is why there are no links in my postings. Guess I need to go researching and see what other Mac users have done to get around the trouble.