How Others See Us: “America,” the European Myth

". . . like the first morning . . ."

John Locke started it, with his Second Treatise on Government. “In the beginning,” he wrote, “all the world was America.” He wasn’t talking about a particular continent or set of continents but about human social life before the establishment of “civil society,” before established cultural traditions and legal concepts.

What would human life conducted in a pure “state of nature” look like? Where Thomas Hobbes imagined the state of nature as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” the constant warfare of “all against all,” and Jean-Jacques Rousseau envisioned “noble savages,” unspoiled rather than deformed by civilization, Locke (neither as pessimistic as Hobbes nor as idealistic as Rousseau) took a middle ground. Acknowledging and welcoming the advantages and protections conferred by civil society, he nevertheless saw their beginnings in the family, nature’s “first society,” with responsible adults working together to improve property and nurture children, long before there were laws or cultural traditions in place.

Locke’s idea of “all the world as America” fired the European imagination, as did the American frontier itself. Long into the 20^th century, Hollywood Western adventure stories were as popular overseas as in the United States, Western movies even at times copied and filmed in European countries (“spaghetti Westerns”), and that fascination is not over yet. Epic literary tales like Jim Harrison’s Revenge find huge audiences abroad. “Jim Harrison?” exclaimed a bookseller I asked in Paris about French translations of our friend’s books. “J’adore Jim Harrison!”

What do most European tourists want to see when they visit the United States? New York, the Grand Canyon, Disney World, and Hollywood. A few may fly over Chicago and get an idea of Lake Michigan, but it is the open, empty expanses of land, the young mountain ranges, the soaring skyscrapers, and the Disney fantasy that best answer European preconceptions of our land.

I was reminded of the myth of America when I picked up Paris la Grande, by Philippe Meyer. Ah, Paris! Surely the antithesis of Chicago, wouldn’t you imagine? But immediately in the opening section the author astounds me by writing of Paris as “cette espèce d’Amerique où chacun peut espérer donner à sa vie un nouveau départ.” Paris, he is saying, is a kind of America -- because (and here comes the myth) one can come to Paris to start a new life on a blank slate! Coming either to Paris or to America, he believes, you can leave small town traditional life and escape your neighbors’ eyes and judgment!

When I was in graduate school, a friend from Ethiopia who had had a very French education up to that point was astonished to find that large numbers of Americans, like “country people” anywhere in the world, maintained attachments to specific regions and landscapes and to life in far-flung towns and villages. My love of Michigan amazed her. Why would I, an educated person, identify so strongly with a particular section of the country? Wasn’t “America” a more universal concept and therefore a more appropriate object for my devotion? She was also surprised to find intense religious feeling among so many Americans. Before coming here, she had imagined America as a land where inhabitants looked only to the future, relying on nothing but science and law, feeling no inhibitions and respecting no traditions.

But that’s just it. Even America is not “America” in that sense – it is not, that is, the mythic “America” -- and it never was. Before Europeans “discovered” the continent, different peoples called different regions of the land home, and while some of them moved from one place to another with the seasons, it rarely occurred to any of them to leave the familiar entirely, without any reason, and strike out for parts unknown. Tradition is part of human life. Our first attachments can only be local.

Paris has its own traditions, and, like Chicago or Cincinnati, many of its neighborhoods are small towns in themselves, peopled by inhabitants who immigrated to the capital from an outlying province or a foreign country, bringing with them their food and customs. Like New York, Paris can be provincial, too, and much of its charm lies in that fact. Meyer recognizes as much, I learn as I read on, but it is still the possibility of anonymity in the metropolis that attracts him and, he believes, attracts most people who come to make their home there.

Isn’t the possibility of freedom in anonymity the attraction of most cities as opposed to small towns? I don’t see it as particular to Paris, much though I love Paris. Meyer’s migration from Versailles to Paris has much in common with Alfred Kazin’s escape from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and I found the delightful feeling of freedom myself in Cincinnati, where I could roam the streets and neighborhoods like a tourist no one knew (like Chiang Yee’s “silent traveler”) and then go home alone to my little student apartment to read and write.

Paris as “America”! Leave it to a Frenchman to come up with such a startling and controversial concept!

Can you imagine a French family coming to live in Northport with the expectation of escaping neighbors’ eyes? In our little village? And yet, ain’t we America, too?

* * * 

Another local note: En cherchant le vert du commencement du printemps ce matin, je l’ai trouvé! Not yet visible from the road, the first wild leeks are up an inch or two in the woods.

Spring is beginning to spring

Detour: Fiction

[The morning after watching an Elia Kazan film, "America, America," I woke up with the beginning of this story in my head, so I got up and started writing. Clearly, the film was my inspiration, although the events in my story were not in Kazan's, and his setting is not mine.]

Once It Begins, It Goes On and On©

P. J. Grath

Here is a picture of my beloved, so big and strong he was! That morning he went to church with his sister, it happened. He never came home, and now I will never marry. That is reality in our little village.

It was not always so. We all used to live together like a family. The Alwadi people and the Mazawa people went to school together, farmed together, owned businesses together, married each other, – anything you can imagine people doing here, we did together, despite tribal and religious differences. The old ones remember that way of life, but all the young ones know is hatred. What no one can recall is how the old way gave way and became what it is today. It is as if it happened overnight, but surely that cannot be so, can it?

My own father was Mazawa. He was killed in the first fighting. By an Alwadi? I will never know, and that’s best, because my mother, after all, is Alwadi. Which am I? You tell me. When I have to leave the house, I go with my face covered and my head down. We no longer have friends or neighbors. No one can trust anyone.

What I am telling, this big change, if it did happen overnight, it had to have happened the night before my father was killed, but my thinking cannot wrap around that thought and push it back further, because everyone, Alwadi and Mazawa, loved my father. There was no reason for anyone to kill him. An accident it had to be. But if he had fallen from a roof or been kicked in the head by a mule – other ways of dying by accident – no one would have thought of revenge. So, since revenge was the first thought, hatred must have begun already in men’s minds, mustn’t it? Could one man start such hatred? Who could it have been? Why? Over what? It seems impossible, and yet it had to start somewhere before it could spread, isn’t it so?

What a shame my beloved’s sister came back here! She had married and was living in Morocco, safely out of the way. Then her husband died. She’d had a child and wanted to bring him back to her own home to raise him. Stupid! What kind of future does a boy have here? If she hadn’t come back, would her brother have been in church with her that morning? No, he would have been safe, she would have been safe, her child would have been safe.

Naturally, the bomb was set off on the men’s side of the church, so his sister, on the other side with her baby boy, escaped unharmed. Physically unharmed, that is. The men were buried in the rubble of the church’s collapse.

This is all I have now – this grave to visit, this photograph to hold. If I could find the man who started all this, I would kill him with my own hands. It would not bring back my beloved, but what else have I to live for if not revenge?

4/2/2013

It Will Be Confusing For a Little While

CONSTRUCTION ZONE!

New wall framed in

New drywall and insulation going up

Gallery to the left, bookstore to the right

BUT WE ARE OPEN TODAY, SATURDAY, DESPITE THE CONFUSION!

I know that the determined booklovers will find their way in!

You Weren’t the Only One Listening to the Radio, Dawn

In the truck the other day, on our way to Northport, the radio was playing an old Jimmy Buffet song, one I’d never listened to closely and wasn’t listening to closely that morning, either. My attention was directed beyond the windshield, my eyes scanning for deer and turkeys. We’ve been seeing a lot of both, the deer dark and lithe this time of year, the male turkeys all strutting and fanning their tails. So, as I say, I wasn’t listening closely, but the refrain kept repeating (as refrains will do) until it penetrated my consciousness. Huh? What was he singing?

“What to the left, and what to the right?” I asked David.

“Fins,” he answered – but I heard the answer as “Finns,” and that seemed strange, coming from Buffet.

“Is it a U.P. song?” I asked.

David cracked up. “Fins! ‘You’re the only bait in town!’" he added as clarification.

“There’s plenty of fishing in the U.P.,” I protested, defending my interpretation. “Remember the bait machine outside our motel in Manistique?”

“It’s about sharks,” David insisted – and of course he was right.

But if you know the U.P., can’t you see that small town bar, all the local Finns lined up with draft beers after a day of ice fishing, and then a lone woman walks in?

David shook his head. “Finns,” he reminded me, "wouldn’t even speak to her. It isn’t the same thing at all.”

I wonder. After all, with logic, everything depends on your premises. Of course, my premises depended on only hearing the refrain and not the verses. The rest of the song tells the story clearly. Oh, well!

Book Review: VIRGIN SOUL (or, "What were the Sixties really like?")

“What were the Sixties really like?” When a younger friend asked me this question, in a moment I suddenly felt many years older, realizing that what was “just yesterday” to me was a historical period to my youthful friend. But how to answer her question? I’ve been thinking about it for years now (haunted by the question still, obviously), as another two decades have slipped past. Here's an overview from Wikipedia to get you started, if you were "born too late" to be one of us, but --

There can be no single answer to what the Sixties were like, because they were different for everyone who lived through them, even if only American experience is considered. How old were you in the Sixties, for starters? A little child, a college student, part of the workforce, or someone “over 30,” one of those the young were told not to trust? Male or female, black or white or yellow or red or brown? Living in San Francisco or Chicago; Selma, Alabama; Aberdeen, South Dakota; or in the wilds of Maine? Rich or poor or in-between?

Student, lawyer, secretary, grocery store cashier, factory line worker, teacher, or Peace Corps volunteer? A draftee in Vietnam, conscientious objector in El Paso, refugee in Toronto, or a protestor at Berkeley? Singing and playing in a rock-and-roll band? Member of the Black Panthers or Students for a Democratic Society, or Young Republicans, or the Country Club?

There were peaceful demonstrations, and there was violence, and there was the undeclared war, and there were drugs, and there was also the continuation of American suburban life, with big weddings and brides in white. Toward the end of the Sixties there was the Pill, but all along there were pregnancies (planned and unplanned), abortions, and young families, some hippies, others mainstream. And for those in their ‘teens and 20s, there was exciting music, poetry everywhere, plenty of available sex and drugs, a lot of lofty ideals, and a minefield of dangerous pitfalls.

That's why I say there is no telling what the decade was “really like,” except in terms of individual lives, but if you weren't there and want a close-up view I just read a new novel that presents a convincing picture through one particular window.

Virgin Soul

by Judy Juanita

NY: Viking, 2013

$26.95

We meet the novel's protagonist, Geniece Hightower, in Oakland, California, in the summer of 1964. Just out of high school, she enrolls in Oakland City College, “City,”

. . . a raggedy, in-the-flatlands, couldn’t-pass-the-earthquake-code, stimulating, politically popping repository of blacks who couldn’t get to college any other way, whites who had flunked out of the University of California, and anybody else shrewd enough to go for free for two years and transfer to Berkeley, prereqs zapped.

Geniece is a journalism major. Right away meets Huey Newton. Right away she loves sitting on the campus lawn, listening to the “black intellectuals and the white boys from the W.E.B. Du Bois Club talk.” Quickly she learns that light-skinned black students (“yellow, high yellow, sandy yellow, mellow yellow, sandy mariney, light brown, peach, or caramel skin; the line stopped there”) had one hangout, darker-skinned blacks like herself another. She lives at the Y (10 p.m. curfew) and works 20 hours a week at the county welfare department in Oakland. She’s launched into life but still has her aunt and uncle’s warning in her head:

“We want you to be a virgin until you graduate from college. If you’re not a virgin, you won’t graduate. Once you have sex, you can’t think about anything else.”

Judy Juanita’s novel is divided into four main sections, one for each of Geniece’s four years of college. Sophomore year she is introduced to Black Muslims and has her hair cut into a natural: “Sleek, short, very African.” She wonders what “being in love” feels like and if she is in love. No longer living at the Y, she allows a boyfriend to hold political education classes in her apartment, and she cleans and cooks for those who attend.

I knew I was becoming militant. I just didn’t know if I wanted to become a militant. Malcolm X, Betty Shabazz, the protesters, the sit-in demonstrators down south were my heroes. I loved them from a distance and on paper. But the militants I met, mostly the guys on the soapbox on Grove Street, were harsh and abrasive and condescending to everyone, not just white people. And they made people do things. . . . I didn’t want that kind of power over people. I just wanted it over myself.

Huey Newton isn’t the only real person readers encounter in the pages of this work of fiction. Bobby Seale is there, and Stokeley Carmichael, too. The war in Vietnam is audible always in the background.

Junior year is a turning point for Geniece, as one black group goes one way and the Black Panther Party (BPP) for Self-Defense another. She enrolls at State and lands a work-study job in Admissions, date-stamping application entries from all over the world.

Lives came out of the words: how little money one’s father made; the off-the-wall place one had traveled to; family crises; serious illness defeated; political activity noted like a badge of honor – “I belong to the W. E. B. Du Bois Club.” They weren’t afraid: “I participated in the freedom rides.” Stuff I never mentioned: “The protest changed my whole life.” State was a destination for radical students: “I’m a child of a union family.” Dissidents. The streets of Berkeley were the pull for people bucking the system. Nonconformists. State was pulling people like me. I was not an in-between. I was a junior facing a cast of thousands wanting to be right where I was, a part of something big, essential, swimming in the big ocean.

In the course of her college career, it is not until her junior year that Geniece sees herself at the center of social change taking place across the country. Before that she felt like “an in-between”; now she is, as people said in the Sixties, “where it’s at.” But she is not yet where she will be at the end of her senior year. . . .

I don’t want to give away too many details of this story, because it’s the details that make the central character’s life a real one and make that time period come alive. Her social and sexual and romantic relationships are important to her development as an adult. Her feelings for journalism wax and wane, but editing the Panthers’ newspaper is an important job she takes very seriously. Also with the BPP, she confronts the question of guns for self-defense, and a volunteer job through the Tutorial Center introduces her to two young, self-sufficient black girls neglected by their battered mother. Education is not limited to the classroom. (It never should be.)

But Geniece Hightower is determined to graduate in four years, so she wisely avoids serious involvement with drugs. While music is part of her life, it also remains, like Vietnam, in the background. Race, class, and gender relationships – politics within and beyond the university – the future she will have as a Black American woman – this young woman maintains ties to her family at the same time she is finding her own way in the world.

Personal, political – political, personal – yes, this was the Sixties. Judy Juanita gives readers a very real look at that exciting and turbulent time through the eyes of her strong, questing protagonist. There are pages when the prose lifts into lyricism, so it should be no surprise that the author’s writing has for years encompassed poetry as well as reporting. This is her first novel. I’m glad she wrote it and hope it won’t be her last.

She (Not I) Walked Another 1,000 Miles!

New on left, first on right --

She has a lot of energy, to put it mildly. Loreen Niewenhuis burst upon the Michigan literary scene four years ago with a blog. Her project was to walk the shoreline of Lake Michigan, beginning in Chicago, going north through Michigan and around the top of the lake through the Upper Peninsula, south along the Wisconsin shoreline, and back to Chicago. She did it and put her story into a book, A 1,000-Mile Walk on the Beach (2011).

Having accomplished all this, Loreen immediately began planning her next project, and when spring of 2012 came around, she began walking selected stretches of all the Great Lakes – another 1,000 miles total – and yes, there is now another book, A 1,000-Mile Great Lakes Walk (2013).

Besides boundless energy, Niewenhuis brings other special talents to her on-site observations and later retelling of her adventures. She has background as a cancer researcher, for one thing, and her trained scientific eye and mind see all kinds of details that others would miss while walking on the beach. Her engaging personality makes a difference, too. Private property owners along the lakeshores and audiences for her public appearances alike find Loreen’s enthusiasm and friendliness irresistible. It was true when she first visited Dog Ears Books, and it was true again when she gave a talk at the Leelanau Township Public Library.

And now Loreen is coming back to Northport! If you’ve noticed the announcement in the right-hand column of this blog, you’re not surprised, but there are a couple more unusual aspects to the story.

(1) What is a “pre-launch” of a new book? Well, Loreen is making her book available to independent booksellers eight weeks before it will officially be for sale online. She’s giving us a head start, bless her heart!

(2) There’s also the matter of the ongoing remodeling project at 106 Waukazoo. Added to my having invited Northport high school students to meet Loreen and hear about her adventure, I had created quite a challenge for myself. Business neighbors to the rescue! Erik and Deirdre Owen of Motovino and Brew North, the same people who have brought live music to Northport on Friday nights, offered their space for my event.

(This morning at Brew North, as I work....)

So our bookstore season opener event will not even be held at the bookstore, but I’m feeling very good about it nonetheless. We’ll be right across the street, able to accommodate a big crowd, and to the energy of Loreen Niewenhuis we’ll be adding the energy of Erik and Deirdre Owen and the energy of Northport High School students and teachers. The rest of the northern Michigan public is more than welcome to this event, also! The more, the merrier!

Yes, there’s big energy in Northport, so come experience it for yourself on Thursday, April 18, from 12:15 to 2:15 at Brew North, at the corner of Waukazoo and Nagonaba. Following the author visit in the Big Store building, we’ll cross the street and be back at Dog Ears Books until 5 p.m. That’s only two weeks from this coming Thursday. Sound good?

If I Could Choose (One of These Two Worlds)

Yesterday, Friday morning, we went to Northport early and loaded the truck up yet again with boxes of books from storage to donate to Goodwill. (Gotta shrink that footprint! Clear the way for workmen and new tenants!) David had other errands in Traverse City, too, so before noon he left on his appointed rounds. Bruce was on the job by 11 o’clock, and I went out then, on foot around Northport, to post and distribute announcements for my bookstore’s first author event of the season, which we will be holding across the street at Brew North and of which you will hear much more very soon. (Hint: She walked another thousand miles!) The sun was shining, the sky was blue, and it was a lovely day to be out and about in my little village, quiet this week with the school on spring break.

When I got back to Dog Ears, there was my new French correspondent, Ed, in town for the holiday weekend. Ed is studying French through Alliance Française and had written to me in French to practice his new language skills. But what was this? He had brought me a beautiful bouquet of bright tulips and an Easter basket containing, besides chocolate eggs and bunnies, a dozen fresh farm eggs from his own chickens! Does the CEO of the online behemoth book-and-everything-else-seller get Easter baskets from his customers, baskets topped with beautiful pale green* eggs? I seriously doubt it! (*Ed’s chickens are Ameraucana, A North American breed developed from the South American Auraucana.)

Next my friend Ellen arrived to take me to lunch, and she also brought bright, beautiful tulips! (We were celebrating my birthday a few days early.) Luckily, although shelf and table space is at a premium during these days of transition, I’d cleared away most of the temporary bookstore chaos earlier in the morning, so it was possible to find room for two vases of flowers.

While Ellen and I were at lunch, Bruce greeted customers and sold books, basking in the sunny front window, with Sarah relaxing in a nearby chair. Everyone was happy. That was Friday in a real bookstore.

In the virtual book world on the same day, life was not as bright and cheerful. The big news there was that the aforementioned online behemoth has swallowed up booklovers’ favorite social network! How could this be? Reaction ranged from somewhat suspicious speculation to sheer outrage.

“Will you write about it on your blog?” David asked. I told him I’d mention it and put in a couple of links but that I had no plans to discuss the buy-out at length or in depth, nor to offer my own opinions or speculations or predictions. There will be more than enough tweeting and twittering and shouting and quacking without my little voice added to (and lost in) the din.

I have my own little book world, and it’s very personal. In July I will be celebrating 20 years of Up North bookselling, face to face with my customers. My way of bookselling is old-fashioned. It is not innovative, and I am not on the “cutting edge.” On the other hand, my dog goes to work with me, people bring me flowers and eggs and chocolate, and I don’t think anyone actually hates me. After all, it’s not part of my business to put other booksellers out of business.

To sum up, as friends in New South Wales might put it, “Change places with that big CEO? Not for quids! Fair dinkum!”

Nightmares of Repetition

Many, many years ago, back when the minimum wage was $1.15/hour or less, I held a part-time job at the Lansing Civic Center. What our crew did depended on the event. For a circus or a country Western concert, we sold popcorn, hot dogs, coffee and soft drinks; for formal events we checked hats. Yes, hats. Even in those early post-Kennedy years, older men still wore hats. In cold weather, we checked coats, too, and if the weather happened to be rainy, oh, no! Umbrellas!

An evening in the coat check room involved one long spell of quiet, with little to do but chat and read, book-ended by two episodes of absolute frenzy. First came the rush of arrivals, with coats piling up on the counter almost faster than they could be checked in; we ran and scurried, arms loaded sometimes up to our noses with coats! That heart-thumping activity was followed by the lull of the event itself, interrupted only occasionally by a visit from someone needing something from a coat pocket or by an early departure. At the end of the evening came the madness of the exodus, men crowded and squeezed around the counter, handing their numbers over the heads of other men, shouting to direct us to coats and hats. Most tossed tips into the aluminum pie plates on the counter when handed their coats and/or hats and/or umbrellas. Tips! We never got tips during the circus when we were selling hot dogs! There was, however, a price to be paid for the “easy money” of the coat check room, because after such an evening came the dreams.

Any tedious, repetitious activity can infiltrate the dream state, lengthening a day’s labor and extending it through the hours of what should be rest. And so, back then, during sleep, the work continued, coat after coat after coat, hat after hat — until someone insisted that he’d checked a hat, but I could find no hat matching his number! Panic! Umbrellas went missing in the coat check nightmares, too. Because it is the dream state itself, not its content, that determines what will be a nightmare, what will roil the stomach, bring cold sweat to the skin, and send the mind into panic.

Last week and this, at my bookstore, my husband and I have been sorting books, boxing books for donation and recycling, moving furniture, loading some furniture to deliver to a consignment store, sorting books, boxing books, moving books, sorting, boxing, moving. 

How will the bookstore’s reduced floor space accommodate what survives the cut, and how can our best books most effectively be displayed? Backs ache, and legs and arms quiver by late afternoon. It’s exhausting. And then in my dreams, night after night, I continue moving tables and bookcases and shifting books, by subject, from one area of the shop to another. Was valuable inventory inadvertently scrapped? Oh, no!!! Panic!

The fun of transition!

From these silly, tiring dreams I wake in the middle of the night, unable to get back to sleep, and get up to read for a while, then return to bed for a couple more unconscious hours, until the packing and moving dreams again become so intolerable that they interrupt sleep. Morning. Pre-dawn light in the sky. Might as well get up. Sigh!

What would it be like to work for a moving company, for heaven’s sake? To do nothing day after day but move furniture and boxes? Would a person ever manage to have decent, interesting dreams?

This too shall pass.

Smaller view will mean more wall space

Long before summer arrives, the new wall will be in place and freshly painted. Pictures will be rehung and bookcases and tables of beautiful books redistributed. A new street entrance will welcome our customers. Everything will look fresh and new and welcoming.

Then, in June, I can start dreaming about sowing seeds and watering and mowing and weeding! If I’m lucky, I’ll also have dreams of exploring woods and fields with Sarah and of alfresco dinners beneath the linden trees with David and friends.

Violets will bloom again soon....

Book Review: THE UNCHANGEABLE SPOTS OF LEOPARDS

The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

By Kristopher Jansma

NY: Viking, 2013

$26.95

[Caveat: I am not now nor have I ever been an “English major,” and I have scrupulously avoided reading any reviews of this book before writing my own. Literary critics will be able to analyze the elements in this work much more thoroughly than I can do. I am merely a reader and a bookseller, writing here for other readers.]

We first meet the narrator of The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards in an “Author’s Note” that appears to precede but almost immediately reveals itself as the beginning of the novel itself. In the brief “Note,” the narrator describes a time in his boyhood when he was not much more than eight years old (“not yet” a writer), and he tells of the first story he wrote -- and lost -- at about that time. Clearly, his young self was the “unnamed boy detective” in his childish story, but clearly, also, the story is invented: the boy detective solves a mystery, turns black marketeer, becomes rich, and secures for himself the friendship of wealthy siblings Xavier and Yvette. The reader has no reason to accuse the narrator of being “unreliable” for presenting the synopsis of what was clearly a fictional tale – a fiction within a fiction, of course, a story made up by a character in a novel. After all, fiction itself is not generally “unreliable.” We accept its world as if it were real, not because we believe every event in a novel is fact.

The best novelists make you believe, as you read, that their stories are real. You hold your breath as Raskolnikov approaches his neighbor with a raised ax. You weep when no one comes to Gatsby’s funeral. And when you realize you are being so well fooled, you love the author all the more for it.

And what young child, left in the casual care of airport shopkeepers until his mother, an airline attendant, returns from her job – what young child in those circumstances would not make up stories to comfort himself?

. . . It is important to be comfortable when you’re just a small boy, alone in a big place. He’ll change, but this fact never truly will. He’ll go on, day after day, unsure if he’s all that different from the day before. Later he’ll look back at the things that are happening now and he’ll think they are almost like something he read about.

For the writer -- for any writer -- fiction borrows from life and invades life in turn.

In the first chapter of the novel proper, the narrator meets his iconic “rich girl,” Betsy, and in the following (freshman year of college) becomes acquainted with his wealthy, eccentric, gifted, lifelong friend and literary competitor. Julian, it turns out, has a close female friend, one who is almost a sister to him, and when Evelyn appears she is the reincarnation of the first chapter’s Betsy. Throughout the book the triumvirate meets at various exotic world locales, their names changing but their identities constant as the narrator continually reinvents himself and reinvents his friends, in search of a way to turn their conjoined stories into literature. And at the same time, Julian is doing the same thing. Who will succeed at best capturing their real lives in a literary work?

Have I made this novel sound too much like a writer writing about writing? That’s a major theme but not the only one, for the various fictions within the fiction are themselves entertaining romps. It cannot be an accident that the female character aspires to the stage. Are all three acting for each other in scene after scene? 

After a while I stopped thinking of Jansma’s novel as postmodern and began to see it as harking back to the English tradition typified by Henry Fielding’s picaresque Tom Jones. Like the character Tom Jones, the narrator of this novel is a social outsider who falls in love with an apparently unattainable girl/woman, but -- also like Tom Jones -- his love for the rich girl does not stop him from becoming involved with other girls and women more easily within his reach. Jansma’s narrator is clearly more rogue or trickster than classical hero; he undergoes many trials and has a great many adventures; the plot is complex, and the humor swings through the gamut from comedy through farce to satire.

And for this imperfect immortality, what prices have been paid? . . . How many children deserted, family secrets betrayed, sordid trysts laid out for strangers to see? . . . How many flawed pages burned in disgust and reduced to ashes? How many flawless moments observed from just a slight distance so that, later, we might reduce them to words? All with the unspoken prayer that these hard-won truths might outlast the brief years of our lies.

So far I have left untouched the question of an “unreliable narrator” and whether or not this central character fits the bill. Jansma's narrator is not delusional or brain-damaged or too young or naive to describe his world, and even as the novel proceeds and he presents himself to others with borrowed names, backgrounds, and credentials, we the readers are privy to the deceptions he practices. We are not taken in by his lies.

The airport, the gold watch, the absence of clocks in Terminal A and the wall of clocks in Terminal B, and a lost manuscript: Here is where we enter the house of mirrors, and here, again, is where we leave the narrator and his nested, changeling stories. Are we right back where we started? Between beginning and end are many games of checkers, as well as references to leopards with unchangeable and undetectable spots. Can the characters learn without changing?

I found the ending satisfying, but to understand why you will have to read the book yourself. If you are up for a crazy ride through a house of mirrors, jump on this train!

And now, excuse me. I've committed myself to these words and am now giving myself permission to read what others have written about The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards.

Guest Blogger: Ken Writes Memorial of Chinua Achebe

by Kenneth Wylie, Ph.D.

Chinua Achebe was the most successful of African novelists of our generation writing in English for good reason. His amazingly successful books, especially Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, Arrow of God, and A Man of the People, evoked a world of dramatic change, from the time of his grandparents when the Ibo homeland was conquered and ruled by the British, through his own era of independence and a terrible civil war. His greatest achievement was to link straightforward chronological narratives (such as we live) with Aristotelian tragedy, so subtle that many early readers, particularly some of his own generation of African writers, accused him of playing to a European or non-African audience.

He strongly defended his use of English for reasons that now seem obvious -- that it was obviously the language of common discourse among educated Africans, not to mention the entire world, and that a revelation of what Africans living in pre-industrial societies (across the continent) were his targets as well. The careful simplicity of his narratives, of characters who might seem too obvious stereotypes (the tragic Okonkwo a prime example) living within already eroded traditional religious and tribal worlds, and even of European overlords (barely outlined, and not real actors in his works), actually made his work, in particular Things Fall Apart, a small book, stand out as a huge artifact of loss and change. It was not by chance that he chose Yeats's The Second Coming

as his title.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

Certainly there are almost sociological passages that chart small but memorable elements of Ibo life, when his grandparents’ generation were conquered and brought under military authority and when his major characters react, via simplified but memorable acts (from the perspective of Greek tragedy) that lead to awful consequences. His African critics accused him of exactly that. But Achebe, in successfully revealing the peaks and valleys of Ibo culture just at and during the coming of the white man, managed to avoid the pitfalls of some of his contemporaries, who would present the African past as idealized, if not romantic, and the ugly colonial era as unmitigated evil. Instead, he explained in later talks and writings, he only aimed at simple (therefore memorable) objectives, to create a sense of real everyday life among his people (including his own time in later works) and to display their struggles by almost set piece conflicts and  conundrums from their point of view, without aiming to please either his own or those in the outer world who read him. He never fell into the trap of anti-racist essentialism, wherein all things African were better. In that accomplishment I think Achebe lifted his characters and the times they lived in to true art, to revelations of insistent tragedy, but in backgrounds of ordinary mundane life.

None of his characters is heroic, but the chi, the personal deity of his people, through all his books, is able to transcend. In that at least, I believe, millions of readers, in places far beyond Nigeria, found his straightforward narrative compelling. It was not hard to teach his work in classes ranging from History to Anthropology. It was accessible, in that it spoke directly to everyday human experience

I won't try to rank him, among African or world writers, for many great ones have come along since his time, but he is high on my list.

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Kenneth C. Wylie, a freelance writer, served in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone,1961-63, has studied and travelled in Africa over five decades, including several trips in the '90s to Kenya, Ethiopia and Eritrea, and is the author of several books including An Enchanting Darkness, (with Dennis Hickey, MSU Press, 1993, still in print). He received his Ph.D. in African History in 1967 at Michigan State University and his B.A. from Albion College in 1960. He has taught at Wayne State University, Lehman College of CUNY, the Maritime College of SUNY, and Michigan State University. He has published pieces on wildlife and the environment ranging from the Common Crow to the vanishing legend of Bigfoot. He is also the author of a short collection of poems centered on the magnificent landscape around his rural home near Traverse City.