I've been pretty busy with all this the last few weeks, and I've done a little reading. Most of my book comments this issue are in the
Short Takes section, while the longer reviews come from a number of kind friends. They include essays on the work of George Eliot, Chuck Kinder, Barbara Whittington, and Donna Meredith. The reviewers include Belinda Anderson, Donna Meredith, Phyllis Wilson Moore, Eddy Pendarvis, as well as a special list of
favorite books from Dolly Withrow.
Take a look!
MSW
“In death they were not divided,” A Review of The Mill on the Floss by Eddy Pendarvis
Not long ago, I came across an old schoolbook my mother has kept for years, probably not one of her own schoolbooks—the inside cover has a childish cursive naming “Horace Thacker” as the owner. Anyway, I was surprised to find that one of the stories in that fourth-grade reader, published in 1918, is an abridged excerpt from George Eliot’s
Mill on the Floss. Entitled, “Maggie and the Gypsies,” the excerpt omits the hardest words, like “obloquy,” and has a short glossary of not quite as hard words, such as “treacle” and “placid.” I’m sure one reason for including the excerpt was to acquaint children with “classic” literature. Other authors represented by stories or
poems in the book were Jonathan Swift, Victor Hugo, Robert Louis Stephenson, Lewis Carroll, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Johannah Spyri (author of
Heidi), with, as my list suggest, male authors far outnumbering female authors.
I wondered if another reason to include the Eliot excerpt was because it featured a girl. It was one of just a few stories with girls as lead characters. Most were about girls helping other people, like a story about a lighthouse keeper’s daughter who risked her own life to save survivors of a shipwreck. The Maggie in the excerpt isn’t self-sacrificing, though. She has run away from home to live with the gypsies. The excerpt ends with Maggie’s being glad to be returned to her family, as the gypsies were far less appreciative of her than she’d expected them to be—they definitely weren’t going to make her their queen.
However, Maggie’s character as developed in Eliot’s novel is certainly self-sacrificing. To me, she is one of those unforgettable women in literature, like Sophocles’ Antigone, Thomas Hardy’s Tess, and, yes, Margaret Mitchell’s Scarlet O’Hara. Maggie is a headstrong, self-pitying, ugly duckling of a child who, naturally, grows into a beautiful woman. Her mother, Bessey, is ashamed of Maggie’s behavior; her father, “Mr. Tulliver” (“Mr.” even to his wife), takes up for the “little wench”; her brother, Tom, puts up with her, mostly. Maggie is sometimes resentful toward her mother; she loves her father dearly, and she adores her brother. Conflict between her desire to please her father and brother and her desire to make other choices drives the plot.
In re-reading Mill on the Floss and thinking about that fourth-grade reader, I wondered why read Victorian novels now? Wouldn’t the time be better spent reading something contemporary? I know, supposedly the quality of a work is established if it’s stood the test of time; but there are books of equal quality that have been published in the 21st century. If I looked up other reasons, I’d see a mention of the historical value of classics in helping us to understand, among other things, what’s changed and what hasn’t in the way people think and act. Published in 1860, Mill on the Flossdepicts middle-class lifeways in a small town in the middle of England in the 1820s as charming and disturbing.
Part of the charm is the nostalgic perspective of the story. The narrator and characters look lovingly on the past. Eliot’s understanding of the deep identification with nature that is shared by people whose childhood was spent playing outside; her apparent love of myths and fairy tales; and her patronization (in good and bad ways) of children, rustics, and “underlings” are part of her popular appeal.
The “Midlands” dialect Eliot has many of her characters speak is charmingly quaint. Especially notable to me was the use of the word “doubt.” For example, in bemoaning Maggie’s dark hair and skin-coloring, one of her aunts says, “I doubt it’ll stand in her way i’ life to be so brown.” The context makes clear that she means she fears it will stand in Maggie’s way. Another example from an aunt reads, “But I doubt high living and high learning will make it harder for you, young un, nor it was for me.” The speaker means high living and high learning may make life harder for Maggie than it’s been for the aunt, who has the advantage of very little education. In sentences like the latter one, “nor” seems to mean “than.” I liked coming across that substituted “y” ending so typical of English and American dialect, as in “baloney” for “bologna.” Maggie’s mother dreads losing her good “chany” (china) in the family’s financial disaster.
Eliot’s use of dialect, though not as heavy as the dialect in Sir Walter Scott’s novels, is reminiscent of his. Fond of Scott’s novels, Eliot has Philip, the character who is truest in his love for Maggie, turn up with the second volume of Scott’s The Pirate in his pocket one day when he and Maggie are on a walk. Maggie tells him she’s read the first volume, but couldn’t get the second volume, and so doesn’t know what happened to Minna, the novel’s heroine.
This scene and some others make me want Philip to be the narrator of The Mill on the Floss, the one who remembers Maggie as a child. After all, Philip has the ending of one woman’s story in his pocket and, as the last person mentioned in the book, he knows the ending of Maggie’s story. His first name “Philip” has “love” in it from the Greek “philia,” and his last name “Wakem” is easy to link to his efforts to get Maggie to wake up and consider what will make her happy and fulfilled, rather than trying to live the way her brother and father want her to live. In other words, he tries to keep her from being so self-sacrificing. He fails, and the novel ends in romantically satisfying tragedy.
This disturbing isolation of a 19th century woman unable to fit into a society which is in many senses too small for her is repeated in infinite regression in the novel. Maggie’s alienation is foregrounded in the novel, but every character treated in any detail is alienated from other characters in some important way. Even Philip, who seems emotionally closest to Maggie, never fully connects with her. His truth is not her truth. The terrible flood at the end of the novel seems like a deus ex machina to eliminate a problem that has no real solution. When Maggie is finally united with her beloved brother, the book ends. In the alienation of individuals from each other, the story recognizes not only the devastating effects of industry and business on agrarian ways of life, but the possibility that shared understanding of truth also suffers from modern realities, which are divergent, complex, and rife with conflicting material interests. Read in the context of our current political economy—in which truth is not just contested but often irrelevant to outcomes, George Eliot’s classic, The Mill on the Floss, is as prescient as it is historical.
A Middlemarch Meditation by Belinda Anderson
Somehow Middlemarch had escaped me until recently. I had read other works of Mary Ann Evans, writing as George Eliot, but never Middlemarch. When I discovered it was available as an audiobook through my local library, I immediately checked it out. The appeal of listening to a classic read in a charming British accent overcame the somewhat daunting prospect of an unabridged recording of a 800-page 19th-century novel.
Just as I’d hoped, I thoroughly enjoyed
Middlemarch, though it does take a bit of commitment at first to shift into the author’s measured pace. But Kate Reading, in her performance for Phoenix Recordings, is brilliantly vivacious. She understands how to enunciate the narration so that the flavor of the writing, from humorous to dramatic, is imparted – too many actors use I’m-reading-you-a-story
voices. Her renditions of the characters’ voices were appealingly distinctive.
I came away with the impression that Middlemarch is a literary soap opera, elevated by the author’s astute observations of human nature. Or: Middlemarch is an examination of human nature, cloaked in a compelling soap opera plot.
There are many lofty summations of Middlemarch that address politics, religion and other themes. This synopsis from the Avid Reader’s Musings blog is perhaps the most succinct: “Everyone has their own secrets and money problems and everyone knows everyone else’s business.” In a later post replying to a reader’s comment about the length of the book (“Holy crap,” to be precise), Melissa, the Avid Reader, said, “Audiobooks are perfect for slow classics. They become so much more accessible when someone is telling me the story.”
As my listening to the book proceeded, I began to better appreciate Eliot’s discussion of her characters in a manner that might at first seem like author intrusion, but becomes more of an invitation to us to consider our own judgmental natures. Just as we’re getting riled on Dorothea’s behalf about the behavior of her husband, Casaubon, the author directly asks us to consider his point of view. Perhaps the warmth of Kate Reading’s voice made me more inclined to accept the author’s discussion points. I found myself reflecting that yes, all of us need to try to better understand others’ points of view.
During the period it took me to listen to the audiobook, Middlemarch kept popping up on my radar. I came across My Life in Middlemarch, a book by Rebecca Mead dedicated to Mead’s experience of the novel. (I read the book in print, but Kate Reading also narrated it for Blackstone Audio.)
Mead explores the book in the context of the life of George Eliot’s life, even describing Eliot’s work routine: “most days, Eliot retreated upstairs immediately after finishing breakfast, at 8:00 a.m., and worked steadily for five hours.” Very admirable. But this is the ultimate writer’s dream: “Affairs were arranged so that she was as free from domestic concerns as possible. Two servants … kept the household running along well-established lines.”
Mead addresses directly my experience of feeling called by Eliot to expand my compassion, in quoting a letter Eliot wrote in 1857: “My artistic bent is directed not at all to the presentation of eminently irreproachable characters, but to the presentation of mixed human beings in such a way as to call forth tolerant judgment, pity and sympathy.” Her intent seems very relevant today.
In an essay written the year before, in 1856, Eliot said, “Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.”
(However, Mead says, she has not been able to verify a very popular quote attributed to Eliot: “It’s never too late to be what you might have been.”)
Mead neatly distills this theme as “we each have our own center of gravity, but must come to discover that others weigh the world differently than we do.”
Eliot’s very last line of Middlemarch, a tribute to Dorothea, echoes her essay’s stated intent about contact beyond the bounds of our personal lot: “But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” (The original manuscript, according to Mead, concluded with an addition phrase: “having lived a hidden life nobly.”)
With such a striking conclusion, I can understand why author Anna Quindlen called Middlemarchperfection, in Pamela Paul’s By the Book feature for The New York Times Book Review. She ranked it with Bleak House and Pride and Prejudice as contenders for her favorite book of all time.
Author Gary Shteyngart confessed in another of Paul’s interviews to being a new discoverer (like myself). When asked what was the best book he had read recently, he said, “Middlemarch! Can you believe I read the whole thing? When I finished it I expected a Publishers Clearing House-type van to pull up to my house and some British people to pop out and present me with a medal.” When he was asked what books he was embarrassed to not have yet read, he said, “Dickens’s Bleak House. What’s wrong with me? On the other hand, I finished Middlemarch! So lay off me.”
He should check out London Records’ audio recording of Bleak House. It’s read marvelously -- by Sir John Gielgud.
And it’s abridged.
The Silver Ghost by Chuck Kinder Reviewed by Donna Meredith
First issued as a hardback by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1979, Chuck Kinder’s The Silver Ghost is now available as a paperback published by Braddock Avenue Books.
While the novel’s characters are not always likeable, the story captures the essence of a mythical era in American history, the late 1950s. Kinder’s great accomplishment in
The Silver Ghost is a nearly perfect rendition of teenage angst. In the first half of the book, anyone can relate to Jimbo Stark. His mooning over his girlfriend Judy. The impossibility of meeting the macho expectations of his war-obsessed father. The agony when Jimbo is forced to move away from friends and girlfriend to finish out his senior year in a podunk town in southern West
Virginia. He is the epitome of the disgruntled, rebellious teenager, the only poet in a small town high school, wallowing in despair as he imagines his girl cuddled up to some other guy at the Valentine’s dance.
Kinder’s over-the-top, poetic language captures the intensity of a lovesick teen: “It is the late 1950s and America is a lush, electric, song-filled garden for teenage truelove, and Jimbo and Judy fully expect that their own truelove will grow and grow until the end of time, until the twelfth of never.” Reality is fluid in this story, dream-like, shifting from real events to movie scenes, both incorporating fragments of songs, all while diving through time.
Jimbo’s adulation of a popular movie star rings true. He attempts to emulate James Dean’s iconic cool in Rebel Without a Cause, a point Kinder emphasizes through lyrical variations of this image: Jimbo “arched his eyebrows and wrinkled his forehead and let his lower face collapse into smiles, which was his perfectly Cool James Dean moviemask, mastered after earnest effort.” The protagonist is even called Jimbo after James Dean’s role in Rebel.
The Silver Ghost of the novel’s title is a Porsche belonging to Judy’s brother Frank. A status symbol, it could burn every other car in town. Quite generously, Frank lets Jimbo borrow it for dates.
When Judy spots a diamond ring with a heart of perfect small pearls shaped around it, she declares it is “the only ring in the whole wide world for us.” Lovesick Jimbo is determined to buy this token for his girl. He sells all his own treasures, but still doesn’t have enough money. Desperate, he steals the soldiers in his father’s painstakingly assembled WWII battle scenes, scenes representing the defining moments in his father’s life. The theft delivers a devastating gut-punch, psychological revenge against the father who never understood his poetry-inclined son, replicating the father/son relationship in the movie.
Banished from his more-than-irate father’s sight, Jimbo suffers through his senior year angry, alone, and lonely. He finds relief by drinking alcohol, smoking and telephoning Judy.
After an epic struggle to return home and deliver a Valentine to his beloved Judy, Jimbo learns from Pace, his best friend, that “teenage truelove” isn’t so true after all. There’s a snake in the “song-filled garden.” Judy has slept with Jimbo’s rival, a star football player.
Devastated, Jimbo steals the Silver Ghost and the two boys set out for Florida. Unfortunately, the gullible teens meet Morris, a charming criminal who preys on young boys. Jimbo soon finds himself on a bad road, one filled with robberies, violence, and betrayals.
In the novel’s final scene, the adult Jimbo sits alone in a bar. He wonders if it wouldn’t have been best if he’d committed suicide back when the authorities caught up to him—died at the moment he was “perfectly seventeen,” with his youth preserved forever like James Dean, who died in his Porsche at the age of twenty-four.
Kinder’s structure allows events to flow freely through time, with a prologue and epilogue adding thematic development and perspective. Fishing imagery appears frequently in this literary novel, with meanings that shift and waver as if seen through water. Sometimes the image seems to suggest fear of delving too deeply into the past: “You never, however, try to imagine fishing that 180 degrees of current lost in space and time.” Kinder himself never flinches from an author’s duty to dive into the past and surface with characters fully formed and seriously flawed.
The novel’s first draft was completed in 1977 while Kinder was an Edith Merrilees Fellow at Stanford. In a December 2017 interview, Kinder said he has always seen the world through a cinematic lens. He claims almost every word of The Silver Ghost is true, close to autobiography, except for a homosexual rape scene late in the story.
Born and raised in West Virginia, Kinder taught at the University of Pittsburgh for more than three decades and served as director of the creative writing program. His other books include Snakehunter and Last Mountain Dancer, recently re-published by West Virginia University Press; and Honeymooners, as well as several volumes of poetry.
Vada Faith: A Novel by Barbara Whittington Reviewed by Phyllis Wilson Moore.
Set in the fictional small town of Shady Creek, West Virginia, the novel Vada Faith has a very southern feel to it. Vada Faith Waddell and her twin sister Joy Ruth are co-owners of the only beauty shop in town. Their lives are tangled in every way possible including their mutual attraction to Vada Faith's husband, John Waddell.
Back in high school, the handsome young athlete was Joy Ruth's boyfriend. To be blunt,Vada stole him. Sister is still single while Vada Faith and John live happily in their old historic house with their twin daughters. Life is good.
Unbeknown to everyone, Vada Faith has issues. She wants to be someone. She wants to help someone. As far as she is concerned, she has never done anything significant and she never will. She never has enough money to spend. She wants a big new house. Now.
When a local couple places an ad offering a huge payoff to a qualified surrogate mother, she answers it. The wealthy couple is prepared to be very generous with the surrogate fee and will absorb all expenses. In addition, they offer perks: clothes, jewelry, etc. If she agrees, she will be the first surrogate mother in the county, ever, and she can quit waiting for the big fancy home. How can she refuse this childless couple?
The way Vada Faith sees it, it should be her decision, and hers alone. In fact, she keeps this good deed a secret from everyone (except her sister) including John and her daughters. After all, it is her body and she is a mature woman, right? Duh.
Pregnancy as a secret is laughable and so is this humorous novel. Her family's reaction and that of the townspeople are just what a thinking person might expect, ramped up a tad.
The novel covers a serious subject but is chock-full of southern humor in a style reminiscent of Fannie Flagg. I can see a young Dolly Parton as Vada Faith and can hear the gossip-fest in the shop.
Water, Water, Every Where and…. WET WORK by Donna Meredith Reviewed by Phyllis Wilson Moore
Authors strive for a hook, and this novel certainly has one. In four succinct pages, Donna Meredith, introduces a likeable illegal immigrant, a former Mexican engineer named Paulo.
Paulo, soon to return to his beloved family in Mexico, is eager to rejoin his mother and wife and see his newborn son for the first time.
In just a few paragraphs, I like the homesick Paulo. Then, bam, Meredith shoots him dead. On the fourth page. Now I call that a hook.
The novel is an environmental thriller set in Florida, first in a swamp, then a university campus, and then out into the lush rivers and byways. I’m rather new to the environmental novel but I like thrillers, especially when they are set in places I’d like to visit, and I like novels with characters from other cultures.
The novel has interesting characters and Summer Cassidy is a good example. Pretty, intelligent, and quick with a witty response, she is finishing her research for a master’s in hydrogeology. Her work is groundbreaking. Some of the ogres of big business are sure her report will be detrimental to their businesses. As Important donors to the university, they assume a woman as intelligent as Cassidy, a woman in need of a scholarship to pursue her Phd, can be convinced to give more thought to her research findings. After all, just how important is clean water compared to jobs?
Well researched and well written, I suggest readers add this work to their stack of books waiting to be read. I’ll go even further and suggest it be placed on the top of the stack and next to a box of tissues and a tall glass of water.
(Wild Women Writers. Tallahassee, Florida, 2014 )
SHORTER REVIEWS
The Land Breakers by John Ehle
I met the late John Ehle at a conference some years back, and he was handsome and courtly and fragile with age. He was carefully watched over by his wife, the British actor Rosemary Harris. Their daughter is Jennifer Ehle, an accomplished actor like her mother, famous for playing Elizabeth Bennet opposite Colin Firth in the BBC's Pride and Prejudice series. As this opening paragraph indicates, I knew much more about Ehle's wife and daughter than about him, and more's the pity, because his work has is rich and full of adventure.
This novel, and the ones I have not read yet that follow it, concern the European-American settlers of the Appalachian mountains. It celebrates the kind of work people used to have to do for food and shelter: clearing forest, skinning animals, smoking meat; weaving linsey-woolsey. There are natural dangers all around-- the bears are particularly present, and there is a scene with rattlesnakes that I
wish I could forget. Like Harriet Arnow's great
Hunter's Horn, this novel doesn't focus on the solitude of hunters and trappers, but rather about people who want a community. They don't all define community in the same way, but they want to be near other people. The main character, although he is only one of many , Mooney Wright, and his long time love buy land on a mountain in what is now Western North Carolina. Shortly after they build their cabin, other people start coming to the same area, and Mooney's beloved sickens and dies.
Soon there are five or six families, all with their own interesting stories, and each representing a type of "landbreaker:" Mooney is physically powerful, adept with his hands, and hard working. An orphan boy, he is about as self-made as is realistically possible. The second group in is led by a patriarch called Harrison who is old and viciously determined to be the big man in his new settlement. He comes with enslaved people, a beaten down son, a new child bride (who happens to be his blood niece), and his daughter and her young sons.
The daughter, Lorry was abandoned by her husband, and is in her own way as determined as her father to find what she needs in this place. She, like Mooney, is especially good at the tasks needed to make a home here. There is also a ne'er do-well musician with a string of daughters. One of them, Mina, is beautiful and imaginative and free-spirited and determined not to be like her mother. Another group lives across the river, primarily made up of hunters.
The big plot question is whether Mooney will pair off with teen-age Mina or turn to Lorry with her knowledge and her sons? The next big question is will the community survive? What if Lorry's original husband shows up and challenges Mooney? Will the wild animals kill all the stock?
There are hunts and conflicts, a murder, that snake story, and a livestock drive that seems to be the settlement's last chance to survive. The book is a wonderful trip, and the answers to the questions the story raises are the least of itspleasures.
The Leavers by Lisa Ko
This is the story of a damaged kid named Deming, sometimes Danie
l, trying to find his way, and his mother who wants to care for him, but is trammelled by poverty and her desire to have her own life. She leaves him in China with her father for the first part of his life, then brings him to the States where she attempts to make a good life for both of them.
She suffers hugely, however, at the hands of the United States government when she is caught up in a raid on undocumented workers. She loses Deming, who is adopted by a white American couple, and she, Polly, apparently disappears.
The book is the winner of one of Barbara Kingsolver's PEN/Bellwether prizes for Socially Engaged Fiction, and it surely deserve the honor for its examination of contemporary international poverty, immigration, and loss.
The ending offers hope that Deming/Daniel will find a way for himself, but the most artful and ambitious part of the novel is the speculation on how and why his mother Polly takes hold of the life that happens to her.
Marking Time (Second Book of the Cazalet Chronicles) by Elizabeth Jane Howard
The Cazalet Chronicles are slow-building novels, set around and during the Second
World War, with enough characters that you really do need the
dramatis personae provided at the beginning. Most of them get their own points of view, too. The setting is primarily the Home Place, a large summer dwelling between London and the English channel where the Cazalet elders, wives, and children live during the Blitz of London. The men commute into the city to work, and just about everyone goes to London occasionally.
As the family goes about its illnesseses and studies and struggles and occasional adulteries, there is the regular passing overhead of German planes on their way to bomb London, and the war is a constant topic of conversation and disruption as family members go to fight. Even though it is mid-twentieth century, the women often seem to be living in Edwardian if not Victorian times.
Still, it's a full, rich world especially as viewed through the eyes of the children in this enormous family. Howard is especially good on children and teens, but also on the old ladies like fat kind Miss Milliment the governess and the maiden aunts who quarrel all the time but are each other's entire lives.
I am presently starting the fourth book, and enjoying them thoroughly, but I have to offer a caveat with my recommendation: to enjoy these, you meed patience for a lot of quotidian life details and for British upper middle class prejudices and their reluctance to show emotion.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Moshin Hamid
This is a highly praised novel that is certainly worth reading, but maybe not as amazing as I expected it to be. It opens with an intriguing situation: a Muslim in his home country is speaking in the second person to a jittery American in a café. Between the situation and the title, you begin to get impatient for the punch line: who is the prey and who the predator? The speaker or the one he is feeding tea and grilled meat?
The story is literary, of course, not genre, so there's no promise of genre satisfaction. The pleasure is in the cleverness and games, and a wonderful created atmosphere of dread. Who is gaming whom. I assumed most of the way through that the narrator was the predator. He tells the long and engaging backstory of his life in America as a financial Master of the Universe and lover of the increasingly psychotic Erica. I kept waiting for the attack on the American who is receiving his story (and wears a gun).
But by the end, there is a growing possibility that the American may be about to attack Changez , who it is revealed is now a college professor who supports his students' anti-american demonstrations. Still, if Changez should be the victim, then his tone of knowingness sounds fake ("Oh you are made nervous by our waiter? It's true he is a powerful man with a grim face and keeps looking at us, but it's really just his natural expression..." ) I get the issues, and empathize with the story of the young man who thinks he is joining the American elite but never really has a chance, and his horror when he realized he is rejoicing when the U.S. is attacked.
I guess I liked the back story so much that I didn't feel the need for the cleverness of the narrative strategy.
Earthly Remains by Donna Leon
I expect you have to be a fan of Donna Leon's Inspector Brunetti books to like this one. It is a downer, and (spoiler! spoiler!) you don't find out for sure there has been a murder (although you suspect it strongly) until the final page. Brunetti and his colleagues do some investigating, but the end is a win for the corporate polluters of the laguna who kill at will and get off scot free.
I've been enjoying Leon's novels for a while, and now I'm trying to remember if any of them actually end with punishment for the murderers? Some of them surely do. As usual, I read mostly for Venice, or in this case an island that is apparently under the jurisdiction of Venice's police force. It was nice to see Brunetti get at least part of a vacation.
Book Recommendations from Dolly Withrow
know. They are not murderers; rather they are just everyday people like our neighbors. The characters reveal meanness and goodness and love and jealousy, oh, and generosity, caring. How it is told brings the characters to life. I can almost hear their heartbeats and feel their warm breath across my face. Excellent book written by a talented Swede who knew exactly what he was doing.
Books for Readers Newsletter by Meredith Sue Willis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.meredithsuewillis.com. Some individual contributors may have other licenses.
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