Norwood

When I anticipated finishing my reading project in mid 2016, I made a request for the Christmas of 2015: I wanted a copy of all of Charles Portis’s books for my shelves.  My family came through, and now that my reading project is done, I have moved on to my 6 Portis books.  I reread True Grit first but am now taking the remaining books in Chronological order.  First up, Portis’s 1966 debut novel, Norwood. 

When Norwood’s sister, Vernell, gets married, her husband, Bill Bird, moves in to Norwood and Vernell’s family home in Ralph, Texas.  Bill and Norwood do not get along, so when Norwood gets an opportunity to travel up to New York to see an old Marines buddy, he takes it.  The remainder of the novel consists of the travels of Norwood to New York and then down to North Carolina, back over to Tennessee, and finally back to Ralph.  On the way, Norwood meets with a cast of colorful characters and ends up with a fiancée named Rita Lee, and makes friends with a British little person named Edmund Ratner, and frees a chicken named Joann from an arcade fortune-telling machine.

Norwood seems to some extent to be a comic take on On the Road and other road novels of the 50s and 60s about seeing America and making sense of this post-war country.  Portis’s interest, however, is always the people and their interactions.  He has a gift for dialogue and voice, and the book is scene after scene with the people Norwood encounters.  Portis’s dry wit and Norwood’s deadpan nature makes for a lot of humor and chuckling to oneself while reading.

Like a road trip, this book needs to be enjoyed for the journey and not for any destination.  I cannot make hide nor hair of it in thinking about what the novel is doing on any large scale.  I get the distinct impression that Portis is amusing himself, that he’s enjoying the characters and dialogue as much as we are.  Character and characterization seem to be the higher aims of the novel, and while I am in the habit of wanting  something more from my literature, I found the book to be very satisfying.

If you have a breakthrough revelation about what this book is doing in its time and place, shoot me a note and enlighten me.  Go read it and get back to me, please.

True Grit Is Truly Amazing

I first read True Grit back in 2009 when I initially learned that the Coen Brothers had turned the novel into a script.  Last week I finally had the pleasure to reread it, and better yet, to read it aloud to my wife.  She sometimes suffers from insomnia, and being read to forces her mind to stop yelling at her and let her drift off to sleep instead.  And I’ll tell you, Charles Portis writes with such music in his phrases that the rhythm of each sentence is a pure joy to read out loud.  And yes, I read the entire novel with a bad southern accent.

True Grit is a true masterpiece; everything it does, it does to perfection.  The characters are engaging and full of life.  The humor is spot on.  The relationships grow and change in subtle and powerful ways.  The writing is gorgeous and insightful.  The tone and Mattie’s voice are consistent and gripping.  Mattie Ross, our fearless narrator, is one of the finest literary creations ever.  From her opening paragraph, to her financial wrangling with Col. Stonehill over his debt to her and her family, to her handling of Rooster Cogburn and her unflinching dealings with LaBoeuf, to her facing down of Tom Chaney who had murdered her father—in all these things, Mattie is breathtaking in the sheer amount of ass-kicking she does.

Because I love the novel so dearly, I am hesitant to look into the political and ethical stances that lay at the foundation of the story.  This story is American to its very core, depicting a frontier life of self-reliance, revenge, and unexplored morality plucked from the bible.  Rooster Cogburn is a lawman who certainly has his own moral code, but who is only too happy to be judge and executioner as well.  When Mattie consults with the Fort Smith sheriff to find herself a Marshal to hunt Chaney down, she asks for the “best,” to which the sheriff replies, 

I would have to weigh that proposition . . . .  The meanest one is Rooster Cogburn.  He is a pitiless man, double-tough, and fear don’t enter into his thinking. . . . Now L.T. Quinn, he brings his prisoners in alive.  He may let one get by now and then but he believes even the worst of men is entitled to a fair shake. . . . He will not plant evidence or abuse a prisoner.  He is straight as a string.  Yes, I will say Quinn is about the best they have.

Mattie of course responds, “Where can I find this Rooster.”  For all of Mattie’s moralizing asides, she does not want morality to enter into this quest for revenge.  In case we doubted the sheriff’s characterization, we get the courtroom transcript of Cogburn’s testimony in the trial of Odus Wharton, in which it is clear that Rooster is not “straight as a string.”

There is great humor in Mattie’s choice and in Cogburn’s courtroom testimony, and Portis makes it clear who these characters are and what they want.  That Rooster rode with William Quantrill in the Civil War and defended Quantrill against LaBoeuf only reinforces who we know Rooster to be.  And don’t even get me tangling with Mattie’s outspoken devotion to the almighty dollar and capitalism.  So the question is this: is Portis making a larger statement about morality and America?  I don’t know.  It seems to be that it’s doing something there, but what exactly that is isn’t clear to me.  The story is first a foremost about this stunning protagonist and her unlikely friendship with these two brutal men.  The story softens them all, and Mattie’s restrained narrative voice only makes that softening that much more powerful.

I am planning on reading Portis’s other 4 novels as well as the published collection of his short stories and other writings, so I expect who Portis is and what is important to him will become clearer to me in time.

Whatever his politics and intentions, he is one hell of a writer, and so far, that’s good enough for me.

Up with Updraft

I have been involved in a personal reading challenge for the last 7 years, during which time, my son has aged from being a 10-year-old to a 17-year-old.  He is an avid reader (and a fast reader!) and always enjoys talking about the books he reads.  Except for pausing my reading challenge to read the three Hunger Games books, I have not been able to participate much in what he has been reading, though he has many times asked me to.  This Christmas, just before I finished my long reading list, a friend got my son Fran Wilde’s Updraft.  My son finished in quickly as usual, and being a fan of dystopian novels, he insisted that I read it too so we could talk about it.

Updraft follows many of the tropes of the YA dystopian novel.  The protagonist is a headstrong young woman, Kirit, who doesn’t much question the world she lives in at the opening of the novel.  She knows precisely who she wants to be in this life and is focused on her own immediate future.  The city has rules and laws in place in the name of protecting the city, and the enforcers of those laws are mysterious and threatening.  Kirit accidentally runs afoul of those laws and her entire future (or at least the one she so clearly envisioned) is threatened.  Like her other YA protagonists, Kirit has a few special gifts, and her unsettled place in the world makes her uniquely qualified to change its course.

Wilde handles her tropes expertly and the world she creates is unique, fascinating, and mysterious.  It’s a world in which humans live above the clouds in towers of living bone that are rumored to possible be part of one structure somewhere out of sight below the clouds.  The main external threat to the city are “skymouths,” flying, people-eating, squid-like creatures whose skin renders them invisible, so that the first time you see them is when their gaping maws come to claim you.  The adults of the city move about on human-made wings, and the towers are occasionally joined together by bridges made from the sinews of killed skymouths.  It’s a fascinating world and wonderfully realized throughout the novel.

The politics of the world are of course the heart of the novel, and they are every bit as intriguing as the physical one.  Updraft, like most YA dystopian novels, is about methods of control and the sacrifice people make in the name of safety.  Particularly, Updraft is about secrets and the withholding of information as a means of shaping and maintaining social structures.  But like all weapons, once peace and order is attained, those with access to the information are tempted to misuse it to secure their positions.  Wilde creates well-formed antagonists for Kirit to struggle against.

The novel is touching and fun to read and there are pockets of lovely prose that soar above the utilitarian, which is the default of YA fiction.  I enjoyed reading it, and have greatly enjoyed being able to talk to my son about it.  I will definitely be reading books 2 and 3 to see how the story develops and to learn more about the secrets of the city of bone.

Scott McCloud's Sculptor

Sometimes we like the story that is told, but not the particulars of how it is told, and sometimes we like the way a storyteller tells a story without liking the particulars of the story all that much.  In a great work of art, you are able to have both.  For me, Scott McCloud’s The Sculptor is aesthetically fantastic, but the story itself falls flat for a number of reasons.

Let’s start with the cool things about The Sculptor.  I liked the very format of a graphic novel in the same dimensions of a regular book.  I liked the use of a bluescale instead of a grayscale.  I liked the drawings themselves, the way the characters and the world wer depicted in ink.  Moreover, McCloud does a fantastic job with pacing and composition.  The dialogue is good and McCloud’s preference for visuals over dialogue is wonderful.  Even when the drawings look a little simple, there is great charm in that simplicity. 

Now beyond this point, I am going to be spoiling plot, so don’t read any more of this review if you don’t want the story spoiled.  Whatever I have to say about the story isn’t all that important anyway since your tastes are your own.  Buy or borrow the book and read it for yourself—it’s a quick and satisfying experience—and then you can hear what I have to say and tell me what you have to say.

All good?  Good.

I’m not really a fan of stories about moping and angst-y protagonists to begin with, but that wasn’t my problem here.  I wasn’t annoyed with David because he was moping.  I was annoyed with David, because he was so incredibly self-absorbed, and still more, I was annoyed with McCloud because he seemed equally self-absorbed.  On the surface, The Sculptor is about an artist willing to die for his art.  He would rather have a 200-day life-span in which to make incredible art than a lifetime of regular human existence.  But outside of a few passages about David believing in “absolutes,” McCloud never asks what it means to be willing to die for art.  In fact, David appears to have little to say with his sculptures.  The art that he makes after a feverish three weeks of binge-creating is nothing more than a collection of snapshots from his past, moments from his life.  The only thing David wants to talk about is himself, but he wants to say it loudly and be praised for it with money and accolades.  McCloud did not create an arc for David’s character in which he discovered what it is that he really had to say, discovered what art really was or what about it was worth dying for.  His final creation, the one he literally died to make was yet another snapshot from his past (Meg holding the baby).  The extent to which David grows is to realize that he needs to make every second of life count.  McCloud seems to embrace the David we meet and seems no more critical of David, in the end, than David is.  McClouds’s novel is every bit obsessed with David as David is of himself, which suggests a lack of irony in his portrayal of David’s self-absorption.  There are no subplots, nothing that happens that doesn’t directly affect David, no character relationships that exist beyond its impact on David.

Meg, while she insists she is not, is really just a thing in David’s world.  While searching the internet this afternoon to determine what didn’t sit well with me about Meg, I discovered the trope “Manic Pixie Dream Girl,” a phrase coined by film critic Nathan Rabin describing Kirsten Dunst’s character in his review of Elizabethtown: “that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.”  That is literally what Meg is in the novel.  She is fun and quirky and there for the sole reason to teach David his lessons about how to live life.  McCloud half-heartedly attempts to complicate that image by giving Meg a few fiery and feisty explosions and chronic bouts of depression, possibly suggesting she is bi-polar or suffering from some similar condition.  The treatment of mental disorders seems painfully simplistic and without genuine insight.  I would be very interested to hear what activists in the mental health community would say about McCloud’s portrayal of Meg.  Of that chronic condition, we only ever witness one bout; her moods, whenever they surface, quickly fade and she returns to her plucky optimistic self.

McCloud gave himself nearly 500 pages to explore the themes of his novel, but there appears to be very little exploration at all.  He is of course, perfectly in his rights to do that—he should tell the story he wants to tell, not the one I want to hear.  My disappointment with the way he treated his own subjects is on me.  He’s a very talented storyteller, and if he ever really delves into the depths of a story he is telling, I would eagerly read it.

Days of Fantastic Nonfiction

In Days of Destruction Days of Revolt, Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco illuminate what they call “sacrifice zones,” “those areas in the country that have been offered up for exploitation in the name of profit, progress, and technological advancement.”  As they say in their excellent introduction, 

We wanted to show in words and drawings what life looks like when the marketplace rules without constraints, where human beings and the natural world are used and then discarded to maximize profit.  We wanted to look at what the ideology of unfettered capitalism means for families, communities, workers, and the ecosystem.

The result of this investigation is a one-of-a-kind non-fiction book that is insightful, moving, and illuminating.

The book is cut into 5 relatively equal sections that look at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota; the destitute city of Camden, New Jersey; the remains of the coal town of Welch, West Virginia; the state of migrant and immigrant farmers in Immokalee, Florida; and the gathering at Liberty Square by the Occupy movement from September 2011 to January 2012.  The politics of the book are clear (as you can tell from the introductory passage I already quoted), but what makes the book more than a political diatribe is how they present the lives of those affected by the forces of institutionalized corruption and greed.

The sections play out like a documentary in writing.  Every aspect about a subject—and Hedges and Sacco do a fantastic job of looking at a wide variety of these aspects in each and every section—is anchored by the tales of individuals living in the specific sacrifice zone.  There are no abstractions, because every effect is seen and heard in the lives of those interviewed.  Hedges gives extensive quotations from the various people he features, letting them speak for themselves, often capturing the speakers’ dialects to bring the spoken nature of their speeches to the fore.  The result is like having a voice-over in a documentary.  To add the visual element, Sacco provides drawings of the various speakers and landscapes instead of photographs.  In each section (except for the final one) at least one person tells his or her life story, and Sacco turns that into a 10-or-so-page graphic novel.  The result is a unique combination of essay and graphic novel that creates a world all its own.

The first four sections of the book are unassailable.  Hedges and Sacco bring the sacrifice zones to life and bring the reader face to face with the cost of capitalism in America.  The weakest section is the final section, mainly because it is the least grounded in the tales of those who were there.  As Hedges and Sacco say in their introduction, the Occupy Wall Street event happened as they were concluding their travels and their book, and they saw it as “the nationwide revolt” that had so far been “absent”: 

This revolt rooted our conclusion [that a revolution was the inevitable result of the sacrifice zones left in capitalism’s wake] in the real rather than the speculative.  It permitted us to finish with a look at a rebellion that was as concrete as the destruction that led to it.  And permitted us to end our work with the capacity for hope.

But of course, the Occupy movement did not lead to a lasting nationwide revolt, or at least not yet, and it’s hard to picture America, with its vastness and complicated government and economic design, yielding to  revolution in any way similar to the Eastern European examples given in the book.  In fact, living in a Post-Trump age, it’s hard to read this call to action the same in 2017 as I would have in 2012: 

We must stop being afraid.  We have to turn our backs for good on the Democrats, no matter what ghoulish candidate the Republicans offer up for president.  All the public disputes between candidates in the election cycle are a carnival act.  On the issues that matter, there is no disagreement among the Republicans and the Democrats.

Even with those final bits sitting at odds with my own experiences, the book is entirely worth reading and experiencing.  Even as a relatively educated and liberal man, there was a lot here for me not only to learn but to think about and consider.  Hedges is a fantastic writer who makes his political insights clear and compelling, and I will eagerly read more of his work, both his short- and long-form journalism.