Crusader's Cross

Crusader’s Cross

The world of New Iberia and Acadiana is the setting of James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux. And while Robicheaux, the alcoholic, former and once-again detective for the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Office is the protagonist of the novel, the area becomes equally important for the novel.

This is a world where class still matters, and where the landed gentry of Antebellum Louisiana still control far too much land, too much clout, and too many lives. In such a world, there is little doubt that the Chalons family controls not only the means to ruin people’s lives but that they fail to reflect on whether there is a reason to do it.  The patriarch of the family holds to antique clothing and manners, being impressed by politeness but not bothering to acknowledge his own past misdeeds that live on the family property. His son, Valerie, styles himself a reporter, owning a Lafayette news station, but finds it more interesting to report on the misdeeds of those who do not deign to respect his inflated self-worth.

Robicheaux finds himself embroiled in a case that touches not only his own past—his brother once tried to save a prostitute in late-1950s Galveston—and the present of a serial killer who tortures women from the Baton Rouge area, dumping their mutilated bodies in South Louisiana and Robicheaux’s jurisdiction.

In the end, though, it is less about finding who the guilty party is and more an extended love letter to the past and the landscape of Acadiana that might exist outside of the machinations of corporations and the landed aristocracy.

Gilead

Gilead

Ostensibly, Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead is a written account of the Reverend John Ames to his son, giving his young son a sense of who his father is/was. As he is writing his testament, Ames consistently notes his advanced age and heart condition that will not allow him to see his son grow into a man.

What the novel seems to be about, though, is the problem of fathers and sons. Through retelling the misadventures of his grandfather, the more straightforward life of his father, and his own life as a preacher in the small town of Gilead, Iowa, the novel points to how these individuals are unable to understand each other.

His grandfather is a man of extreme conviction who chooses to live by his principles, from going off to minister in the Civil War—causing him to lose an eye—to giving away everything to those less fortunate than his family, including the sheets drying on the lines in the backyard. 

Such behaviors, though, run counter to the sense of family that his son (Ames’ father) holds to be the most important aspect of life. He stays when his father leaves, becoming the man of the family and taking over the responsibilities of ministering to the congregation.

And when it is his time, the narrator of the novel tells us that he takes his role as the leader of a congregation in Gilead. But he does not have the pull to moral certainty of his grandfather, and he is not so enamored with his family like his father, but he finds himself indebted to the town itself. It is the identify he hearkens back to most, and it is the choice he makes when his own father attempts to force him away to be with his family. 

Furthering this motif of sons and father is the lifelong friend of Rev. Ames, the Presbyterian minister Rev. Boughton and his son John Ames Boughton (better known as Jack). Here are two men who love each other, and yet, they cannot speak to each other in honest terms. And despite the fact that Jack is a disappointment in many respects, the Rev. Boughton loves him the most. 

This novel of fathers and sons serves to instruct the young Ames (who we imagine one day will read this account) on how difficult it is to live in a world of fathers and sons, highlighting what he lost but also the freedom he gains without the overwhelming sense of disappointing his own father.

Downtown Owl

Downtown Owl

A novel detailing the events leading up to an unexpected blizzard on February 4, 1984 told through the perspectives of a junior in high school who cannot satisfy his football coach, a 73-year-old retiree who spends his free time reading and drinking coffee with his friends, and a 23-year-old high school teacher who instantly becomes the most exciting and attractive woman in the small town.  There are two additional narrators of the aforementioned football coach who reflects on his predilection for teenage students and a teenager who defines his existence through fighting.

Each of the characters struggles with secrets and their abilities to define their lives in ways that have meaning. 

For Mitch, he cannot fathom why his football coach dislikes him so, and he only longs for the days where he can exist in the non-being of sleep. As he works to cause as little trouble as possible, he recognizes his ability to read the people around him. When he does not quite understand the questions of the exam on 1984, he realizes that his teacher (the same football coach he cannot please) must identify with Winston Smith since it is his favorite book—why else would he like the book unless he saw himself in the character, he muses.

For Horace, the world was formerly more simple, and he longs to be more effective in losing (actually for him winning) bar dice to see who will buy the rounds of coffee in his daily meetings. His group of friends argue over history and politics—just like anyone might—and he looks forward to these meetings more than anything. But despite his daily meetings, he cannot bear to let them know what has happened to him in his life.  

For Julia, she longs to live where she can both be the center of attention and also be somewhere more exciting than Owl, North Dakota. But as the novel progresses, she comes to find herself growing more attracted to the former, one-play star of the Owl football team. But while she recognizes with whom she might be in love, she does not recognize that she loses control of herself through nightly drinking.

But in the end, these daily concerns and worries pale when compared to the power of an unexpected blizzard.

Canada

Canada

Are our parents the people we can actually trust? What value/role do we fit into our parents’ lives? These questions seem to haunt Dell Parsons, the narrator of Richard Ford’s Canada. In Ford’s novel, Dell, now a retired high school English teacher in the titular country, looks back on two formative events in his life: a bank robbery and two murders. 

Each of these events shape his life, as he comes close to becoming a partner to or actor in these crimes, despite the fact that the adults in his life seem to have no compunction with bringing someone of his age and experience into orbit of these events. When his father, driven to rob a small, North Dakotan bank to pay off debts incurred during the commission of illegal beef sales, he first considers enlisting the services of his fifteen-year-old son to draw suspicions away from his actions. 

In that moment, we can see both the desperation of the father and the way that he views his only son. The son’s purpose and life is adjunct to the needs and desires of the parents, causing him in later years to imagine what might have happened had he participated in his father’s bank heist. Would he have succeeded where his father and mother did not? Would he have died in a hail of bullets like his father’s aspirational heroes—Bonnie and Clyde?

What Dell and his sister Berner turn out to be are afterthoughts in a system of neglect and disinterested adults. After the arrests of their parents, no officials from the state come to check in on their welfare, leaving them to choose their own paths. 

Berner’s path is one of running away, becoming a sometime waitress, sometime nurse’s assistant, who dies of liver cancer from years of substance abuse. She does not form the meaningful relationships that seem needed to succeed in life, with the exception of her final relationship with Ray who tends to Berner during the last days of her life.

The story reminds us of the cruelty and hardships that life cannot often deal to individuals. Ford’s insistence on seeing who these characters are brings to mind the travails of Sophoclean characters who cannot escape the inevitability of fate. It is not enough to survive for Dell; rather, he must use the world’s events to become someone who places value on the things that he missed in his childhood—education and meaningful relationships. 

Naked Lunch

Naked Lunch

Is this a less coherent On the Road? Is it the narcotic-version of Tropic of Cancer?

Housekeeping

Housekeeping

Marilyn Robinson’s novel asks us to consider what are the connections that bind people. One would think that love and family might be enough to keep a family connected through crisis and catastrophe; however, this novel attempts to assert that such bonds hold very little sway.

The novel is narrated by Ruthie, detailing her life with her sister Lucille, as they look to make sense of the world after the deaths of their mother (who drowned herself) and their grandmother (who dies of old age). They are immediately given over to the custody of their maternal great aunts who are incapable to keep up with children, as they claim a host of impediments—age, temperament, location, etc.  And eventually, their maternal aunt, Sylvie, comes back to Fingerbone to raise the girls.

Sylvie serves as a stark contrast to the settled, ordered life that they knew with their grandmother and great aunts. She is a transient, and her quirks emphasize how little she knows of housekeeping or staying connected to the everyday experience. The house becomes ensnared in piles of old newspapers—which Sylvie reads for odd pieces of news—and collections of old cans.  The detritus of news and simple consumerism dominate a place that should offer basic comfort and stability for the young girls.

The issue that I found most pressing with the novel is that I could not see why Robinson wanted us to sympathize with Ruthie or Lucille. Here are characters who have gone through traumatic events, and they are forced to remain in the care of their aunt who has no business in keeping house or family. And yet, I could not tell you much about these young girls. They seem unformed as characters, and so the sympathy that the novel looks to elicit from the reader fails to materialize.

A recurrent motif in the novel was discussion of memory, and memory’s impact on how people attempt to make sense of their surroundings. Ruthie believes that memory is something that focuses us on creating narratives that improve people. She is able to keep an image of her mother as someone who was not perfect, but she would have probably ended up worse than their transient relative had she lived. It is echoed earlier in the novel by Sylvie who decries the fragmentary and arbitrary nature of memory. They cannot be fixed and they cannot be verified, and for Sylvie their function is worsened by that absence.

Memory, of course, is an active process—science has demonstrated that to us in many ways. We actively modify and transform memories, shaping them to respond to the moments in which they are recalled, and so they become less and less tied to the initial moment. The most perfect memory is one that cannot be altered, and yet an unaltered memory exists only in an inactive mind. My memory of Housekeeping will change over the years, but this record will remind me of the fact that emotions must be drawn from characters of substance, an absent quality of this novel.

Inherent Vice

Inherent Vice

Is the world simply filled with overwhelming senses of coincide and deja vu? Or is the world fundamentally controlled by nefarious groups—sometimes large, sometimes small? Pynchon believes that the world answers to the latter understanding. 

When Larry “Doc” Sportello takes interest in a case from his former “old lady,” he runs into a series of events that point to a conspiracy. The worlds of the Aryan Brotherhood, corrupt members of the LAPD, a drug-dealing/tax-shelter corporation of dentists, a land developer who recently found a conscience, and various ex-cons intersect throughout the novel.  Too often, the novel wants us to question whether or not there are connections to be made, or if we are too eager to see something; our questions come through Doc, as he is not often sure if things are as they might seem—is it coincidence, dumb luck, or is he simply hallucinating from a new or old trip?

Whether or not these events and parties are actually coincidental or part of the vast conspiracy, Inherent Vice knows that the connections only matter through the eyes of Doc. He is adamant that the world needs to care about these connections, and he is certainly of a mind to look after all the people who he comes across. He cares deeply about the world, and he cares that people are happy. Pynchon’s novel appears to end hopefully, but it also recognizes the dominance of capitalism and consumer society that will overwhelm the human-connectedness of society.

A New Year and New Resolutions

I have been far too absent from this medium, and though these thoughts are seldom viewed, I want to be a more active presence.

To that end, for each book I read this year, I want to write a small post to offer some thoughts on the work. It might offer an opportunity for greater discussion--should anyone care to comment--but also a reminder of my impressions of each work.

The Virgin Suicides

The central question of the book is how do we respond to death.  That question is made all the more difficult when there is really nothing that anyone can know about the real circumstances of those deaths.  So the suicides of the Lisbon girls, beginning with the gruesome defenestration of the youngest daughter, Cecilia, who dies not from the fall but from impaling herself on a fence.  It is a gruesome beginning of the book, and that incident sets into motion each subsequent action of the novel.  

The novel works through the deaths of the girls via the chronological events of the late 1970s with the intrusion of a separate narrative strain of the boys who knew the girls, attempting to make sense of the events years later.  This second narrative strain works as a commentary on events, but it also pushes the issue of making sense of loss.  The boys are haunted by their love, or nostalgia or regret or lust, for the girls years later.  These boys, now men, attempt to solve the mystery, collecting evidence after the house is cleared out, compiling interviews with relevant parties, and piecing together their own memories of the events.  

But what the boys, and the readers, come to know is that the facts, the evidence, the memories are never enough.  They are attempts to capture the ephemeral existence of the Lisbon girls.  These were girls who could not be captured in life and they cannot be captured in death.  They are, as Shelley wrote in Adonais of Keats, "Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are."