Fab Books of February

BOOKS WE LOVE: In which we editors gush about some books (old and new) that have knocked our respective socks off.

RIVER OF EARTH
by James Still
(New York: Viking Press, 1940)

Printed by the same publisher and within a year of Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, James Still's RIVER OF EARTH echoes similar themes. A child narrator tells the tale of his two siblings and parents, Brack and Alpha Baldridge, as they suffer in the mountains and mines of Eastern Kentucky during the Great Depression. When cousins Harl and Tibb and Uncle Samp show up at the family's small cabin, where the family's literally been scraping the bottom of the pork barrel for the last bit of rinds, Alpha demands Brack throw them out lest the children starve. "As long as we've got a crust," he says, refusing his wife's request, "it'll never be said I turned my folks from my door." Alpha resolves by her own means to run the cousins and uncle off.

We waited in the backyard while Mother went around the house again, looking off the hill. Uncle Samp was nowhere in sight, and neither Harl nor Tibb could be seen. Then she went inside alone. She stayed a long time. We could hear her moving across the floor. When she came out and closed the door there was a haze of smoke behind her, blue and smelling of burnt wood.... In a moment we saw the flames through the back window.... When [the neighbors] arrived, the walls had fallen in, and Mother stood among the scattered furnishings, her face calm and triumphant.           

It is an endearing act of hubris, and it sets in motion the nigh-apocalyptic story of conflict between man and wife, family and environment, miner and mine company, that follows.

But if by an accident of birth a comparison can be drawn between Steinbeck and Still's books, RIVER OF EARTH is a rival but distinctive read: humble where Grapes of Wrath is epic, linguistically playful where Steinbeck is partisan. "I was borned in a ridgepocket," mumbles a priest in mid-sermon near the end of the novel. "They hain't a hill standing so proud but hit'll sink to the low ground o' sorrow. Oh, my children, where air we going on this mighty river of earth, a-borning, and a-getting, and a-dying-the living and the dead riding the waters?"

Still, who died in 2001, has two new books to be published posthumously this year by the University of Kentucky Press. Seventy years after the publication of RIVER OF EARTH, his work is still relevant. In an age of mountaintop removal and Massey mines, his spirit shadows the sentences of contemporary writers like Alex Taylor and Erik Reece, still trying in their own art to delineate the linguistic peculiarities and political conflicts that define life for many in the mountains the Baldridge family once called home.

—WGE

HOUSE OF PRAYER NO. 2: A WRITER'S JOURNEY HOME
by Mark Richard
(Doubleday, 2011)

In Mark Richard's memoir, HOUSE OF PRAYER NO. 2, a "special child" with messed-up hips and possibly a mental glitch grows up lonely, fending off school bullies. A "good afternoon," according to the special child, "is when the school is struck twice by lightning." He, who prefers to narrate in the second person, explains why:

Everyone else starts crying when the lightning strikes the swing set first. You stand at the window. It's raining and thundering and the lightning strikes the roof but the sun is also shining, and you heard from your father's mother that when it rains and the sun is shining, it means the Devil is beating his wife. As the big boys from the county and all the little girls cry for their mommies and the teacher is shouting for everyone to get into the cloakroom, you clap and laugh and shout, The Devil is beating his wife! The Devil is beating his wife! The children and teacher are afraid of your loud laughter, you can tell by their looks, as they crowd into the cloakroom as you stand by the open window getting soaked by the windblown rain, the special child.

The scene pretty much epitomizes young Richard's blissful alienation as well as the religious undercurrents that will later define his adulthood.

HOUSE OF PRAYER NO. 2 describes a familiar sort of Southern childhood—one in which the father is a brutal, hard-drinking perfectionist, the mother is unfulfilled and desolate, and luxuries are nonexistent—but the book is affecting. Richard endures countless operations on his hips; the doctors predict he'll be in a wheelchair by age thirty. (Doesn't happen.) He goes to college, thrives in creative-writing classes, wrecks his car a few times, graduates, and drifts about digging ditches. His fortunes change when he is selected as a finalist in an Atlantic Monthly fiction contest and when Esquire publishes one of his stories. Meanwhile, he's been asking God for "signs"—and getting them—and "the Call" eventually leads him back South to his mother and to her Pentecostal church, House of Prayer No. 2 (they're the only white congregants). Mark Richard's experiences are compelling, but it's the writing that makes his book miraculous. Like his outlook, like his life, his sentences contain taut, unexpected reversals that can make you read a little differently: "The hospital is crowded with children from Appalachia with knees that have to be cut up and legs that have to be sawed off," he writes, then adds: "They're a pretty happy bunch."

—CAF 

THE GOSPEL OF ANARCHY
by Justin Taylor
(Harper Perennial, February 2011)

Taylor's debut novel picks up on a string of characters he first introduced in last year's collection: a group of young, self-defeating anarchists in Gainesville, Florida. Set in the summer before the WTO protests in 1999, David, an "atheist Jew," drops out of college, abandons his job and apartment, and enters the faux-revolutionary fold—who reside together in a dilapidated rental house dubbed "Fishgut." After becoming the male cog in a struggling lesbian relationship, David falls for the den mother, Katy, whose ecstatic devotion to the teachings of an erstwhile collective member, Parker, becomes the makings of a bizarre religion. Each section shifts character perspectives, written in the accurate voices of twenty-somethings intoxicated by their own sense of self-importance.  Once again, Taylor blends the competing heat of religious fervor, threatening politics, and nihilistic sex, yielding dangerous results.

—NE

LEARNING THE VALLEY: EXCURSIONS INTO THE SHENANDOAH VALLEY
by John Leland
(University of South Carolina Press, 2010)

To describe a geographical region is as difficult as trying to see it all in a day, so John Leland, in LEARNING THE VALLEY, divides his experiences into vignettes, each an anthropomorphic ode to a different feature of the Shenandoah Valley. Adulterous creeks wander from one bed to another, greedy limestone siphons waters from wells and decorative ponds alike, and the variety of fossils Leland and his son find confirms Thomas Jefferson's mythical theories about the landscape—that the valley had recently been undersea and the ground was still moist with its waters. A trail guide, a vegetation handbook (including poison ivy's uses), and a memoir, LEARNING THE VALLEY inspires the same nostalgia in readers that Leland has spent years and miles cultivating for himself and his son.
 
LINES WE LIKED: "And mistakenly boil some [maple sap] down into sugar that you've got to scrape off the pot and spoon and that barely warrants saving, but do so anyway and give it to someone you love, preferably someone several decades younger than you so that you can addict them forever to that which they will be compelled to make themselves."
 
—MTP

GRYPHON: NEW AND SELECTED STORIES
by Charles Baxter
(Pantheon Books, 2011)

In Charles Baxter's stories, reality is never debased by convention, though his characters move through lives as seemingly bland as the landscape of their Midwestern locales. Baxter's earthly limbo, where "the sounds one hears drifting from porches...on soft summer nights" are evocative of Dante's "duol senza martiri"—grief without torment—is redeemed by love (in all its complicated variants), surprising joy, and moments of "resigned spiritual radiance." In one story, an over-confident art dealer looks out the window of his airplane, sees the Northern Lights, "hideously majestic as a floor show in heaven," and "for a moment [feels] degraded by humility." Each of the twenty-three tales in this new compilation reads like an American koan; for Baxter, a consummate magician of the short story form, orchestrates economy and beauty with such graceful precision that attentive readers will come away from his words moved, if not changed.

LINES WE LIKED: "At recess the class was out on the playground, but no one was playing. We were all standing in small groups, talking about Miss Ferenczi. We didn't know if she was crazy, or what. I looked out beyond the playground, at the rusted cars piled in a small heap behind a clump of sumac, and I wanted to see shapes there, approaching me."

—JHB

MISS ME WHEN I'M GONE
by Philip Stephens
(Plume, 2011)

MISS ME WHEN I'M GONE tells the stories of Cyrus Harper—an alcoholic, failed folk guitarist whose first appearance involves him getting into a bar brawl—and Margaret Bowman, a forest-dwelling murder suspect determined to reclaim her daughter from Social Services. Cyrus is haunted by his past; namely, his ongoing search for his sister, Saro, whom he believes will be his musical savior. He returns to his hometown of Apogee, Missouri, to a dying mother, a greedy brother intent on destroying their childhood home and erecting a McParadise (complete with condos and a golf course), and a town that ignores his precious concept of rural ethics. Margaret's story reveals the drug- and crime-filled shadows of the Missouri Ozarks community, and her quest for her daughter parallels Cyrus's own pursuit of his sister and the music they once created together. Overall, MISS ME WHEN I'M GONE is a melodic, heart-aching read.

LINES WE LIKED: "The past was never past. It was a song of wandering verses, each lyric hooked to the next until it made little sense, and the best way to end it was to cease singing before all meaning was lost. Sense might be made one verse at a time, though."

—KNW

A FRIEND OF THE FAMILY
by Lauren Grodstein
(Algonquin, 2010)

In this novel, Peter Dizinoff believes there is right, there is wrong, and anything in between is a lie, manufactured to make wrong seem right. With a successful medical practice that has earned him the admiration of the community, Peter has done right by his wife and son by providing (a lot) for them. His attempts to preserve the world he has so carefully built include such ruthless stunts as forging a college application in his son's name and abandoning the Sterns, his best friends, in the midst of their daughter's scandal. But fifteen years after she delivered her doomed, premature baby in a library bathroom, Laura Stern returns to her parents' house. In the name of protecting his family, Peter tries to thwart the redemption Laura seeks, and, instead, desecrates the very relationships for which he fought.

LINES WE LIKED: "So this was where we were. My son's future was in the toilet and Joe was strumming his sad guitar."

—MTP