REVIEWS ON OTHER WORKS
Book Review
'A PLACE IN TIME'
November 2, 2012
By Aimee Zaring
Special to The Courier-Journal
"A Place in Time:Twenty Stories of the Port William Membership "
by Wendell Berry
Counterpoint Press, 2012.
Reading Wendell Berry’s new short story collection (his first work of fiction since 2006) is a little like saying hello and goodbye to a long-lost friend in the same breath. Here again are so many of the unforgettable characters whom fans of the fictional small Kentucky town of Port William have come to know and love over these past 50 years.
But in “A Place in Time: Twenty Stories of the Port William Membership,” characters age and pass on, homesteads are auctioned off, belongings are sold piece by piece and farms are destroyed for commercial development. Each story is a reminder that a time and place unlike any other has come to an end, only to be remembered and revisited through voices from the past and the transformative power of story.
Spanning over 100 years, from 1864 to 2008, these stories unfold like pop-up art, one story rising from the pages of another, the past breaking through to the present. The end result is a collective story or consciousness, reflecting
one of Berry’s chief preoccupations in his over 50 works of fiction, nonfiction and poetry: the interconnectedness
of all things.
In the first story, “The Girl in the Window,” Port William cannot escape the Civil War’s toxic, divisive effects. Rebecca Dawe, haunted by the death of her brother, killed by a neighbor on the way to join the Confederate army, learns about the saving rhythm and routine of farm life and what true freedom looks like.
“The Dark Country” tracks Burley Coulter on a hunting trip through the woods, where he experiences a certain
sorrow for taking another life, but with the innate understanding and acceptance that “No life lives but at the
cost of other lives.”
In “Misery,” one of several stories from Andy Catlett’s perspective in old age, Andy reflects on his grandparents’ unhappy household, sustained and partly redeemed by “an agricultural order, resting upon the order of time and nature, that was at once demanding and consoling.”
Lighthearted tales of longtime friendships, shenanigans and young love balance more thematically complex stories like “A New Day,” a gripping story of two worlds: the world of the old agrarian economy versus the world of the economy of industrialization. In a battle of wills between two teamsters, Elton Penn proves how old-school methods — namely steady, unflinching perseverance and strength — can trump short cuts and quick fixes any day.
By capturing the still-beating heart of this people and place, Berry, recipient of the 2010 National Humanities Medal, offers a virtual blueprint for present and future generations of how one should behave toward others and the environment. “Our descendants may know such a time again when the petroleum all is burnt. How they will fare then will depend on the neighborly wisdom, the love for the place and its genius, and the skills that they may manage to revive between now and then.”
The olden days might be gone forever, but they will never be forgotten, living on through stories like these, and Berry’s inimitable voice, telling us, in no uncertain terms, Listen. Remember. Tell your children and your children’s children.
Aimee Zaring is a Louisville native who holds an MFA from Spalding University.
An ESL instructor, she is presently working on a collection of refugee stories and recipes.
'A PLACE IN TIME'
November 2, 2012
By Aimee Zaring
Special to The Courier-Journal
"A Place in Time:Twenty Stories of the Port William Membership "
by Wendell Berry
Counterpoint Press, 2012.
Reading Wendell Berry’s new short story collection (his first work of fiction since 2006) is a little like saying hello and goodbye to a long-lost friend in the same breath. Here again are so many of the unforgettable characters whom fans of the fictional small Kentucky town of Port William have come to know and love over these past 50 years.
But in “A Place in Time: Twenty Stories of the Port William Membership,” characters age and pass on, homesteads are auctioned off, belongings are sold piece by piece and farms are destroyed for commercial development. Each story is a reminder that a time and place unlike any other has come to an end, only to be remembered and revisited through voices from the past and the transformative power of story.
Spanning over 100 years, from 1864 to 2008, these stories unfold like pop-up art, one story rising from the pages of another, the past breaking through to the present. The end result is a collective story or consciousness, reflecting
one of Berry’s chief preoccupations in his over 50 works of fiction, nonfiction and poetry: the interconnectedness
of all things.
In the first story, “The Girl in the Window,” Port William cannot escape the Civil War’s toxic, divisive effects. Rebecca Dawe, haunted by the death of her brother, killed by a neighbor on the way to join the Confederate army, learns about the saving rhythm and routine of farm life and what true freedom looks like.
“The Dark Country” tracks Burley Coulter on a hunting trip through the woods, where he experiences a certain
sorrow for taking another life, but with the innate understanding and acceptance that “No life lives but at the
cost of other lives.”
In “Misery,” one of several stories from Andy Catlett’s perspective in old age, Andy reflects on his grandparents’ unhappy household, sustained and partly redeemed by “an agricultural order, resting upon the order of time and nature, that was at once demanding and consoling.”
Lighthearted tales of longtime friendships, shenanigans and young love balance more thematically complex stories like “A New Day,” a gripping story of two worlds: the world of the old agrarian economy versus the world of the economy of industrialization. In a battle of wills between two teamsters, Elton Penn proves how old-school methods — namely steady, unflinching perseverance and strength — can trump short cuts and quick fixes any day.
By capturing the still-beating heart of this people and place, Berry, recipient of the 2010 National Humanities Medal, offers a virtual blueprint for present and future generations of how one should behave toward others and the environment. “Our descendants may know such a time again when the petroleum all is burnt. How they will fare then will depend on the neighborly wisdom, the love for the place and its genius, and the skills that they may manage to revive between now and then.”
The olden days might be gone forever, but they will never be forgotten, living on through stories like these, and Berry’s inimitable voice, telling us, in no uncertain terms, Listen. Remember. Tell your children and your children’s children.
Aimee Zaring is a Louisville native who holds an MFA from Spalding University.
An ESL instructor, she is presently working on a collection of refugee stories and recipes.
Book Review
'YOU HAVE GIVEN ME A COUNTRY'
September 4, 2010
By Aimee Zaring
Special to The Courier-Journal
"You Have Given Me A Country: A Memoir "
by Neela Vaswani
Sarabande Books, 2010.
Aug. 15, 1947: The date India gained independence from British rule. The date one country was divided into two, segregated by religion, resulting in riots and murders and one of the largest migrations in human history. Neela Vaswani's father was among the 14 million people displaced and relocated, rendered homeless and landless.
In explaining to his young son the word partition, Vaswani's grandfather slapped his hand against a wall: “This separates one side from the other.” It is this very divisiveness that author and education activist Vaswani challenges throughout her deeply moving memoir, “You Have Given Me a Country.”
In the spirit of full disclosure, I have known Vaswani, who has a Ph.D. in American cultural studies and teaches at Spalding University's MFA in Writing Program, for many years. I have always admired her lyrical, innovative writing, including her award-winning collection of stories, “Where the Long Grass Bends.” But I had no idea when I began her second book that I would be embarking on such a mind-expanding journey, that I would meet such unforgettable characters or discover such a sacred message. Hers is the message of unity, grace and love.
“You Have Given Me a Country” is a mixed being — a unique fusion of styles and genres. One would expect perhaps no less from the offspring of an Irish-Catholic mother and Sindhi-Indian father. Vaswani guides us through her parents' fascinating childhoods, the courageous journey that brought them together and her own unique experience as a bicultural child growing up in America.
As a young girl, Vaswani liked to play a game: Unfocus Your Eyes. Objects would bleed together, become undistinguishable. “No man, no woman, no table, no chair.” An apt metaphor for the interconnectedness Vaswani sought in real life. Vaswani recounts the time she and her parents entered a store in North Carolina. The clerk, after sizing up the three, asked Vaswani's mother if she was a Christian. When her mother replied affirmatively, he pointed to Vaswani and said, “That's disgusting,” then threatened them with a shotgun.
Vaswani found refuge in story, the power of words. “To join things, even opposites, was as easy as writing the word ‘and.'” Vaswani's parents shared their faith and family stories “as an act of love, of resurrection.” They taught their daughter to listen to words, even if she couldn't understand their meaning. “It was a taking of words into the body, like Communion, like prashad. A seeking after words, a seeking after God. A God of paper, a God of trees. A God of ink.”
Though Vaswani sometimes felt divided growing up, like there was a war within her body, she also learned how to hold two things in her mind at once. “Two feelings, two ideas, two languages. The in-between, inside me. Like two spotlights on a dark stage, coming together. And where they overlapped it was brightest. It was easiest to see.” Vaswani's book is like the spotlight on that dark stage, illuminating the pain of isolation and the cruelty of prejudice, but also the beauty, wonder and necessity of Other.
Vaswani avoids one of the common pitfalls of memoirists — self-pity. Hope, humor and an indomitable spirit fill
these pages, and by book's end, three heroes have emerged: Vaswani's parents, who defied the cultural, religious
and societal norms of their time and instilled in Vaswani a love and appreciation of story; and Vaswani herself,
brave enough to “pledge allegiance to the in-between” and to deliver the often unpopular message of tolerance
and compassion.
“To me, the point of love is to overcome difference. Nothing is too hard for love. Not threats, not a lifetime of alienation, not money, not religion, not skin, not ruined reputation, not gigantic corporations with a long reach, not famine, genocide, poverty, government, not the power of one's raising. Nothing is too hard for love. Nothing.”
'YOU HAVE GIVEN ME A COUNTRY'
September 4, 2010
By Aimee Zaring
Special to The Courier-Journal
"You Have Given Me A Country: A Memoir "
by Neela Vaswani
Sarabande Books, 2010.
Aug. 15, 1947: The date India gained independence from British rule. The date one country was divided into two, segregated by religion, resulting in riots and murders and one of the largest migrations in human history. Neela Vaswani's father was among the 14 million people displaced and relocated, rendered homeless and landless.
In explaining to his young son the word partition, Vaswani's grandfather slapped his hand against a wall: “This separates one side from the other.” It is this very divisiveness that author and education activist Vaswani challenges throughout her deeply moving memoir, “You Have Given Me a Country.”
In the spirit of full disclosure, I have known Vaswani, who has a Ph.D. in American cultural studies and teaches at Spalding University's MFA in Writing Program, for many years. I have always admired her lyrical, innovative writing, including her award-winning collection of stories, “Where the Long Grass Bends.” But I had no idea when I began her second book that I would be embarking on such a mind-expanding journey, that I would meet such unforgettable characters or discover such a sacred message. Hers is the message of unity, grace and love.
“You Have Given Me a Country” is a mixed being — a unique fusion of styles and genres. One would expect perhaps no less from the offspring of an Irish-Catholic mother and Sindhi-Indian father. Vaswani guides us through her parents' fascinating childhoods, the courageous journey that brought them together and her own unique experience as a bicultural child growing up in America.
As a young girl, Vaswani liked to play a game: Unfocus Your Eyes. Objects would bleed together, become undistinguishable. “No man, no woman, no table, no chair.” An apt metaphor for the interconnectedness Vaswani sought in real life. Vaswani recounts the time she and her parents entered a store in North Carolina. The clerk, after sizing up the three, asked Vaswani's mother if she was a Christian. When her mother replied affirmatively, he pointed to Vaswani and said, “That's disgusting,” then threatened them with a shotgun.
Vaswani found refuge in story, the power of words. “To join things, even opposites, was as easy as writing the word ‘and.'” Vaswani's parents shared their faith and family stories “as an act of love, of resurrection.” They taught their daughter to listen to words, even if she couldn't understand their meaning. “It was a taking of words into the body, like Communion, like prashad. A seeking after words, a seeking after God. A God of paper, a God of trees. A God of ink.”
Though Vaswani sometimes felt divided growing up, like there was a war within her body, she also learned how to hold two things in her mind at once. “Two feelings, two ideas, two languages. The in-between, inside me. Like two spotlights on a dark stage, coming together. And where they overlapped it was brightest. It was easiest to see.” Vaswani's book is like the spotlight on that dark stage, illuminating the pain of isolation and the cruelty of prejudice, but also the beauty, wonder and necessity of Other.
Vaswani avoids one of the common pitfalls of memoirists — self-pity. Hope, humor and an indomitable spirit fill
these pages, and by book's end, three heroes have emerged: Vaswani's parents, who defied the cultural, religious
and societal norms of their time and instilled in Vaswani a love and appreciation of story; and Vaswani herself,
brave enough to “pledge allegiance to the in-between” and to deliver the often unpopular message of tolerance
and compassion.
“To me, the point of love is to overcome difference. Nothing is too hard for love. Not threats, not a lifetime of alienation, not money, not religion, not skin, not ruined reputation, not gigantic corporations with a long reach, not famine, genocide, poverty, government, not the power of one's raising. Nothing is too hard for love. Nothing.”
Book Review
'THE NEW YORK STORIES OF ELIZABETH HARDWICK'
July 3, 2010
By Aimee Zaring
Special to The Courier-Journal
"The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick"
by Elizabeth Hardwick
New York: The New York Review Books, 2010.
pp. 256 $15.95
She was among the first generation of female intellectuals to make a splash on the New York City literary scene. She was married to the poet Robert Lowell and wrote four essay collections and three novels. A co-founder of the New York Review of Books, she is considered by some one of the best literary essayists of the last century.
She was born in Lexington, Ky., and graduated from the University of Kentucky, yet I would venture to guess that few from her native state are familiar with Elizabeth Hardwick or her work. And who among even her most avid readers knew she had written short stories--and with such exquisite artistry?
"The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick," published now 21/2 years after her death, showcases the hallmarks of Hardwick's writing: keen, incisive intelligence; penetrating, unflinching, spot-on insights into the human psyche; and sentences so vivid and sensual that writer Susan Sontag once claimed they were burned in her brain.
Hardwick's narrators are most often observers, analyzing others, searching for truth. But Hardwick often turns
the mirror back on her narrators, forcing them to look their weaknesses and false convictions in the eye.
In an early story, "Yes and No," a girlfriend finds an old notebook filled with scraps of fiction based on her former boyfriend. She recognizes that these bits are far removed from the truth of his character and their relationship. The truth: "Old flame, lost beloved -- I have left out of my little 'story' my abject dependence upon you! How mad I was about you, how perversely aware of my sinful enjoyment of your affection for me."
In "Evenings at Home." Hardwick's narrator returns to her hometown of Lexington. "There is something false and perverse in my playing the observer, I who have lived here as long as anyone. Still these bright streets do not belong
to me and I feel, not like someone who chose to move away, but as if I had been, as the expression goes, 'run out
of town.'"
Hardwick was fond of Kentucky but discovered her true home in New York City, where she moved in 1941. The city never ceased to amaze her.
In "Cross-town" she writes, "What obstinacy in the air. A whole city built on obstinacy." In the same story, the narrator notes, "Sometimes while waiting for a taxi at Seventy-ninth Street, after midnight, it is possible, with a certain amount of effort or with a little too much wine, to imagine the city returned to trees, old footpaths, and clear, untroubled waters, returned to innocence and nautical miscalculations and ancestral heroics." But in the next breath, the narrator admits she does not miss or lament old New York. Like the narrator, Hardwick found the city's grit more compelling than its grandeur.
These 13 stories are presented in chronological order and span almost five decades, from 1946-1993. There is an unfortunate two-decade dearth of stories beginning in 1959; however, this period gave rise to Hardwick's groundbreaking essay collection, "Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature" and her last novel, "Sleepless Nights," nominated for the National Books Critics Circle Award. When the stories pick up in 1980, Hardwick's sentences have become sparser, the language more poetic, the story structure less conventional. Vignettes replace case studies.
In those later stories especially, Hardwick demonstrates her uncanny ability to paint a character's biography and essence in a few brushstrokes. Of the beautiful man with whom the narrator in "Back Issues" becomes fascinated at the New York Public Library, Hardwick writes, "He is not an American, certainly not. His genealogy is filled with martyrs, black-eyed, black-haired oppressed peoples, mowed down, starved."
Unlike many short story collections, there is not a weakling in this bunch, and though Hardwick's style might have evolved over the years, as Darryl Pinckney points out in his introduction, "Her voice, like Baldwin's, never aged."
"The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick" will offer the uninitiated a perfect introduction to one of America's most brilliant--and overlooked--writers, while giving loyal followers another delectable taste of the Hardwick they've come to know and love.
'THE NEW YORK STORIES OF ELIZABETH HARDWICK'
July 3, 2010
By Aimee Zaring
Special to The Courier-Journal
"The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick"
by Elizabeth Hardwick
New York: The New York Review Books, 2010.
pp. 256 $15.95
She was among the first generation of female intellectuals to make a splash on the New York City literary scene. She was married to the poet Robert Lowell and wrote four essay collections and three novels. A co-founder of the New York Review of Books, she is considered by some one of the best literary essayists of the last century.
She was born in Lexington, Ky., and graduated from the University of Kentucky, yet I would venture to guess that few from her native state are familiar with Elizabeth Hardwick or her work. And who among even her most avid readers knew she had written short stories--and with such exquisite artistry?
"The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick," published now 21/2 years after her death, showcases the hallmarks of Hardwick's writing: keen, incisive intelligence; penetrating, unflinching, spot-on insights into the human psyche; and sentences so vivid and sensual that writer Susan Sontag once claimed they were burned in her brain.
Hardwick's narrators are most often observers, analyzing others, searching for truth. But Hardwick often turns
the mirror back on her narrators, forcing them to look their weaknesses and false convictions in the eye.
In an early story, "Yes and No," a girlfriend finds an old notebook filled with scraps of fiction based on her former boyfriend. She recognizes that these bits are far removed from the truth of his character and their relationship. The truth: "Old flame, lost beloved -- I have left out of my little 'story' my abject dependence upon you! How mad I was about you, how perversely aware of my sinful enjoyment of your affection for me."
In "Evenings at Home." Hardwick's narrator returns to her hometown of Lexington. "There is something false and perverse in my playing the observer, I who have lived here as long as anyone. Still these bright streets do not belong
to me and I feel, not like someone who chose to move away, but as if I had been, as the expression goes, 'run out
of town.'"
Hardwick was fond of Kentucky but discovered her true home in New York City, where she moved in 1941. The city never ceased to amaze her.
In "Cross-town" she writes, "What obstinacy in the air. A whole city built on obstinacy." In the same story, the narrator notes, "Sometimes while waiting for a taxi at Seventy-ninth Street, after midnight, it is possible, with a certain amount of effort or with a little too much wine, to imagine the city returned to trees, old footpaths, and clear, untroubled waters, returned to innocence and nautical miscalculations and ancestral heroics." But in the next breath, the narrator admits she does not miss or lament old New York. Like the narrator, Hardwick found the city's grit more compelling than its grandeur.
These 13 stories are presented in chronological order and span almost five decades, from 1946-1993. There is an unfortunate two-decade dearth of stories beginning in 1959; however, this period gave rise to Hardwick's groundbreaking essay collection, "Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature" and her last novel, "Sleepless Nights," nominated for the National Books Critics Circle Award. When the stories pick up in 1980, Hardwick's sentences have become sparser, the language more poetic, the story structure less conventional. Vignettes replace case studies.
In those later stories especially, Hardwick demonstrates her uncanny ability to paint a character's biography and essence in a few brushstrokes. Of the beautiful man with whom the narrator in "Back Issues" becomes fascinated at the New York Public Library, Hardwick writes, "He is not an American, certainly not. His genealogy is filled with martyrs, black-eyed, black-haired oppressed peoples, mowed down, starved."
Unlike many short story collections, there is not a weakling in this bunch, and though Hardwick's style might have evolved over the years, as Darryl Pinckney points out in his introduction, "Her voice, like Baldwin's, never aged."
"The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick" will offer the uninitiated a perfect introduction to one of America's most brilliant--and overlooked--writers, while giving loyal followers another delectable taste of the Hardwick they've come to know and love.
Book Review
'HOME' READER FEELS PART OF RECONCILIATION PROCESS
October, 2008
By Aimee Zaring
Herald-Leader Contributing Writer
Home By Marilynne Robinson.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 325 pp. $25.
After the release of her 1980 modern classic,Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson's fans had to wait more than two decades for her next novel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead. Fortunately, the wait wasn't nearly as long for her third novel. Home, a companion piece to Gilead, revisits the same characters in the same small Iowa town during the same time period, only the focus shifts from the Rev. John Ames' household to that of his longtime friend, the Rev. Robert Boughton.
Glory, the youngest of Boughton's children, returns home to care for her frail father. A 38-year-old high school English teacher, Glory passes the slow days trying not to think about her past, including a failed love affair, or her unpromising future. "It is as if I had a dream of adult life and woke up from it, still here in my parents' house."
Then, after an absence of 20 years, Jack, the black sheep of the family and ne'er-do-well, arrives on the doorstep, hung over "and in no state to receive the kindness prepared for him." What follows is the other half of the Prodigal Son story, the one that picks up after the celebration ends and the arduous work of reconciliation begins.
Jack has been the "weight on the family's heart" since his precarious entrance into the world. His past offenses include petty theft, drinking, joblessness and an illegitimate child with a teenage girl, both of whom he abandons. But perhaps his greatest transgression is his inability to accept or return his family's love.
Jack has always felt like a stranger in the house in which he was raised, that "good and blessed and fustian and oppressive tabernacle of Boughton probity and kind intent." The home is both the embodiment of grace and a place of exile, where neither spiritually homeless Jack nor the rest of his God-fearing family can find true comfort or refuge.
Robinson, an instructor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and author of two non-fiction works, seems to anticipate the Boughton family story and shed light on their unceasing fealty toward Jack in an essay, "Family": "Imagine that someone failed and disgraced came back to his family, and they grieved with him, and took his sadness upon themselves, and sat down together to ponder the deep mysteries of human life. This is more human and beautiful, I propose, even if it yields no dulling of pain, no patching of injuries. Perhaps it is the calling of some families to console, because intractable grief is visited upon them."
Home is not propelled by plot and is perhaps even more ruminative than its sister book. The reader, like the characters, must plod through the "sheer power of sameness," must endure the polite, banal exchanges and desolate silences. But this wearying effect is by design. Robinson asks that we not only imagine this family's suffering but also participate in it. Counterbalancing the novel's mournful tenor is Robinson's clear, calm and unsentimental voice, which carries a peaceful assurance that joy and blessing can be found in the midst of sorrow, that "new love (will) transform all the old love and make its relics wonderful."
Home is Robinson's only novel written in third person; it is told from Glory's viewpoint — a wise choice, for it is the woman who bears life and on whom the burden often falls to sustain it. "Home to stay, Glory!" is the novel's opening line, but only at the end of the novel, after Glory recognizes the self-sacrifice she is called to make, do we fully appreciate the bittersweet magnitude of those words.
Why did Robinson take us back to the same town, to these same characters — even to some of the same scenes as in Gilead? Why re-introduce the problem of Jack? Perhaps because Jack's story belongs to all of us. Who among us does not know a Jack? Who among us might in fact be Jack? Jack puts true faith to the test. We can hear sermons and read books about forgiveness, but "the real text was Jack."
Some believe to understand is to forgive, but in Home, Robinson suggests the opposite: "You must forgive in order to understand. ... If you forgive ... you may indeed still not understand, but you will be ready to understand, and that is the posture of grace."
'HOME' READER FEELS PART OF RECONCILIATION PROCESS
October, 2008
By Aimee Zaring
Herald-Leader Contributing Writer
Home By Marilynne Robinson.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 325 pp. $25.
After the release of her 1980 modern classic,Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson's fans had to wait more than two decades for her next novel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead. Fortunately, the wait wasn't nearly as long for her third novel. Home, a companion piece to Gilead, revisits the same characters in the same small Iowa town during the same time period, only the focus shifts from the Rev. John Ames' household to that of his longtime friend, the Rev. Robert Boughton.
Glory, the youngest of Boughton's children, returns home to care for her frail father. A 38-year-old high school English teacher, Glory passes the slow days trying not to think about her past, including a failed love affair, or her unpromising future. "It is as if I had a dream of adult life and woke up from it, still here in my parents' house."
Then, after an absence of 20 years, Jack, the black sheep of the family and ne'er-do-well, arrives on the doorstep, hung over "and in no state to receive the kindness prepared for him." What follows is the other half of the Prodigal Son story, the one that picks up after the celebration ends and the arduous work of reconciliation begins.
Jack has been the "weight on the family's heart" since his precarious entrance into the world. His past offenses include petty theft, drinking, joblessness and an illegitimate child with a teenage girl, both of whom he abandons. But perhaps his greatest transgression is his inability to accept or return his family's love.
Jack has always felt like a stranger in the house in which he was raised, that "good and blessed and fustian and oppressive tabernacle of Boughton probity and kind intent." The home is both the embodiment of grace and a place of exile, where neither spiritually homeless Jack nor the rest of his God-fearing family can find true comfort or refuge.
Robinson, an instructor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and author of two non-fiction works, seems to anticipate the Boughton family story and shed light on their unceasing fealty toward Jack in an essay, "Family": "Imagine that someone failed and disgraced came back to his family, and they grieved with him, and took his sadness upon themselves, and sat down together to ponder the deep mysteries of human life. This is more human and beautiful, I propose, even if it yields no dulling of pain, no patching of injuries. Perhaps it is the calling of some families to console, because intractable grief is visited upon them."
Home is not propelled by plot and is perhaps even more ruminative than its sister book. The reader, like the characters, must plod through the "sheer power of sameness," must endure the polite, banal exchanges and desolate silences. But this wearying effect is by design. Robinson asks that we not only imagine this family's suffering but also participate in it. Counterbalancing the novel's mournful tenor is Robinson's clear, calm and unsentimental voice, which carries a peaceful assurance that joy and blessing can be found in the midst of sorrow, that "new love (will) transform all the old love and make its relics wonderful."
Home is Robinson's only novel written in third person; it is told from Glory's viewpoint — a wise choice, for it is the woman who bears life and on whom the burden often falls to sustain it. "Home to stay, Glory!" is the novel's opening line, but only at the end of the novel, after Glory recognizes the self-sacrifice she is called to make, do we fully appreciate the bittersweet magnitude of those words.
Why did Robinson take us back to the same town, to these same characters — even to some of the same scenes as in Gilead? Why re-introduce the problem of Jack? Perhaps because Jack's story belongs to all of us. Who among us does not know a Jack? Who among us might in fact be Jack? Jack puts true faith to the test. We can hear sermons and read books about forgiveness, but "the real text was Jack."
Some believe to understand is to forgive, but in Home, Robinson suggests the opposite: "You must forgive in order to understand. ... If you forgive ... you may indeed still not understand, but you will be ready to understand, and that is the posture of grace."
Book Review
'CALLING HOME' EXPLORES A KENTUCKY FAMILY'S CHALLENGES
April 5, 2008
Special to The Courier-Journal
The Greek philosopher Heraclitus maintained that a man's character is his fate, but in her new novel,Calling Home, Janna McMahan reminds us that a "bad judgment call when you're just a kid shouldn't ruin the rest of your life." And Virginia Lemmons, who shares this insight with her teenage daughter, should know, for she still lives with a painful secret from her past -- a secret that threatens to destroy herself and her family.
When the novel opens, Virginia discovers she's not the only one harboring a secret. Her husband, Roger, is having an affair. After years of trying to placate his emotionally unavailable wife, Roger moves in with his beautician girlfriend. The Lemmons' children -- Shannon, a studious go-getter, and Will, a local baseball star -- try to adjust to their mother's increased despondency and their father's withdrawal from their lives. Both dream of getting out of their small town the first chance they get. Shannon tells her boyfriend, Kerry, "I'm tired of driving around Falling Rock in a circle every weekend. That's a good metaphor for my life, driving around in circles and never getting anywhere."
Virginia wants a better life for her daughter. "Things were finally changing for women," Virginia thinks. "Girls of Shannon's generation had options." Shannon plans to go to college and have a career. Though she feels pressured
to have sex with her boyfriend, she doesn't want to become a young mother like Virginia. But the more she tries
to distance herself from her embittered mother, the more she spirals headlong into the same traps that once
seduced Virginia.
McMahan paints a vivid, convincing portrayal of a small Kentucky town during the transitional period of the late 1970s and early '80s, transporting us back to those uncertain, changing times: Middle East peace talks, the Iran hostage crisis, Van Halen, Izod, big hair and add-a-bead necklaces. Though Falling Rock is removed from some influences ("Disco hasn't even hit here yet," laments Roger's girlfriend), its residents can't escape the world's injustices.
A Columbia, S.C., resident, McMahan applies a compassionate lens to her native Kentucky, tempering honest dialogue like, " 'What does it say about a town when the nicest place is the funeral home?' " with reverential descriptions of the land and its people. Kerry, who comes from a farming family, considers Shannon's eagerness to flee Falling Rock: "Maybe one day she'd realize that her people were land grubbers and factory workers and that that was nothing to be ashamed of. If you couldn't get the dirt out from under you, then you put down roots and grow. This rich Kentucky soil was a better place than most."
Fans of Jodi Picoult's work will appreciate this novel's spare prose, unexpected plot turns and moral complexities. Some readers, however, might find the ending unsatisfying, if not downright objectionable. But it is a brave storyteller who refuses to let her characters off the hook. And McMahan, though she gives her characters a long leash, isn't afraid to deliver tough-love consequences when they stray. Nor is she afraid to tackle difficult, hot-button issues like infidelity, rape, teenage pregnancy, drug use and abortion.
Calling Home shows us that some things in life we can change and some things we can't. And sometimes life is "one big compromise." But it is how we respond to the cards we're dealt and the choices we make that ultimately define our characters and fates.
Aimee Zaring is a Louisville writer and native.
'CALLING HOME' EXPLORES A KENTUCKY FAMILY'S CHALLENGES
April 5, 2008
Special to The Courier-Journal
The Greek philosopher Heraclitus maintained that a man's character is his fate, but in her new novel,Calling Home, Janna McMahan reminds us that a "bad judgment call when you're just a kid shouldn't ruin the rest of your life." And Virginia Lemmons, who shares this insight with her teenage daughter, should know, for she still lives with a painful secret from her past -- a secret that threatens to destroy herself and her family.
When the novel opens, Virginia discovers she's not the only one harboring a secret. Her husband, Roger, is having an affair. After years of trying to placate his emotionally unavailable wife, Roger moves in with his beautician girlfriend. The Lemmons' children -- Shannon, a studious go-getter, and Will, a local baseball star -- try to adjust to their mother's increased despondency and their father's withdrawal from their lives. Both dream of getting out of their small town the first chance they get. Shannon tells her boyfriend, Kerry, "I'm tired of driving around Falling Rock in a circle every weekend. That's a good metaphor for my life, driving around in circles and never getting anywhere."
Virginia wants a better life for her daughter. "Things were finally changing for women," Virginia thinks. "Girls of Shannon's generation had options." Shannon plans to go to college and have a career. Though she feels pressured
to have sex with her boyfriend, she doesn't want to become a young mother like Virginia. But the more she tries
to distance herself from her embittered mother, the more she spirals headlong into the same traps that once
seduced Virginia.
McMahan paints a vivid, convincing portrayal of a small Kentucky town during the transitional period of the late 1970s and early '80s, transporting us back to those uncertain, changing times: Middle East peace talks, the Iran hostage crisis, Van Halen, Izod, big hair and add-a-bead necklaces. Though Falling Rock is removed from some influences ("Disco hasn't even hit here yet," laments Roger's girlfriend), its residents can't escape the world's injustices.
A Columbia, S.C., resident, McMahan applies a compassionate lens to her native Kentucky, tempering honest dialogue like, " 'What does it say about a town when the nicest place is the funeral home?' " with reverential descriptions of the land and its people. Kerry, who comes from a farming family, considers Shannon's eagerness to flee Falling Rock: "Maybe one day she'd realize that her people were land grubbers and factory workers and that that was nothing to be ashamed of. If you couldn't get the dirt out from under you, then you put down roots and grow. This rich Kentucky soil was a better place than most."
Fans of Jodi Picoult's work will appreciate this novel's spare prose, unexpected plot turns and moral complexities. Some readers, however, might find the ending unsatisfying, if not downright objectionable. But it is a brave storyteller who refuses to let her characters off the hook. And McMahan, though she gives her characters a long leash, isn't afraid to deliver tough-love consequences when they stray. Nor is she afraid to tackle difficult, hot-button issues like infidelity, rape, teenage pregnancy, drug use and abortion.
Calling Home shows us that some things in life we can change and some things we can't. And sometimes life is "one big compromise." But it is how we respond to the cards we're dealt and the choices we make that ultimately define our characters and fates.
Aimee Zaring is a Louisville writer and native.
Book Review
PANCAKE'S POWERFUL MOUNTAINTOP REMOVAL NOVEL
January 5, 2008
Special to The Courier-Journal
I have tried to educate myself about mountaintop removal. I've read articles, gone to public meetings and listened to the heartrending stories of those struggling in the Appalachian coalfields to protect their land and families from the devastating effects of strip-mining. I've seen scalped mountains in the distance while driving through the hills of Eastern Kentucky, but that's as far as I could see the problem -- from a distance. A horrifying, inconceivable concept. That is, until I read Ann Pancake's fearless and beautiful debut novel, Strange As This Weather Has Been.
Not even Pancake's characters can seem to fully absorb the magnitude of what is happening in their small West Virginia town. "It's like you can't get your mind to adjust, the thing won't come into focus, but, no, not like the focus of your eyes, but your mind, your mind can't focus it," thinks Corey, one of Lace and Jimmy Make's four children, after he and his younger brother discover an unidentifiable dead creature among the debris left behind after a spring flood, which has devastated their Yellowroot hollow.
The moment 15-year-old Bant and her father break through the coal company's padlocked gate, to see if the rumors of a slurry impoundment on Yellowroot Mountain are true, Pancake takes us behind the scenes, exposing the destruction she herself witnessed in her native West Virginia during the three years she researched her novel: busted sediment ponds, polluted creeks, ruined roads and hillsides and a valley fill as tall as a small skyscraper. When Bant first gazes up at the tower of dirt, rocks, and dead trees -- "Yellowroot Mountain blasted into bits, turned inside out" -- she can't believe it is real. "It was like my mind didn't want to make a place for this here."
Lace and Jimmy's sad, quiet second child, Dane, sleeps with boots on, prepared for the next flood. "I am only 12 years old," he thinks. "And I'm going to see the End of the World." Mrs. Taylor, the elderly neighbor Dane assists, is convinced it will take another Buffalo Creek disaster (where 125 people died in West Virginia in 1972 when a slurry impoundment broke) before things will change.
When Lace, who eventually speaks out against mountaintop removal, first meets her activist friends, she doesn't want to believe their claims. "It hurt to learn it, it did. It was easier to half-ignore it, pretend it wasn't that bad anyway, or if it was, couldn't do nothing about it so why get worked up. …" But as Bant recognizes in the end, "to not care wasn't to save yourself at all. It was only another loss."
Though there is an unmistakable agenda here -- Pancake's voice rising out against mountaintop removal, nearly every chapter spotlighting some aspect of strip-mining's destructive effects -- the story never falls into sentimentalism or didacticism. Through the unique, convincing viewpoints of multiple characters, Pancake manages to edify without preaching -- or judging. The coal companies' employees, for example, are just trying to put bread on the table, the coal companies themselves the embodiment of humanity's age-old thirst for power. And we are made to see our own culpability in each character's refusal to see, at one point or other, what they feel helpless to fix.
Mrs. Taylor's stories of Buffalo Creek "put shape and control and a kind of finality on a thing that was obscenely shapeless and uncontrollable and forever unfinished." The same could be said of Pancake's tale, both a testament to what has happened and a harbinger of what is to come in other towns, in other states, if we continue on our path of excessive, unregulated consumption. As Bant's wise Uncle Mogey suggests, "what we're doing to this land is not only murder. It is suicide."
Strange As This Weather Has Been is not just a story about Appalachians or mountaintop removal. It is a story about vision -- what we choose to see and not to see. Lace learns by novel's end that the most effective way to fight is to refuse to leave. "Stay in their way -- that's the only language they can hear. We are from here, it says. This is our place, it says. Listen here, it says. We exist."
Aimee Zaring is a Louisville writer and native.
PANCAKE'S POWERFUL MOUNTAINTOP REMOVAL NOVEL
January 5, 2008
Special to The Courier-Journal
I have tried to educate myself about mountaintop removal. I've read articles, gone to public meetings and listened to the heartrending stories of those struggling in the Appalachian coalfields to protect their land and families from the devastating effects of strip-mining. I've seen scalped mountains in the distance while driving through the hills of Eastern Kentucky, but that's as far as I could see the problem -- from a distance. A horrifying, inconceivable concept. That is, until I read Ann Pancake's fearless and beautiful debut novel, Strange As This Weather Has Been.
Not even Pancake's characters can seem to fully absorb the magnitude of what is happening in their small West Virginia town. "It's like you can't get your mind to adjust, the thing won't come into focus, but, no, not like the focus of your eyes, but your mind, your mind can't focus it," thinks Corey, one of Lace and Jimmy Make's four children, after he and his younger brother discover an unidentifiable dead creature among the debris left behind after a spring flood, which has devastated their Yellowroot hollow.
The moment 15-year-old Bant and her father break through the coal company's padlocked gate, to see if the rumors of a slurry impoundment on Yellowroot Mountain are true, Pancake takes us behind the scenes, exposing the destruction she herself witnessed in her native West Virginia during the three years she researched her novel: busted sediment ponds, polluted creeks, ruined roads and hillsides and a valley fill as tall as a small skyscraper. When Bant first gazes up at the tower of dirt, rocks, and dead trees -- "Yellowroot Mountain blasted into bits, turned inside out" -- she can't believe it is real. "It was like my mind didn't want to make a place for this here."
Lace and Jimmy's sad, quiet second child, Dane, sleeps with boots on, prepared for the next flood. "I am only 12 years old," he thinks. "And I'm going to see the End of the World." Mrs. Taylor, the elderly neighbor Dane assists, is convinced it will take another Buffalo Creek disaster (where 125 people died in West Virginia in 1972 when a slurry impoundment broke) before things will change.
When Lace, who eventually speaks out against mountaintop removal, first meets her activist friends, she doesn't want to believe their claims. "It hurt to learn it, it did. It was easier to half-ignore it, pretend it wasn't that bad anyway, or if it was, couldn't do nothing about it so why get worked up. …" But as Bant recognizes in the end, "to not care wasn't to save yourself at all. It was only another loss."
Though there is an unmistakable agenda here -- Pancake's voice rising out against mountaintop removal, nearly every chapter spotlighting some aspect of strip-mining's destructive effects -- the story never falls into sentimentalism or didacticism. Through the unique, convincing viewpoints of multiple characters, Pancake manages to edify without preaching -- or judging. The coal companies' employees, for example, are just trying to put bread on the table, the coal companies themselves the embodiment of humanity's age-old thirst for power. And we are made to see our own culpability in each character's refusal to see, at one point or other, what they feel helpless to fix.
Mrs. Taylor's stories of Buffalo Creek "put shape and control and a kind of finality on a thing that was obscenely shapeless and uncontrollable and forever unfinished." The same could be said of Pancake's tale, both a testament to what has happened and a harbinger of what is to come in other towns, in other states, if we continue on our path of excessive, unregulated consumption. As Bant's wise Uncle Mogey suggests, "what we're doing to this land is not only murder. It is suicide."
Strange As This Weather Has Been is not just a story about Appalachians or mountaintop removal. It is a story about vision -- what we choose to see and not to see. Lace learns by novel's end that the most effective way to fight is to refuse to leave. "Stay in their way -- that's the only language they can hear. We are from here, it says. This is our place, it says. Listen here, it says. We exist."
Aimee Zaring is a Louisville writer and native.
Book Review
RISKING FREEDOM IS CHALLENGE IN
HA JIN'S NOVEL
October 27, 2007
Special to The Courier-Journal
In light of the debate over immigration reform in our country, Ha Jin's latest novel, A Free Life, offers a unique and necessary perspective on the often silent struggles immigrants face in their adoptive land. Just as poet and scholar Jin drew from his military background with the Chinese People's Liberation Army in his award-winning novels Waiting and War Trash, so too does he draw upon his experience as a first-generation immigrant in America (an often neglected viewpoint) in his fifth novel.
Set in Boston shortly after the Tiananmen massacre, immigrant Nan Wu, outraged by the atrocities of his mother country ("China has betrayed me, so I refuse to remain its subject anymore"), commits himself to becoming a truly independent man in America. He quits his graduate work in political science -- an area of study assigned to him in China -- and searches for a job to support his young son and wife, whom he cherishes as a partner but doesn't
fully love.
Without a green card, however, Nan's employment opportunities are limited. After several disappointing jobs, Nan's enterprising and supportive wife, Pingping, encourages him to travel to New York, where he works his way up from dishwasher to sous-chef in a Chinatown restaurant.
Once discouraged by American capitalism, Nan soon finds himself caught up in the drive to make money. He eventually takes over a Chinese restaurant in the suburbs of Atlanta, and within a few years, he and Pingping are debt-free -- owners of a small business, house and car. Despite their outward success, Nan still feels dissatisfied and suspects "the whole notion of the American dream was shoddy, a hoax."
Lurking in the shadows of Nan's mundane life is his passion for writing poetry and an ex-love, Beina, the embodiment of his complicated feelings toward his motherland. "If only we could squeeze the old country out of our blood," Nan laments to Pingping.
Jin goes further than some immigrant writers in that he doesn't simply ask, What does it mean to be an American, but also, what does it mean to be truly free? And with this question, Jin transforms a subjective immigrant experience into a universal story -- one of love, loyalty, perseverance and hope. For Nan, a free individual "had to go his own way, had to endure loneliness and isolation . . . had to be brave enough to devote himself not to making money but to writing poetry, willing to face failure."
Though Jin belabors certain points and themes, his writing rings with an understated grace and humility, as seen in the final lines of "Belated Love," a poem Nan dedicates to Pingping:
Now I'm at your feet,
no zest left in my chest,
my wings fractured,
my mouth foaming regret,
my words too jumbled to make sense.
What I mean is to say,
"My love, I've come home."
In an interview with The Boston Globe last year, Jin worried how the American public would receive A Free Life, the first of his books set in the United States. "You have to take the risk," he said. "If it's a flop, let it be a great one." Jin can rest assured that he has not only successfully transitioned from writing about his homeland to writing about his adoptive land, but has also made a vital contribution to American immigrant literature.
Aimee Zaring is a Louisville writer and native.
RISKING FREEDOM IS CHALLENGE IN
HA JIN'S NOVEL
October 27, 2007
Special to The Courier-Journal
In light of the debate over immigration reform in our country, Ha Jin's latest novel, A Free Life, offers a unique and necessary perspective on the often silent struggles immigrants face in their adoptive land. Just as poet and scholar Jin drew from his military background with the Chinese People's Liberation Army in his award-winning novels Waiting and War Trash, so too does he draw upon his experience as a first-generation immigrant in America (an often neglected viewpoint) in his fifth novel.
Set in Boston shortly after the Tiananmen massacre, immigrant Nan Wu, outraged by the atrocities of his mother country ("China has betrayed me, so I refuse to remain its subject anymore"), commits himself to becoming a truly independent man in America. He quits his graduate work in political science -- an area of study assigned to him in China -- and searches for a job to support his young son and wife, whom he cherishes as a partner but doesn't
fully love.
Without a green card, however, Nan's employment opportunities are limited. After several disappointing jobs, Nan's enterprising and supportive wife, Pingping, encourages him to travel to New York, where he works his way up from dishwasher to sous-chef in a Chinatown restaurant.
Once discouraged by American capitalism, Nan soon finds himself caught up in the drive to make money. He eventually takes over a Chinese restaurant in the suburbs of Atlanta, and within a few years, he and Pingping are debt-free -- owners of a small business, house and car. Despite their outward success, Nan still feels dissatisfied and suspects "the whole notion of the American dream was shoddy, a hoax."
Lurking in the shadows of Nan's mundane life is his passion for writing poetry and an ex-love, Beina, the embodiment of his complicated feelings toward his motherland. "If only we could squeeze the old country out of our blood," Nan laments to Pingping.
Jin goes further than some immigrant writers in that he doesn't simply ask, What does it mean to be an American, but also, what does it mean to be truly free? And with this question, Jin transforms a subjective immigrant experience into a universal story -- one of love, loyalty, perseverance and hope. For Nan, a free individual "had to go his own way, had to endure loneliness and isolation . . . had to be brave enough to devote himself not to making money but to writing poetry, willing to face failure."
Though Jin belabors certain points and themes, his writing rings with an understated grace and humility, as seen in the final lines of "Belated Love," a poem Nan dedicates to Pingping:
Now I'm at your feet,
no zest left in my chest,
my wings fractured,
my mouth foaming regret,
my words too jumbled to make sense.
What I mean is to say,
"My love, I've come home."
In an interview with The Boston Globe last year, Jin worried how the American public would receive A Free Life, the first of his books set in the United States. "You have to take the risk," he said. "If it's a flop, let it be a great one." Jin can rest assured that he has not only successfully transitioned from writing about his homeland to writing about his adoptive land, but has also made a vital contribution to American immigrant literature.
Aimee Zaring is a Louisville writer and native.
