Recommended for adults.
In anticipation of going to a conference in Charleston, South Carolina later this year I sought out novels set there. I found a couple and I started with this one. Now that I have read it I am too drained to go on to the next one right away. It is a wringing experience to follow these lords of discipline.
To say that the novel is an account of the education of four students at a college is true but without texture or meaning. The four are boys from 18 – 21 years old. The college is a military school. It is in Charleston.
The major characters, in addiiton to the four room-mates, are the president of the college, the dean of students, the family of one of the boys in the room, and a love interest for the narrator. But the major character is Charleston itself, its foliage, its seasons, its smells, its beaches, its grass, its insects, its social conventions, its colonial origins, its Confederate past, its slave past, its caste system. As a book to read before visiting Charleston it is exactly right. (Though it did not tell me why that 1920s dance is called ‘Charleston.’)
What happens? The boys learn a lot and our protagonist grows up. The novel is rich with incident and offers a flavour of that all male environment where brutality taken and brutality given is the road to manhood. To list all of the examples would make it seem a litany of violence and blasphemy, and it is not. Though there is plenty of both.
Conroy alternates very deftly between the systematic beastiality of some events at the school with lyrical descriptions of the coastal wind, or tiered reflections on love and life by the boy becoming a man. Conroy’s judgment in measuring for the reader doses of pain with relief from it is sure. He guides the reader through the distasteful parts by providing oases before moving on.
Throughout the prose is beautiful, elegiac for lost youth.
None of the characters are cardboard. Even the president, a thinly disguised representation of Douglas MacArthur, and the many who imitated him, is developed. He has his reasons, convoluted and self-serving though they be, but they are not idiosyncratic or synthetic. He is not simply a plot device. The same goes for the Dean of Students, the Commandant. He is not honest but he is trying to do what is best.
Of course the most well developed character is the narrator who tells some of this in retrospect. His inner confusions, contradictions, volte faces, his mistakes, his blunders, are very touching as he recovers from romantic rejection, deals with social ostracism, copes with responsibilities shoved onto him, is rocked by betrayal, weighs the demands of friendship…. Life is complicated at any age but the more so for youth.
The other three room-mates are also developed personalities, though we see them only in relation to the narrator. The other cadets, even the sadists, are presented as human beings, despicable though some are, and not merely as plot devices. It is a great talent that can do that. Conroy seems to be in complete control and command of the novel; he is no child prodigy but a mature observer and a seasoned ponderer on the human comedy.
All of this is played out against the times in the United States in the 1960s. Civil rights and integration of this school, and the Vietnam War in which many of the graduates of the school have already served. But always more important than these externalities is the school itself and its very Charleston cosmology.
There is enough violence, profanity, stupidity, and prejudice in the book to interest a Hollywood film producer in turning it all into slam-bang cardboard. Read the book, skip the film is my advice.
Conroy has written much else, like The Great Santini, and I will read more some time. I also plan to re-read another book about a military school. It will be Calder Willingham’s End as a Man (1947). His most arresting character was not the victim but the vicious bully.
Having finished the book and before gathering my own thoughts I looked for reviews but all I could find were hundreds of comments on Good Reads and Amazon, and those I scanned were as inane as most comments on Trip Advisor. Most are about that fascinating subject, the writer of the comment, and not about the book. These are no doubt the same twits who FaceBook their every meal. I am sure there are measured and informative reviews available but they are overgrown with the obscuring and choking vines of the Twitterati. I am left to my own devices.
Category: Book Review
Herbert Hoover, A Presidential biography
Inspired by Robert Caro’s nonpareil biography of Lyndon Johnson, I have been reading biographies of US presidents as the occasion permits. Shortly after I decided to do that I chanced up Edmund Morris’s three volume biography of Teddy Roosevelt. Reading those three volumes confirmed me in the enterprise, though one volume works suffice. I have since read Willard Randall, George Washington; David McCulloch, John Adams; Walter Borneman, James Polk; and Stephen Ambrose, Eisenhower.
I noticed a review of a recent book about Herbert Hoover and since it was current and available I decided it would be the Hoover biography: Gary Dean BEST, The Life of Herbert Hoover, Keeper of the Torch, 1933-1964. It covers his post-presidential years, as part of multi-volume biography, where each volume is by a different writer. Despite the title there is much reference to Hoover as president.
From the 550 pages of this book I conclude that Hoover had enormous energy and vitality and remained intellectually and political active into his 80s. He outlived many of his enemies, and all of his friends. That he was something of an intellectual, rather like T. R. Roosevelt. Hoover read a lot of books and wrote a few. He took care to do research for his many speeches and often packed them with facts and figures.
He also had a set of consistent beliefs about personal liberty that he often articulated and which informed much of this thought, action, and speech. It seems also that for all his public speaking, he was not easy with company, especially the hordes one meets at a convention. He often came, saw, spoke, and left by the side door.
In this period it was common for speeches to be reported nearly verbatim in newspapers, and often printed and distributed. They were also excerpted in newsreels shown in theatres. There was a constant demand for Hoover to speak and he did, except for the first year after leaving the White House, defeated by Franklin Roosevelt at the polls. The demand for Hoover to speak suggests that he struck a cord, as did the favorable press comment, and the audience reaction in theatres. It is too bad newsreels are gone from the silver screen because audience reactions in the darkened theatre was always uninhibited, as I recall.
I have no doubt that Herbert Hoover did much good in his life and that the reputation of his presidency has suffered in the shade cast by FDR. Having said that, in the period described in this book, Hoover appears all too often to be thin-skinned, pompous, and scheming. That he should appear thus in these pages is all the more surprising given that the author verges on hagiography in his adulation of every word, deed, and gesture Hoover made. The author is completely one-eyed. On that more at the end.
Hoover wanted to be president again, and like a lot of people who have wanted that job, he did not want to run for it, he just wanted it handed to him. So he made himself available for the Republican nomination in 1936 and again in 1940, and he opposed and undermined alternative candidates right up until the last minute. He offered mere lip-service support to the Republican nominees who emerged, Alf Landon and Wendell Wilkie, respectively. Yet he constantly felt they should pay obeisance to him, and when they did not, he withdrew further.
He spend thirty years vindicating his administration in those speeches with a mixtures of facts and figures that often made sense to him alone. He regarded every criticism of his administration as a personal slight, a smear. The author uses that word ‘smear‘ repeatedly for every objection or criticism levelled at any of Hoover’s many interjections into political life.
Hoover wanted to contribute, as World War II drew nearer, but only on his terms and in his way, and only if begged to do so. To that end he proposed some crazy ideas about food relief, and anyone who suggested his plan was not feasible or would, as it obviously would have, aided the German war effort is said, by the author, to have smeared Hoover.
Harry Truman tried to put Hoover to work and Hoover chaired several commission to streamline the Federal government. Well Truman thought the purpose was to streamline it but Hoover’s declared aim was to wind back Roosevelt’s New Deal, like the Tennessee Valley Authority, twenty years later. Despite Truman’s several efforts to flatter Hoover, it was never enough, and Hoover reveled in Joe McCarthy’s red baiting with nary a thought to conscience or consequence to judge by this book.
Even Eisenhower’s victory in 1952 left Hoover cold. Ike had other things on his mind and did not bow to Hoover, and so Hoover had few good words to say for him. I am afraid for most of the time in the period this book covers Hoover thought it was all about him. Petulant, one might say, for thirty years.
I have made several allusions to the book itself. There is no distance between the author and Hoover. If Hoover says black, then black it is. Assertions of fact are taken solely from Hoover, more than once. The book is packed with lengthy quotations from Hoover’s speeches and letters and these are transmitted without qualm or qualification and taken as read. Perhaps one page in four is such a direct quotation. The author seldom draws a conclusion from these long passages, but rather just lets them hang, often at the end of a paragraph. It becomes very tempting just to skip them since the author is not making any declared point with them.
For good or ill this is my Hoover biography.
Having acquired a taste for presidential libraries last year, I knew there was Hoover library and I just assumed that it was in Palo Alto where he lived most of his life. But one valuable fact I got from this book is that the Hoover Library, which Truman, demonstrating a magnanimity that Hoover never had, helped him achieve, is in West Branch, Iowa on I-80, which is where Hoover was born. It is a four-hour drive from Omaha through Des Moines, and I hope to visit it someday soon. It is near Amana.
Murray Bail, Eucalyptus (2009)
Murray Bail, Eucalyptus (2009)
Recommended for adults.
A delightful fairy tale for grown-ups from a master of the short story. This, however, is a novel in length and conception, but it is also a book of short stories. That distinctive combination is part of its charm, and charming it most certainly is. The princess is in the tower amid a forest of eucalypts and her suitors must prove themselves worthy of her. Sound familiar?
Mr. Holland’s wife died in childbirth and he the baby girl with an insurance payout retired to the hinterland where he planted every known and some unknown eucalypts without end. There was no grand plan and yet a pattern emerged. See above. Then along came, first, the professor, and, then, the sign maker and – in time – there came a revelation.
Wonderful. It deserves the superlatives applied to it.
I have been asked the meaning of ‘adults’ in my recommendation. That is a question on notice.
The Ballad of the Sad Café
Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951).
Recommended for adults.
Eleven years after this child prodigy published The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) at the tender age of twenty-one, she produced this novella. It is a meditation on love, not on what it is, but on what it does to people, even the most unlikely ones.
In a tiny mill town deep in the pines of northern Georgia Miss Amelia comes to love the drifter Lymon, but he in turn falls under the spell of the no-good Marvin Macy. These loves are not of the flesh, I add. But slowly, Amelia discovers that she likes doing things for Lymon, and the more she does, the more he takes it as his due with nary a word of thanks. This she does not mind.
Then Marvin reappears and slowly Lymon comes to admire and imitate Marvin. Along the way McCullers offers a glimpse of the people and practices of that isolated community. Lymon cannot bear to be parted from Marvin, and so the despicable Marvin moves in with Lymon and Miss Amelia. In time she is displaced from her own home to allow Lymon to serve Marvin.
I read a lot of Carson McCullers’s novels in high school and college, and having re-read The Ballad of the Sad Cafe I am reminded why. The judgements are sharp, Marvin is a creep, but even so McCullers extends a compassionate gaze on him, too: He is the way God made him, part of this world. Neither more nor less than anyone else.
That Lymon is a dwarf, Miss Amelia acts more like a man than many men, that Marvin’s brother is ineffectual, adds color to the account but these are only the surfaces beneath which McCullers peers, perceptive, unflinching, calm, and determined. No these oddities are what attracted a Hollywood film maker to mangle it.
My mission is clear. It is time to read anew The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and see how Sam and Mickey have aged since last I had their company.
On Kingdom Mountain
Quite a trip once again. Set in northern Vermont in 1930, On Kingdom Mountain is the story of Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson. Recommended for adults.
A bookwoman, bird carver, and the last remaining resident Kingdom Mountain on the Vermont-Quebec border, which mountain is now threatened by a new highway. Miss Jane encounters a mysterious stunt pilot and weather-maker when his biplane crashes on a frozen lake. He brings with him a riddle containing clues to the whereabouts of stolen gold that may have been hidden on Kingdom Mountain. As she and the courteous aviator search for the treasure, Miss Jane is confronted by the most important decisions of her life. Lost gold, rainmaking, a combine harvester on the loose, much bird carving, char not trout, many French-Canadians about, a fly-in and out, wing walking, not to forget the sex, and more. Did I mention buried treasure? Miss Jane approves of firearms, and how.
Northern Borders
Howard Frank Mosher, Northern Borders (1995). Recommended for adults.
A coming of age story set in the remote Kingdom County Vermont in the 1940s and 1950s. When his mother dies six-year old Austin Kittredge is sent to live with his grandparents in township of Lost Nation.
There he works on the farm, which produces just about enough food to sustain life, and helps with apple jam and the one-man saw mill to earn cash money. The work starts before dawn most days and involves strenuous physical labor in shifting planks, milking cows, haying the stock, fighting off the predators (some animal, others human). As Austin grows he deals with a school teacher in the one-room school house who is in equal parts a thug and an ignoramus. He develops a reputation as a ‘famous reader’ which is a term of derision most of the time. The repeated beauties of nature are detailed but so is the cruelty and indifference of nature detailed.
More importantly, he survives the Forty Year War between his grandparents, and they each individually slowly reveal to him their inner most secrets. Hers is Egypt and his is Labrador. Along the way there are sled rides, a fight at a traveling carnival, the assault of a snow owl, the fall of much snow to be waded through hip deep, a Solomon-like judgement, and a memorable performance of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Then the Grandmother dies and Austin and his grandfather go to Labrador, where the latter, has always been. It is an arduous trip but the arrival is well worth it.
Over ten years Austin passes almost imperceptibly from boy to adolescent and seems well set to be adult.
Because the central character is a young boy at the start, no doubt many libraries will shelve it as Young Adult. It can be that, but it is also much more. Although Whiskey Jack’s reading matter might belie that conclusion. (Read the book to get the point.)
Lie Down in Darkness by William Styron
William Styron (1925-2006) published the novel Lie Down in Darkness (1951) when he was twenty-six, a boy. Recommended for adults.
How could a boy have had all those voices in his mind: Milton, the alcoholic lawyer; Helen, the angry, self-martyred wife; the Elektra-like daughter, Peyton; Carey, the childish churchman; and all the others. It was hailed as a masterpiece when it appeared but it has not weathered so well in the eyes of some reviewers. On that more later.
First for the uninitiated it is a southern novel, what has been called, Southern Gothic (for a definition see:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Gothic).
Styron did not write another novel of this ilk, though he wrote others that are better known: The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) and Sophie’s Choice (1979). I have already commented on his The Long March (1952). By the way, a reader would never connect the spare prose of that book with the languid and at times moving descriptions of people, places, and gestures in Lie Down in Darkness. The two books seem to come from two different hands.
Recent retrospective reviews that I have read seem to be driven by the need of the reviewer to demonstrate superiority, moral, technical, literary, to Styron and his novel. Thus they comment on the condescending references to blacks, the drumbeat of negation that runs through the story, the unbelievable medical interludes, the inconsistent references to psychoanalysis, the stream of consciousness chapter is labeled imitative of William Faulkner (who thought highly of this book), the Sunday school theology, and even the geography of the story. To read such reviews one might wonder why bother.
Here’s why.
When the needs of the reviewer takes priority over the book reviewed much is taken out of context and rendered disproportionate. The book is no dirge. There are arresting passages of great beauty, as when Helen describes her love of Maudie, the oldest daughter with brain damage and polio; as when the juggler appears in the rain; as when the train rocks through the woodlands of northern Virginia; as when Milton swears off drink (again, and again, and again); and most of all in that stream of consciousness chapter inside Peyton’s broken soul. It is certainly not imitative, transcendent rather.
There are novels of that time and place that do more justice to blacks, agreed, here I think of many examples in Faulkner, but they are few, too few and too singular to be a standard against which to judge this book. Nor does one read a novel to learn of medicine, psychoanalysis, theology, or geography. Let the poet have license.
Of course, there is no explanation of why Peyton was so fated. She just was. That is the premise of the story. The parents, Milton and Helen, blame each other, as mature adults do. But given that she is what she is, then the rest unfolds.
I first read this novel when I was about twenty, not much younger than Styron was when he started writing it, nd that makes it all the more remarkable that he had all those voices in his mind, though he could not always control them each, nor orchestrate them just so. For all of that, it remains a masterpiece.
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The Long March (1952) by William Styron
William Styron, The Long March (1952). Recommended for adults.
Styron (1925-2006) is an acclaimed writer whose work I have largely missed. I read his Lie Down in Darkness (1951) as student and probably missed most of it though I can have been only a few years younger than he was when he published it at the age of 24. His two most famous novels are Sophie’s Choice (1979) and The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967).
I recently read The Long March. In one word: Powerful. To say, accurately, that it is an account of an U. S. Army Reserve training exercise says everything and nothing. It is about an exercise that tests the men involved against each other in a contest of wills, while simultaneously testing them each individually in a battle within himself to keep going on the long march.
It is training and those who drop out get a ride back to base. There is no enemy trying to kill them. Yet it is arduous and soul-destroying to keep moving.
The prose is windowpane clear. The author does not intrude into the action with poetic flourishes or clever comparisons. The story is left to speak for itself. That is indeed bold.
It compares to the hypnotic passages describing physical effort in Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948), though the accolade must go to Mailer’s book.
The tools for hyper linking, underlining, and bolding remain off line. Oh, hum.
Fly Away Peter by David Malouf
I have read all of David Malouf’s novels, I thought. Each year I give the undergraduate intern with whom I work a David Malouf novel as a thank you. These interns are international students, and I reason that a Malouf novel gives them a little more of Australia to take home. I also think that they should read novels, and that having one in hand before a long flight home to Sweden, Germany, Poland, or the United States might be read. One lives in hope for there is no other way to live.
In july 2012 when I purchased the annual Malouf novel for the intern, I noticed that among the list of his novels there was an early one which I had not read, Fly Away Peter (1982).
I put it on my Amazon Wish List and sure enough, Santa gave it to me for Christmas, in the person of daughter Julie.
Krimie Travelogue
James McClure, The Steam Pig (1971). This series is now being reprinted. They are of their time and place, the Republic of South Africa in the 1960s, replete with institutionalized racism, colour coding of one and all, English-Boer hostility, and casual brutality. Sergeant Tromp Kramer, a Boer, and his Bantu assistant Mickey Zondi get on with the police procedural, leaving the moralizing to the reader.
I do know about underlining title but once again the tools for underlining and hyperlinking are not available.