5 Books for 5 Moods

The past couple of weeks have been fortunate as far as book choices go. Most times you read a couple of reviews, flip through a few pages on Amazon and you’re still not sure it’s the right book for your mood. This time I got it right with a string of five books, some new, some not, one something I’d been meaning to read for a long time. It’s unusual to hit upon five in a row that all prove to be the right choice. Here are those that did it for me:

Continental Drift (1985) by Russell Banks

This is the book I had been meaning to read for the last several years. I’ve read a couple of other books by Banks, so to some extent knew what I was getting into. Continental Drift is about a luckless guy from New Hampshire who uproots his family from all and everyone they know and drags them to Florida trying to catch his dream. Like others before him, he falls prey to people looking to exploit, one of many looking for the chance to better themselves in a new setting. The story is built upon a marvelous cross section of characters that range from black and white, to old world and new, from the living as well as the dead. Continental Drift gives us a bleak perspective of opportunity in the America of the 1980s.

Long, Last, Happy (2010) by Barry Hannah

This selection of old and new stories was published shortly after the writer’s death. For a while there, Hannah was a blazing comet across the skies of American literature, a reputation ignited by his first novel, Geronimo Rex, published in 1972. He followed that with another novel before showing readers that his true power lay in short stories. Barry Hannah could do just about anything with words, leaving images on the page that you hadn’t thought were possible. The problem often arises that his beautiful sentences and use of language, along with his fascinating oddball characters never find the plot, or at least one that’s clear. For the reader with an interest in southern writing, Hannah shouldn’t be overlooked. He wrote a good many incomparable short stories that are taught in universities. Long, Last, Happy is a good sampling.

The Painter (2014) by Peter Heller

After reading Heller’s earlier book, The Dog Stars, his new book grabbed my attention at first glance. The author has written mostly non-fiction, but makes the shift to fiction without the least stumble. In the two books I’ve read, Heller tells a story of moral ambiguity, the main characters in each at battle with the laws, traditions and culture that have shaped them. The Painter is about a man successful in his painting but with less luck in his personal life, where violence seems to almost seek him out. Jim Stegner is trying to outrun his past but keeps bumping into reminders that threaten to undo him. The story is set in Colorado and New Mexico, a landscape that is as rugged as it is lyrical and Heller soars in his descriptions of fly fishing in creeks meandering along canyon walls under an overhang of lime-green cottonwoods. With short, abrupt sentences and paragraphs you would expect the story to flow with less grace. Not so with Peter Heller.

The Son (2014) by Jo Nesbo

Saw this book in the window of my tiny local library and checked it out mostly because I had never read anything by a modern Norwegian novelist, or anything set in the city of Oslo. From the first page this crime novel grabbed me up and didn’t let go. Jo Nesbo has a new fan and after the last page of The Son, I jumped up to order two more of his books. The son in this story is a young man serving time in prison for the crimes of others. He is accepting of his sentence until learning that his father’s suicide was not that at all. He escapes from prison (very cleverly) and begins working down a list of those who he believes killed his father. The question is, who will get him first, the cops or the criminals?

The Keillor Reader (2014) by Garrison Keillor

I have long been a fan of Garrison Keillor for two things in particular. It is a long custom of mine to begin each day with a cup of coffee and the latest online edition of The Writer’s Almanac. That has led me to read Keillor’s several compilations of poetry which have done a lot to re-shape my appreciation of a form that high school taught me to hate. By hook or by crook find a copy of Keillor’s splendid introduction to Good Poems for Hard Times (2005) wherein he explains what poetry really is and who it is meant for. The Keillor Reader is something just out and is a collection of his writings over the last forty years. There is so much humanity and warm humor in this writer’s stories that natural reaction is a smile that lasts for 358 pages. Never read any of the Lake Wobegon stories? This one’s for you. I took great enjoyment from this little snippet out of “The News from Lake Wobegon.” 

    

‘I wish to be cremated… I wish my ashes to be placed in the green bowling ball that Raoul also gave me, which somebody can hollow out (I’m told), and then seal it up, and I would like the ball to be dropped into Lake Wobegon.’

Remembering Barry

For some time I’ve wanted to write something about recently deceased southern writer, Barry Hannah. Barry played some part in my childhood as our mothers were sisters, and he and I first cousins. There is a stash of old words and images, days, nights and childhood games that continue to occupy a corner of my memory and keep this cousin fresh in mind. To my regret, the last time I saw Barry was in 1972, shortly before his first novel was published by Viking Press. That novel was Geronimo Rex, which launched the writer, and was subsequently nominated for the National Book Award. Barry was in New York for a meeting with the publisher and we spent a few hours visiting and catching up. He died of a heart attack on March 1 of this year.

The strange thing is, as much as I liked Barry and respected his talent, I have never been a big fan of his books and stories. I’ve read enough of his writing to realize it’s not a matter of one novel or one story, but an impression that encompasses a good part of his work. On occasion I have stumbled upon this or that story in some anthology that truly grabbed me, shook me and wrung me out, but these times have been fewer than I would wish.

This morning I pulled down for the second time a collection of stories by southern writers, one which includes a story written by Barry sometime around 2000, and first published in the magazine, Le Monde. The collection is titled, The Cry of an Occasion: Fiction from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and was published in 2001. The book features nineteen stories by as many writers, and includes the above mentioned Barry Hannah story, “Death and Joy.” This one story is by no means the centerpiece of the collection, but it is still one of those pieces by Barry that I found some connection with, and read through two times back to back.

Though I cannot say so with any assurance, I suspect the story grew out of an acquaintance, sort of friendship Barry had with a local character in Oxford, Mississippi, location of Ole Miss University, where he was writer-in-residence for something like twenty-eight years.

Elkin Dixon Willifox in “Death and Joy” is a character the writer likens to Tennessee Williams. From most perspectives the man is an almost pitiful caricature of an aging southern queen, a drunk who finds some vestige of comfort in his odd and often ridiculed existence. He is one who falls in love with any man who treats him however briefly with kindness. Hannah links his character to the famous playwright with reference to the well-known Blanche Dubois line from A Streetcar Named Desire, “I have always depended upon the kindness of strangers.”

The story ends with regret that Willifox dies without ever receiving the respect due to him, either for his mere humanity, or for his talent as a near poet. Only after it is too late does the narrator lament that he didn't have the courage to take the old queen’s hand in that ‘good ole boy’ atmosphere of southern Mississippi at the time.

Most fans of Barry Hannah’s books would call this a minor work, but however you classify it, there is evidence enough in its ten or so pages to show why one critic described the writer as, “One of those young writers who is brilliantly drunk with words and could at gunpoint write the life story of a telephone pole.”