"Words Made Fresh" by Larry Woiwode

Larry Woiwode bestows on us ten thoughtful and fearless essays in “Words Made Fresh.” He tackles subjects as disparate as education, faith, the role of place in artistic inspiration, John Updike, William Shakespeare, and Bob Dylan. And throughout, he poses questions and conundrums, expresses doubt and hope, and passes judgment in a graceful, even-handed way.

Right out of the box he gives us a hint of the depth and unblinking earnestness we will encounter in each piece. In “Guns & Peace: An American Icon,” we find a startlingly frank questioning of his own motives when attending to a mercy killing of a deer after an automobile accident. The physical description of the landscape and his perception of it is stark and memorable – perfect. In “Homeplace, Heaven or Hell: On the Order of Existence” he launches a theme to which he returns again and again in other essays: the role of the childhood home in the creative process. He handily debunks the big-city critics and guardians of orthodoxy who would label a writer from the hinterlands as “regional,” which when they use it is nothing but pejorative. He flips the table over on them, saying not only is region and homeland important in the creative process, but an accurate and faithful attachment to it is a prerequisite part of any great art. He applies this principle in turn to such diverse writers as John Gardner, John Updike, and Shakespeare.

Mr. Woiwode holds with John Gardner that true fiction must have a moral element, that the author’s intent regarding the moral issues propounded must be clear and that lessons and ideas flowing from the action must point in the right moral direction. Mr. Woiwode several times avers his service to Scripture, and always admits that this places him far outside the mainstream of academia. Well, not outside the mainstream, diametrically opposed to it. I am aware of the “on the outs” status of Christianity in current “correct” thought; Mr. Woiwode, while staking his ground squarely and usually straightforwardly, fails in main to acknowledge the cynical and exclusionary way in which the vast community of honest, self-avowed Christians of the U.S. were hoodwinked into supporting illegal and immoral schemes hatched by administrations enjoying their very support.

The long, elegiac piece on Updike (“Updike’s Sheltered Self: On America’s Maestro”) deserves a broad audience. Written to the highest standard of critical essays, this comprehensive appreciation gave me more pause and more food for thought than anything I have read, ever, on Updike. Unified, persuasive, well-paced, even-handed, this is the main attraction of this collection. The treatment of Gardner’s “Mickelsson’s Ghosts” is an outstanding example of what I aspire to on the “Deeper Appreciations” pages. (It embarrasses me for you to look at them now. I am substantially re-writing the “Housekeeping” essay – and hope to fashion an actual conclusion for it.) I need to get to that piece and see what Mr. Woiwode’s fussing about.

Enlightening, thought-provoking, well-written in the extreme, Mr. Woiwode does himself, his faith, and his craft proud. This is an important collection for anyone interested in today’s literature, thought, education, or culture. It’s only too bad Mr. Woiwode’s faith puts him in the wilderness of “incorrectness.”

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"The Redemption of George Baxter Henry" by Conor Bowman

George Baxter Henry is GBH, and he makes a joke out of having the same initials as “grievous bodily harm.” There’s really not much risk of that when you pick up this breezy, off-hand little tome, unless you injure yourself one of the times you throw your head back and laugh out loud. Because you will do that certainly, if you’re anything like me. You might not find the same things funny, but there’s more than enough to tickle everyone’s fancy.

The wisecracks start early and don’t let up. George Baxter Henry, fifty-one-year-old commercial lawyer and his fractured family are traveling to France from Boston for a holiday to see if George’s marriage can be saved. He also has to deal with his coke-addled rock star son and his hateful, vituperative mother-in-law. Along the way he sheds one paramour for another, more exotic, French one. You wind up wanting GBH to come out on top because of how involved he gets with his son and what how he quietly stays out of his daughter’s way. Through some underhanded tricks and some careful research and a climactic confrontation, George Baxter Henry squeaks through.

This is a moderately enjoyable bit of fluff, touching on some serious life issues, but never getting heavy-handed about them. At least George really learns what’s important by the end of the book.

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"The Paperbark Shoe" by Goldie Goldbloom

Virginia Toad, née Boyle, has married Toad, a man whose name describes him, and lives a hardscrabble life on a farm in the Australian Outback. During the years of World War II, the drought is worse than usual, and the normal struggle to eke out a living becomes even more difficult. Then the British high command directs that Italian prisoners of war be sent to Australian farms as slave labor, and the conflicts of “The Paperbark Shoe” begin as the authorities assign two prisoners, John and Antonio, to the Toad farm.

Virginia – “Gin” – is angry at and repels the world, including her husband, her two children, and the child yet to come. She has survived a cold kind of abuse from her stepfather and has been denied a piano scholarship and tour rightfully hers. She deserved it because Gin can play – in fact, her virtuoso abilities combine with her albinism to make her a complete freak in her isolated community. She has a caustic word or response to every situation until the arrival of Antonio, an attentive, cultured man who takes time with her, can appreciate her musical skill, and eventually finds her beautiful. This is a revelation to Gin but she struggles with it because of her loyalty to her husband. She struggles until she finds that Toad has not been loyal to her.

Ms. Goldbloom compels us to see Gin’s harsh life in the harsh landscape and conditions. She makes everyone’s motivation plentifully clear; the main characters are gratifyingly nuanced and deep. The somber, almost foreboding tone throughout makes this book something of a drag, at least it did for me. There are things about this book that recommend it: the correspondence of the harsh and empty landscape to the heroine’s parched heart; the effective glimpses into Australian thought and psychology during the war; the weaving of Aussie words and phrases into Ms. Goldbloom’s staccato, hard-edged prose. This book does have an edge, and is very well written, but it is limited by its pedestrian ambition.

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"Lowboy" by John Wray

In “Lowboy” we experience the thoughts of a teenaged mental patient, Will, who has abandoned his medication. They are shocking in the sense that somehow we recognize the torture Will suffers, the agonized logic of his delusion and the urgency he feels to make things right. Author John Wray shows all this in highly effective and arresting prose. It’s exceedingly well done – it haunts the reader and we begin to fear that we too might be drawn into the madness rampaging through the book.

We fear it because our representative in the book, N.Y. Police detective Ali Lateef, begins to weaken under the influence of Will and his mother Yda. He starts his day feeling good about himself and his fitness for his job, but when Yda arrives for questioning about her missing son, the mystery and uncertainty make their entrance. The chapters from Will’s point of view are nothing short of uncanny. I could translate Will’s inner posturing and his outward mien into a highly intelligible whole, thanks to Mr. Wray’s skill. The mental problems almost seem contagious, not only to Detective Lateef, but also to us, the sorry-for-eavesdropping-but-I-can’t-help-it reader.

Two other stories come to mind, which offer intimate narratives of mental illness, Anne Enright’s The Gathering and John Burnside’s The Devil’s Footprints. Of these two marvelous pieces, “Lowboy” resembles the Enright more closely, because it devotes more of its pages to the internal dialog of the stricken person. This book also has a thriller’s nerve-wracking and inexorable pacing. Mr. Wray acknowledges a few sources at the end; if he’s able to weave such a stunning, beyond-the-pale fiction from such sketchy sources, all honor and glory go to him.

I consider the artifice of Will’s internal and external dialog, at length, beyond compare. So much is devoted to them that the passages take on a life of their own, which seems appropriate given his schizophrenia. It’s all there. Desperation, the genius observations, the hallucinations, the perverse application of his own mad framework to every look, object, and word.

Every look, object, and word in this novel will impress, haunt, and harrow you throughout. I’m sure I didn’t expect this. My only experience with Mr. Wray, The Right Hand of Sleep, did not prepare me for it. Then again, nothing can prepare you for Lowboy.

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"The Laws of Harmony" by Judith Ryan Hendricks

Judith Ryan Hendricks gives us the tribulations and crankiness of Soleil (who goes by ‘Sunny’) in “The Laws of Harmony.” Even given the struggle of her childhood in a New Mexico commune, and all the resulting issues she has with her mother, we still find it hard to engage our emotions or hopes for her.

Sunny Cooper pushes people away from herself. Her large unresolved resentment of her mother Gwen precludes closeness with others, even the handsome, compelling Michael, who proposes to her. She balks and makes him wait for her to come around to the idea. But Michael’s duplicity, legal trouble, and disappearance generate not only the tension that pushes the narrative forward, but it pushes Sunny to move from Albuquerque to a remote island off the coast of Washington state.

Here she meets the permanent (non-tourist) population, a mixed lot who try to offer help and support, which Sunny feels ambivalent toward, and doesn’t want to accept. Ms. Hendricks makes an attempt to wrap up the story’s threads and does so at some basic level, but again, I found my emotions only half-engaged.

“The Laws of Harmony” spends a fair amount of its capital in expansive descriptions of mundane tasks: food prep and cooking, showering, tidying up, or simply walking through a ferry terminal. Events and thought process quite central to the novel, however, have a glossed-over feeling at times. Chief among these: Sunny’s near-constant anger and anti-social behavior. This does soften near the end, but I don’t think it’s adequately founded in the story. I don’t see her motivation. Sunny’s evolution from being someone with a hard, isolated outlook into a person capable of accepting and giving human kindness, starts by novel’s end, but the ending has an abrupt, rather arbitrary feel. There are sections that amuse, and I did find myself laughing at some of the dialog, but overall, I felt I could spend my time on projects with a greater reward.

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"The Elegance of the Hedgehog" by Muriel Barbery

There come times when you hope you aren’t the boy who cried “Wolf!” too often, whose statements about this or that book have caused calluses to grow in people’s hearts and not to trust their devoted reviewer. If they have, I want to take it all back and beg you to trust me about this book. A bestseller in Europe, highly praised wherever it was reviewed (this space will be no exception), “The Elegance of the Hedgehog” will stun you with its own elegance, with its erudition, and with its wisdom.

Originally published in 2006 in France as “L’élégance du hérisson,” this marvelous second novel of Muriel Barbery charts the highly refined intellectual journey of a fifty-four-year-old Paris concierge from isolation to a full, loving embrace of her life and loved ones. Our heroine, Madame Michel, has read deeply and widely of the world’s narrative masterpieces, and has delected the great art of the world, recognizes and appreciates the world’s great music, and is more than passingly familiar with the themes of modern philosophy. And in her strong intelligence, her reading bears the fruit of a highly sophisticated wisdom. (However, all is not Tolstoy, Mozart, and Vermeer: at a critical juncture in the narrative, Madame Michel finds meaning and persuasion in a lyric by rap artist Eminem.)

Madame Michel’s narrative alternates with that of Paloma, an unhappy young girl who is part of a family that lives in the apartment building. Each in her own way, they ponder the function and effect of Art in our lives, and jointly their understanding has a deep and highly persuasive effect on us. The book is completely beguiling – a delight to read and thought-provoking in the extreme. Mme Barbery brings us into the confidence of these two very different-but-similar female characters. We love Madame Michel and learn to love Paloma as the book proceeds, and the alliance of the two is too brief – we regret that it can’t take up more of the story – such is the author’s effectiveness with her characters.

I need also to devote a moment to the seamless and virtuosic translation by the novelist Alison Anderson. This could not have been an easy book to translate, but this just might be better than Michael Hulse’s rendering in English of W.G. Sebald’s “The Emigrants.”

For most of this unique book, philosophical considerations share space with skewerings of modern manners and pretension. The fact that such beautiful and heartbreaking love unfolds late in its pages just strikes me as miraculous, and a tribute to Mme Barbery’s powers. I doubt very seriously if I will a better book this year.

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"In Matto's Realm" by Friedrich Glauser

Brought out by Friedrich Glauser in Germany in 1936, “In Matto’s Realm” contains the story of Herr Studer, at one time a chief inspector, but now simply a detective sergeant, brought in to discover what happened to the missing director of an insane asylum. Told at a time when modernizing changes were coming to homes where the mentally ill and incapacitated were kept, this book straddles eras, and brings us a very human, flawed hero.

“Matto” is the spirit of mayhem, or madness, as imagined by one of the inmates of the institution. This inmate ascribes to “Matto” multi-colored webs of war and fate and red bouncing balls of revolution in a malicious global campaign. Given the events here, the inmate is surely onto something. Detective Sergeant Studer has been called in by the rather un-forthcoming acting director of a Swiss mental institution when the Director goes missing. The mystery has its requisite violence, hidden motives, and suspicious characters, but this is clearly the story of Studer and Laduner, the new director-presumptive. They joust over psychology and motivation, over how to treat people including each other, over the new ideas of “analysis” and “therapy.” Though the jousting is fairly low-key for such high stakes – three people die during the story. They keep secrets from each other, alternately support and undermine each other, and certain misunderstandings last beyond the end of the book.

Herr Glauser’s meat consists of his treatment of Studer as the détective manqué: Laduner has kept so many secrets that he makes it impossible for Studer to do his job. His understanding of how the minds of schizophrenics and neurotics grows, but he does become compelled eventually, by the mythos of Matto, the demon who makes all consciousness and life miserable. At one point, Dr. Laduner obliquely supports the demon’s existence when he says the success of radical political movements is really the revenge of the psychotic.

The real characters of “In Matto’s Realm” get off fairly easy, Studer included, since one young man dies virtually in custody. I didn’t quite get the neat conclusions we like to see in murder mysteries, although that’s probably partly me and partly the translation (by Mike Mitchell). It’s a well-paced mystery, with a touch of modern forensics; its treatment of psychological disorders seems logical and straightforward; but its conclusion left me non-plussed. Does Detective Studer accept or even believe Dr. Laduner’s explanation of events? Is the doctor ever called to account for obstruction? Does the doctor ever come to realize the true service Studer has rendered him? I feel tepid about this book but respectful of its author, a onetime inmate of mental institutions himself.

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"The Underground Railroad in the Adirondack Region" by Tom Calarco

In “The Underground Railroad in the Adirondack Region,” Tom Calarco painstakingly builds a weighty narrative of abolitionist fervor and illicit transportation of runaway slaves in Upstate New York in the 1830s, ‘40s, and ‘50s. It’s an illuminating and intriguing read.

Mr. Calarco shows how, against the backdrop of faith-based reform movements – suffrage, temperance, and abolition – the growth of abolitionist sentiment generated a very active clergy and legal community which helped runaways. He also recounts the additional hardships placed on coloreds – the accepted term at the time – which pervasive racial prejudice imposed.

I had never explored this subject before. Here are some of the aspects of the movement Mr. Calarco brought to light for me:

• The abolitionists were divided among themselves: various factions favored a “whatever means necessary” approach to immediate abolition, while others thought such militant talk was dangerous and counterproductive. They did agree, however, that abolition should be immediate and universal. 

• Abolitionists did not immediately split from the colonization movement (which favored relocation of blacks to Africa and support for their government there), but ultimately learned of the movement’s racial hatred and reactionary nature, and avowed their opposition. 
• One odd aspect of the movement: its adherents were quite slow to pursue political action to achieve its ends, but this is perhaps because of the very long odds they faced in that arena.

Along the way, we get an up-close view of the stiff-backed and uncompromising John Brown, some of whose opinions even Frederick Douglass found objectionable; the frightening practice of kidnapping, by which slave hunters abducted free blacks and sold them into slavery; the insights of the intuitive and charismatic Sojourner Truth.

Mr. Calarco tells us the Underground Railroad story of Upstate, particularly eastern, New York State has been omitted from the history texts; well, now there is no longer any excuse for that. Closely researched and engagingly told, Mr. Calarco’s work very ably fills the gap for those of us lucky enough pick it up. Recommended.

For publication info, see http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/

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"Touch" by Alexi Zentner

In Alexi Zentner’s atmospheric “Touch,” grandfather Jeannot returns to the village deep in the Canadian North woods when young Stephen nears his eleventh birthday, and begins to tell stories. Jeannot founded the village when the dog he was walking overland with got too tired to go on, and settled down to sleep. The stories he tells Stephen flow from two traditions, the tall tale and the fairy tale. They do not spare the frank and deadly detail, nor the outrageous misbehavior, nor the vengeance served cold.

Stephen’s birth comes at a time when he’s too young for World War I and too old for World War II. Thus can his grandfather have founded a boom town in the harsh and unforgiving Canadian taiga. But can the other things his grandfather tells him be true? He says he has encountered a number of evil spirits in the forest and survived them. He survived a winter in a sawmill with his pregnant wife when the snow started in mid-fall and only let up in July. What he did to survive the winter there, and the ghastly retribution flowing from it forms the crux of the story.

Mr. Zentner in his debut shows strong promise in handling the geography of the primeval forest and of the larger-than-life characters that populate this story. The fairy tale aspect is never far from the surface narrative, and pops up at unexpected times. The stories are told by the characters, whose presence we barely notice. It could be Grandpa Jeannot telling the story to Stephen, or Stephen telling the stories in turn to his daughters. All these features of the story tell of Mr. Zentner’s skill and ambition in his first novel. Both are considerable.

An atmospheric story with extreme conditions of snow, river, forest, and fire, and extreme conditions of human survival, which bring out the best and worst in the human beings and the non-human beings, “Touch” presses deeply into our memories and consciousnesses. The style is perfect for the subject matter, and suspending our disbelief rewards us generously here. Take it up if you’re ready for a good, well-told fantasy.

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"Cost" by Roxana Robinson

Early in Roxana Robinson’s “Cost” we learn of Edward Lambert that he enjoyed finding fault, it made him feel competent and sure of himself, useful. Finding what was wrong with a certain situation, person, or idea put him in control, and made him superior. We feel for his grown daughter, Julia, a New York artist and college professor, and understand why his presence at her Maine summer home puts her on edge, and makes her resent him.

In this realistic, perfectly-paced novel, Ms. Robinson presents the tragic story of loss accompanying the deadly heroin habit of Julia’s son Jack, which wraps the family up in his inexorable downward spiral. It starts with Edward. He has sailed through his life as a distinguished brain surgeon; he loves the prestige and the notoriety, and the power this gives him; he has developed a powerful ego. He sees himself as a virtuous standard, a member of an extremely exclusive society, but very late in life his wife’s fading faculties trigger worry and memories that begin to tell him and us a different tale. The leucotomies, the enforced surgeries on mental patients, the use of humans as little more than experimental subjects, these all come back to him, and as the trying events of his grandson’s drug habit proceed beyond his control, he begins to understand his own failing facilities, and wonders if he really was as fine an individual as he liked to believe.

This story recounts the unbearable cost of the young man’s heroin addiction, in terms of heartbreak and financial capital, and it may cost him his life if he can’t kick it. However, there’s another cost running through this plainly- and effectively-told tale. The toxicity flowing from Edward, the embittered and estranged patriarch, generates coldness and distance in his offspring. His two daughters, Julia and Harriet, barely speak, and their brother in nowhere to be found at this time of family crisis (he lives on the opposite coast). This negativity and mistrust lead directly to Jack’s addiction. His suffering is the cost of the way this family behaves; he needs to be emotionally elsewhere, not part of this family.

“Cost” thus holds up the unfeeling Lambert family for our review, at odds, unloving, ultimately ineffective in dealing with its youngest member’s crisis. The author seamlessly shifts points of view, so that we get internal dialogs from all major characters. These are perfect. They guide us through the treacherous waters of this family strife, and we end understanding all. Ms. Robinson’s powerful novel exposes this fractured family at its worst time; it is artfully, thoroughly done, and so harrowingly real. A serious, excellent, and thought-provoking piece.

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