Regular contributor Julie Ann Weinstein has been kind enough to send us another book review – and we encourage you to do the same!  We’re a community that loves to write, but we also love to read and discuss books. Fortunately, there’s such a lot of them!  Tell us [...]]]>

Regular contributor Julie Ann Weinstein has been kind enough to send us another book review – and we encourage you to do the same!  We’re a community that loves to write, but we also love to read and discuss books. Fortunately, there’s such a lot of them!  Tell us what you think and we’ll be happy to post it.

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Kenneth Weene’s jaw-clamping, nerve-spinning novel-like memoir depicts life behind the scenes in a mental asylum.  But this incredible novel is more than just a book about the insane. The characters, in all their crazed-out existences, question what it means to be human and what happens when our greatest fears trap us from living.

Set during the 1970s/1980s, the book is reminiscent of the One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Girl, Interrupted, only with a more uplifting, thought- provoking edge. Like its movie predecessors, this novel pits the inmates against the staff, but therein lies the excellent dichotomy that author has developed. In Memoirs of the Asylum, some of the staff members view the mentally insane as mere furniture, yet others  see their own vulnerabilities and frailties mirrored within the patients.

In the view of the narrator, the inmates are controlled by whatever means necessary, including excessive medication, shock treatments and even lobotomies, so that the inmates are kept out of sight from society. To do this, the staff must be willing and able to lie.  Yet neither inmates nor staff fit very well in this pre-ordained script. The characters tend to be a messy, vibrant lot, a point made in the novel’s various discussions of excrement. For, in our most smelly states – in the view of the narrator – we are our most authentic selves. Here, in the proverbial restroom, there is no escape from our basic and most primitive selves.

The sense of “no escape” is a central theme in this novel. The more the patients and staff try to escape from themselves at each harrowing turn, the more they find themselves. The book presents a virtual kaleidoscope of characters losing their minds, and ultimately climaxes with a symphonic roar at the full moon as patients are united in their madness which culminates in a murder. However, this book is anything but gratuitous in its depiction of violence or madness. Each insane person is treated with the utmost care and humanity, and that is the genius behind Weene’s writing and his story’s authenticity.

The character we come know most intimately is the narrator, who is at once an observer and a patient suffering from schizophrenia – but, more to the heart, he is a character making sense of the loss of his best friend, and suffering from immense grief.

He is not the only mourner in this novel. Marilyn, a catatonic patient, is alternately trapped between a variety of layers of grief for her mother, a lost love, and a lost dog. She is the silent hero. Her catatonic state has a transformative effect on the new medical resident, Dr. Buford Ambrose.  He is at once fascinated, mesmerized and disgusted with her state of non-existence – what is, essentially, a waking death. This notion of not-quite-living is symptomatic of many of the inmates, and even staff members. It is Marilyn who has the most powerful effect on another patient, Alan, who finds her captivating and representative of the ideal woman, pure and unmoved by the world around her.

Yet Marilyn’s state is anything but un-removed. She is living in the crack in her room in ways she is afraid to do in the outside world. It is there that she can face her own fears, her own tormentors, over and over. Even though her mini-conquests occur in her mind and in silences, they have an un-gluing effect on Dr. Ambrose, who questions his very fiber as he feels helpless and unable to cure her, and unable to save his own crumbling marriage. At the same time, he grows to care for her. In his near-paternal love for her, a family is formed with both him and Alan as her dutiful suitor.

Alan is the peeping tom, the crazy philosopher, and the man who masturbates at will in front of any and everyone, including circus elephants.  As Marilyn seeps into a deep stupor under the heavy cloak of meds, she becomes a hero to herself as she faces her demons once and for all, while physically she becomes the victim of rape which results in a pregnancy. It is in their collective finest hours that Alan (though he is not the father) chooses to be her husband, and Marilyn breaks through the walls of her existence and says, in her own words, to Dr. Arbrose, “The vacation is over. “ She welcomes impending motherhood. Though the fate of her life, Alan’s life, and the life of their child is up to the asylum, the readers are left with the sense that love and acceptance – while it may not cure lunacy – can dampen its severe decree.

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Julie Ann Weinstein is the author of the forthcoming short story collection, Flashes from the Other World (All Things That Matter Press, fall 2010). To learn more about the authors, visit their websites at www.authorkenweene.com and www.julieweinstein.com.

Our contributor Julie Weinstein has been kind enough to write two reviews for us – what follows is her second – and we hope you’ll follow suit and tell us about the books which have moved you, inspired you, or made you laugh (or even made you wish you [...]]]>

Our contributor Julie Weinstein has been kind enough to write two reviews for us – what follows is her second – and we hope you’ll follow suit and tell us about the books which have moved you, inspired you, or made you laugh (or even made you wish you hadn’t bothered).  Send it to admin@awordwithyoupress. We’ll post it and perhaps we’ll enjoy a lively discussion about it in the Comments section. You never know; you might start a literary landslide. At any rate, here’s Julie’s review – Geronimo!

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Musical Chairs by Jen Knox
Reviewed by Julie Weinstein

Jen Knox’ memoir, Musical Chairs, is an uplifting, hard-knocks story of independence and of facing one’s fears. The book opens with Jen as a teenager, living in a house that’s falling apart at the seams as her parents’ marriage begins to crumble. She is a witness to a home that is slowly divided up in quarters as her parents each carve a space of their own. Jen is weighted down by their silences and what is not said between them. This is juxtaposed against another side of Jen, who is creating her own space and struggling to find herself as an adolescent girl and as a woman.

Jen learns the value of running as an athlete from her Dad, and also as an escape mechanism from her great grandmother, whom she’s heard about in family legends. And so she becomes a runaway teenager living life on her terms. She camps out at her boyfriend’s house and at friends’ houses, but doesn’t cave into others’ whims, or even to the notion of what home means, finding a safety net of one’s own. This notion is at first too alien and foreign and, ultimately, too threatening. When she does finally contact her parents, it’s to let them know she’s safe, even though they offer to let her live with them at their respective homes.  Jen says no, and later, when she questions her own sanity and wonders if she might have inherited her grandma’s mental illness, she voluntarily checks herself into a center for troubled teens.  Jen knows she’s in the wrong place, though in some way it’s the right place. Once there, she finds the seed for reading, and gains more humanity and a part of herself, even though she’ll keep on running.

Lured by the hope of fast money and the sense of power that her own sexuality brings, Jen rises, then falls, as a stripper as she attempts to escape the hard life through booze binges. She says goodbye to the stripper life, rekindles relations with both parents, yet still has the urge to run. She hops from one job to the next on a path towards a college education. Along the way, she settles down and wonders again about her own sanity as her fear catches up with her in the form of panic attacks.  The ironic thing is that, as her life gets calmer, the old fears of not being safe find her, even though she discovers a home of her own making. It is what makes this story all the more human and real. For all its gritty edges, Jen has an unshakable confidence and knows that if things get bad enough, she can always run. Yet it’s the staying with her own fear, her panic, that gives her the most courage as she welcomes in romantic love and forms a tight friendship with her grandma.  Jen learns that running runs deep in her family, but that some things – like love – you can run toward, instead of running away.

A Word with You Press always keeps this in mind:  before we were writers, we were readers.  In fact, we became writers because we were readers – we fell in love with stories, we became enchanted with language, enamored of the written word, and, eventually, obsessed with filling the [...]]]>

A Word with You Press always keeps this in mind:  before we were writers, we were readers.  In fact, we became writers because we were readers – we fell in love with stories, we became enchanted with language, enamored of the written word, and, eventually, obsessed with filling the blank page.  So . . . what have you read lately?  Send us your book reviews.  If you’re bold enough to write one, we’re bold enough to post it.  Julie Weinstein has done just that.  Here’s her first review for A Word with You Press:

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Widow’s Walk by Kenneth Weene
Reviewed by Julie Weinstein

The book opens with Mary, a widow who takes on the burden of nursing her son, Sean, who came back from the Vietnam War both mentally and physically shattered.  Mary wears her despair like a badge and shield. It’s what she knows, and it is all-consuming as she shuts herself off from the world. But Mary does change slowly, through her children. Sean finds a feisty caregiver, Jem, who challenges Sean’s core view of himself and causes him to question whether he wants an independent life – the very notion Sean didn’t think possible before, and one, ironically, that Mary didn’t dare.

Sean learns how to live as an independent, handicapped person.  Emboldened by Sean’s progress Mary, embarks on a journey of knowledge at the university and the school of life, where she questions her strict Catholicism and the beliefs that have kept her from letting others into her life and of letting go of past hurts.

Almost simultaneously, Mary falls in love, and so does Sean. Encouraged by her son’s blossoming family and inner strength, Mary tries love with Arnie, a college professor.  Their relationship has passion, true togetherness, and a partnership; everything that Mary didn’t have with her husband. Yet Mary has her doubts, questioning if she can and should give love – and, most importantly, life – a chance.

It’s a burden and a curse she doesn’t carry alone, for her daughter, Kathleen, has her own grief that she can’t seem to shake.  Hurt by a broken marriage and the realization that she can’t bear children, Kathleen cares for the dying at a hospice center when she’s too afraid of living. When she finds tragedy again, Mary takes on her burden, wearing the widow’s coat ‘til the very end, even when her children have so bravely and eloquently dared to embrace life.

How dare you take advantage of me in my vulnerable state? Here I am, sitting at home, tired, achy, taking a sick day because brain and body won’t work, and I innocently finished reading “The Boy with a Torn Hat.”

I thought this would be easy reading–a boy-book [...]]]>

How dare you take advantage of me in my vulnerable state? Here I am, sitting at home, tired, achy, taking a sick day because brain and body won’t work, and I innocently finished reading “The Boy with a Torn Hat.”

I thought this would be easy reading–a boy-book surely, full of beer and pissing rain and chasing skirts and the antics of youth. And there you go seeping in between the cracks of my carefully erected armor with insidious poignancy, exposing all the uncertainty and longing and the suffering borne of being torn in too many directions–exposing what it means to be humanly afraid, to hurt someone you love, to be victim to your own weaknesses.

I did not know how to start. How to tell you how good “The Boy with a Torn Hat” is. [Caution, spoilers] I was leaking tears for the last few chapters at the suffering, the betrayal, and the redemption. But it is not a tragedy. The book makes mention of a Hollywood ending. I did not find that moment so. It would never make it in a Hollywood script without being blown out of proportion with a man-to-man battle. It’s triumph was one of the human spirit. The redemption of having one clear moment where one small act makes a giant difference to oneself and breaks the mold was the crowning touch. How many of those moments do some of us pass up, locked in insecurity, ignorance, or fear? You made up for all of those moments for all of us.

I was a bit misled (I always read that word ‘migh-zled’) at first by the light humor of our blundering protagonist. I thought of the wit as a writing style; instead, it was a social coping mechanism, a mask for angst. His stumbling ways, his botched attempts at art and love, his inability to say something substantive to at least one of his paramours, establish him as an Everyman early on. I was embarrassed and chagrined for him, and with him, as his misadventures reminded me of uncomfortable past moments of my own.

I cringed and berated him for his betrayal of Renate, while realizing that this trip to “the dark side,” was perhaps the first thing he’d made a definitive stand about. He willfully created an alter ego to take unearned credit, just to get something he wanted–to know how it felt to have someone admire his work, and by extension, to admire him. I was relieved that he was found out so early, however painful that exposure, and I felt vindicated in the end when he learns how to take positive action for the benefit of self and others.

Despite this human flaw, this selfish and flagrant succumbing to temptation, despite his constant and desperately awkward attempts to get laid, he still emerges the hero when he glimpses desire for love of another kind. His tenderness toward Sasha and his desire to paint for the blind, for the heart, overcome the constant nagging of young male hormones that pervades his existence. When circumstances push him toward maturity, he accepts the ride with insight and grace.

There are so many other things for which to commend the book–the subtle weaving of the plot around Arthur McBride, the symbolism of the portrait of the boy as icon of the innocence and flaws of so many of the characters, the creation of real villains, the uplifting of spirit when the entire busker community comes together to support Jimmy, the finding of Jimmy’s voice alone without Arthur. There are many instances of admirable wordsmithy (my word) that I marked in the margins–I do not usually mark up books.

It is interesting that women don’t fare so well in the book. While Jimmy, Morgan, Dieter, and Tobias find themselves in larger or smaller ways, Hannah remains frozen in childhood, Sabrina remains a resentful mom, Renate chooses the sadist, and Lola goes to look for one. Still, I have known them and been some of them, so it is a fair depiction. I just wanted more for at least one of them.

I am so happy you gave me a copy of your book, Thornton. But how dare you write and touch the heart so deeply.

–
Your fan,
Diana

P.S. I wrote this today, immediately after reading Thornton Sully’s novel, “The Boy with a Torn Hat.”

I know exactly how many of you feel when someone comments on your writing that gets posted here.  We are not typing these words into a computer screen, but into some reader’s imagination, and maybe heart and mind.  We never really know how it will be received until we [...]]]>

I know exactly how many of you feel when someone comments on your writing that gets posted here.  We are not typing these words into a computer screen, but into some reader’s imagination, and maybe heart and mind.  We never really know how it will be received until we get feedback, and that feedback can either feed or diminish our worst fears or our greatest expectations.  Monika Spykerman was good enough to read and review our debut novel, The Boy with a Torn Hat.

Here is what she has to say:

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Review of “The Boy with the Torn Hat” by Thornton Sully

by Monika Spykerman

Thornton Sully’s third novel has been described as a coming-of-age story, but this isn’t entirely accurate.  It’s less about a boy becoming a man and more about a man learning to see the truth in himself and others – that imperfection can be beautiful.

The novel is set in 1970s Heidelberg, where the protagonist, Morgan, spends his days applying paint to either houses or canvas, and his nights painting the town red.  His compatriots are a polyglot mix of singers, painters, musicians and devoted drinkers.  They make a living mainly on the streets – exchanging art for “geld” (that’s money, if you nicht sprechen deutsch) and spend their proceeds mainly in the pubs.  You’ll meet The Sassy Waitress, The Prickly but Passionate Prostitute, The Unattainable Woman, The Naughty Student, The Soulful Irishman (who bears the preposterously allusive name Jimmy Joyce) – and Morgan himself, The Struggling Artist.  There are unexpected characters:  a guitar, and the city of Heidelberg itself.  If ever there was a love song written for a city, this book is it.

Sully is true to the times, with a surplus of sex, a deluge of bier, and a helping of civil unrest.  He serves us a bubbling steinful of love, both unrequited and requited, topped with a frothy dollop of lust.  For some, that’s enough to recommend the novel – but beneath the flirtatious banter and the veritable fountainhead of double-entendres, there’s a deeper vein of gold to be mined.   If you’ve ever wondered why some artists fail and others succeed, Sully puts forth a hypothesis worth examining.  What’s the secret alchemical formula that transforms paint, brushes, canvas, clay, words, notes, voices, instruments into Art?  How do artists reconfigure the flawed beauty around us into a vision of perfection?  Are artists merely conduits whose sole task – or soul task, if you will – is to make themselves hollow so that beauty can shine through?  The Philosopher’s Stone – the mythical substance that turns base materials into gold – might just be the artist.

Sully follows Morgan down his rocky path of self-discovery, and you’ll want to tag along, not least to know whether he Gets the Girl – or gets something completely unexpected.  Most of all, you’ll want to walk with Morgan up the hallowed steps of the Philosopher’s Way, and see through his eyes as he realizes that beauty is truth, and truth, beauty.

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Proceeds from the sale of  The Boy with a Torn Hat help fund this website, and look very cool in your hands sitting at a coffee shop.  You can buy a boy to call your own from the author’s limited signed edition by clicking  www.awordwithyoupress.com/buy/

The Widow of the South
A novel
By
Robert Hicks
(Warner Books, 404 pages, $24.95)
Reviewed by
Thornton Sully

While the emaciated Confederate forces of General John Bell Hood fixed bayonets in the late afternoon of November 30th, 1864 in Franklin, Tennessee, the [...]]]>

The Widow of the South
A novel
By
Robert Hicks
(Warner Books, 404 pages, $24.95)
Reviewed by
Thornton Sully

While the emaciated Confederate forces of General John Bell Hood fixed bayonets in the late afternoon of November 30th, 1864 in Franklin, Tennessee, the Grim Reaper honed his scythe, and could hardly contain himself.
Defying the consul of his incredulous field generals, six of whom would die that day, Hood ordered an uphill charge across pastoral slopes into the spittle of canon and musket.  Two miles in the distance Union troops were deeply entrenched, while the only cover for the boys in gray was the penetrable aura of their valor, the stupor induced by the knowledge of their own impending slaughter, and, for the lucky ones, the mounting pile of flesh that had fallen before them, by some accounts seven men high. The imminent annihilation was so disheartening that among the Union forces reincarnated under the command of historian-turned-novelist Robert Hicks, those whose humanity had not yet atrophied refused to fire.
The Widow of the South is a novel about nothing less than the night they truly drove ol’ Dixie down, and a remarkable event that followed.  The Confederacy faltered after Atlanta, but it fell at Franklin.
The charge is sounded.  It was imperative that Hood obliterate the Union forces of Brigadier General John Schofield before they could coalesce with additional troops fifteen miles further north in well-fortified Nashville, thereby becoming invincible. Schofield on- the-march had indeed been vulnerable the night before, and yet, as the Confederate army bivouacked, Schofield’s men passed quietly and unfettered within a few hundred yards, to the advantage of the higher ground and the sanctuary of solid breastworks already established by a smaller number of Union troops who had occupied Franklin for two years. How could an army of twenty thousand possibly have slipped through the night and his grasp? The blunder infuriated Hood.
Was his brazen charge, flawed only in that it failed, an irrational tantrum or was it endemic Confederate courage?  Historians still draw sabers over that, but in 1864 while the wails of the wounded and the death rattle of the dying were choking in the smoke of battle, Schofield ordered his men to evacuate to Nashville, leaving Hood the following dawn to count the bodies.  Fifteen hundred of them.
Hicks has mustered a confederation of cameos to authentically re-enact a slice of the battle. Their poignant voices are the soft artillery of Hicks’ own charge across the printed page upon which fall the dead and the dying. It is as if the departed were given ten minutes in the waiting room of their Maker with quill and parchment to dispatch their final recollections to Hicks.  But the war and The Widow of the South are not confined to the killing field.
On the day of the battle, before the first shots are fired, the Confederates commandeered the plantation house of Carrie McGavock for a field hospital.  Carrie is not Scarlet O’Hara.  Carrie has been in a constant state of mourning, as one by one three of her five children die of the usual causes rampant a century and a half ago. She is dry and withered and black is the color of her only dress and the color of her every sunrise.  The war that had politely kept itself at bay for four years suddenly staggered up to her veranda, and against her will it collapses tragically upon her door.  As does Zachariah Cashwell.
Cashwell survived the charge, and Carrie discovers him propped up among the bullet-ridden and lacerated casualties in her parlor, a kind of purgatory where the wounded await swift entry into God’s Heaven or the protracted agony of the surgeon’s Hell. Carrie has been pressed into service as a nurse, and is quickly intoxicated by her newly vested authority. Rather than shrinking from the task she is invigorated by it. Cashwell’s first salvo of stoic words, a suggestion to take others more in need, and that he himself was likely to die anyway, at once impress Carrie, wed, but in a passionless marriage.  “This is the way a man is supposed to talk.” she thinks. She reserves him a table with the surgeon. Cashwell despises her for it, preferring death.  Almost to punish herself for dispatching him to the frontlines of pain, Carrie herself attends the amputation of Cashwell’s leg, which is tossed from the second story window to a growing pyramid of discarded limbs.
And so their romance begins, as Hicks transitions gripping and accurate historical journalism into conventional fiction.  This, too, will prove to be an uphill charge.
His foray into a contrived love story loses the ground the authenticity of his narrative has triumphantly taken.  He obeys the formula: the lovers meet, deny attraction, obstacles are put in their way, and then there is a cathartic moment of union.  As with Hood, the only flaw of Hick’s battle plan is that it fails.  There is a further breach as his fiction surges forward: stoicism bleeds from virtually every major player, and we implore Hicks to plug the holes and apply the tourniquet. He declines, and as a result our vision blurs and it becomes difficult to differentiate the nuances of his characters, as it is similarly difficult to tell the difference between courage and bravado.  Sabers will undoubtedly be drawn here, too, in Hick’s defense.
It is entirely possible that stoicism or cowardice are the only outcomes of such a calamity the battle of Franklin documents, but stoic characters are potentially boring, even if they do extraordinary things. Ultimately, the test of a novel is its final page.  Do we lament that it has come to an end or do we embrace the armistice? Are we craving to discover if Scarlet ever gets Rhett back?  As The Widow of the South rambles among the head stones of the fallen, we are battle-weary and relieved that the shooting has stopped.
And yet, its weakness as a novel in no way diminishes its power as a story.
If we surrender ourselves to the eloquence of Hicks’ narrative, our consolation is to be made privy to an event in history that counterpoints the brutality of the battle that necessitated it.  A few years after the war, the dead, who were buried in haste not far from the McGavock plantation, come under attack once again.  A planter threatens to plow the fields in total disregard to the sanctity of the gravesite.  Carrie McGavock will not hear of it, and invites fifteen hundred exhumed corpses to reside on her own property. She cares for the graveyard of the re-interred the rest of her days.
Carrie McGavock made a willful effort to remember them all, though, by remembering, denied herself the luxury of healing. She, too, was a casualty of that late November afternoon.  Her generosity of spirit proved to be as profound as the sacrifice of those who died in her home, even, in her arms. The Widow of the South may fail as a novel, but it succeeds as history.  It preserves, even renews, the legacy of Carrie McGavock with such passion and clarity that it is no less poignant than the futility of the charge at Franklin or of the cause lost that was finally acknowledged at Appomattox.

Thornton Sully is a freelance writer in Oceanside

Addendum-direct quote

Carrie McGavock: (page appx 135)

“…It took some time before I realized that there was nothing I could do for a dying man except ease his journey a little, and that wasn’t accomplished by staring sadly into their faces and making it clear to them that, indeed, they would be dying soon.
When I realized that my gestures of comfort were only extinguishing hope, and therefore creating another agony, I began to bring the gravely injured men whiskey, which I poured down their throats with a smile.  And when the other men in the room complained about not getting their dram, I’d stand up and declare that the whiskey was only for the handsomest among them, and that the rest should count themselves lucky to get water.  The other men would curse and laugh.  The dying men with the taste of whiskey on their tongues knew the charade meant they would surely die, but I thought it possible I made them hopeful by swallowing my sadness. At least death was not something to fear, if a proper woman could treat it so cavalierly, and that was a form of hope.  That’s what I thought, at least.”

End:  body of review appx 1200 words minimum
Addendum:  appx 220 words

The Ruins

a novel

by

Scott Smith

(Alfred A. Knopf, publishers, 320 pages, $24.95)

reviewed by

Thornton Sully

Ahh! the summer read! In the back yard, under the gazebo, while the kids entertain themselves with feats of daring agility on the slip ‘n’ slide. You occasionally look up [...]]]>

The Ruins

a novel

by

Scott Smith

(Alfred A. Knopf, publishers, 320 pages, $24.95)

reviewed by

Thornton Sully

Ahh! the summer read! In the back yard, under the gazebo, while the kids entertain themselves with feats of daring agility on the slip ‘n’ slide. You occasionally look up and offer a “Bravo!” to create the impression that you are present, but the truth is you are elsewhere. You have your iced tea by your side, a book in hand, and it offers you…escape.

But here’s the paradox. If you happen to have chosen The Ruins by Scott Smith for your summer read, there is no escape. Certainly not for you, who will become the captive reader, and perhaps not for his carefree tourists who willfully stray from the jungle of Cancun nightclubs to the real jungle and the ruins adjacent to a Mayan village. Have you pruned the vines lately, that grow so chaotically upon the lattice of the gazebo? Do they stir, ever so slightly, as you read? They do, of course, and this will begin to disturb you, ever so slightly, as you turn the seemingly innocuous pages.

We have names that suggest normalcy: Jeff and Amy, Eric and Stacy, whose only adventures in life are the ones that they have manufactured themselves. The adventure of tanning by day and drinking by night at the hotel is much like their entire lives have been, a pleasant bore.

So when the opportunity comes up for a genuine, spontaneous quest, it proves to be irresistible. They have befriended Mathias, an affable German tourist whose brother left a hastily scrawled map indicating he was off to an archaeological dig with his new love interest. When he does not return as scheduled…

The not-in-Kansas-anymore greenery to which our intrepid ones trek conforms to that they had imagined. Lush jungle, macaws macaw-ing, a village of thatched roof huts, quaint natives for the photo ops. And then, of course, it all changes. The entrance to the path from the village that leads to the dig has been camouflaged, and when our tourists robustly pluck their way through the barrier, the reader will realize instantly what our crew has yet to discover. They have past the point of no return.

The lovely little girl who almost smiled for their camera alerts the elders in the village. The natives are restless. Our tourists are still oblivious, and wander into a clearing. A mote, of sorts, surrounds a large hill, covered with vines. The mote that they cross is simply dirt in which nothing grows. The dig, they reason, must be on the hill. They boldly go where no man has gone before. (they are still in play-explorer mode). They find the archaeologists’ tents, but no sign of people. An arrow protruding from the vines says “look here”. The pointy end of the arrow is in the rapidly decomposing body of the brother they had come to find, and as they gaze down from the hill, they see at neatly spaced intervals are those restless natives with bows in hand. They are surrounded.

You refill your tea, and notice the ice in the pitcher has melted.

Now the mysteries begin. The locals only flex their bows when the stranded ones attempt to leave the hill. We start to wonder, could this be the sacrificial mound to which Kong or some equivalent will come by night in search of virgins? And why are there no mosquitoes or ants, or any other signs of life on the hill, except for…the vines?

We are teased by possibilities of escape and false hopes. A deep pit that perhaps branches off into a labyrinth that may offer a way out. A lost cell phone that rings tauntingly in the dark that can’t be found. But soon we realize that some must die, and once we are reconciled to that, we then ask, who among them will remain to tell the tale? Who among them to sell the movie rights to the story that will undoubtedly preview somewhere in the vicinity of Hollywood and Vine?

The Ruins to which Scott Smith leads us this summer entertains as advertised.

But you really should prune the overhanging greenery on the gazebo.

Thornton Sully is a freelance writer in North County

The Amalgamation Polka

a novel by

Stephen Wright

Alfred A. Knopf, Publishers, 304 pages, $24.95

reviewed by

Thornton Sully

The porcelain sky that a cannonball shattered over Fort Sumter in 1860 not only rained screaming shards of broken glass over this nation but also seeded the stratosphere with even [...]]]>

The Amalgamation Polka

a novel by

Stephen Wright

Alfred A. Knopf, Publishers, 304 pages, $24.95

reviewed by

Thornton Sully

The porcelain sky that a cannonball shattered over Fort Sumter in 1860 not only rained screaming shards of broken glass over this nation but also seeded the stratosphere with even finer particles of whispering destruction that still dusts the air we breathe. Once inhaled, they rasp their way through our guts, eviscerating us from within. Until the bleeding stops, until the unfulfilled promise of healing is delivered, novels of the Civil War and the dissension the Union victory failed to pacify will remain a contemporary field of engagement, and not just a nostalgic war game waged by boys fascinated by guns and gore. Among a resurgence of novels about those terrible times, none is finer than the one by Stephen Wright. Unlike other novels in the arsenal of literature, The Amalgamation Polka is not about the caissons and casualties of that revisited war —it is about the racism that took us there.

We are immediately engaged and inspired upon opening the book to find a reproduction of a print, circa 1850, entitled “An Amalgamation Polka”. Imagine a cotillion. Couples dancing sprightly upon a polished oak floor, mingling beneath the glow of a chandelier, frivolous in flirtations, stealing a glance or even a kiss, toasting the night air, enraptured by one another and by the moment. But impose upon this convivial scene the fact that the dance floor is completely integrated, without self consciousness or animosity, and this blissful extract from the past is exposed as only a pretended history, a wish. We glimpse the revelers’ future as it might have been, as it might yet be. A caption addresses the readership of the times:

“A Lofty Destiny for the Human Race— A clergyman at Milford, Massachusetts, called the Reverend E. S. Best, has published a sermon in which occurs the following paragraph–’This blending of the two races (Caucasian and African) by amalgamation is just what is needed for the perfection of both. You will then have the highest, noblest, and most God-like species of humanity. Such a race will constitute the real people of America. Here the human race will reach its loftiest destiny, and this nation will become the glory of all lands; the place which, above all others, shall most resemble heaven, and be nearest to it.’ ”

Just how far from heaven this nation found itself in1860 thunders like the artillery of hell throughout the telling of Wright’s tale. The sentry of his embattled ideals is Liberty Fish, a boy who becomes of soldiering age when dry powder and restless flint sit down together to negotiate the future of North and South. And when the anger compacted in the barrel of a musket is emancipated by spark, no one buys the Lincolnian notion that the war is about preserving the Union, or the Confederate posturing that it’s all about state’s rights; it’s about slavery. Good was never so Good, Evil was never so Evil, Right and Wrong were never so…Black and White. Wright tints the daguerreotype as deftly as Matthew Brady.

Liberty is born into a family of what we might now call social activists, what was then called social misfits. The locomotive of social upheaval screeches to a halt at their front door in bucolic New York State, their home a station in the underground railroad. They are far enough north to operate openly, too far south in moral evolution to escape the wrath and disdain of their neighbors, who refer to the family (when they are being kind) as “amalgamators”.

Thatcher Fish, Liberty’s father, is devoutly religious, and the dimension with which Wright animates him is a pleasure to read in these modern times when “devoutly religious” is an almost interchangeable euphemism for dogmatic. Thatcher has a sense of humor, but also a passion for human rights that is genuine, and not a manifestation of mindless obedience to what he perceives as God’s call to action. He threatens to give religion a good name, and at much risk to himself journeys about New England (Liberty in tow) as an orator for the abolitionist movement. Wright is led not into temptation to sermonize, with one well-chosen exception. When Liberty as a small boy makes his first foray from his front yard into his neighborhood, only to be driven home (“Get back to your nigger hotel!”) by a baffling salvo of stones, his father gives him comfort: “All (are) touched by this curse that has been laid against this land. I know it hurts, but sometimes, Liberty, all one can do before such malignant idiocy is be polite and gracefully withdraw. There are certain terrains the wise general seeks to avoid. Because there will come other days, other fields, where one will be presented with the opportunity to beat back the tide of hatred and work to lift the curse that weighs heavily as chains upon us all, free and bonded alike.”

The other days, and other fields, present the opportunity. Liberty Fish is off to war.

For Liberty, the soldier, an awareness smolders that the Civil War actually began before his birth, when the slings and arrows of outrageous bigotry compelled his mother, Roxana, to secede from the union of her mother and father, Carolinian slave-holders, to marry Thatcher, Yankee and abolitionist. As a child, even without a reference point of enlightened adults, she rejects the moral validity of slavery and its biblical endorsements, and is horrified by her parents’ cruelty. There can be no armistice while Roxana subscribes to the heretical notion that slaves are actually human. A soul under siege, she abdicates wealth and privilege, but is incurably distraught by her parents’ hideous inhumanity. She begins to self-destruct.

When the flame of the War Between the States slowly starves as it forages for sparse remnants of combustible timber, Liberty goes awol to track down Asa and Ida Maury, the grandparents who so damaged his mother. This encounter, as the war collapses everything, is the terrain where Wright chooses to beat back the tide of hatred, and unleash the dogs of war. So stunning is his delivery of words, so breathless are we left by the cavalry charge of his prose, there is almost no space in the cavity of our lungs to inhale the full meaning of the book or the author’s vision. The truth is, Asa and Ida are a decomposing Simon and Simone LeGree, brutal beyond redemption, and they feel no moral quandary from which they must extricate themselves. Wright’s only flaw is flawless writing; he articulates the position of “malignant idiocy” that so reviled Thatcher Fish with such virtuoso sarcasm and wit that his villains become caricatures of evil, which perhaps undermines their credibility and may render them less potent than evil itself. Asa Maury proposes a much different interpretation of “amalgamation” than the one that has drawn us so deeply into the novel, or actuated its author. The battle of good and evil becomes the battle of reason and madness, and Wright’s work is the blade of that terrible swift sword of illumination.

Most books can be judged as good or bad immediately upon consumption. “Can you put it down?” is the usual standard. Great literature, on the other hand, often needs time for assimilation into our senses. So let it be with The Amalgamation Polka. This emancipating novel has all the elements of enduring art; a high purpose, a masterful use of language, engrossing conflict, catharsis. More than this, The Amalgamation Polka, the book with the deceptively frivolous title, does what we ask all great literature to do; it inspires us to a loftier destiny.

Thornton Sully is a freelance writer living in North County.

(1287 words)

Addendum, direct quote (253 words)

“My life is over,” she (Roxana) sobbed. Around them the frozen trees swayed and creaked like giant chandeliers caught in a draft. Tinkling crystals of ice plopped without cease onto the thick carpet of snow.

“No, no,” said Thatcher, his own voice a stranger’s to his ear. “No.” He had no idea what she was talking about and didn’t know what to do but keep patting her mechanically on her quavering back, his uncertain hand running up and down the hard china knobs of her spine.

When Roxana finally dared to look up at her husband, her expression emptied of all defenses, she gasped, reaching out to touch the monstrous swelling around his half closed eye where the skin bulged with organic color normally kept from view.

“It’s nothing,” Thatcher said, brushing her hand away. “The mark of Christian love. Tell me what’s happened here.”

So she did, and the very words themselves, spoken out loud at last to the one person they’d always been directed toward, settled like ballast deep inside her. “And I keep thinking,” she concluded, in a surprisingly firm voice, “of all those babies who need me.” She could see them, too, infinite acres of squalling infants, manacled each to each, each fresh tiny mind merely another receptacle of sufficient dimension to contain entire the whole of the world’s pain, the chorus of their shrieks and wails rising like incense unto the stone nostrils of the father whose true features were perpetually obscured by the human mask of God.

Alternate addendum, direct quote (330 words)

At the sound of approaching footsteps…the dinner party turned as one to observe an ancient woman…bearing a huge chipped bowl of steaming vegetables. Her crooked nose had obviously been broken sometime in the distant past and never correctly reset, and her left ear reduced to a twisted knot of cartilage stuck to the side of her balding gray head.

“What in the weeping name of Jesus is this?” demanded Mrs. Maury, indignantly examining the dish placed on the table before her. “These aren’t potatoes, they’re goddamn turnips!”

“There ain’t any more potatoes,” replied Ditey… “This here is all we got.”

“There were potatoes yesterday,” insisted Mrs. Maury, stabbing a turnip with her fork. “What happened to ‘em?”

“All et up, I expect.”

“Yes, and I’m sure you thieving ingrates made a fine meal of it too, leaving us to dine on this miserable hog food. And they aren’t even properly cooked. These things are hard as stones.”

“I did the best I could, Missus.”

“Well it isn’t good enough, and it’s never been good enough, you worthless bitch.” Grandmother lifted her knife as if preparing to carve some fowl. “Hold out your hand.” And with a single swift movement she opened the cringing woman’s palm to the bone. In an instant, with a savage cry, Ditey was upon her, the chair overturning, both women toppling to the carpet, Ditey’s hands, blood spilling from the one in shocking amounts, locked tight as iron collars about her mistresses scrawny neck, a stunned Liberty only half risen from his seat as Grandfather, with astonishing celerity, charged around the table, seized a chair and brought it crashing down upon Ditey’s head in a dreadful splintering of wood and skull…

Out in the kitchen, the other servants having briskly fled, Liberty found only a distraught girl crouching under a table. “What’s going to happen ?” she cried frantically. “What’s going to happen now?”

“I don’t know,” he replied calmly…”You’d best get out of here.”

A Pirate of Exquisite Mind

The Life of William Dampier: Explorer, Naturalist, and Buccaneer

By Diana and Michael Preston

(Walker and Company, 384 pages, $27.00 hardcover)

reviewed by

Thornton Sully

Shiver me timbers! The culture of piracy has been pirated!

In these modern times a tattoo, once the [...]]]>

A Pirate of Exquisite Mind

The Life of William Dampier: Explorer, Naturalist, and Buccaneer

By Diana and Michael Preston

(Walker and Company, 384 pages, $27.00 hardcover)

reviewed by

Thornton Sully

Shiver me timbers! The culture of piracy has been pirated!

In these modern times a tattoo, once the dark and distinguishing emblem of rogues and sailors, is reduced to a fashion statement of conformity. A ring through the ear and a parrot on the shoulder have become merely accessories to a look-at-me wardrobe, and meaningless. But three hundred years ago, before image displaced substance, before Errol ever Flynned or Johnny Depp ever swashed a buckle, there was the Englishman William Dampier, who riveted landlubbers with authentic accounts of adventure gleaned from a life at sea, pistol and rapier(and quill) in hand.

A Pirate of Exquisite Mind is a treasure map of a book that dares its readers to ’way anchor, hoist the mains’l, and sail in the wake of the brilliant buccaneer who really did go boldly where no man had gone before, circumnavigating the world an unprecedented three times. Was it “that sacred hunger of gold” for which he endured tempest and treachery? Or was the voracious voyager inspired, even addicted, as the authors suggest, by an insatiable curiosity regarding just about everything on the planet? No matter the motives, he kept the London coffee shops abuzz with speculation, for he had the foresight and perseverance to log everything he encountered, and to publish his escapades and observations. There had been nothing like it. A literate privateer, sanctioned by The Crown to pursue, pillage, and plunder the enemies of the King. The genre of travel writing had been born on a rolling sea and made landfall on England’s shores.

“Chopsticks”. “Flamingos”. “Avocados”. Even, “tattoo”. He enthralled society with his bounty of over a thousand new words he captured for the English language, each word representing a new discovery. And when he felt that written English was too restrictive for him to articulate what he saw, he unshackled the language and linked words together in new ways. Never before Dampier had a “slope” been “gentle”.

He was the first ashore on five continents, and his drawings and comparison of plants helped the science of botany take root. He contributed to the evolution of Charles Darwin’s thinking by introducing the concept of “sub-species” after a stroll on the Galapagos Islands. He was a refined and patient observer who recorded not only the migrations of birds and sea turtles but how they tasted over an open fire. He described with detachment the attire of the Hottentots, and with relish how to make Thai fish sauce.

And he was lethal.

While plundering Panama he dispatched a letter to a Spaniard holding English prisoners and warned that if they were harmed, ‘”by the help of God we will color your land, rivers and sea with Spanish blood of men, women and children…we will bring our ships near your walls, that you may have the pleasure of seeing (Spanish prisoners) hanged at our yardarms…we will make you know that we are the Commanders of the whole South Seas!’” Take that, Russell Crow!

But Dampier’s exploits were not exclusively patriotic. He refers to “some troubles” in Virginia, a euphemism for run-ins with the law. As a privateer, his conduct was legitimized, but there is ample evidence to conclude that not all his victims were on England’s “to do” list, proving that he was, in fact, a pirate.

Nevertheless, he was the hero of the coffee shop crowd, which included Samuel Coleridge, who called him “a pirate of exquisite mind”, and Jonathon Swift, who fashioned the traveler Gulliver after him. Daniel Defoe found his Robinson Crusoe in the pages of Dampier’s books. Admiral Nelson made Dampier required reading for his mid-shipmen. It was Dampier, after all, who deduced that ocean currents were wind driven, and charted the Trade Winds with remarkable accuracy.

Not only do the authors of A Pirate of Exquisite Mind examine the frail parchment of archives for this salty biography, they admirably retrace his voyages and landfalls in person to conjure his ghost. Their efforts have made it easy to picture him at the helm, sextant in hand, rapier in his belt, parrot on his shoulder.

And his timbers never shivered.

Thorn Sully is a freelance writer living in Carlsbad

The Night Watch

a novel
by

Sarah Waters

(Riverhead Books, 450 pages, $25.95)

reviewed by

Thornton Sully

Romance has a shelf-life.
London has become Hitler’s dartboard, and the normal causes of love’s demise—jealousy, infidelity, unfulfilled expectations, or just plain burn-out—are all trumped by the knowledge that at [...]]]>

The Night Watch

a novel
by

Sarah Waters

(Riverhead Books, 450 pages, $25.95)

reviewed by

Thornton Sully

Romance has a shelf-life.
London has become Hitler’s dartboard, and the normal causes of love’s demise—jealousy, infidelity, unfulfilled expectations, or just plain burn-out—are all trumped by the knowledge that at any moment the ordinance from the bloated belly of a bomber could be spiraling downward upon the object of your desires, or, even, yourself.
There is no twenty-five-words-or-less synopsis for Sarah Waters’s plot-less tale, The Night Watch.  The story unknots the coarse hemp and manila that binds together the lives and loves of several young adults who endure The Blitz-Kreig of London in World War Two.  Waters has chosen to work backwards in time, when the relationships literally forged in fire have cooled.  It is 1947, and the continuing lives of war-time friends and lovers are more or less spent.  They have become passive and self contained, and guarded. Waters banks that we will be curious as to how they got to be the way they are, but for those who cannot immediately identify with any particular citizen of her novel, the hints of great secrets in their past evoke only the mildest curiosity.
In order to be truly interested in the secrets, we have to be truly interested in her characters.  Here is where the accomplished author has gambled, leaving each reader to decide for themselves if there is a pay-off.  Rather than pulling us in by the actions that exposed, defined and more importantly, animated her players, Waters chooses instead to give us still life portraits embellished only slightly by their interactions, after the major dramas in their lives have already expired, and along with it much of their passion.
Thank God there’s a war.  Her somber characters are at last encaffeinated as Waters brings on the Blitz.  At once her Londoners have the purpose that eventual victory and peace usurps.  Her depiction of London under siege is as brilliant as the flames that incinerate the ashened sky, and is by design or by accident a metaphor for souls under siege.
Except that under siege her lesbian characters enjoy an acceptance or at least a tolerance that is rescinded once the war is over.  Their heroics no longer count for anything:
“’Don’t you know the war’s over? ‘ the man behind the counter in a baker’s shop asked Kay.
He said it because of her trousers and hair, trying to be funny; but she heard this sort of thing a thousand times, and it was hard to smile…He handed over the bag, saying, ‘There you are, madam.’  But he must have given some sort of look behind her back because, as she went out, the other customers laughed.”
Mickey, her comrade and fellow ambulance driver during the war, is reduced from that much revered status to become a much unnoticed pumper at the petro-pub, barely able to get permission for a few extra minutes to catch up with Kay over lunch.
“’Look at me, Mickey!’ (Kay) said.  ‘Look at the creature I’ve become!  Did we really do those things—you and I, when the war was on?  Sometimes I can’t bring myself to get out of bed in the mornings. We carried stretchers, for God’s sake!  I remember lifting’–she spread her hands–’I remember lifting the torso of a child…What the hell happened to me, Mickey?’”
Hell is, in fact, what happened to her and her fellow inhabitants of The Night Watch.  The mosaic of relationships that Waters presses upon the printed page is made from the blood stained glass combed from the rubble of blitzed London.  We are tempted to touch it just to see if it is as sharp as it looks.  While her women characters fare well in this kind of portraiture, her male characters, regardless of sexual orientation, are all defective, but in ways that alienate rather than inspire our compassion.  They are without nobility. One abandons his lover rather than have to explain details of a “miscarriage” to the authorities.  Another, from his upper prison bunk, spatters the issue of his loins during an interlude in the bombing upon his very tepid homosexual cell-mate. Other males are stodgy, dogmatic and repressed.  The distilled impression that is left, intentional or not, is that heterosexual males are not capable of investing the same sincerity and depth in a love relationship as their lesbian counterparts because there is no depth or sincerity.
Dismay not.  That debatable perception may be lost in the debris of London wreckage.   There is a scene in which a crew must dig through the rubble after a bombing run, and rather than discovering another body, salvage a life.  Similarly there is a bit of rubble on the surface of The Night Watch, but claw through that and what is unearthed is well worth getting your fingernails dirty.

(Thornton Sully is a freelance writer in North County)  800 words