Empire Falls- Richard Russo

Blog-dom, I have another book report for you.  I typed it up and printed it out and brought it to class.

I am reviewing Richard Russo's "Empire Falls."  This is a first for me in terms of the author.  I had never heard of him before I received a large stack of excellent books from my uncle and aunt (thanks!!!), and now, post read, hope to delve into his literary repertoire.

So, I think I'm just going to hit this one head on.  No big subtitles or anything, just a meandering flow of words which convey the river that was this book.  Funny, a river (The Knox, to be specific) was actually a central catalyst in the novel.  And the river, in classic literary fashion, is again a metaphor for the journey of life and death we all boat through daily.  I am getting ahead of myself, maybe some boundaries are needed. Maybe a few less literary analogies pertaining to Siddarthian lore.  Lets start....

Here:

The setting is rural Maine.  Prologue: Backwater town, once a thriving little gift of life and land, booming with industry.  The introduction of semi-main characters.  Chapter 1 (and on): cut to present day (maybe 2000?) and the main character is an in-the-process-of-getting-divorced, heavy, humble, simple man named Miles Roby.  He has a daughter whom he loves, he is smart and witty, and he has an intensely dysfunctional lifestyle.  He is morose about it, but too much seated in inaction to move forward.

Miles' wife is divorcing because of his lack of manly appeal and well, bluntly, sex drive. She is on the road to further discovery.  His daughter is early high school, a standout mind and a bit of a loner.  There are the Whitings (particularly Mrs. Whiting and her cripple daugher Cindy) and the Robys (the father, the sons, the daugher, the distant relatives) and the priests and the past and the resturant, Empire Grill.  Then there's Martha's Vineyard and the effects of old money on small populations, river pollution, mystical magic moments in Mexico, and a murder mystery.  And...and.....and.....

 .....and I could go on and on. (Through editing I actually covered most of it)  What this means, people, is that this book is about characters.  Each character is crafted like the statue of David.  Russo chisels away, slowly but surely, at the history, job, education, and most importantly mindset of each of his characters.  (Counting in my head now...of which there are eight or nine.)  He chisels for almost 500 pages, and by the end you feel like all these randomly screwed over screwed up people in rural Main are distant relatives.  Russo takes his time to create an intimate setting in a quiet place, gives little shoves to each of his protagonists (they are all good guys when it comes down to it) and then shifts his fictional world in such slowly stuttered filtered effects that it feels like real life.

You may be getting the impression that it was long, which it was, but this is not a complaint.  I just want the potential reader to beware that it is a character piece, a languid study in the actions of humanity.  And, historically, that has never been a quick process.

The plot of this book is like the tectonic plates.  They shift always, they are movin' and a-groovin' to a deep earthy rhythm we cannot hear, and similarly, the little threads of life that Russo writes edge forward until they collide.  I would say the uniqueness of this book lies in the collision.  No, I won't spoil the ending or anything like that.  But, I will say that the monumental discovery and emotional transformation of the main character (Miles Roby) is hinted at and hoped for, and when it does finally happen, it is small. What I mean by this is that, objectively, his discovery of self is pint-sized, there is no reshaping of human future (think Ice-Nine Vonnegut) or religious transformation including horns (Satanic Verses), but instead a simple fact.  A simple fact that flips Miles' entire world upside down--much in the way our lives can be so altered by small realizations.

Overall, I don't really understand how one writes a book like this.  So much is about building the world, not about what is happening, and yet the further you read the more all the pieces come together.  There are adventures and stories, ridiculousness old world oddities and a strong tie to the modern man and his plight.  Russo impressed me, which is always a plus.  Read it!

                                                                                -----

Just so you know, I love character studies.  The building of a character is sort of the mindset I have been in for some time as a writer--how do I create a character worth reading about, regardless of what he/she is doing--and I have found it to be quite hard. Russo does it easily, and for that I am both jealous and proud.

A quote from the mind of Tick, the daughter of the main character, on this slowness of which I speak: 

"And that's the thing, she concludes.  Just because things happen slow doesn't mean you'll be ready for them.  If they happened fast, you'd be alert for all kinds of suddenness, aware that speed was trump.  'Slow' works on an altogether different principle, on the deceptive impression that there's plenty of time to prepare, which conceals the central fact, that no matter how slow things go, you'll always be slower."

p.s.  a lot of this post was about speed...it is nice to feel time having slowed a bit. Typing that I currently think about how the weeks fly by.  What is time?  Where is time?  Why is time?  Help??

Middlesex- Jeffrey Eugenides

Now here's a modern classic.  For those that haven't read, this is essentially the story of a hermaphrodite telling the story of him/her-self from a gleam in the grandparental eye up until his/her late forties.  So that I can stop doing the him/her thing, I'll let you wonderful readers know that the name of the protagonist in Middlesex is Cal.  Or Calliope.  Or Calli.  Identity, I think, becomes quite complicated when you have a penis and a vagina. That, in basic terms, is what the book is about.  Who we are, and why we are, and how all parts of ourselves merge together over time to create an individual that has some semblance of a modern man or woman.

Now, there are a number of points this book touches on, so I'll take them one at a time.  First:

History- Eugenides, with his strong voice and straight-forward style, is a historian.  He takes the fictional (albeit seriously realistic) life of a confused young person in the 70's, fast-fowards to their forties in the 00's (this is my denomination for the beautiful age of no-time we just spent a decade in), and has that person tell the story of their grandparents and parents, starting in a small town in Turkish Empire (see Ottoman...)  Sounds complicated right?  Like, whoa man, can you hold all the threads together?  Nope.  Eugenides is concise and detailed; Cal as a narrator is unfaltering in both his (I'll explain the masculine later) omniscient reproduction of a life he admits to only sort of know, and in the engaging way in which he tells it.  The book really starts in war-torn Turkey/Greece.  It describes the horrible conquering and massacre of the war of Smyrna (something that actually happened and we as Americans, at least me, have literally no idea about), the lives of a silk-weaver and her brother that become lovers on a refugee ship to the U.S.A, and then their blossoming as a married couple in pre-depression emerging auto industry Detroit.  Zuitsuits, speakeasies, prohibition, the invention of the Cadillac, the riots in Detroit, the slow deterioration of a once great nation.  I'm telling you guys, Eugenides really knows his shit.  It is always, always a pleasure to enjoy the narrative of a story and then learn about real parts of this world without having to do two things at once.

There is some more to history, but this book is dense so that's it for now...on we go.

Authorial Style-  Let's just say that I checked numerous times to see if Eugenides was a hermaphrodite, to see if this was based on a true story; I parsed the pages to see what was real and what was fiction.  Cal gave life to a sexual and identity struggle through humor and history, and Eugenides gave life to Cal.  It is like reading the diary of some brilliant person (this blog...perhaps..eh, eh??), seeing the inner workings of a complicated mysterioso that seems to have some cool business going on.  Cal takes you in and makes you feel like you've known him for ages and finally, finally get to hear what he thinks.  My only comparison is that of Garp, in The World According to Garp by John Irving, in which after reading the book I realized how much I had thought was true, true to this political fact recording world, that he simply made up.  The style is not flashy or presumptous, it uses long sentences and short ones, correct commas and semicolons, but it brings with it the force of authority and some degree of labor.

Genetics- Now a big part of the hooplah about this book was its genetic bent.  Eugenides writes often like a scientist (another profession?) in describing the physical and genetic disposition that Cal has.  This makes little sense to me.  He explains it well, as you would read in a journal on modern science, and I tend to blow by this. I'm sure (the back cover tells me so) that many people enjoyed this aspect immensely (I think Eugenides covered his bases by being a historian, a scientist, and a novelist; we all had to love it).  I did not connect scientifically, but rather Biblically.  I felt his categorizing and serious use of genetic history to mirror the awfully long sections of our beloved Western dominant paradigm: the lists and lists of genealogy.  Blank begat blank begat blank.  Now, yes, dull it seems, but I feel Eugenides used an old idea and brought it to life.  He traced the life of his narrator back before his narrator was born, and in doing so, much like the Bible, gave us all little lessons from a multitude of times, helping us along our own way.

Identity- Now this is the nitty-gritty of the book.  The stuff that is past words and past plot.  This book won a pullizter and is read by Oprah, people have talked about it and an impact has been felt. Why?  Because we are all somebody.  We all look at ourselves at some point and wonder, who am I?  Who do the eyes in the mirror reflect, there is light there and we know it means life, but what are the details?  Eugenides supplies the details of an intensely complicated person, and makes you feel connected.  Identity is the core of this book in two ways: it is a definition of self through ones literal history, who our ancestors were and how their lives will forever shape our own.  It is also identity through the chance of fate, in this case, the blending of sexes to create a confused, beautiful, puberty-wrought girl that turns into a boy at the age of 14 and spends the rest of their life becoming comfortable.  I think the power in this book lies in the fact that we all struggle with these things. Everyone hates puberty, everyone wonders at some point how they look in the eyes of their peers and sexual equals; it hits the issues head on but from a seemingly more complicated and confused perspective than our own, and in doing so gives us hope.  Because, well, Cal found hope. We can all breathe again knowing that someone so predispositioned to confusion can come out ok. Eugenides teaches us that all skin crawls, all locker-room situations are less than satisfactory, and that, most important, we decide who we want to be.


Getting pretty deep here.  Book review, for real yall.  Also, this is starting to look like an academic paper.  Sorry about that, I haven't written a paper in so long I must be craving it or something.  This was an incredible book.  Read it, please.

p.s. after the age of 14 Cal decides to be a man, and therefore is a "he" for a large portion of the book and that is why I use "him" to describe him in most of this post.

p.p.s I love reading!!

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man-James Joyce

So I'm trying out the book review thing.  This is for a number of reasons, but the main one is because I have spare time and I love to read.  My thoughts, of which I have many, usually come from books.  And, believe it or not, I have an opinion about the books and authors I read.  Thought I'd share.  Thats what blogging is right? Sharing? Caring? Anyway...

James Joyce.  For some reason I always thought he was a she.  Not like a pen name or anything, but because the last name Joyce seems feminine to me, I just skipped right over the James.  So I picked up the book on an old bookshelf, saw lots of notes scribbled inside (thanks Lelah) and decided that yes, I now have the time to read a classic.  And it's not that long, so why not give it a shot?

Mind equals blown, ladies- and gentle-bloggers.  How did I not know about Joyce?  He's coarse and cryptic, his words slip and slide across the page and through the mind of the reader, but he is so incredibly savvy with the English language, it astounds me.

Here is a book about his infamous character, Stephen Dadelus, growing up and discovering himself. He goes to Irish prep school as a younger boy-confused and bossed around by priests-, then as a teen among fellow Irish teens-still confused and slowly turning into a priest-and then as a college man by the end-confused in an enlightened sense and renouncing all he's ever known (sounds like college). "Portrait" is the story of a young, self-conflicted, mildly depressed, incredibly smart soul growing up in the early part of our last century.  Ireland is painted in grey and blue hues, the deep green of the countryside usually overshadowed by an impending cloud bank reflecting across a morose pond, all of which mirrors the mood of our young protagonist.  Dedalus is said to be an image of Joyce himself, and so as I read I felt as if I were connecting with the author, always a great pleasure.

Some interesting writers techniques: Joyce combines words.  He throws them side by side and they are brilliant: "cricketcap" "drinkingbout""gasflames."  It goes on but I can't find any more examples at the present.  From a writer's perspective, it is always loveley to see an author make up his own language.  Joyce does this with specific attention to detail, and all of his combinations seem to have always made sense, as if they were supposed to be that way in the first place.

Another technique: Stream of thought.  This book is so hard to read (objectively speaking) because of it's haphazard storytelling.  Sometimes you are an omnipotent reader, sometimes inside Stephen's head as if this were always his world.  And sometimes, thanks to Joyce, you are just floating on a drift of words.  He seems to want to write, simple as that is.  He loves words and wants to put them down, the way he sees his homeland and his people, and so there are vast passages that have little to do with anything plot or character or even book related.  This, I feel, is refreshing.  I write like this too sometimes, and because I have now seen Joyce do it, I feel that there is some precedent for my reigning bouts of confused word play to skip across the page of a novel as well.

A quote, read it aloud: "It broke from him like a wail of despair from a hell of sufferers and died in a wail of furious entreaty, a cry for an iniquitous abandonment, a cry which was but the echo of an obscene scrawl which he had read on the oozing wall of a urinal."

We see Joyce employing a great amount of repetition, something I try and avoid, but he does it with diligence and therefore builds recurring moments or revelations that follow us as we read.  He also blends all of his lavish wordplay with simple, understood physical description, such as the wall in a urinal.  I guess people were doing that then, too.

The last part of this book I want to comment on: the religion.  Being as interested as I am in this subject, "Portrait" was a goldmine of information and delectable imagery.  A large section of the book occurs when Dedalus attends school to become an Catholic priest, and in doing so we hear the vast array of description given to young impressionable men in that time period.  Hell is weaved through our mind, the repentance of sin and the feeling of unlivable guilt.  He tells it all with such passion that it reminded me how religion is alive and well, good or bad, and that everyone should know a little more about it.

Overall, this book opened my eyes.  Joyce caressed me with his words and left me actually wanting to read Ulysses, and so I recommend this to all who dare.

p.s. this is my first book review, and I have read a book and a half since reading Portrait, so spare me the lack of examples.