Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) By Nathanael West

 

Last year when I blogged The Day of the Locusts by Nathanael West, my recommendation was a no. I did, however, qualify that critique by indicating I would still read his better-known novel, Miss Lonelyhearts, before writing him off. Earlier this week I did so, fortunately it was a short novel therefore not too much of my time was wasted.

I fail to understand those who “appreciate” West’s work. Both novels were coarse and poorly written, his overview of life is a sad commentary as a style. West is to American literature, what “shock jock” talk shows are to radio … if you have nothing to say, say it loudly and profanely.

Miss Lonelyhearts concerns a newspaper reporter, male, who writes the paper’s advice column. There is, or should I say could have been, a lot that one could work with on that subject, West broached it then failed miserably. Miss Lonelyhearts, the columnist gets achingly depressed by his job, ridiculing his readers, questioning his self-worth. All the while he is ridiculed by his co-workers and an editor who even hold an intervention to try to reignite his cynicism.

West’s formula was to build on the stereotype of reporters as hard drinking, chain smoking jerks; and introducing gross chauvinism and racism, at one point even setting his characters at their hangout tavern relegating them to telling jokes about gang raping a female reporter.

The Day of the Locusts

That this race for the bottom mirrors the same format West used in The Day of the Locusts, leads me to say conclusively, I’ll never read another work by Nathanael West.

Recommendation: Absolutely not.

The Wapshot Chronicle (1957) By John Cheever

 

Every once in a while I’ll read works by an author who I know next to nothing about. Such was the case when I picked up the collected novels of John Cheever printed by the Library of America. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1979 for a collection of short stories published primarily in The New Yorker magazine.

The Wapshot Chronicle was his first full length novel. Written in 1957, it is set in New England in the post-war era (WWII) and is a family history of sorts. The Wapshot family had generations of prominence in the village of St. Botolphs, an old river town now nearly forgotten to all but summer visitors from Boston.

The family consists of Leander Wapshot, known as the “captain,” his wife Sara, their two boys Moses and Coverly, and Leander’s cousin Honora who is the matriarch of the family and controls the purse strings. Cheever quite skillfully tells each of their individual stories as they progress through their lives, eventually spawning the next generation of Wapshots. Leander, Sara, and Honora are mostly presented in recollections, and the boys are in present tense. The most interesting (to me) is Leander who tells the whole story through a journal he posts in every day, and in his letters to the boys.

The boys, while compatible, are quite different. Moses is slightly older and is clearly the “heir apparent” to the family’s history. He’s sports oriented, destined for college, though at first life beyond the village holds no interest to him. Post graduation he’ll head to Washington DC to a job arranged by Honora. Coverly is more of an introvert, interested in literature, and whose interests are focused anywhere but St. Botolphs. When Moses leaves for DC, Coverly secretly departs on the same train, but with the destination of New York. Both of them will have interesting and improbable lives as they go through young adulthood and marry. This part of the novel reads like a page-turner.

They will return to their childhood home in St. Botolphs for their father’s funeral at which it rains. “Then, before the rain began, the old place appeared to be, not a lost way of life or one to be imitated, but a vision of life as hearty and fleeting as laughter and something like the terms by which he lived.” 

In 1964 Cheever wrote a sequel to the Chronicle and titled it the Wapshot Scandal. I thoroughly like the Chronicle, and I am eager to read Scandal.

Recommended: Yes

Annals of the Western Shore (2004, 2006, 2007) By Ursula Le Guin

Ursula (Kroeber) Le Guin (1929 – 2018) was a prolific American writer with a large body of work in what most people would categorize in the science fiction genre. [The Wikipedia post on her is the longest I’ve ever read] She is known for creating fantasy settings for her works, including the Hainish Universe, Earthsea and the Western Shore and many others. They are fantasy series in the manner of say Narnia, or King Arthur.

The Annals of the Western Shore is a trilogy written late in her career. The novels are from ancient times and contain stories with related characters and topics scanning multiple generations. Unique to each of the main characters is an individualized inherited supernatural trait. The novels tell the story of how they deal with this mysticism, is it an honor, or a curse?

Book One is titled Gifts. It is set in the uplands of the ancient Western Shore where each village is said to have a resident who is “gifted” with a special trait. It is a coming-of-age tale of two individuals from neighboring villages. One is Orrec, a young man who has the power of “the undoing,” the ability to destroy anything with a stare, a useful trait in warfare. But Orrec was terrified of his gift, believing that he could not control it. He feared he would accidentally destroy that which he loved, as well as that which he might purposely target. He would spend much of his adolescence blindfolded to prevent such accidents. When not blindfolded, he reads in secrecy and becomes an excellent storyteller.

The other individual was a young woman named Gry. She had the power to communicate with animals, from ants to cattle. When she came into her power her village always took her on hunts with them expecting her to call the deer to come to slaughter, a chore that spiritually distressed her.

Orrec and Gry eventually marry and leave the uplands, traveling to where no one would know of or expect them to use their powers.

Book Two is Voices. After Orrec and Gry leave their home in the uplands, they wander throughout the Western Shore earning their keep, he by storytelling, she as a horse trainer. They eventually came into the subjugated town of Ansul in the lowlands with the intention of telling stories in the market place. Storytelling had become popular in town when it was conquered by the warrior Alds who were illiterate and banned and destroyed all books in an effort to wipe out the prior culture.

Orrec’s first public storytelling drew a large crowd which the Alds moved to disperse. When Orrec moved on with Gry and her pet lion, they needed a place to stay and a young orphan girl named Memer led them to where she lived, at the Oracle House, which the soldiers stayed away from because of the fear it was populated with demons. The head of the Oracle House was a secretly gifted man known as the Waylord. He had hidden books in the caverns in the back of the House, only he knew the ancient password to get into the caverns, though he had found out Memer too was gifted and discovered on her own how to get in. To keep the secret, the Waylord was teaching her to read.

To greatly condense what’s next, a revolt broke out, which the multi-lingual Orrec was able to mediate. As a thank you for his role, the Waylord presented Orrec an ancient lost history from the hidden library that he had been seeking throughout the Western Shore.

 When Orrec, Gry and the lion move on, they will take Memer with them to see and travel throughout the Western Shore, with the understanding that she return to Ansul in a year.

Book Three is Powers. It shifts gears significantly. While a mystical trait aspect of the trilogy is still in play, the storyline becomes much darker. The lead character is a boy named Gavir, a slave owned by a wealthy family in the town of Etra. His worldview is entirely shaped by his enslaved condition, which as a child occurs to him to be “normal.”  But he’s also educated, which makes him realize his life is not normal. He will escape, during a war, to a world unknown to him. His mystical trait is the ability to see bits of the future, though without any power to change it. (This is the same “gift” outlined in the current movie: The Life of Chuck).

I think I could easily make this minireview several pages longer, but I won’t. Just keep in mind that while the above is a structural review of Annals of the Western Shore, there are many excellent substories and discussions in this trilogy that should be given equal justice.

Recommendation: A good, leisurely read. The books can be read independently. My favorite would definitely be Voices.

America is in the Heart (1946) By Carlos Bulosan

 

A brief and simplified history is in order for this book. Resultant of the Spanish-American War in 1898 the U.S. military in a loose alliance with Filipino revolutionaries (the future Tagalogs) defeated and expelled the Spanish colonial government from the Philippines. Although the Filipino revolutionaries wanted to take over at that point, the militarily stronger Americans claimed the islands as a US colony based on the terms ending the Spanish-American War.

During the American colonial period, tens of thousands of men and some women were recruited to the U.S. mainland as cheap labor. Just as Chinese had been recruited to help build the transcontinental railroad, Filipinos were destined to be farm labor and cannery workers. All were swayed by the promise of the “American dream.”  Carlos Bulosan would be one of those immigrants, fleeing the corruption of foreign land owners, and the poverty of his home country.

As is typical of all of U.S. immigrant history, Irish, German, Italian, Polish, etc., they were treated horribly, taken advantage of by agricultural landowners who were backed at every level by government institutions. They were denied all rights taken for granted by “real” Americans.

Concurrent with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese troops also invaded and occupied the Philippines. Thousand of Filipinos, like tens of thousands of others flocked to army recruitment centers in the United States. They were denied enlistment because they had never been given papers when they were imported to work in the country. This bureaucratic bigotry was eventually ended by order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Filipinos would be allowed to join the U.S. military – though citizenship status was not paired with that. Good enough to die, but not good enough to become a citizen, not unlike 2025 America as Mexican Americans and Native Americans can enlist; but are often denied veteran benefits because of their lack of paperwork.

In 1946, after the end of the war, the Philippines was “given” “independence.”

America is in The Heart, is Bulosan’s semi-autobiographical memoir of what being a native in the Philippines was like; and then learning that being a recruited immigrant in the United States, primarily on the Pacific coast, did not mean they were welcomed. He worked tirelessly to help organize Filipino workers to fight for better working conditions and better pay. He sought to build coalitions with other groups, and had to deal with police raids, blacklisting, and other constant intimidations underwritten by opportunist landowners and their paid political allies. His work in union organizing gained him notoriety as a Communist during Red Scare America. He also worked to build social and educational organizations within the Filipino communities to help assimilate people into an America which was vastly different from what it purported to be. His experiences and reflections on what American hostility does to immigrants is depressing, and accurate.

He was self-educated utilizing American libraries. Later in his short life he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, the scourge of its time. He was hospitalized and underwent three operations and two years of convalescent care. It was during those two years that he read every book he could lay his hands on and then dedicated himself to writing of the Filipino experience in America. He would begin submitting articles and poetry to many literary magazines which in turn helped him develop friendships with other American writers. This section of the book reminds me of a book I blogged a few years ago titled: The Republic ofImagination by Azar Nafisi.

Carlos Bulosan’s first book, Letter from America, would be published in 1942. He would die in 1956 having never seen commercial success. Malnutrition would be cited as a contribution factor.

While Bulosan is well known to Filipinos throughout the world, he is not well known outside that community with one very significant exception, he was asked to write the essay that accompanies the Saturday Evening Post publication of Norman Rockwell’s Freedom from Want painting, part of Rockwell’s Four Freedoms series in the Post and displayed in a traveling exhibit across the country.

Recommendation: Yes for history buffs; and should be required reading for any politician who believes they know anything about immigration.

Paducah Gateway: A History of Railroads in Western Kentucky (1978) By Donald Lessley

 

Today most people think of Paducah as a river town because its location is where the Tennessee River flows into the Ohio River, just a few miles east of where they will jointly meet up with the Mississippi River. With flat boats and then steamboats the river was a major throughfare of pioneer America. What people don’t know is that it was also a key city in the early days of railroading – Paducah Gateway covers that history.

Both sides of the Ohio River had dozens of short line railroads moving people, agricultural commodities, timber, and coal, lots and lots of coal. In the book author Donald Lessley puts all of that in a roughly chronological order with failures and mergers eventually narrowing the railroad companies down to basically the Illinois Central Gulf, the Burlington Northern, and the (Norfolk) Southern RR – all three are still active. They faced a common challenge however, getting across the river: to the north with an end goal of Chicago; and to the south with an end goal of either New Orleans or Mobile. Hence, Paducah, KY with its established ferry to Brookport, IL became a key transfer point. Today it is hard to imagine, but before bridges trains were decoupled and placed on ferry boats, three or four cars at a time, and then recoupled on the other side. The time! The expense!

Importantly, the IC (Illinois Central) owned and profited from that ferry. When later the IC was asked to join with other lines to build a two-track rail bridge across the river at Metropolis, they declined. They would later have to lease access to the bridge when it opened in 1917.

Although that decision was questionable, the IC would turn Paducah into a rail hub by building its repair shop there, growing the small city into an IC “factory town” employing thousands in what would evolve into a massively large building complex and roundhouse – steam engines needed regular maintenance. The expertise developed at the complex would result in not only the IC but also other rail lines sending their engines to Paducah. When the entire industry turned from Steam power to Diesel power, the shop turned with it. But diesel engines required far less maintenance resulting in a significant downsizing of operations over the years.

Perhaps the most interesting of the chapters in the book deals with the Ohio River flood of 1937, the worst in the city's history and before the city's reknowned flood walls had been completed. With a 60 foot crest, it impacted railroading (and everything else) particularly the maintenance complex & round house. 

Today the former complex is one of the City of Paducah's major urban renewal challenges, what to do with these huge, mostly vacant buildings. 

Passenger traffic declined locally as it did everywhere else in the country as a result of America’s love affair with the automobile. All local stops except for the IC’s iconic City of New Orleans train, now operated by Amtrak, were eliminated, and it only has a flagged stop in Fulton, KY, passing by at 3 in the morning.

Mr. Lessley’s book contains extensive reference material, far more than my oversimplification can relate. History buffs would benefit from it, and railroad buffs will love it. I bought my copy at Paducah’s Railroad Museum.

Recommendation: I liked it, but I’m both a history and railroad buff, not to mention I live in Paducah. 

All Boys Aren't Blue (2020) By George M Johnson

 

All Boys Aren’t Blue is the #1 target of book banners in the United States.

The American Library Association compiles an annual list of books targeted for banning. The complaint filers are interesting: per the ALA, 72% of book ban attempts are initiated by public officials egged on by campaigns organized by far-right political organizations, not by individuals. Interestingly, only 16% are initiated by parents.

To no surprise, four of the top ten books on the 2024 targeted list, including All Boys Aren’t Blue, are there because of “pro” LGBTQ subjects and/or authors. The political far-right just can’t stop bashing LGBTQ people for political gain -- just look at this year’s constant bashing of trans individuals if you don’t believe that. What better way in their minds to distract voters away from issues like corruption or billionaire tax breaks? But ask one of them if they personally know, or even know of, a trans person and you will get a blank stare.

The argument of course is they are protecting their children. From what? From exposure to the real world? So, what, they want their children to enter the real world without a clue? LGBTQ people have existed throughout history. At what age do they think becoming aware of gay people would be okay, 30, 50 70?

And then there is the issue of statistics. Let’s say All Boys Aren’t Blue is in a library. In all likelihood there will be at least 5,000 (small library) to 100,000+ (university library) other books there too. The impact will be none, with one important exception.

The exception is the person utilizing the library because they are or think they might be LGBTQ. Dick and Jane do not cover that topic. Parents emphatically do not discuss that topic. The bullshit in the locker room is not helpful. And religious organizations are likely to condemn it, or at minimum ignore it. The common early question among all gay people is this: am I the only one? There is a reason that LGBTQ kids are twice as likely to commit suicide. People who want to “protect” children are responsible for that statistic.

Imagine, if a kid had even one nonjudgemental resource to turn to.

If you are a Black “sissy,” or a White, Latino, Asian one, looking for answers there is no better starting point than George Johnson’s memoir All Boys Aren’t Blue.

Recommendation: Yes. 

The Stone Diaries (1994) By Carol Shields

 

The Pulitzer Prize winning Stone Diaries by Carol Sheilds is a fairly structured, complicated, and mostly well-written biography of a woman named Daisy born 1905 in far western Canada. Her mother Mercy dies in childbirth. Her father, Cuyler Goodwill, a worker in a stone quarry, traumatized by this turns to a neighbor lady Clarentine to care for the newborn.

Eventually, Clarentine will leave her husband and move to Winnipeg to the home of one of her sons, Barker, taking Daisy with her. Barker is a professor, well-known botanist and research expert on the spring-flowering Lady’s Slipper, but from a more practical standpoint it was his work on improving the Marquist hybrid of hearty spring red wheat that won him acclaim, and a military exemption from World War I.

Cuyler will provide financial support for his daughter but does not see her. Considered an expert in stone work, Cuyler is presented as an uneducated bumpkin in Chapter 1, but he somehow becomes a partner in a limestone mining company in Bloomington, Indiana, and transforms into a leading Chamber of Commerce type citizen.

As his career advances Barker will be advanced to the Agricultural Department of the Canadian government headquartered in Ottawa. And Daisy will move into her father’s palatial home in Bloomington and attend college.

As is expected for the time period, Daisy will marry. On her honeymoon in Paris, her husband dies in an accident making her an incredibly young widow; until she takes on her second husband, Barker, her senior by 20-some years.

Got all that?  Like I said, it is complicated.

At this point, the book becomes less complicated, and more interesting. It takes us through chapters titled Marriage, Love, Motherhood, Work, Sorrow, Ease, Illness and Decline, and finally Death.

Daisy has had two lifelong friends, nicknames Fraida and Beans. Her interactions with them, primarily through letter writing are priceless, and remind me closely and favorably of one of my favorite movies: How to Make an American Quilt. If you have not seen the movie (you should) it is comprised of weekly quilt-making meetings of old friends and relatives where personal and private trials and tribulations, loves and hates, are discussed in a manner that only close friends can understand. These are heartfelt discussions common among women, and nonexistent among men.

The book never lost my attention, though parts of it irritated me, Chapter 1 in particular. But read it, do not skip it, it provides too many connecting details – not the least of which is the “relic” discovered as Daisy’s children shift through her belongings after her death.

Recommendation: Yes