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The Passenger — Cormac McCarthy (2022)

The Passenger is an excellent new novel by Cormac McCarthy that brings us a mystery to solve amid some serious family dysfunction.  It explores Bobby Western’s melancholic ambivalence to threats that may pose real personal danger or may instead be the despair of mental illness and guilt.

The novel follows the wanderings of Bobby Western, son of a prominent physicist who developed nuclear weapons at Oak Ridge Tennessee after World War II, and older brother to his brilliant mathematician sister Alice.

Let’s cut to the chase – Bobby is ten years or so older than teenage Alice (who later renames herself Alicia) and they find themselves in an intimate relationship of reciprocal intense love.  There are suggestions of incest and perhaps even pregnancy, but Bobby denies the consummation to his acquaintances.

Bobby was a gifted student mathematician and physicist. Alice was a true mathematics savant entering the University of Chicago at age 13.  Alice rejects the slow pace of mere written proofs and instinctively solves advanced mathematical problems while developing sidebar expertise in fields such as the mathematical properties of resonance in Amati violins. She has no interest in joining academia or serving as the next iteration of the personality cults of the Oppenheimer Fermi and Einsteins or helping the scientific military infrastructure of her father.

She is schizophrenic and is often visited by characters who entertain her and exploit her vulnerability.  These beings come and go, usually in conjunction with whether she is on or off her medication.  Her main visitor is The Thalidomide Kid, deformed with flippers instead of hands, who is by turns hilarious and viciously cynical with a snide running commentary on the unseemly desires of Alice and her brother.

Alice commits suicide early in the novel.  Bobby spends the rest of  his life obsessed with Alice – with her beauty and brilliance and her death and his guilt over their love.  He hoards her letters to him like contraband, and yet refuses to open her last letter.  Bobby visits Stella Maris, Alice’s former psychiatric ward in Wisconsin, just to speak with patients who knew Alice during her stay.  The patients and staff of Stella Maris loved Alice and her obvious brilliance.

Bobby abandons a life of science, smart as he is, because he knows he doesn’t have the potential to match the heights of his father and sister.  He tends to high risk activity, such as race cars and deep sea salvage diving, but mainly drifts with the grifters.  His friends are the barmaids and parlor alcoholic intellectuals of dive bars.  He lives in cheap ruined apartments and goes on solitary travels around the country while he waits for something to happen.

Something might indeed happen because he and his partner discover during a salvage job of a downed plane in the Gulf of Mexico that a passenger is mysteriously missing from among the underwater dead, and serious men connected to the mystery start to follow Bobby.  His partner mysteriously dies.  It seems that even the federal government is colluding in some way.  Bobby knows he should rise to the occasion of the threat, but he can’t summon the energy to shake his malaise and protect himself.  The ambivalence is rooted in his memories of Alice.

Bobby and Alice carry the guilty weight of their father’s role in developing nuclear weapons, and they are mathematically sure the world will be destroyed by those weapons.

My view is that it is possible that the mystery men may be Bobby’s inheritance of the mental illness that runs in his family.  Are the Feds really after him?  Would the Feds collude with a kidnapping/escape of a passenger in a plane crash?  Does it make sense that burglars would steal old science and math notes of his father and his adolescent sister from his grandmother’s backwoods home in Tennessee?  Is this paranoia?

This book is fast, and full of intellectual sidebars, and a pleasure to read.  I read slowly because I didn’t want to it end, even though I knew that in the great McCarthy tradition it would finish in uncertainty. 

Given that this novel was a long time coming from America’s greatest living author, how does it fit with the prior books of Cormac McCarthy?

The core of The Passenger is the relationship of brother and sister, which closely parallels the moral core of McCarthy’s Outer Dark (1968) in which a baby is born of brother-sister incest.  Guilt drives both novels.  In Outer Dark, the characters wander into a never-ending biblical hell, while Bobby Western in The Passenger wanders to fate. 

I also liken The Passenger to McCarthy’s Suttree (1979), but thankfully without Suttree’s impossibly difficult vocabulary.  Both contain many set pieces that McCarthy must have gathered over time and then inserted into the vehicles provided by these two long-honed novels.  A Viet Nam vet is interviewed by Bobby for his perspective of the war, or a gorgeous transgender woman explains her journey of gender from the backwoods to the stages of New Orleans, or a private detective explains the conspiracy by organized crime in the assassination of John Kennedy. 

The main character of The Passenger and Suttree are similar. Both are educated loners, fleeing from shame, who elect to live among the urban underclass of New Orleans and Knoxville. Both men are surprisingly well-liked and accepted by their boozing and un-educated acquaintances, but they only participate in the fringe of the culture of drinking, fighting and petty crimes. Both men drift.

It felt good to get back to the Tennessee sensibility and the boomer generation, even though much occurs in New Orleans.  See my review of McCarthy’s Tennessee novels rhttps://bobfall.com/2022/08/11/mccarthy-the-tennessee-novels/

McCarthy will release Stella Maris as a short companion novel in early December 2022.  It will apparently focus on Alice in the mental institution.  I go on record here in November 2022 with the belief that they had a passionate sexual relationship, perhaps even if only once.  And that it resulted in pregnancy.  And that it confirmed their certainty that the world is doomed anyway.

• The Orchard Keeper (1965)
• Outer Darkness (1968)
• Child of God (1973)
• Suttree (1979)

Four novels by Cormac McCarthy

Having now read all of Cormac McCarthy’s novels, I accept your dare to synthesize the themes of the first half of McCarthy’s writing career – the four Tennessee books. These novels were published over a 14-year period, beginning in 1965 with The Orchard Keeper, and then Outer Darkness in 1968, Child of God in 1973, and culminating with Suttree in 1979.

These early novels differ in location from the rest of McCarthy’s novels which are set in the American southwest and Mexico. The difference matters, because McCarthy’s books are driven by place and time and circumstance, rather than by will of the characters.

While the Tennessee novels are unique and distinct from each other in subject and style, together they differ significantly in scope from the western novels. The Tennessee novels generally focus on a small number of backwoods characters living fairly narrow lives constrained in very limited geographic areas. They are rural and extremely poor, without transportation, and do not have any opportunity (or inclination) to travel beyond a few dozen miles of their place of upbringing. The western novels are sweeping in scope, with many characters who seek change by travel – wanderings, really — through vast regions of the southwestern US and Mexico. (See my reviews of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and the three novels of The Border Trilogy)

I should explain the statement that the characters of the Tennessee novels live fairly narrow lives. Their lives are complex and full and spin in and out of control with dynamic change, but their range of experience is shaped by extremely limited opportunities for jobs, education, or participation in the wider American culture. Change is instead generated in confined space with feral instincts, extreme personal violence, crimes of opportunity and greed, and the absence of family and home.

The remarkable feat McCarthy pulls off in the Tennessee novels is his ability to withhold judgment of his characters, while sparing nothing in describing their shuddering and dismal mountain rural lives.  Life in the mountains and gullies and rivers – and the city of Knoxville, in the case of Suttree – is filthy and brutal, with dishonesty round every bend and an economic environment that is dirt poor and getting worse every year.  There is a de-evolution of infrastructure and family, resulting in a brutal code of self-sufficiency and survival. 

This soup of ignorance and filth is the catalyst for change for the characters, and much of the change is for the worse as survival options narrow. In Child of God, we follow the main character of Ballard, who raises himself in isolation into a physically small and bent man whose quirky way and foul mouth repels his neighbors in a nameless poor hamlet. He evolves to opportunistic murder and necrophilia in his isolation. McCarthy presents the facts as they exist, for better or worse, without judgment. We are made to understand.

McCarthy handles the characters in all his novels by describing what they do, rather than what they are or what they think. In Outer Darkness, incest between brother and sister results in pregnancy. In The Orchard Keeper, every person, except an old man of perhaps a more honest generation, is on the take and would as soon steal their neighbor’s last nickel as not. In Suttree, our main character abandons his wife and child to live a life of destitution and self-reliance.

These characters are male and are unable to sustain any form of lasting relationship with wives and women.  There is male wistfulness when wives escape, and lonely dissolution appears inevitable as the men descend further into poverty.

There are few black characters in the first three rural novels, but in Knoxville the white men casually use the n-word.  Suttree himself does not do so and appears to be one of the few white men with friendships among the black men and women.  The best one can say is that McCarthy has accurately captured the speech and attitude of the time and place – and it speaks volumes about these white men.

McCarthy doubles-down on the common characterization of the mountainous southeastern rural way of life as backwoods, dirty and ignorant. It is a crucible that grinds up its people and the environment. Some have said that there is a similarity between McCarthy and Faulkner. One similarity between the two is the ferality of character and racial interaction formed by the narrow geographic worlds created in Yoknapatawpha County and the Tennessee books. Generations are captive to a narrow slice of geography. This similarity between the two authors ends in McCarthy’s later novels that spin out over the vast geography of the southwest.

Each Tennessee novel is an experiment in form and realism. The Orchard Keeper, his first novel, is the most like Faulkner. It is difficult to get a bearing, with shifting narratives and sequences. It has memorable characters, including a scoundrel thief who steals spare change from his wife, and who weasels himself into the pockets of any and all until one day he meets his match when he tries to ambush a stronger man. It has interesting subplots of running moonshine during Prohibition. It paints a way of life in the dirt-poor boondocks, in which folks are unreliable, violent, dishonest, if not resourceful and resilient.

Outer Dark is my favorite of the Tennessee books.  It is actually not clear whether it is in Tennessee, for while the characters and scenes are described in McCarthy’s traditional description of dirt-poor rural folk, the roads and mountains have a dream-like quality and there are references to swamps with alligators.  It begins with a incestuous birth, born of brother and sister.  We encounter mysterious figures of retribution, all violent, ultimately forming an allegorical tale, with magical undertones of fate and comeuppance.  It is driven by a father and mother’s search for a child, and it is excruciating to see them blindly walk into webs of deceit and violence.  I am quite sure the “outer dark” is a biblical tale, and the allegories are surely fantastical tales for the religious among us to appreciate, but I could only feel the presence of a story with magical roots that I did not fully understand.

Child of God is the most straight-forward of the novels.  It is short and moves sequentially to capture the fall of man with a character who is born into nothing, who acquires nothing, and who values only his rifle.  He deteriorates into a hermit-like foul-mouthed existence, shunned by all, until he finds his one opportunity for sex with a dead girl.  He knows of nothing else within his reach, and wallows down a hole of women’s undergarments, murder and obsession.

All the Tennessee books are told in the third person, but in each a mysterious first person speaker briefly appears.  In Child of God, I could identify that narrator as a deputy sheriff, but in other books the role and purpose of the first person is unknown to me.  Might it be some god, or perhaps the reader, providing perspective?

Suttree is a very difficult book.  Apparently, McCarthy worked on it for many years, and the language suggests intense editing.  As with the western novels, it is chock-full of metaphors and vivid descriptions, but much of the vocabulary was beyond me.  There were probably at least five words per page I did not know.  When I took to my dictionary, the selected word was perfect, but it was a chore.  The sentences are dense, and I often thought it could serve as top-drawer poetry if the prose was broken into lines. 

This novel also contains many set pieces that McCarthy must have surely accumulated over a lifetime, in anticipation of incorporating them into a novel.  One could create short stories of scenes in which Suttree, the protagonist, binges into a drunk so overwhelming that the world wheels before his eyes in a 3-day hallucination, or a scene of a bottom-rung whorehouse in which a cynical prostitute contemptuously hikes her skirt to show a tattoo of a rabbit running down the rabbit-hole, or a scene in which Suttree describes the profession of brailing for freshwater mussels, or of a months-long quest for solitude in the mountains near Gatlinburg.  Among others.

Suttree is the only Tennessee book located in an identifiable time and place.  Knoxville.  One can even look up the streets and buildings referenced in the book.  McCarthy is so popular, indeed, that there are websites that show the streets and buildings in Suttree.

This was the start of a trend for McCarthy, for the western novels (other than The Road) occur in specifically identified times and places, some with figures from southwestern and Mexican history.

As dark as the other Tennessee novels are regarding rural disintegration and violence, Suttree is over the top, even for McCarthy, for its unrelenting description of the absolutely disgusting deterioration of infrastructure and nature.  School buildings deteriorate into rat holes, abandoned rusty tools and factories litter the landscape, pus and puke accumulate in beds and clothes, violence is a game, and kindness is notable for its rarity.  It is an unremitting description, in intense prose, of a society gone to seed.

For readers who want to know where to begin:  I recommend starting with Outer Dark, as a place of evil and violence, but with enough magic to wonder what is real and what is imagination.  Child of God is a straight-forward, short novel of the deterioration of a man who starts with nothing and ends with less than nothing.  The Orchard Keeper is a successful experiment, as a debut novel no less, with shifting narratives and out-of-sequence disordered scenes which paint a finely described picture of mountain Tennessee life.  The rural dialogue is hilarious with the wry wit of our education-less characters.  And finally, Suttree is a difficult masterpiece of unrelenting grime and ugliness, presented in dense precise prose, which chronicles a narrator who abandons a life of advantage to make a go of it as a man with nothing but his own identity. 

Cities of the Plain — Cormac McCarthy (1998)

No spoilers here.

I experienced a reading rush rarely enjoyed since I was a kid.  Late at night about 40 pages short of finishing this third book of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Border Trilogy” I went to bed, tired and concerned of not being awake enough to appreciate the finish.  I was so riled with the set-up that I couldn’t sleep and got out of bed at 3 a.m. to finish it off. 

The first two books of the trilogy are masterpieces.  They are intense, vivid, violent and unsparing, with tension fueling nearly every page.  Both are coming of age novels of teenage boys, already master horsemen, who ride with vague intent into Mexico where they become hardened survivors of graft and violence, while incongruously being welcomed and fed by every poor Mexican family they encounter. 

All the Pretty Horses (1992), takes place a couple of years after the end of WWII when 16-year old John Grady Cole, put out of his Texas family ranch when his mother decides to sell the ranch, rides into Mexico where he impresses the rich owner of a huge hacienda with his expertise of breaking wild horses.  The bottom drops out into violence and conflict when John Grady and the 16-year old daughter of the owner fall in love.  The novel takes us through his travels by horse throughout northern Mexico as he attempts to connect with the girl while he is pursued by corrupt officials.

Similarly, in The Crossing (1994), teenage Billy Parham, out of New Mexico, spontaneously leaves his loving family and sets out by horse for Mexico seemingly out of a vague sense of melancholic nostalgia for the old ways.  Billy doesn’t quite have the horse genius and charisma of John Grady, and during three trips throughout northern Mexico he encounters incredible violence by corrupt law enforcement and the landed elite, while at the same time being invariably helped by impoverished Mexicans.  He returns with WWII underway, and he can’t pass a physical to enter military service.  Even as an 18-year old, he has essentially failed at every turn in both Mexico and the States.

Both the young men return changed and hardened and alone, but still with a cowboy ethos of self-sufficiency and honor.  It is strange to remember that these cowboys are riding the range with shootouts and knife fights all the while in the middle of the modern 20^th century.  These wild west adventures could only happen in poor rural Mexico and not in their own country.  The societies divided by the Rio Grande are like different universes.

At the time I read these books in order it was curious that McCarthy considered the first two novels as parts of a trilogy, since the only similarity between the books are boys and their horses coming of age in the wild of Mexico.  It is a theme, but not a relationship between character or chain of event.  The final book Cities of the Plains crosses us up as it becomes satisfyingly clear early in the novel that our two protagonists John Grady and Billy Parham have come to know each while working on a cattle ranch 30 miles north of El Paso in the early 1950s.  Given the cowboy code of taciturn humility neither John Grady or Billy tell each other about their experiences in Mexico except to say they had a rough go down there.  They become buddies on the basis of their common values, rather than shared Mexican experience.

While the two earlier novels focus in depth on only a couple of characters as they encounter dozens of Mexicans and difficult situations during their ramblings, this third novel moves more slowly to develop a detailed picture of how a half-dozen American cowboys get along and do their work on the ranch.  There is plenty of dialogue, often funny for its understated irony and wit, as they discuss wild dogs, weather, government, prostitutes and horse trading.    

McCarthy is a master of dialect and dialogue and he uses the understated code of southwestern rural talk.  Keep it short, keep it humble, but finish it with deflective humor.  Here is the conversation when talking of using tracking dogs to find some wild dogs that had killed cattle:

Is that your best dog?

No. But he’s the dog for the job.

Why is that?

Cause he’s run dogs before.

What did he think about it?

He never said.

Because John Grady and Billy had prior similar experiences in Mexico it was difficult to distinguish their personalities for the first 100 pages or so of Cities of the Plains.  Their backgrounds and sensibilities were so similar that sometimes I had to pause to trace in my mind the differences in the plot arcs of the two books.  Gradually the unique past experiences became integrated with their respective characters and imbued each with a special past and personality.  

The tension in this third book develops from love-at-first sight. John Grady falls hard for a young prostitute in a Juarez Mexico whorehouse. He is smitten — irrationally even he would concede — and works over the course of a year get her out of the whorehouse so they can marry. Billy is his co-worker and friend and reluctant accomplice. John Grady’s life in the first and third books is dominated by two star-crossed loves of two beautiful Mexican girls. The one is seemingly unattainable due to her rich patrician pedigree, and the other a prostitute whose life is in the hands of her cynical and violent whorehouse pimps.

The two pimps are exquisitely sinister.  Tiburcio is the alcahuete with the face of a weasel who manages the floor of the upscale whorehouse.  He would slip his switchblade in your ribs without hesitation.  Eduardo is the mysterious whorehouse boss dressed in black with affected manner and speech who would calmly and graciously describe the manner of your death even as he killed you.

Billy is more difficult to characterize than John Grady. Billy often finds himself in harms way, not by way of intent, but more in the way of drift. While John Grady is the young master horseman and lover, Billy is the competent and often unlucky cowboy who finds himself in no-win situations while he tries to pursue an honorable path forward. It leaves him spent and broke and alone.

These books are about Mexico and the history and poverty and corruption that grind away its inhabitants.  Two themes surface.  The first is that landed wealth and petty local officials are a combination of cynical power that has consumed the poor population in a boundless maw for centuries.  There is no redress to that power, even for wandering American cowboys, other than violence. 

The second is that the powerless and landless local poor Mexicans have a pure generosity of spirit to strangers.  Many times throughout all three books our American cowboys find themselves starving or injured or pursued by corrupt intent, only to be taken in by whoever lives in the next hovel the Americans stumble into.  Even as complete strangers they are fed, though the family may have no food for themselves.  They are nursed and hidden and protected as the family puts itself in peril.  And perhaps most poignant, they share with these strange Americans their philosophies of life and death.  Much of that philosophy is religious, based on the Virgin, but much of it is a hard-won stoic and articulate philosophy of the vagaries of life and death and fate, honed from generations of happenstance violence and poverty and the endless cycle of season and time.

I bring your attention to the epilogue of Cities of the Plain.  We find a much older Billy Parham spending the night under an interstate overpass in Arizona.  He meets an old Mexican who spins a long story of a dream that changed his life.  Billy is by that time nearly entirely cynical and challenges the veracity of the dream.  It is a lengthy discussion and difficult to understand, but I believe it is a novelistic way of explaining McCarthy’s view of the interaction of our long-evolved unconscious with the more recently developed unique use of language that considers itself as the mind of us humans.  It is an interesting concept that suggests that the conscious mind does not understand what the unconscious biologically urges us to do.  See:  https://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/the-kekul-problem.  Perhaps the Mexican dreamer is describing the unconscious that has evolved for millions of years to enhance survival, while Billy represents human language that attempts to shout down and override the advice and instincts of the unconscious.

The trilogy examines an extinct way of American life and combines gut punches with beauty as it takes us through rural Mexico life and the 20^th century American southwest.

Lost in the City — Edward P. Jones (1992)

 All Aunt Hagar’s Children — Edward P. Jones (2006)

Edward P. Jones has, perhaps guardedly, allowed me a view into a community and way of life I don’t know well, even though I lived near that community during some of the later periods covered in his stories.  The community he describes in these short stories is a particular neighborhood in Washington, DC NW, while my community was a dozen miles away in Arlington and Alexandria, Virginia.

His two books of short stories, Lost in the City published in 1992 and All Aunt Hagar’s Children in 2006, report on the lives of African Americans living in Washington, DC.  In between these collections, Jones published his Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Known World in 2003. 

The difference between the short stories and the novel is that the novel covered extended families of slaves and free blacks in a particular county in rural Virginia before the Civil War, while the short stories are each self-contained separate stories of mostly unrelated people living in Washington in various eras from the 1900’s to the 1990’s.  (See my review of The Known World here.)

The novel included extensive coverage of the white people in that pre-war Virginia county, probably because it would have been impossible to cover generations of slaves and free blacks without continuously colliding with white slave-owners or racist poor whites.  In contrast, the enlightening difference, for me, in the short stories was the fact that white people were not relevant, or more precisely, not included, at all.  While the discriminatory societal structures created by white people shaped the residential, economic and power structures of the city, white people were ignored to the extent possible by the black lives in these stories.  On the rare occasions the characters in these stories even mention white people it was only to knowingly confirm to each other that no good can come out of any interaction. 

These stories provide a view for all into the day-to-day lives of black families and individuals living in very real neighborhoods of Washington, DC.  Jones provides the actual addresses, the street intersections, and the names of churches and schools in each story, and these exact locations serve to validate the reality described in the fiction of the stories.  Most of the stories cover various tight knit neighborhoods, often limited to only two or three blocks in Northwest DC between North Capital Street and 8^th Street NW and from E Street NW up to S Street NW, plus a few stories in very real locations in Anacostia and Northeast DC.  Several of the Northwest neighborhoods described in the stories were later torn up and separated when the 395 Freeway leading to New York Avenue was developed in the 1960s.  In fact, since the stories were published, most of the neighborhoods have gentrified and the commercial areas are now the upscale theater and restaurant areas of Penn Quarter in NW and H Street NE.

As a white suburbanite in neighboring Virginia, I felt fortunate to have Jones show me the ordinary day-to-day lives of the people in these neighborhoods.  I am conscious of my irrelevance to their lives, but I am nevertheless thankful that Jones was willing to allow me to see.

What did I see?  These are lives of generational inter-dependence and unselfishness, lived in the context of the slow deterioration of neighborhoods.  For nearly every family whose lives are disrupted by drugs or crime or divorce, there are neighbors and grandparents and aunts and uncles who step up to catch the falling pieces.  The neighborhoods are nearly organic in the way they evolve and inter-relate.  Everyone seems to know each other in these micro-neighborhoods, and more importantly, most everyone takes responsibility for each other.  If a woman meets an old friend or a cousin on the street, then that person is invited, sincerely and insistently, for dinner that very evening.  If a mother has to go see the “city government people,” she knows she can ask her neighbor to watch her child while she is gone.  However, as discussed below, Jones believes that the fabric of support is tearing, and the old ways of community brought to the city from the migrations from the South are disappearing.

Each of the stories has the building blocks that could have been used for high emotion and action scenes.  There is marriage and betrayal, generational conflict, drugs, and violence.  Yet, as discussed in my review of Jones’ novel The Known World, Jones as a writer does not create scenes that crescendo.  The narration is detached.  An act of deceit in marriage is described with the same neutral description as a daily commute on a city bus.  Most stories end without warning and without conclusion.  Jones’ style is to present each character fairly and without judgment.  While our understanding of the characters is powerful, the neutrality of presentation means the stories do not propel a reader along.  It could be difficult for some readers — one must be more interested in who the characters are than what happens to them.

The theme of relationships plays out with the characters across the stories of both collections, but in a very subtle way.  As pointed out by O.E.Scott in his wonderful essay in the NY Times Book Review on Edward P. Jones on August 11, 2020, one character in each of the 14 short stories of Lost in the City also appears in the corresponding 14 stories in All Aunt Hagar’s Children.  The connection is almost coincidental and there is usually no action in one story that carries forward in the corresponding story.  For example, in “Marie,” the 14^th story of the first collection, an older woman, Marie Delaveaux Wilson, who carries a knife to protect herself on the streets, is repeatedly humiliated by the federal government people.  She is summoned to the Social Security office at 21^st and M Street Northwest, land of white people, for an interview where, after sitting for six hours in the waiting room she is told, with cruel satisfaction by the African American receptionist, that the person she is to see is not in that day.  After several such humiliating trips, Marie slaps the woman hard across the face and then waits in fear for weeks to be summoned for punishment. 

Marie lives in the Claridge Towers apartment building at 12^th and M Street NW.  One day a thin young man knocks on her door and introduces himself as George Carter, and asks whether he could interview her as part of his project for a folklore course at Howard University.  He speaks in a “voice that old people in her young days would have called womanish,” and he has long dark-brown fingers that remind her of delicate twigs.  They talk through the chain on the door for about 15 minutes and she finally allows him in even though she would not have been surprised “had he turned out to be death with a gun or a knife or fingers to crush her neck.”  He introduces himself as “born right here in D.C. Born, bred, and buttered, my mother used to say.” They have a nice talk and she eventually fixes him dinner.

Two generations earlier in “Tapestry,” the 14^th story of All Aunt Hagar’s Children, the cousin of a country girl in Picayune, Louisiana, introduces her to a sleeping car porter based out of Washington, DC named George Carter.  Carter falls instantly for Anne and visits as often as his life as a porter of the trains will allow.  The story covers life in the rural south and the fish-out-of-water oddity of a city boy wooing a country girl. They are eventually married and she leaves the farm to live with him in Washington, DC.  The story ends with their arrival in Washington, but we are told that she would live there for 68 years, “a mother to seven living and two dead, a grandmother to twenty-one living and three dead, a great-grandmother to twelve, a great-great-grandmother to twins.”  We, as readers, can allow ourselves the presumption that George Carter, the student with the womanish voice at Howard University, is one of those descendants.  As thin as the filaments may be, there is a community in Washington, DC in which the fates of each other are somehow bound.

These two stories also illustrate the apparent view of Jones that the ways of the rural south – inter-generational support, unselfishness and personal responsibility – cannot survive for the African Americans who migrated to the cities in the Great Migration.  As Annie and her porter husband are on their train of destination in 1932 to Washington, DC, the narrator says of the passengers that “none of them could know that the cohesion born and nurtured in the South would be but memory in less than two generations…. All the people in that car would have said two generations was a long time. It was, and yet it was not.” In his dedication to All Aunt Hagar’s Childer, Jones writes:

to the multitudes who came up out of the South

for something better, something different, and again,

to the memory of my mother,

Jeanette S.M. Jones,

who came as well and found far less

than even the little she dared hope for

In the story “Root Worker” in All Aunt Hagar’s Children, a sophisticated and successful doctor cares for her father and her mentally ill mother.  Her mother believes that witches pin her body down in bed every night, and she is in and out of St. Elizabeths for years.  Her father learns of a “root worker” in his hometown in rural North Carolina who cures in the old-fashioned way.  The doctor reluctantly accompanies her parents to the care of what the doctor considers to be voodoo.  The doctor comes to learn that the plants used by the root worker are nearly forgotten medicinal plants that eventually cure her mother.  Indeed, the ways of the South are about to be forgotten.  The doctor takes it upon herself to learn the ways of the plants, and she brings the knowledge back to her medical practice in Washington, DC.

Edward P. Jones’ writing is dispassionate, but it is empathetic, and Jones permits each character their dignity no matter what their choices.  The author’s judgment does not get in the way.  It permits the readers an opportunity to meet people they might not otherwise get to know and to better understand their lives.

The Known World — Edward P. Jones (2003)

This novel is set in the heart of Virginia slavery, spanning roughly the two decades before the War Between the States, as that war is described by author, Edward P. Jones (and as that war was described in my textbook when I was in grade school in Alabama).  As tempting as it must have been to set fire to the institution of slavery, Edward P. Jones somehow sets aside that temptation and instead simply lets the acts of sympathy, cruelty, love and brutality between slaves, free blacks, slave owners and landless whites speak for themselves.

Despite the emotional distance Jones puts between his description of events and the inherent shock of the acts themselves, the scenes just resist fading from my memory.  Even a month after I completed the book, there are at least a half a dozen scenes that continue to find their way into my imagination nearly every day.

Jones’ The Known World, winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize, inhabits the geography of the fictional county of Manchester County in the piedmont of Virginia, the only world known to most of its inhabitants.  It is a story of black and white families, interacting among themselves and with each other in the context of slavery, wealth, and skin color – all of which is driven by the fundamental fact that slaves are units of property.  Yet, as much as economics and social status are measured by the inventory of black humans as property, we discover that, regardless of the economics, skin color is ultimately the dividing line of society.

At the end of the day, notwithstanding the relative wealth, skill, and education of the free and slave black population, the trump card is skin color and it is a card that can only be played by white people.  In the county of Manchester, Virginia, Jones plays out a situation, apparently true, in which slaves who purchased their own freedom through incredible feats of hard work and cultivation of relationships with their white slave owners, have themselves then chosen to become slave owners.  To these black slave owners, the decision to acquire slaves is a matter of economics, since slaves are the surest path to productivity.

Not only do these free blacks become slave owners, but they participate, somewhat, in the social society of other landed white slave owners.  They are addressed as Master by their slaves.  Some are light-skinned and make sure that their relationships and marriages occur among other light-skinned black people.  Some even pass, and thereby pass out of the realm.

But, woe to all within the realm.  Do we really believe that wealthy, slave-owning, educated, light-skinned black people will somehow escape their black identity?  The richest white man in the county, William Robbins, loves a black woman, and compulsively lavishes his time and money on her and their two children.  He buys their freedom.  He protects his favorite black acquaintances (“friends” would be too foreign of a word) from mistreatment by other whites.  But, ultimately, in times of stress and jealously and conflict, every white person in the county, whether William Robbins or the poorest of white trash, will identify these free blacks as n—-s and will make them suffer as such, with impunity. 

Jones just presents the facts of what happens.  There is little description of the interiority of the characters.  He does not embellish, whether it is a master hiring a local “expert” to slice an ear off of an impertinent slave or a traveling slave trader tossing a dead black child’s body to the side of the road. Notwithstanding this detached style, the most jarring of the matter-of-fact scenes in the novel are the frequent negotiated sales of slaves, whether for $352 or for $412 plus a barrel of apples.  These sales of humans occur in all manner of situations, ranging from sales on the block to spontaneous sales at a cross-roads between traveling strangers.  The common feature is that these black humans are viewed exclusively as pieces of property.  The fact that the seller and buyer know that the property will be separated from his or her longtime home or from family is irrelevant.  The property is valued by age, health, compliance of personality, and “papers.”  By papers, we mean that it is not unheard of in this world for a free black to be kidnapped and sold, and a buyer must beware of the lack of a bona fide bill of sale.   

While not mentioned in this novel, there is a historical reason that wealth represented by slave properties was so high.  The 1807 Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves prospectively prohibited the importing of slaves to the United States.  Given the finite supply of slaves, the property value of slaves in the 1840s and 1850s was key to the accumulation of wealth pursuant to the secondary market of slave re-sales.

Although this complex, multi-generational tale is placed in a fictional county, the book is at pains to place Manchester County firmly in a non-fiction context.  The counties surrounding Manchester retain their names as the real counties of Virginia.  Jones occasionally leaves the fictional narrative to introduce actual historical census studies of local white and black populations and wealth.  He unexpectedly steps into the 1980s to briefly describe some modern academic studies of pre-Civil War Virginia, and he briefly describes in an aside the number of 20^th-century descendants of one of the pre-War slaves.  The Mistad HarperCollins edition of the novel contains a wonderful interview with Edward P. Jones at the end of the book, in which Jones explains that the overtly historical contexts provided in the novel serve to “give some heft and believability to the creation of Manchester and its people.”

He jumps around in time as we see the characters develop.  We see the development of Augustus, the extraordinary slave carpenter who buys his own freedom and then also buys the freedom of his wife and son.  Sometimes we see him as an older free man, and sometimes as a young slave.  In the interview, Jones explained that he was the “god” of the people in the book.  As the creator of the characters, he “could see their first days and their last days and all that was in between…”  A character might not see beyond her linear life, “but her creator could.”

The device of jumping back and forth effectively shows us the whole context of an individual at any given time, but it also results in some slack to the usual tension that drives a narrative.  When this technique is combined with Jones’ tendency to understate the emotional interiority of the character, the book does not drive the reader forward with plot.  The reader doesn’t quite experience the satisfaction of a swelling tension and the delivery of an ending.

I came to the works of Edward P. Jones from a column in the NY Times Book Review by A.O. Scott in August 2020, and a corresponding podcast interview with Mr. Scott and Pamela Paul.  Mr. Scott is writing a series of columns in 2020 on lesser known American authors who, Scott finds, describe the social fabric in America with a different angle than the usual trusty riffs rolling off the bullet points of liberal/conservative, black/white, politically correct/incorrect literature.  Edward P. Jones does not frame slavery or racism for readers to consume in the manner they may have come to expect.  He presents this world on its own terms.  He does not tell the readers what to think.  He doesn’t judge the characters for us.  Jones does not tighten the tension that typically propels a novel forward as a reader becomes invested in the fate of characters, and he instead simply lets the acts of characters speak for themselves.

The fact that some of the slave owners are themselves free blacks is a jarring twist on the consequences of slaves as property.  To see how their lives and decisions play out provides but additional points of information to account for the role that inherited black skin plays in America.  It is left to the readers to meet the slaves and the slave owners and determine how to respond.

Coming:  a review of the two short story collections by Edward P. Jones – Lost in the City (1992) and All Aunt Hagar’s Children (2006)

The Plague and I — Betty MacDonald (1948)

I wanted a book to make me laugh out loud, and Pamela Paul, editor of the NY Times Book Review, persistently talked up the smart humor of The Plague and I on her book review podcasts.

In fact, I did laugh out loud a few times, but more than anything I appreciated author Betty MacDonald’s good-natured cynicism and her razor-sharp perception of personalities, all on display in her wry observations of patients, nurses and doctors while convalescing at a tuberculosis sanatorium near Seattle.

Published in 1948, The Plague and I covers the year or so that Betty MacDonald spent in a sanatorium in 1938-39.  Although it is a memoir, names and places are changed, presumably because MacDonald is just too decent of a person to cast folks in an unflattering light.

MacDonald has that ability to instantly “get” the essence of a personality, and she does us the favor of naming them by type.  On the bus to work (in her pre-sanatorium life), she watches the Silent Hater, always a woman, who usually came home with a rich dessert to make her even more bilious the next morning; the Big Saddo, usually a woman, who always dropped her change on the floor and fought a tearful battle with the conductor; the Non-Sleepers, usually men, who launched into dull stories with strangers about their callous wives; the Pretend-to-be-Cheerfuls, women who laughed only with their mouths and who would tell their bus seatmates in a loud voice that their green coat doesn’t match their sallow skin; and the Sickos, women with voices like whistling teakettles with lots of “trouble” at night.  Did I tell you that MacDonald does this with generosity of spirit?  She does, actually.

You can now imagine our luck when she describes her many roommates, nurses and doctors at the sanatorium. 

There are two types of people that MacDonald finds in droves at the hospital – humorless nurses, trained to suppress empathy, who enjoy filling a hot water bottle with tepid water for the ever-cold MacDonald, and fellow patients who talk only of their innumerable ailments.

She loves her roommates who have pluck.  While the wallowing roommates complain to nurses and flirt with the male doctors, the plucky roommates fight underground wars against the sanatorium rules requiring silence and forbidding make-up.

MacDonald doesn’t recount for us many of her personal battles with the nurses, but she is constantly reprimanded, transferred and otherwise put under the eye of the Charge Nurse, so she must have been one of those patients who always had a pithy rejoinder to frowning nurses. 

The stakes are set appropriately upon admission to The Pines when the Charge Nurse determines that Betty MacDonald, who had long before divorced a certain Mr. Bard, would henceforth be addressed by all staff as Mrs. Bard.

One morning the Charge Nurse confronts MacDonald with a report from the night nurses that MacDonald is not sleeping well.  MacDonald says, with mistaken honesty, that she misses her children and thinks about death.  To which the Charge Nurse replies to Mrs. Bard, “We do not allow patients at The Pines to think of unpleasant things.  You must have cheerful thoughts or I will report you to the Medical Director.”

So, as MacDonald lay quietly before sleep attempting to muster good cheer, she can’t help but hear the two women in the next cubicle compare ailments.  One has a liver that is crowding her tonsils, and the other talks about her organs as though they were little friends.  “Old Mr. Gall Bladder is acting up this morning.”

MacDonald and nearly all the other women (they are in separate areas from the men) are curiously passive about the TB treatment. The doctors and nurses make it a point to never discuss a plan or medical status. The patients are, instead, directed to simply lay prone in their beds, to avoid reading and conversation, and to eat full, heavy meals. On certain days, without warning, a nurse will arrive with a wheelchair and take a patient to some location in the complex of buildings, without telling the patient the destination or the purpose. She will be wheeled through some door, and there waiting will be a doctor and medical team ready to operate by deflating a lung or removing a rib or some such other obscure procedure. This fueled MacDonald’s gallows humor.

This book brings smiles and nodding, but not belly-laughs.  It is a book of kindness, because MacDonald brings wry understanding even to the humorless nurses.  This makes sense, because MacDonald sounds like one of those people you would love to have as a friend.  She is funny and wickedly irreverent, while also smart, kind and generous.

Blood Meridian — Cormac McCarthy (1985)

You must read Blood Meridian.  It is a classic American novel written in 1985 by Cormac McCarthy.

It is violent, intense, and populated with desperate lone men brought together by happenstance, each following a destiny that surely will end in a bloody ignoble death made meaningful by audacity.

It is fantastical prose, almost indulgent, with description and metaphor that bursts from the page, unable to stay in its grammatical rails.  It is a headlong, unapologetic spill of words, made free and legitimate by McCarthy’s knowledge of his subject.  It is beauty in awfulness.

There is a bit of Faulkner, not quite as dense or difficult, but sometimes the reader must doubleback to understand better the meaning of a precursor signal 15 pages earlier.  It is worth it.

It is a story told with such understanding, a mastery of a way of life of the southwest frontier beginning around 1848 that dashes the schoolbook whitewashing and provides visceral detail to the mayhem on that frontier.  There is particular attention paid to the political and social tension as Mexicans are displaced in Texas and as Americans seek to push the Texas border further south.  It is told with an intelligence that does not compromise with the reader – a full vocabulary, an inappropriate vocabulary that is yet necessary, sometimes in Spanish, of the bloody, dysfunctional relationships of Americans, Mexicans and Indians.  It is in part historical fiction with some local warring historical figures seeding the action. McCarthy knows the frontier tools of trade, of animal husbandry, of Indians, and weaponry, to such an extent that a dictionary is necessary on most pages.

It is a book of men, all violent loners, all damaged in some way, mercenaries of brutish violence by default.

It is sometimes difficult to distinguish the violence of greed from self-defense.  Glanton, a historical figure, forms a mercenary group of Americans who are hired by the Mexican city of Chihuahua to rid the territory of marauding Indians, at $100 a scalp.  He is a brilliant, sadistic, hardnosed leader who shoots an old Indian woman point blank in a town square for the scalp.  He is a man who, when Indian scalps become scarce, kills Mexicans and turns their scalps in as counterfeit Indians.

The descriptions of both the American mercenaries and the Indian fighters (Apache, Comanche, Yuma) are over the top, with breathtaking images of filth, gore and casual death.  They wear the clothes of their kill, draped in dried entrails, with necklaces of human ears, reveling in the intimidation of their appearance.

This lawless frontier occurred in the late 1840s, less than two generations removed from the powered wigs of our founding fathers.  It is an alien world, totally unrelated to the genteel history of revolutionary action ostensibly based on intellect, philosophy, rationality, and the compact of constitutional compromise.  The men in Blood Meridian call themselves Americans, proudly distinguishing themselves from the n-word they use to describe Indians and Mexicans.  It is hard to get your arms around a big tent that could somehow accommodate the disparate coordinates of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and the ignorant murderers of the frontier.

Want a memorable character?  The judge, as he is called in the book, is amazing – seven feet tall, pink-skinned and hairless from top to bottom.  Amoral, awash in intelligence and apparently, surprisingly, grounded in an intellect of literature, history, religion.  He holds forth on Indian anthropology, he artfully sketches Indian artifacts in his journal, and he expounds on a godless universe that challenges men to cut a path to make a life significant, and he kills without mercy.  To his fellow mercenaries he is a mystery as they take a wide berth around him.  He shares some of the mystery, cold grace, and internal integrity of the character Anton Chigurh in McCarthy’s book No Country for Old Men, and the judge appears to enjoy comparing the incongruity a life fully-lived with the banal prescriptions of religion.  The following description of the judge is representative of McCarthy’s exuberant excess and his totally perfect bursts of prose and energy:

A great shambling mutant, silent and serene. Whatever his antecedents he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go. Whoever would seek out his history through what unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to bear upon the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will discover no trace of any ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing.

This is an America that we never learned about in school.  It feels true, however, and undercuts our notion of a logical expansion of the American ideal across the continent.  Where there is no authority, murder fills the void.  And the continent was a huge void.

This book must be read.  It is flamboyant, extreme, inappropriate, honest, and it pulses with energy.  It tells a story of the southwest frontier that is horrifying and raw, but it is a history that must be heard.

The Fifth Risk — Michael Lewis (2018)

The Fifth Risk begins promisingly with a compelling demonstration of the cynical and incompetent Trump transition to governance, but then fades with a repetitive series of portraits of career federal employees who quietly and competently manage their federal departments.

The book opens as Michael Lewis paints a memorable and priceless scene when, on the day after the election, Jared Kushner, acting through Steve Bannon, ousts Chris Christie as chair of the transition team.  This allows Kushner to not only avenge Christie’s prosecution years before of Kushner’s father for fraud, but also empowers Kushner to fill coveted government political positions with his buddies.

Christie: you sold your soul for nuttin’!

It turns out that a federal law requires the candidates of both political parties, prior to the election, to create transition management plans in anticipation of winning the presidency.  It also turns out a federal law requires the outgoing President to mobilize the federal agencies to assist the President-elect’s transition team to take over management of each federal agency.

The promise of Michael Lewis’ book is an inside look at this handoff at three federal agencies (Energy, Commerce and Agriculture).  It is easy to guess how that went.  No spoiler here.  Obama’s teams in each agency prepared exhaustive binders of information explaining the roles and risks of the agency.  In the few cases where Trump actually appointed people to manage the agencies in the first year of his administration, those people certainly did not look at the materials or even chat with the outgoing experts of those agencies.

There are two major flaws with Lewis’ book.  The first is obvious – and it led to the second flaw.  The first flaw is that every story is the same – each agency works extremely hard to hand the ball to Trump’s folks, and every ball is dropped.  Lewis attempts to overcome this sameness by describing the amazing work of these three agencies, but doing the same thing three times feels like a horse is being beaten.  Just how many times can you describe the set-up:  an agency gathers its briefing materials, assembles its experts, prepares its best conference room with coffee and danish, and awaits the incoming Trump team on the day after the Inauguration — only to find that no one shows up.

That first flaw leads to the second flaw.  The story of each of the agencies is worthy of a long magazine article, but together they do not have the heft worthy of a book.  Lewis makes up for the sameness by introducing us to the incredible risks managed by these agencies, such as the $100 billion project managed by the Department of Energy in Oregon to stop the flow of nuclear weapon waste into the Columbia River.

It feels like Lewis started with an interesting angle, but then had to find filler to make it a book.  As the book dragged a bit, I was befuddled by the detail Lewis allotted to NOAA within the Department of Commerce.  It was interesting, but it went on disproportionately long compared to the descriptions of the other agencies. 

Prior to publishing The Fifth Risk, Lewis released audio on Audible called The Coming Storm.   Lewis was one of the first writers to sign on for the audio-first publication strategy of Audible.  The Coming Storm consisted of the NOAA portion of The Fifth Risk, which explains why the discussion of NOAA was clearly the core that Lewis had developed as a standalone piece.

The book provides value by debunking the common assumption of government as a bureaucracy of mundane clerical workers who do their best to thwart the efficiency and productivity of private enterprise.  Who knew that some agencies have investment funds to seed innovative technology projects that are otherwise too cutting-edge to attract private capital – and that some of these projects have gone on to spearhead the American edge in worldwide business?  Or that the routine reports of weather data around the globe collected by NOAA over many years now afford American farmers with the ability seed and monitor their fields at the granular level of a single square meter?

Or that 20% of 6,000 senior governmental managers left in Trump’s first year…

On her NY Times Book Review podcast, Pamela Paul asked Lewis how we can turn around the neglect of the federal government by both Trump and many of his predecessors.  His reply was wistful — perhaps the government will so badly fail that the American people will wake up to the need to fund and appreciate the government.

 

The Witch Elm — Tana French (2018)

A bit of self-knowledge is a rare gift.  Especially when it relates to differentiating the kinds of books I prefer.

With The Witch Elm, I did a very, very bad thing.  See below.

For the past several years I’ve happily allowed the editors of the NY Times Book Review to vet books for me.  My discovery, confirmed with the thud of Tana French’s The Witch Elm, is that, notwithstanding the endorsement of Book Review editors, I don’t take to psychological thrillers.  This discovery is not a negative development, it is very positive.

Readers of my reviews know that I recently reviewed unfavorably The Girl on the Train.  I didn’t know it at the time, but it is a psychological thriller, as opposed to an actual … thriller.  I didn’t realize there is a difference.

In the case of both books there is little action, though there is plenty of internal dialogue and idle conversation between bored characters.  This is literally true – the characters are bored with each other.

The Witch Elm is revered by the NYTimes staff.  Pamela Paul, chief editor of the Book Review and podcast interviewer extraordinaire, interviewed Tana French when the book was released and then recently replayed the interview when the covid restrictions knocked the podcast off the air for a few weeks.  Tana French is smart and engaging, and Pamela Paul clearly loved the book, so the book looked like a good bet.

In The Witch Elm, the narrator is badly beaten by burglars and suffers brain damage, and a skull is discovered in the hollow of a tree.  These are not spoilers, given that these events are mentioned on the back book cover and were discussed in the podcast.  These crimes suggest action!  But, by page 145 of 500, only one of those actions had yet occurred.  For my first time, I appealed to the wider world of Twitter by tweeting that I was 145 pages into the book and there had been no action yet other than the burglary.  Was it, I asked, worth continuing and when would it turn into a page-turner?  One of my favorite editors of the NY Times was kind enough to respond by saying that it is not so much a page-turner as it is a psychological study of different characters.  Good to know.

The skull appeared soon after the 145^th page, so I continued to read.  However – and, full disclosure, this is the very bad thing – I gave up at page 294 and skipped ahead to page 455, so that I could read the final 50 pages.  That’s a 150 page skip.  I knew from another kind twitter responder that there is a final twist, so I wanted to know how it ends.  In fact, I deserved to know, because 294 pages represents a fair number of hours and constitutes a sufficient investment to warrant a payoff.

It was the best reading decision I’ve made in a long time.  I missed little of consequence in the 150 skipped pages, and I was able to get the gist of the intervening conversations.  In fact, I had already figured out much of whodunit before I skipped ahead.

Does this make me a bad person?

Back to the theme of this review, self-discovery.  At the same time I was reading The Witch Elm, I was also reading aloud Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials to my wife.  What a contrast!  His Dark Materials is such a page-turner that if I skip a day or two while reading to my wife, then we often have to go back and re-read a few pages just to remember which world we are in!

Perhaps the proof of my interests is that I’ve read His Dark Materials at least three times.

If The Witch Elm had characters who were fascinating or intriguing or impossible to forget, then all the pages may have been worth it.  But, the characters are shallow, inarticulate, middle class bourgeoisie.  They may be described accurately and may remind us all too well of people we know, but it doesn’t make them interesting.  In fact, the only remarkable characters were the detectives.  They knew how to elicit fear and how to wind tension in the ebb and flow of conversation.

I remain indebted to the NY Times Book Review and will continue to rely on the editors to cull worthy books.  But, I have just saved myself time in years to come by learning that I shouldn’t read psychological thrillers.  I now have a spring in my step!

 

 

Lee Child – Blue Moon (2019)

Paula Hawkins – The Girl on the Train (2015)

Delia Owens – Where the Crawdads Sing (2018)

My reader(s) knows that I read and review literary fiction recommended, primarily, by the New York Times book review staff – especially the books discussed on Pamela Paul’s podcast.  Although reading these books provides some sense of accomplishment, many of the books leave me dry, as PJ Harvey would say.  I find myself procrastinating and debating whether to finish a book.  Note to self:  you usually complete a book, even if you don’t like it, and in retrospect you should have followed your instinct to stop.

On a recent visit to one of the Fairfax County Library branches, I plucked three books from the “Staff Favorites” table.  These books are bestsellers  and are mentioned in everyday conversation.

These three books are mystery/thrillers.  Each of them involve a love interest, a killing – and in Lee Child’s Blue Moon, many killings – and a mystery to be solved.  Two of the three books were quite satisfying, with fast-moving action, while one was truly awful.

The most fun was Lee Child’s 2019 Blue Moon, featuring manly hero, Jack Reacher, taking on both sides of warring organized mob cartels in an unnamed Midwestern city. Child has written dozens of Jack Reacher novels, and Blue Moon is the latest iteration.  Child makes it easy to jump in any time, since each novel is self-contained without the need to know of Reacher’s previous exploits.  The book moves.  Jack Reacher manages to kill at least one bad guy in each short chapter.  It is amazing how Reacher can lay out a bad-ass dude with one bare-fisted punch.  With two dozen bullets, Jack can kill two dozen armed cartel guys.  The 45ish Reacher also manages to charm, without even trying, a good looking waitress half his age who has her own grudge against one of the mafia-like gangs.

Reacher is easy to like, because he is competent, unassuming, and unafraid. He is of no fixed abode and wanders into dangerous fights on behalf of good-hearted local strangers because it is the right thing to do.  Child makes it fun by informing the reader of Reacher’s Army training for how to sleuth, or handle a gun, or calculate mortal risk in a nano-second.  We learn how to best assess the odds of success when a man is pointing a handgun from 30 feet away, where to sit in a bar, how to question a bystander, and most fun, how to successfully escape overwhelming danger while maintaining a wry wit.  He makes good friends, but is merciless to his enemies.  When he is done, Reacher will ramble off to wherever the next Greyhound bus is heading for another adventure.

Sound corny?  Perhaps, but it is fun and moves very fast.  Reacher is an everyman hero and it feels satisfying for the good guy to overcome overwhelming obstacles to, violently, win.  I’m in, and will soon reach for another Lee Child novel.

Not so much for the novel by Paula Hawkins.  The Girl on the Train is one of the worst novels I’ve read.  It is a book my inner voice told me, often, to abandon, but I persevered due to its popularity.  It must be me, I thought, who just doesn’t appreciate what must be certainly a good book.

There is one murder of a beautiful, sexy, troubled woman.  The cast of characters is small, and it is fairly obvious who killed her.  Yet, 90% of the book consists of the shallow inner dialogue of banal characters.  The primary narrator is an unhappy divorced woman who drinks too much and is obsessed by the apparent marital happiness of her ex and the happiness of everyone else she watches from her commuter train window.  There is no action here.  She provides no insight, other than her envy of others – their clothes, their comfy homes, their sex lives.

I’m a man, but I felt sort of embarrassed for how women were stereotyped in this novel. The book assumed a conspiratorial “between us girls” understanding that it is obvious that any woman would love to receive a shear little black teddy from her husband for her birthday.  Any woman would fantasize that her husband would ravish her as she walks in the front door at the end of a workday.  Any woman would feel glowing self-conscious pride walking the street with her baby in a stroller and her husband on her arm, while all the childless, unmarried women look on in envy.

This book’s plot plods along with vain inner dialogue and almost no action.

I saved myself for the smash hit, Where the Crawdads Sing, by Delia Owens.  While some parts are unlikely and hard to believe, it contains beauty, tenderness and insight.  It is the story of a girl, Kya, who lives alone in a shack in the wild marsh of the North Carolina coast, abandoned by her family when she was six years old.  Kya manages to become self-sufficient with no education, no money, and no social support, through spunk and dogged inventiveness.  She is feral, and just one step away from a child raised by wolves.

She comes to be known to the people of the nearest town as the Marsh Girl, a figure of ridicule and mystery.  She lives utterly alone, and learns of everything by experience – her first menstruation, her first attempt to pay for groceries with coins, her first awareness of sexual desire.  She is utterly fascinated with the nature around her – plants, shells, animals, and mushrooms.  Eventually, an older boy with a heart of gold, who also loves nature, teaches her to read.  With literacy, she is off to the races, eventually becoming a published naturalist.

These are the 1960s, and there is a murder in the first pages of the book.  Owens does a nice job of splicing the years of Kya’s development with the clues of the murder.  The characters of the nearby poor little town – the sheriff, the local mean girls, the social elite (the ministers’ wives), and the local segregated black community – are drawn beautifully and empathetically.

Eventually there is a murder trial, and my sense is that Owens was a bit out of her John Grisham comfort zone in describing the courtroom drama.  But, cross-examination provided Owens a great opportunity to reveal the prejudices, strengths and weaknesses of local witnesses in a 1-horse town “show trial.”

Kya is propelled by her love of nature, formed in her inner being without the prompt of an education or a mentor.  Even though Kya is captivated by nature, there is no mistaking that she is lonely.  This is not the story of a girl who doesn’t need others.  It is the story of a girl who can find meaning even if it must be without others.  Actually, she is the opposite of the women in The Girl on the Train, who could not live without the attention and approval of others.

Some parts of the story strained credulity – the ability of a six year old to support herself, and a trial that seemed a bit too close to Perry Mason – but the author succeeded in overcoming our disbelief by spinning a fast-moving tale of the wonder of nature and self-discovery.