Heading West By Doris Betts

I'm not quite sure what I think about this one.  Well written, insightful and vivid, it was a good novel---but I don't know if I liked it or not.  Does that make sense?  It's like, Wuthering Heights is a good--no, GREAT novel---but damn, if I can't stand the thing.  I had a lot of issues with this novel, but the annoying thing is I think Doris Betts wants me, us, the reader to have issues with it.  The whole Robin Hood vibe at the beginning, the bad boy--when I first started reading, I thought, 'ok wait,is this going to be a stockholm syndrome thing?'  Is Dwight supposed to be sexy or something?  Then, I had to get over my own romance novel reading and realize, ok this is not a cheap $1.99 convience store book--though at times it reads almost as quickly as those books.  (What? Yes, I know how fast they read.)  I'm all for a horribly predictable, fast reading, crappy romance.  The last one of those types of books that I read--which was about 5 years ago---had the whole "pirate" thing and was about a woman being "kidnapped" by a sexy pirate and ooh la la.

But, alas, Dwight is not a sexy pirate.  And the judge is definately not a young, hard-bodied deck hand.  In the crappy romance novel about pirates, that I read (A Pirate's Love if anyone is interested...) the abuctee ends up in the 'final abduction' of marriage.--just to get a little feminist up in here.  Anyway, let's get away from pirates, shall we?

I guess my main issue was with Nancy. I understand she wanted to escape from family and duty.  I get the sadness that the "spinster sister" is often forced to deal with, the frustration of being the one who "doesn't have a life so she purely lives for others."  The one that is FORCED into being a Martha and never gets a chance to be Mary.   I get that.

But holy moly, chick, you use a kidnapping as your "escape"?   I kept wondering why she bargained with her kinapper.  Yay, the west!  NO! No yay!! You are kidnapped--he has a weapon--he might kill you, torture you, etc.  I don't know.  It was just hard for me to read about Nancy at times, seemingly going along with the kidnapping as if it might "mean" something more to her.

Once they do get out west it totally seems like a blur.  That whole episode with J. Waldo--I was mad.  I was mad at the damn kid, I was mad at the damn dude, the damn horses, and, most of all, dammit I was mad at Nancy.  I guess I've never been kidnapped (too bad, I guess?!?) I have no idea the psychological torture that one might be going through.  I guess you don't really realize how demeted Nancy has become until Chan "rescues" her. (Very Angela Carter's "Bloody Chamber"-esque if you ask me.) Then it's clear that Nancy is freaked-- (can we say: finally?)  I think Nancy's journey through the Grand Canyon was maybe one of my favorite parts of the book, if only for it's harsh, hard descriptions.  Emotion, besides paranoia, is absent.  It's as if the Canyon itself, it's depth and vacancy, fills the book to where it's only survival, it becomes only about Nancy's quest to make it to the other side--to escape.  In fact, after it was all over, I was exhausted myself.

Also, why doesn't she want to tell anyone that Dwight fell off the cliff?  Why is that a mystery?  Does she think people will think she's a killer?  Self-defense, kiddo!

But then Hunt Thatcher shows up, and while I'm happy that Nancy is able to find a companion and her "happy ending,"  I'm just not sure what his purpose is.  Is it a reward that she (and we) gets for going through such horror.  I mean, anyone who goes through a kidnapping or any type of trauma totally deserves a happy ending.  But is that realistic?

I wonder if after it's all over, if when Hunt comes to visit Nancy for Thanksgiving, if the happy ending will really happen.

 I dont know, maybe I'm too hard on it.  I read a lot of Victorian fiction and and I get mad if someone doesn't end up married or everyone dies in the end--why should this be different??

Maybe I should just shut up and read Vanity Fair (the next one to tackle).  Or maybe that's just my problem, I do read a lot (too many) Vic lit and not a lot of contemporary 20th century stuff, so maybe my view is scewed.

Maybe becuase to me the Blue Ridge Parkway IS west (having grown up in NC) Maybe I need to expand my horizons.  I just hope I don't have to get kidnapped for it to happen.

Like I said, I dont know about this one?  I'd love some thoughts and commentary.  Am I stupid?  Do I not know what I'm talking about?  Would I have been happier if Dwight had been a sexy pirate to begin with?  Would I have liked it more if it had had some depressing ending where Nancy dies, or goes back to the mundane 'take care of Mama and Becks' world and leaves her chance of love lost in the west?

I dunno.  So I'm going to just read Thackeray.

The Great Gatsby

I found it appropriate to read this on the day everyone was waiting to see how the Big Apple and Long Island would fair against the forces of Irene--looks like they did ok. All while reading this I kept thinking, is this an episode of Mad Men?  No, it can't be--this is the 1920s not the 1960s!  However, I can't help but think Matthew Weiner had Gatsby (and Buchanan) in mind when creating Don Draper.  The affairs, the passion, the lack of passion, the necessity to claim a different life than your own to "make" it--the cigarettes, drinking and parties?  I even pictured Joan when envisioning Myrtle Wilson. Maybe it's all because I'm depressed MM will not be around this fall.  Or maybe it's because the inherent sense of loneliness and longing that I feel in the characters of MM is the same in the characters of GG. Maybe the society that the characters in MM hold is a desperate attempt to keep the feelings and "gaiety" of a pre-WW2 world.  But WW1 has already happened in Gatsby, the crumbling of the past into a "modern" and then "post modern" existence has happening. So, not quite sure if that whole "gaiety" thing was forreal or not.  Carraway describes the partygoers at Gatsby's shindigs via their futures:  one drowns, another commits suicide, one strangles his wife.  The 20th century upper class is grasping for something that's not there--they have to make themselves interesting, like Gatsby does, or they look on in disgust (and desire) as the Buchanans do--New money vs. Old, West vs. East. It's all there.   Nick Carraway was a boring dude, in my opinion, but that's because he's normal, because he doesn't feel the need to create an exuberant existence for himself.  He is, as us, the reader, caught up in the drama of these other peoples' extraordinary lives.  It becomes a fog of indulgence until the reality of the world crashes down upon those involved and poor Nick is left to try to put some sort of meaning into why it all happens.  Poor sap loses his girl in the process.

I'd like to know more about Fitzgerald.  I asked Matt about this when I started reading--he didn't know much but did say Fitzgerald had a very tempestuous marriage to Zelda (his wife, not the Nintendo princess) who apparently "went crazy" (Matt's words).  I wonder if the various love-lives of this novel all point to various aspects of F.S. and Z's love.  I'm sure someone's written about this.

Also, just randomly, I'd like to know more about this East vs. West business.  I mean, I get it, but being from the South, I've always considered myself from the East Coast--however, that is not this East.  This concept of the "East" is the same geographic area as the "North" --but depending on where you are from I assume you see the are north of the Potomac River in a different light.    I love Nick's (Fitzgerald's) comments in the last few paragraphs about the Dutch coming over and discovering the area that is now Long Island and New York--the opportunity they saw there, and the opportunity the characters of this book still saw in that slither of land--how, in a way, those in the West like Nick and Daisy and Gatsby, they go there to hopefully find that opportunity.  They wish to be those Dutch immigrants coming across the Atlantic, finding a new home.  But they fail because New York has already been conquered and what's left is for it, the Big Apple, to do the conquering.

So what's next?  Next, I read (appropriately) "Heading West" by Doris Betts.

FTLadies: Final Thoughts

So I finished Fair and Tender Ladies and, if it wasn't noticable in the previous post, I highly recommend it.  Here's a few final thoughts:

As Ivy grows and ages you become more and more entrapped in her successes and mistakes.  I know I am happy to have plans to spend Labor day weekend in the mountains--I need them after reading this novel.  Silvaney continues to be a force in this story even in her absence, even in her death as we discover happened years and years ago despite the continued letters written to her.  She is still a ever present reality for Ivy--that connection to her childhood.  What a beautiful scene when Ivy writes to her daughter that she knew Silvaney was dead and that no, she's not crazy to have written to her dead sister all these years.  It was the writing that mattered, not the letter itself, not the reading of it--but the process of writing her innermost thoughts to her best friend.  Silvaney becomes an outlet for Ivy to have a journal or a diary without even the understanding of what it means to write down ones thoughts purely for the theraputic necessity of writing.  When Ivy burns the letters (of course now I can't find the passage to reference, but it happened, I swear!) and watches them spark and flame into the mountain air, she lets go of her childhood and her past life and is able to finally be content with being Ivy--something we all need to learn to do, find that comfort in our own skin.  She does the same when she unscrews the mason jar full of lightenbugs caught by her surrogate grandchildren and watches them crawl out of the jar and then fly away (pg. 273).  Guh, Lee, your descriptions are right on!

Also, her last name after she is married becomes "Fox". So yeah, add that to the whole "nature" "wildness" thing mentioned previously.

Up next:  Great Gatsby.  The required High School reading that I plum forgot.

Lee Smith's "Fair and Tender Ladies": Review Part 1

Upon first few pages of FTLadies, I wondered if this was going to be the typical coming of age "poor southern gal" novel.  Mountains, sickness, numerous children, slightly educated but uneducated main character, country-fied names, all those things that a generic novel about southern Appalachia encompasses.  I was like, ok, let me just put on my Dolly album "New Harvest" and tap my toes to a couple tunes for 45 minutes instead of reading a story I've already heard. However, it didn't take me long to realize how much more Smith has going on this novel.  I've been taking quick, mostly one-word notes and comments on an index card as I read and I keep coming back to words in the largest print on my index card:  "IVY ROWE".  Blame it on my Female Gothic professor Dr. May who had us spend a day dissecting what the title/name "Jane Eyre" meant (which, by the way, is a novel that is continually referenced in the book--also Yellow Wallpaper is less obviously hinted at throughout). Smith smartly picks this beautiful southern name that perfectly describes its owner and the world around her, wild and unruly but strong and sometimes over bearing, yet also purposeful, straight and structured.  It's the perfect description of what Ivy has to fight throughout her life, the call to be on the mountain, in nature, wild and on her own, or to be in town, in that perfect mill village life that is prescribed and new and shiny.  Ivy Rowe is a contradiction in her name and character.  Gardeners plant in rows and weed out encroaching ivy.  Ivy by its very nature cannot exist in a straight line, it must wind and twirl and hold onto something else.  I've only read the first couple sections of the book--all told in epistolary format.  As you read, as Ivy grows, (winds and twirls if you will) ages, learns, her phonetic spelling changes to "proper" English.  But I love how a couple words that she uses like "bury" and "seen" turn into natural words in Ivy's phonetically uneducated spelling.  Ivy spells these words as berried and seed.  Other examples of her phonetic spelling that struck me were "ribands" for ribbons, "direckly" instead of directly, "anser" instead of answer.  Funny, how all this kind of makes sense to me.... "et" instead of eat.  We love those superfluous letters, don't we?  I blame the French (via the English). 

To go back to the natural world of FTLadies, Ivy's best friend/ sister, Silvaney, is part of the crux of this conflict in Ivy of nature vs. civilization, wildness vs. structure.  Silvaney, who we do not know if she is crazy, mentally retarded, or autistic (which all 3 would be the same thing in the 1910s), thrives in nature, on the mountain. I believe, especially once she is sent off to a "home", Ivy's letters to her, her confidence in Silvaney, her wish to always be with her is a desire to get her childhood back.  Silvaney and Ivy are the same until they are about 10 and as Ivy grows up, Silvaney stays the same.  Ivy grows up into a world of structure and rules and consequences, whereas Silvaney never grows up.  I believe Silvaney represents not only a connection to nature, but represents Ivy as a child--I assume these connections are intertwined: childhood and nature, childhood and wildness.  Ivy even says in one of her letters, "Silvaney, it is like you are a part of me."  She confides to that that sometimes she believes Silvaney was made just for her. As children we thrive outdoors (at least I know I did), we are more animalistic than ever with seemingly only the desire to eat, sleep and play.  As adults we get complicated and convoluted with "human" ideas, civilized structures, rules and regulations of what is proper, what is right, what we are supposed to do.  Ivy reminds us, through Silvaney, that maybe there is something more human in this wild world of childhood, of being on the mountains and making angels in the snow and "berrying" your dead dad up on top of the mountain in a wooden box so that his body can become one with the earth.  And you can't forget, that as soon as Ivy and her family move down off the mountain to the town of Majestic, Virginia, World War 1 is looming.  Its back burner topic through the first part of this novel, but it is crucial to the story.  Ivy falls in love and eventually conceives with a boy who goes off to the war, and then dies in the war.  Her brother goes off to war, instead of staying at home on the farm; the war creates the need for increase coal mining which creates a boom economically as much as possible in a small Appalachian town.  War is this "human" and "civilized" idea, yet is the very essence of wildness and chaos.  Smith is very subtle, through a warm, typical, "poor southern gal" novel in creating a world with juxtapositions between mountain and valley, rural and suburb, childhood and adulthood, war and peace (what up Leo?), nature and civilization.  The over simplification that I sometimes find so obnoxious with much middle brow "southern" novels is non-existence in Fair and Tender or in the character of Ivy.  It is a simple story about one girl--but she is as complex as the south, as World War 1, as poverty, as the mountains and valleys in which she lives.  Ivy has me captured in her wild, structured world through her purposeful, thoughtful letters with their rambling, honest tone.

And gosh, y'all, I can't wait to read more.  I could fly through this novel, read it in a day maybe.  But I don't, I have savored it, swallowed it, and thought about it continually.  I hope if you read it, you will do the same.

Friday Night Memories

With the end of the televsion series "Friday Night Lights,"  (here on out known as FNL)  it congers up fond memories of football games in middle school (we'd always go to the high school games--where I proudly boasted how my sister was head cheerleader of the Warriors).  My crew and I would huddle down in the consessions and buy hot chocolate on November nights and cheer when the crowd erupted and sigh downtroddenly when it was required--though, the only thing we knew about football was that a Warrior with the ball running towards one end of the field was a good thing.  But that's pretty much all you have to know, right?  FNL, over it's 5 seasons, was a perfect representation of that memory to me.  Was it a perfect show?  No.  Season 3 attests to that.  But I believe these past 2 seasons were almost perfect.  But before we get there, let's recap: in seasons 1 and 2, Jason Street broke your heart, Tim Riggins stole it, and Matt Saracen brought it back all warm and fuzzy.  Season 3, however, became tiresome and soap opera-esque, almost as if the writers of the show only saw their audience as teenage girls who fought over Tim Riggins and whether Tyra was better than Lyla (ok, seriously, their names ryhme?).  But with the last 2 seasons, FNL reclaimed it's ability to pull on the heart strings just as the first 2 seasons.  It once again became a smart, important show about small towns in America, today--not yesterday, not tomorrow, but right now (despite the 1995 hot chocolate memory that spawned this post). Politics, family, friendship--all of these often-rambled about topics--are discussed with respect and thoughtfulness.   And the topic of race, which can so easily be overly understated or blatantly one sided,  is so carefully and beautifully discussed within this show.  We get a truer view of the relationship between black and white teenagers and their parents, coaches and teachers than most television shows or movies care to take the time to craft. To backtrack ('Cause through editing my blog, I've rambled even more and lost my train of thought.  Oh, aren't you glad you'd wasted time reading my dribble!!), the one thing that kept me coming back during Season 3, beside Matt Saracen's awesomeness--cause, seriously, how do you resist him? (The episode where he buries his father is probably the best episode of any television show I've seen--and I did watch all 6 seasons of Lost--multiple times)--was the Taylor family: specifically, Eric and Tami much more so than Julie.  Tami is my hero, pure and simple.  I want to be Tami Taylor when I grow up, please?  Eric is exactly the type of person that we all wish we had as a coach in our lives, whether we play sports or not. And, I think many women see Eric Taylor as an ideal husband/father--despite his numerous flaws.  That's what made this couple so great.  They were perfect, yet very much not.  You could really root for them, and suffered with them as they made those hard decisions that coaches, counselors and parents have to every day. FNL, with it's realistic portrayl of small town America, had the one thing that so many of our Cop/Crime drama shows and sarcastic comedies lack--true hope.  FNL proves to us that these memories created in our youth carry us through our lifetime.  The show tells us, without telling us, that we all will grow up, we all will make numerous mistakes, but we all will always be connected in some strange way to and through this experience of high school (unless you were home schooled-and I know nothing 'bout no home schoolin'). And whether your high school was a football school, a basketball school, or did not even have money for a sports program (just like East Dillon continually struggled with), we are all connected in that need to pull for something, to win in the purest form.  Forget all this emo, 'my heart hurts' crap!  Everyone wants to be happy and successful.  Everyone wants to do good, be praised, and ultimately to be a part of something bigger than just themselves. To me, this idea culminates when Coach Taylor prays before the State Champions in this last episode.  He prays to be a part of something bigger than a high school football team, even bigger than State Champs.  Isn't that what we are all looking for in life?  But maybe not, maybe we're just looking for those simple fond memories, that probably no one else will remember.  Maybe we need these simple single memories, so on a 100 degree July day, a chick in the South can think back to being 13 and crowded with her friends in the stands, wearing her awesome aqua and purple Columbia jacket, secretly wanting to be her cheerleading sister, seeing her clouded breath vanish quickly in front of her, and feeling her hands slowly, slowly thaw while holding that perfectly warm cup of water and Swiss Miss.  This is just one of the memories of a Friday Night.   Let's hope they last forever.

It's All Ali's Fault

My friend Ali requested (ok, more like demanded) I make a blog about books (see title above). So here we go.  Tada! I did it!  Yay!

Hope to have thoughts up about Lee Smith's "Fair and Tender Ladies" soon.  And let's hope I dont embarass myself or look like a dumb-butt in the process.  Please feel free to suggest books or post your own comments about books you've read!  I'm not really sure how this blog business works and at this point I'm just rambling into infinity so let's stop that and say good afternoon and get back to work so I can get paid, and go home and have the time and leisure to read Ms. Smith's work.

Toodles bittles!