Hot, Hot, Hot circa 1995!

image from amazon.com
Travel back in time with me, fourteen years ago or so. Bill Clinton was in the Oval Office, but no one yet knew who Monica Lewinsky was. Pearl Jam and Nirvana were on the radio. Braveheart was stirring the hearts of moviegoers, while Twelve Monkeys was scaring the crap out of them. And the book everyone was toting around was Snow Falling on Cedars, by David Guterson. It's been on my personal TBR list for a couple of years, and I finished it the other day.

Snow Falling on Cedars was not really a "traditional" TBR for me. Rather, it was in with a bunch of books my parents asked me to drop off at the library for them. The library closest to them also sells used books donated by patrons, in a separate room off the main floor, with all proceeds going to the library. My father taught social studies and my mother taught English, so I grew up with scads and scads of books in the house. They get rid of more than most people own, and I went through the boxes first to see if there was anything that interested me. Snow Falling on Cedars was one of the ones I grabbed. I knew nothing about it except that I liked the title and that, at one point, it had been one of those books everyone was reading.

I could see why almost immediately. It's set on fictional San Piedro Island, off the coast of Washington state in 1954. It starts with the murder trial of a second-generation Japanese man, accused of killing a white man. At the beginning of the novel, you get little more information than that. It slowly spirals out, back in time to before World War II, when all the principals were young and life was open. The reader slowly learns of the links between the accused and the deceased, and of the doomed teenage relationship between the wife of the accused and a white reporter, and how the war changed them all.

The fictional island had a large Japanese-American community, and the novel deftly explores the relationship between them and the whites, and how the war changed it. During the war, all of the island's Japanese-Americans were rounded up and sent to the Manzanar internment camp. In high school, we had to read another book on this topic called Farewell to Manzanar. Maybe it was because I was a callous 15-year-old, or maybe the book just wasn't very good, but it failed to make much of an impression on me. It could have also been something in the way it was taught, paired with a Nazi concentration camp memoir. Internment didn't sound so bad next to that.

But this book made me "get it" much better. The defendant's family had an under-the-table agreement to purchase land from their employer, and were two payments away from outright ownership when they were interred. Because law prohibited first-generation immigrants owning land at the time, the agreement was under the table. Their employer (the parents of the deceased) sold the land from under them. Also lost to the war, and to the general culture, was the teenaged romance between the defendant's wife Hatsue, and the son of the local newspaper publisher, Ishmael. Hatsue's family wanted her to marry a Japanese man, so she did. Ishmael never got over it.

The scenes where the main characters were forced out of their homes were very moving. Guterson describes an FBI visit to Hatuse's home, where much was made out of innocuous family heirlooms and dangerous but common faming implements and chemicals. He describes the hive of activity between the time the notice for relocation went out and the date of the transport: how the community worked together to round up and secure everyone's furniture, how the Japanese businessmen were selling down to the walls at cut-rate prices and trying to arrange promises from their neighbors to watch over their crops. I'd say that these portions of it are much more moving than Farewell to Manzanar, at least as far as I remember.

But lest anyone mistake it for an "issues" novel, that's only a portion of the story. There's the murder trial, the love lost, and the lush depiction of the fictional island. I was really disappointed to learn that it wasn't a real place, because in the novel, you could practically smell it: the strawberry fields, the heavy vegetation, the rain and the sea. I wanted to visit someday. The peaceful beauty of the title extends to the whole book, even in the more violent war scenes. The book is about a wide range of topics, ultimately all of them human. I'd say it deserves its reputation, and I'm curious about what else Guterson has written.

Confidence Game; or A Post About A Book

I finished a book that's due back pretty soon, and also haven't been in the mood to scan photographs, so I'll take a short break from my "New York State Photos" series to talk about Plain Heathen Mischief by Martin Clark.

Plain Heathen Mischief opens on one of the worst days of Pastor Joel King's life. He's delivering a last sermon to his congregation before he begins to serve several months in jail for contributing to the delinquency of a minor, tasty 17-year old Christy. His wife, naturally, kicks him out of the house and serves him with divorce papers on the day of his release from jail. He heads west to live in his sister Sophie's basement and attempt to start all over, from absolute scratch.

Fate, or Edmund Brooks, intercedes. Edmund was one of Joel's few and staunchest supporters, and volunteers to drive him west to Montana upon his release, as he's going that way for "business". Turns out, Edmund's a con man. Despite his extravagant support of Joel's church, he's been scamming the system for most of his life. And he offers to cut Joel in. Joel resists temptation at first, but with an expensive divorce, a needling -- and needy -- sister and nephew, and a $5 million lawsuit from Tasty Christy looming, it's not long before he succumbs.

Anyone who collects stupid criminal stories (like I do) can spot a simple truth: it's easy to commit a crime. The challenge comes in getting away with it. Inevitably, things get rough, and Joel is a minister at heart, an intellectual who enjoys fishing and doesn't use swear words. These scenes reminded me at first of the part in Office Space where the three main characters are looking up money laundering in the dictionary.

But something about it became uncomfortable. Joel's a decent, likeable guy who's just trying to make everything work out. There's very little good in his life. His sister (in some of the weakest parts of the book) is constantly on his case, putting down his chosen vocation, riding him about the sex scandal he became embroiled in, angry that he can't contribute more around the house. And she's his closest ally. The book was trying to be both comical, and a serious examination of faith. The funny parts were pretty good, but Joel's overall situation is more sad than anything else. The parts about faith fall flat, as his sister Sophie is playing the "devil's advocate" but comes off as a two-dimensional character, existing merely to argue with him.

Still, the book was decent overall. Martin Clark made Tasty Christy a pretty intriguing character, one that I would have liked to see more of. Edmund's good, too, as a genial, religious con man. There was a good side plot about a case of domestic violence that Joel witnessed, and the story arc of Joel's attempted con was pretty good too, even with all the misery it contained. Martin Clark's got a few other books. This one wasn't perfect by any means, but good enough that I might give one of his others a try sometime.

Central New York

It's weird. There are some places that you have to get away from in order to appreciate. When I lived in central New York, I didn't like it much. I had a hard time meeting people and finding things to do. Most of the people my own age had grown up in the area and had a set group of friends already, not to mention kids and family. There was one bar, and it was pretty lame. The nearest movie theater was a half hour away. My apartment building was full of old people who bitched to the apartment manager if I vaccuumed after 7:30 at night. I couldn't wait to get out of there.

Now that I am out of there, I appreciate it more. It was very pretty and peaceful. It had Sylvan Beach, a great summer hangout with rides, bars and good food. It had some historic interest. There were a lot of scumbags living there: the police blotter was full of DWIs, domestic violence calls, and welfare fraud complaints. You could see a lot of this stuff firsthand whenever you went out, actually. But looking back, I often think that perhaps I counted the place out too soon and didn't give it enough of a chance.

Geese on the Irrigation Pond, waiting to take off, Fall 2006

Spring Comes to Downtown Oneida, 2007


Sunset over Lake Oneida, 2006

Fire Escape, Oneida, 2007


Sylvan Beach bar interior

Skee-Ball at Sylvan Beach


One of the Oldest Dark Rides in the State


The Galaxi at Sylvan Beach

Disappointment

Worse? April 30, 2009
Filed under: Wordpress — --Deb @ 1:01 am

Which is worse?

Finding a book you love and then hating everything else you try by that author, or

Reading a completely disappointing book by an author that you love?

This is an interesting question. I don't think I've ever had the first experience. I have had authors wear on me, though. For a while after I read My Sister's Keeper, I got into Jodi Picoult. I read the one about the Amish girl accused of killing her newborn baby. I read the one about the teenaged boy who was on trial for murdering his lifelong friend and girlfriend. I read the one about the twice-accused, never-guilty-of-pedophilia teacher and the girls who dabbled in witchcraft. Somewhere in there, they all started to blur together. She's got a formula, and once I could spot it, I lost interest. I felt I'd gotten all there was to get out of her books, at least for me.

I do hate reading disappointing books. A. Manette Ansay's book Blue Water leaps to mind, probably because it's in the stack of books I'm going to sell on Amazon, here on my desk. I loved all of her other books. I've read Vinegar Hill and River Angel many times. I thought the latter was an excellent novel about religion and faith, that should appeal to Christians without being overly preachy towards agnostics and atheists. I thought of it when I started that horribly cheesy "Christian" novel, Doesn't She Look Natural? last winter. Nothing in the first half made it Christian except for a few hackneyed references to the main character's belief in God and an unfortunate intolerance of homosexuality.

So, I had very high hopes for Blue Water. I was disappointed. I didn't find the main characters terribly engaging, nor did there seem to be much driving the story forward. You can read my review of it here. It wasn't horrible on its own. If my expectations had been lower, I might have even been keeping it instead of selling it.

So I guess I don't know which is worse. They're both pretty disappointing. But I'd say it's worse to be let down by an author you really like, than to merely find out you don't like a particular author after all.

Grain Elevators of Buffalo

For many years they were underappreciated around here, the rusting, abandoned hulks standing silent watch over the lake shores. I think they're starting to make somewhat of a comeback. A local historical society offers a boat tour three times each summer among them, and they always sell out, so more and more people are getting to see how amazing they are. Riding along the water among them is an indescribeable, eerie sensation. It's virtually silent on that part of the Buffalo River, without even any noise from highways or houses. And on both sides of your boat are these grain elevators, as tall as skyscrapers, as silent as boulders, slowly crumbling to oblivion.

Custom Made for Me

Ever come across something -- a book, a blog, a museum exhibit -- that seems like the perfect intersection of your interests? I found such a book recently, and it's going on my birthday list for sure. The Tavern Lamps Are Burning is a literary journey through New York State since its colonization up until about the 1960s (that's when this book came out). It's edited by Carl Carmer and contains lots of interesting morsels: Rudyard Kipling's description of Buffalo's grain elevators, Charles Dickens' visit to the Shaker colony in Lebannon, NY before it became a museum, and writings by Red Jacket and Mary Jemison. There are short stories, poems, and excerpts from longer works. All in all, it's around 500 pgs long and not the type of work one reads cover to cover.

The book was published in 1964, as my graduate program was being founded. I thought I'd recognized the author's name, and I'm still not 100% sure I do, but he was a trustee of the museum my program works with, and dedicated this book to one of the founders of my program. I think it would be an excellent project for any institution in the state to update this book. Things have changed a great deal in the state since the book was published, and not always for the better. But many new writers and works would be worthy of excerption and inclusion, such as Richard Russo's Mohawk, The Risk Pool and Bridge of Sighs; Lauren Belfer's City of Light; and many, many others that I can't think of at the moment.

The book also inspired me to share some of my photos on this blog from around New York State. I have quite a few of them, after all. I'm going to be doing that all this week -- certainly not promising an update every day, but who knows?

Today's are from Camp Sagamore, in the Adirondack Mountains. Built by the Vanderbilts in 1897, today it's a tourist attraction. It's also host to overnight programs like Elderhostel and a corporate retreat. Every year, the Upstate History Alliance holds an institute there for museum professionals. I was privileged enough to attend one year. The leaves were beginning to change and it was just gorgeous. Even if the sessions had been absolute crap, it would have been worthwhile. But as it was, I learned a lot, had a lot of fun, and enjoyed a truly gorgeous setting in New York State.

Symbolically Speaking

It's that time of the week again! Here's today's question:

My husband is not an avid reader, and he used to get very frustrated in college when teachers would insist discussing symbolism in a literary work when there didn’t seem to him to be any. He felt that writers often just wrote the story for the story’s sake and other people read symbolism into it.

It does seem like modern fiction just “tells the story” without much symbolism. Is symbolism an older literary device, like excessive description, that is not used much any more? Do you think there was as much symbolism as English teachers seemed to think? What are some examples of symbolism from your reading?

This one's a pretty challenging question. It's hard to know what to think sometimes. I do think English teachers, particularly English PhD's, sometimes go a bit too far. For example, you don't even want to know what Hermione's magically enlarged satchel from the last Harry Potter book is supposed to symbolize. There's all kinds of scholarship on it, apparently, but I'll leave the reader to Google it for him or herself. You may wish you hadn't.

At the same time, though, I always disliked those whose sole contribution to class was to assert "It don't symbolize nuthin'. It's just a story." That's not exactly the truth of it either. In graduate school, we had to read the Melville short story "Bartleby the Scrivener." I was pretty surprised to be the only one in the room who grasped that the story was about alienation and that Bartleby was a symbolic character. After classes were over for the week, a friend and I argued about that all the way to Friendly's (nearly a 40 minute drive; school was in the middle of nowhere). He was a very black-and-white sort of person and couldn't understand how to tell the difference between a symbolic character and one that's more like a real person. I just couldn't figure out how to explain it, either, though. "You can just tell, they don't act quite right," was the best I could do.

As far as symbolism in modern fiction, I would say that it's still there. It's not trendy in the popular stuff that's meant to be digested easily. But I guess it probably never was. My absolute least favorite use of symbolism is when the writer kills off an animal. I read a short story where a woman and her brother were visiting their family for a holiday. They'd grown up in a rural area that was being developed. They got drunk and rode their horse to a local Wal-Mart, where it fell in a construction pit or retention pond and drowned. They watched it, knowing there was nothing they could do.

When I read that story, I understood intellectually that the horse was supposed to represent the conflict between the rural life they'd grown up with and the development that was threatening it. I think it also symbolized something with the brother's life -- my memory's a little hazy, but I think the sister felt he was drinking too much or in some kind of trouble. But I couldn't get past the horrible image of the horse drowning like that, struggling to get its footing, to keep its head above water, and looking to its owners for some kind of help the entire time.

I have to admit, though, that I'm not usually on a very sharp lookout for symbolism while I'm reading. I mostly read for enjoyment, or in the case of nonfiction, to learn something specific as well. The best writers will write on both levels, so that readers can enjoy the story without getting all the symbols. And at some point, maybe it stops mattering whether the reader makes symbols out of nothing or whether the writer put them there. One of the members of Pink Floyd was once asked about the meaning behind his songs. He replied that it no longer mattered, that now that they were out in the world, it was what the listener took from them that counted, not what he put there. Perhaps that's true of books to an extent, as well.