Into Unfamiliar Territory

After finishing a World War II book, I decided to pick up a book from another genre that I usually ignore—the Western.

I’ve never seen the John Wayne classic True Grit, but—as a fan of the Coen brothers—I’m interested in their version of the story.  Before renting it, though, I thought that I would read the novel by Charles Portis (first published in 1968).  And you know what?  I can’t believe how much I enjoyed it!

When her father is shot by a drunken outlaw, 14-year-old Mattie Ross leaves her mother and younger siblings in their backwoods Arkansas home to track down his killer.  With the aid of Rooster Cogburn—a Civil War veteran-turned-marshal with a murky past and a record of violence—and a Texas Ranger named LaBoeuf, Mattie follows the murderer into the unsettled, lawless territory of Oklahoma.

Mattie is a character with spunk and spine.  And—though she tells another character that she hired Cogburn because of his grit—it is clear that the novel’s title describes Mattie more aptly than any other character.

If other things hadn’t called me away from this book, I would have gladly read it all in one sitting.  I’m not necessarily running out to find more Westerns, but True Grit was a pleasant surprise.

 

The Great Escape

War stories don’t tend to make it to my reading list very often.  But strong reviews for Mitchell Zuckoff’s Lost in Shangri-La (and one critic’s comparison of the book to Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit, another gripping piece of non-fiction), led me to pick up this World War II story.

Late in the war, a United States military plane crashed in a remote part of New Guinea.  Most of the passengers on the plane—military men and WACs on a sightseeing flight over a secluded, primitive valley—were killed immediately.  But three passengers—an officer, an enlisted man, and a WAC—survived.  The book tells the story of the incredible efforts to rescue the three survivors (two of whom were seriously injured) from a remote, inaccessible spot surrounded by natives who believed that the planes passing overhead were vehicles of the gods.

Lost in Shangri-La: A True Story of Survival, Adventure, and the Most Incredible Rescue Mission of World War II is a wealth of information on some of the first women in the United States military, on planes and paratroopers, on a society previously untouched by modern technology.  But it’s not a textbook—it’s an engrossing story that could easily be the subject of a major motion picture.

 

From a Master of American Drama

2011 is the centennial of the birth of Tennessee Williams, and I am a fan of the great stage dramas written by Williams, so these seemed like good reasons to pick up his first novel (published in 1950), The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone.

In subject, in style, in mood, this slim novel is clearly the work of the master playwright.  Mrs. Stone—an aging beauty and retired actress–has moved to Rome after the death of her husband.  There she meets Paolo, an attractive young Italian who is interested only in her money.  As the relationship unravels, as Mrs. Stone claws to maintain her dignity, she struggles with the sense that everything in her life is drifting:

She shook her head, looking at it.  She murmured No to herself.  She would not accept it. . . . The nothingness continued.  The drifting that was nothingness went on.  Something, she said to herself.  Anything at all, except nothing.  Nothing could not be allowed to go on and on and on like this!

The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone is a moving character study, a worthy addition to the canon for any fan of Tennessee Williams.

 

For the Love of Books

If you love books, you will love Nick Hornby’s The Polysyllabic Spree.  Hornby (probably best known as the author of such novels as High Fidelity, About a Boy, and Juliet, Naked) wrote a monthly book column in the early 2000s.  The Polysyllabic Spree (subtitled A Hilarious and True Account of One Man’s Struggle with the Monthly Tide of the Books He’s Bought and the Books He’s Been Meaning to Read) is a collection of the first 14 months of that column.

Each month, Hornby starts by listing the books that he has purchased and the books that he has read.  Then—in an essay of seven or eight pages—he provides some critique of the books he has read, some explanation for his reading selections, and some discussion of the connection between his reading life and his “real” life.

Hornby writes with great humor in this collection; I know that I smiled frequently while reading, and I laughed aloud more than once.  Hornby is a voracious reader of both literary and popular books; I have added several new titles to my reading list based on his essays.  Best of all, Hornby writes with clarity and insight about reading—about why we read, how we read, how our reading life informs and enriches the rest of our existence.

(Hornby’s susequent book columns are collected in two additional books—Housekeeping vs. the Dirt and Shakespeare Wrote for Money—and I look forward to picking them up.)

 

A Century of War through One Man’s Eyes

Peter Pouncey’s Rules for Old Men Waiting is one of those literary novels that has some beautiful moments but that also sometimes feels like homework.

Robert MacIver knows that he is in the final winter of his life.  After the death of his wife, he steals away to their secluded summer home, essentially waiting to die.  Stranded in the house by the harsh winter, with his food diminishing and his health declining, he decides to write a story about a fictional company of soldiers in the trenches during World War I. 

As he writes, MacIver relives his own associations with war—the loss of his father during World War I, his work interviewing men poisoned by gas during that war, his brief service in World War II, his first encounter with his future wife near the end of the war, the loss of their son to the war in Vietnam. 

My favorite part of the book, though, was probably the fictional story that MacIver crafts during his final weeks.  I was always eager to return to those sections of the story, while the momentum sagged for me a little during some of the other sequences.

 

Trying to Understand the Unfathomable

When author Jill Bialosky’s youngest sister, Kim, was 21 years old, she took her own life.  History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life is Bialosky’s effort—some 20 years later—to understand and come to terms with that loss.

Bialosky’s book is the story of her mother (who suffered the death of her husband when she was only 24, leaving her with three young daughters to raise alone; who married again but found herself divorced shortly after giving birth to her fourth daughter; who lacked the education and job skills needed to support her family; who fell into bouts of depression and dependence on prescription drugs), of her sister (who felt deserted by her father, who disappeared from her life for ten years after the divorce; who dropped out of high school one semester before graduation; who desperately longed for someone to love her; who started dating an older man who sold drugs; who was torn between a desire to improve her life and a fear that she could never succeed), of her own life (her move to New York to work in publishing while Kim was still a young girl, a move that sometimes made her feel as if she had abandoned her sister; her marriage and her miscarriage; her adopted son; her years of struggle to understand why her sister committed suicide).

Within this narrative, Bialosky weaves information that she has gained from her extensive reading on the topic of suicide—works by psychiatrists, researchers, novelists (including Herman Melville), and poets (including Sylvia Plath, whose poetry she often quotes within the text).  She also includes the artifacts of her sister’s death—the police report, Kim’s suicide note, the contents of her sister’s room.

In the end, despite her best efforts, Bialosky is unable to pinpoint an exact reason for her sister’s suicide.  But it seems that her work on this book—the research, the discussions with prominent psychiatrists, the study of novels and biographies and poems, the conversations in group support meetings—has provided her with a way to remember and become closer to her sister.