Borderlines, by Archer Mayor

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If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know I like mysteries. Their literary quality is often outstanding, and I always love a good puzzle. This second book in Archer Mayor’s series featuring Joe Gunther hits every mark, making it one of the best police procedurals I’ve read.

Gunther, a policeman in Brattleboro, Vermont, has been seconded to the State’s Attorney at the opposite end of the state. Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom is an isolated, rural area far from the state’s scenic mountains and tourist destinations, and depressed economically, even in 1990 when this novel came out.

He’s familiar with the area, having spent childhood summers here with his aunt and uncle. He’s looking forward to time with his now-widowed Uncle Buster, whose benevolent support he could use as he wrestles with questions regarding both work and love.

In the gripping opening scene, Gunther’s journey is interrupted by an illegal shot, but he is quickly reminded that his authority as a law enforcement officer is limited in the Northeast Kingdom, which is “populated by people who had chosen to put their independence and wariness of the rest of the world above the hardships of living here.”

The pace doesn’t let up, as Gunther arrives in Gannet, the small village of his childhood summers. Ramshackle and rundown, the town allowed half of its building to be bought up by an intentional community, seen by some as a cult. Tensions between the Order and the town have grown, only to explode when a couple from Massachusetts arrives to rescue their daughter. The tension is nicely modulated, with plenty of scenes of Gunther sitting on a step with a childhood friend, walking with his uncle, or phoning his girlfriend to vary the suspense before building to a satisfying climax.

What’s best here is Gunther himself. With this character Mayor finds just the right balance of thought and action. Gunther’s quiet, unassuming voice sets him apart from sometimes brash or bragging detectives. Though there’s not a lot of soul-searching, he’s quick to acknowledge his own mistakes. We’re given all we need to perceive his sorrow at the way the village and its people have deteriorated. The loss of his childhood refuge provides shading to Julie’s story, the young woman whose parents have come to steal her from the cult.

There is one twist that seemed to come almost out of nowhere. Mystery writers have the daunting task of planting enough clues to significant plot twists so that readers think Oh, of course! Why didn’t I see that? while not so many that we guess it too soon. Mayor did an excellent job of preparing for all the plot twists here, save one, noticeable only because of the superb plotting everywhere else.

In talking about the elements in fiction, plot and character are the stars. Increasingly, though, I find myself drawn to novels in which the setting is richly evoked and becomes almost another character. Mayor does that here, brilliantly. The environment he evokes helps us anticipate and understand the people in this story, all brought to life, no matter how small their role. It also charges the mood of the story.

When I was younger, the Kingdom had been much as the name implies – a magical other world, removed from the mainstream and endowed with a specialness in the minds of those who knew of it. Its topography, both rugged and cursive, could reject and embrace, kill and nurture. It was a place where land and weather ruled, where the beauty came less from the majestic mountain views found further south, and more from the perpetual surprises that lurked behind the low, ever-present hills. Even at its harshest, the Kingdom was seductive, as when its omnipotent sky darkened with boiling blue-black clouds, low slung and pregnant with threat.

Its people, like those of Gannet, clung to this mercurial terrain mostly out of choice . . . They were independent, self-supporting, proud, and generally uninterested in what was happening outside of their boundaries . . . But, obviously, the fabric of the Kingdom had begun to strain and yield.

Even now, several decades after publication, this book is a valuable resource if you want to understand the crumbling lives of the rural poor. Mayor’s insight into his fellow Vermonters is demonstrated on every page. As death investigator for Vermont’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, and formerly a detective and volunteer firefighter, Mayor brings the authority of real-world experience to this spellbinding tale.

Have you read one of Archer Mayor’s books? What did you think of it? Do you have a favorite?

Kindred, by Octavia E. Butler

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I’d heard so many good things about Butler’s work, and especially this early (1979) stand-alone novel of hers, and I was not disappointed. I was a little surprised, because it was not the science fiction novel I expected, given that is how it is classified. No matter. I was entranced and changed by the story it actually tells.

Kindred is the story of Dana, a modern-day woman of color who is mysteriously transported back to a pre-Civil War slave plantation. Not only is Maryland’s Eastern Shore a far distance from her home in Los Angeles, in time as well as miles, but it is a shockingly unfamiliar culture.

She sees a young red-haired boy who is drowning and rescues him. Apparently, she has been drawn back by Rufus’s fear of dying. She continues to move between the past and present, something neither she nor Rufus has conscious control over. Time moves faster in the past, so she encounters Rufus at different ages. Dana’s white husband Kevin also gets drawn back with her at one point, and his experiences highlight how much Dana’s changed status is due to her gender as well as her skin color.

What is astounding in this book is the way Dana comes up against the small and large ways that life is different for her in Rufus’s world. No matter how much I’ve read of histories and novels and slave narratives, no matter how many museums and former plantations I’ve visited, nothing brought home to me the live of a slave the way Dana’s experience does.

Why? Partly of course that’s due to Butler’s extensive research. Even more, it’s due to her vivid writing—the strong characters, the plot that never stops, the high stakes, the familiarity in her use of slave narratives as story structure.

But most of all it’s because Dana is me. The differences in our race and cities mean nothing compared to our common culture. Experiencing the indignities, injustices, and downright torture of that life through Dana’s frame of reference opened my eyes in a new way to the abuses of slavery. Here is a woman who expects to wear pants, be able to read a book and write a letter, speak up for herself and demand justice, even to go where and when she pleases. Deprived of all that, powerless, considered property, something less than human, without even the survival mechanisms other slaves have learned, Dana must find a way to endure her trips back in time.

There are many lessons here for fiction writers. One is the use of voice. Dana’s modern-day narrative voice reinforces the connection with the reader while emphasising how far away she is from the time of slavery. This is starkly apparent when she is forced to put on a slave-voice to protect herself.

Another is not only the importance of research, but how to use it effectively. It is clear that Butler has done her research well, not only into antebellum plantation conditions, but also into slave narratives and historical accounts of slavery. Yet, she employs that research lightly, including details only as appropriate for plot and character. For example, at one point when she’s back in Los Angeles, Dana throws away her books on African-American history because she now sees the flaws and gaps in their depiction of slavery. I expect Butler could have listed texts and quoted examples, but wisely refrained.

Yet another lesson is for fiction writers looking for a new way to write about a common theme. I think of it as the what-if game. What if you took a classic western and put it in a different setting, maybe outer space? You might come up with Firefly or Star Wars. What if you took a classic vampire story and used a different—even implausible—protagonist? You might have Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Twilight. What if you took one of your own experiences and gave the protagonist different characteristics from you (good, bad or both) or a different time period or a different culture? How might that story play out?

Or you can use the tropes of science fiction/fantasy genre to explore modern-day problems by taking them out of the modern day. That is what Margaret Atwood did in her classic The Handmaid’s Tale. And it is how Octavia Butler shows us that, instead of papering over them, we in the U.S. must confront the ugly crimes of our past in order to move forward.

Have you read any of Octavia Butler’s books? What did you think of it?

The Book of Emma Reyes, by Emma Reyes

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A review by Marjorie Agosin in the Women’s Review of Books sent me in search of this epistolary memoir. She says, “After I completed reading this intense and brief collection of letters, which have such a sense of immediacy, I realized they were written by a woman who was illiterate as a child and only learned to write at age fifteen.”

Reyes, who died in 2003 at the age of 84, lived in Paris where she was known as an artist, friends with Sartre, Frido Kahlo, and Diego Rivera. She was also known as a fascinating storyteller, full of stories of her childhood in Colombia. Germàn Arciniegas, a historian from Colombia persuaded her to write some of them down by sending him 23 letters between 1967 and 1997. I only wish there had been more.

The translator Daniel Alarcón says in his introduction, “Her vision is acute, detailed, remorseless, and true. There is no self-pity, only wonder, and that tone, so delicate and subtle, is perhaps the book’s greatest achievement.”

I quote others because I am utterly bamboozled. How does she do it? She starts in a one-room hovel in San Christóbal in Bogatá, where she lives with her sister Helena, a boy she calls Piojo, and a woman—apparently unrelated to her—called María who terrifies her. Immediately we are oh-so-carefully walking with her to the garbage heap carrying the brimming bedpan, their only toilet, tiny Emma’s sickening daily chore. The garbage heap is where all the children play and—once the bedpan is emptied and wiped out—the scene of an imaginative game the children play.

There is no hint of self pity, no complaint about having only two sets of clothes—everyday and Sunday best—and four pieces of furniture. When María goes away with Piojo, she locks the sisters inside the hovel. “The bedpan filled up. . . so we started using the large serving plate. The neighbor came by only once a day and left us a big pot of porridge . . . We cried and screamed so much that the neighbors came to the door to try and console us.”

Only the beginning of Reyes’s trials, yet each is narrated in this matter-of-fact way. I could not look away. I could not stop reading. The second half of the book takes place in a convent, where she and her sister are taken in after being abandoned at a railway station. Reyes describes the nuns so precisely, and the mix of terror, mind-numbing work, rare kindness, and childish playfulness are so vivid that you can’t help but feel you, too, have experienced life at this convent too.

It seems impossible that a child could be so resilient as to emerge from such a childhood with the courage and endurance to face all the griefs and successes that still lay in wait for Reyes. I wish she’d written more letters to cover all those years.

This is the most powerful memoir I’ve read in years. In his introduction, Daniel Alarcón says that he came to this book when

. . .a stranger literally pressed it into my hands at the Bogatá Book Fair in 2014.
“You must read this,” she said. “You have to.”
Now I urge the same of you.

As I do of you. Read this book!

What memoir have you read that made you feel you’d lived that life?

Night Picnic, by Charles Simic

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I actually read several of Simic’s poetry collections to prepare for the poetry discussion group I lead. He’s certainly well known, although I had not read much of his work before. In addition to serving as poet laureate, he has won many prizes and awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize and the Wallace Stevens Award.

One reason I had shied away from his poetry was that I’d heard it was dark and depressing. That turns out to be untrue. I actually found his work to be curiously uplifting.

Born in 1938 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, Simic’s youth was buffeted by the dangers and disruptions of war, emigration, and poverty. His work shows the lessons he’s absorbed about the workings of fate and chance, his awareness that an elevator is likely to take you to an “icy cellar” before going to the desired upper realms.

What impresses me about his poetry is his close attention to the world, the precision of his details, and the concision of his lines. Each poem feels finished, in a way many poems I read do not. Each word is there for a reason, and sometimes more than one. Most of his poems are fairly short, often presenting a fairly ordinary scene before inviting us to explore it, turning it over in our hands, letting the resonances build. Here’s an example.

The Altar

The plastic statue of the Virgin
On top of a bedroom dresser
With a blackened mirror
From a bad-dream grooming salon.
Two pebbles from the grave of a rock star,
A small, grinning windup monkey,
A bronze Egyptian coin
And a red movie-ticket stub.

A splotch of sunlight on the framed
Communion photograph of a boy
With the eyes of someone
Who will drown in a lake real soon.

An altar dignifying the god of chance.
What is beautiful, it cautions,
Is found accidentally and not sought after.
What is beautiful is easily lost.

We see a seemingly random collection of items on a dresser, imbued with humor. Yet there is foreshadowing here: the blackened mirror, the bad dream, the grave, the punched ticket. So we are surprised, but not completely, by the sudden turn at the end of the second stanza. Chance can change things in an instant, as we are warned by the pun in the title (altar/alter).

Each word here works so hard. My group talked at some length about the inclusion of the word “communion” in the description of the photograph. It tells us a great deal: not just the approximate age of the boy when he died and what he is wearing, but also the poignancy of leaving life the age of reason, just as he can begin to understand about death. Simic doesn’t need to tell us the photograph commemorates the boy’s first communion. What I find uplifting in the final stanza is the assurance that we will find beauty, even if accidentally, even if it is easily lost.

In many of his poems, Simic uses humor to leaven the gloom, as he does in “The Altar”. Sometimes the humor is ironic, such as a blackened mirror or a salon that delivers bad dreams. He uses puns as well, and changes of tone, such as the shift to a more colloquial “splotch” and “real soon”. Some poems, such as the aptly titled “Avenue of Earthly Delights” with its nod to Bosch, verge on the surreal.

I appreciate his attention to the darkness inherent in something as simple as the berries in “Roadside Stand” that “will stain our lips and tongue / As if we were freezing to death in the snow.” To me, adding the possibility of death to a poem that starts out as “a paradise” and ends with the bored boy “Straightening crumpled bills in a cigar box” creates a necessary shading that rounds the picture.

As I read these poems, I found myself thinking of the online flood of Mary Oliver poems following her recent death. It may seem ludicrous to compare the two but both have an attention to even the smallest things in the world around us; both don’t hesitate to include the darkness and danger in that world; and both to me feel ultimately positive.

If you are looking for a way to acknowledge the dark forces in our lives and address the meaninglessness of existence—and to do so without despair—then these poems are for you.

What is your favorite Charles Simic poem?