Category Archives: Fiction

A Girl of the Limberlost

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5

A Girl of the Limberlost is sort of an early twentieth-century Cinderella story. Published in 1909, the novel is written by noted Indiana naturalist Gene Stratton Porter.

The book tells the story of Elnora Comstock, a neglected country girl whose mother has been embittered by the loss of her husband quite early in their marriage. She has never shown any love to Elnora, whose hardships refine and develop her character and send her escaping into the nearby swamp enough to cause her to accumulate a wealth of naturalistic knowledge. Over the course of the story she enters high school in the city against the odds and excels, financing her wardrobe and books through the sale of her extensive moth collection. The second half of the story traces her mother’s change of heart and Elnora’s courtship.

I enjoyed reading Limberlost, though several things about it bothered me. It’s quite sentimental, and the idealized characterizations seemed a little silly to me at times. The narrator casts Elnora as an intelligent, determined, mature young woman, but the description of her high school years consists almost entirely of wardrobe descriptions and social hurdles she crosses effortlessly.

Golden Emperor Moth, courtesy of Wikipedia

The story’s naturalistic focus is interesting as far as it goes. Today nature study is almost always framed in a conservationist perspective, but Elnora hunts moths to kill, basically — even the rare ones — and to make them into collections and sets to finance her education.  The golden emperor moth figures prominently in the story at several points, and it along with several others were specimens I looked up online in curiosity. In one plot development, Elnora takes a job as a nature study teacher for grade school students — a position created for her because of her expertise, so I thought of another Comstock (Elnora’s name is a little too coincidental), Anna Botsford Comstock, whose nature study handbook for the purpose of equipping elementary school teachers to do just what Elnora does was in the works at the time Limberlost was published.

There’s kind of a debate over the exploitation of Limberlost swamp that delineates two ways of seeing the land. Elnora’s mother has refused to allow her old growth forest to be logged, and has refused any oil wells on her property, though other neighbors have done both of these things to their great financial benefit. The swamp is also being drained in the course of the novel, greatly shrinking the habitat for various wild creatures, and the ecological cost of this is something Stratton-Porter makes clear. The ethical terms of that debate have been sharpened over the years, something folks in my neck of the woods are particularly aware of as we’re in the midst of debate over drilling for natural gas in the Marcellus Shale.

Perhaps it’s not great literature, but I enjoy reading novels of this era. If we read to be transported to another place and time, this is one of those books that creates a very appealing “elsewhere” in the general civility of the culture, a beautiful natural setting, and the capability and honor of many of the people.

The Westing Game

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6

The Westing Game is a super-smart whodunit.  A Young Adult classic for over twenty-five years, this book didn’t even appear on my radar till recently when a reviewer of The Atomic Weight of Secrets mentioned it. Better late than never, I thought, and hunted it up at the library.

If you’re in the mood for an intricate puzzle book, this is worth picking up. The scenario is that sixteen people have been mysteriously invited to the reading of a millionaire’s will. His death is suspicious, and his will invites them to solve the puzzle by dividing up into pairs and following the cryptic clues he provides. The winner will be his heir.

It’s a puzzle book, but a two-dimensional puzzle isn’t the best metaphor for how the book works. It doesn’t supply pieces that gradually fit together into a whole picture. It’s more like a Rubik’s Cube, or maybe a holograph; your perspective gets altered with each new piece of information, and the ground is constantly shifting underfoot.

It’s an exceedingly clever book, but in all honesty it didn’t impress me as having much heart. There is some real insight into human nature, but somehow it doesn’t work to build much sympathy for the characters. All are a little odd (much like real people, perhaps?), but I never found myself really pulling for any of them. It was mentally engaging while I had it in front of me, but it didn’t haunt me in the between-times the way some books do.

The Atomic Weight of Secrets

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3

…or The Arrival of the Mysterious Men in Black. That’s the whole title, and each chapter is titled in similarly long and complicated form. Every chapter gives you an “or.” It’s perfect for a book so concerned with trying to settle on a right interpretation of events, and so continually thwarted  in the attempt.

I became interested in this book, first in the planned Young Inventors Guild series, when I read Tanita Davis’s review. Set in 1903, it focuses on five young geniuses, the children of important scientists as well as scientists in their own right, who are abruptly and quite mysteriously separated from their parents and exiled to a farm school near Dayton, Ohio. They have a beautiful and caring teacher, comforting nannies who are excellent cooks (this is one of those stories that make your mouth water with its food descriptions), and a well-equipped laboratory that they use to full advantage. They are also shadowed and guarded by men in black who wear strange costumes and seem not quite human.

What they don’t have is an explanation. Where have their parents gone? Did they go willingly or were they kidnapped? Or were the children kidnapped? Are the men in black protectors or abductors? These are brilliant children, but they’ve become involved in happenings that leave them — and the reader — grasping continually for answers.

It’s true that the novel’s action is slowed by back story. For some readers this interferes with the pacing and seems to drag. But I didn’t mind it. Maybe it’s because the story wasn’t only about the action, but about the children’s experiences with (and without) their parents. The narrative is an admirable balance between entertaining, suspenseful, and interesting on the one hand, and quite sad on the other. We learn that all five children have incredibly self-absorbed parents, busy about their Very Important Work and only glancingly aware of their progeny, long before the strange events of this story. There is an emotional realness that goes to the heart, though it’s managed so well among the other elements of the story that it never tips into dark or morose.

These children are gifted scientists, and their teacher is intimidated at first. But she quickly discovers that their education hasn’t been complete:

“You all know so much,” Miss Brett finally said. “It’s a bit daunting for me. Has anyone else ever felt like Alice trying to chase the White Rabbit?”

To this, she received a sea of blank faces.

“Alice who?” Jasper asked, wondering if Alice had been perhaps a zoologist or small animal veterinarian.

“Why, Alice in Wonderland, from the stories of Lewis Carroll,” Miss Brett said.

“Maybe we didn’t get that story in England,” Jasper said.

“The story comes from England, Jasper. I’m surprised that your parents never read it to you.”

“Read to us? Our parents?”

“Well, what kind of stories do they read to you?” Miss Brett asked.

From the empty expressions on those intelligent faces, Miss Brett knew something was amiss.

Miss Brett’s effort to rectify this neglected aspect of their education is one of my favorite parts of the story, resulting in a conversation between this book and other books, between sense and nonsense, between science and magic and mystery, between caution and faith and love. It’s a richly textured book that leaves enough mystery at the end to make me eager for the next installment in the series.

The Metamorphosis

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3

This strange little novella is a staple of college literature classes. But I didn’t read it till I was studying for my graduate exams. It intrigued me, and for some reason I thought of it again recently and decided to read it again.

It begins this way:

One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug. He lay on his armour-hard back and saw, as he lifted his head up a little, his brown, arched abdomen divided up into rigid bow-like sections. From this height the blanket, just about ready to slide off completely, could hardly stay in place. His numerous legs, pitifully thin in comparison to the rest of his circumference, flickered helplessly before his eyes.

So that’s the basic situation. How does Gregor handle it? How does his family respond? How does it all turn out? These are the questions raised as the story unfolds.

It’s been “interpreted” psychoanalytically in all kinds of ways. When I finished it, I found I simply wanted to take a step back and think about the broad outlines of the story: Gregor is transformed into something loathsome, is increasingly isolated within the enclosures of his body and his room, and eventually dies. His family responds without any real compassion, dutifully supplying scraps of food but becoming gradually more neglectful. They never understand that it is still Gregor inside the transformed exterior. Last but not least, they are transformed themselves into both more independent people — previously Gregor was the provider for the family — and more bestial, callous people. When he dies, they feel released.

It’s thoroughly depressing. It has a way of getting under the skin because it raises questions about what is bug-like or bestial in modern life — how our humanity may be affected by our values and routines and expectations of one another. Kafka develops the incredible, fantastical tale using a realistic, documentary tone. To me the whole thing reads like a dream where the strangest things can happen, but in our dream selves we don’t question them; we adapt and react and live in the alternative terms of the dream.

Maybe it’s this — Kafka’s creation of an air-tight fictional illusion — that explains why The Metamorphosis is pretty much universally lauded as a masterpiece. But like so many masterpieces, it disturbs, and leaves me with the sense that I see bits and pieces but miss many facets of its meaning. I can’t say as it was enjoyable to read; I’m glad to move on to something else now. But it does send me into this day with a heightened sense of how we treat one another.

Goodnight Mister Tom

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8

Goodnight Mister Tom is… heartbreaking. Inspiring. Eye-opening.

It’s heartbreaking because it depicts two ways people can damage and destroy one another: child abuse and war. William Beech, a little boy evacuated from a London slum to the English country village of Weirwold during World War II, comes out of a home where he “didn’t get much lovin’,” as his guardian Tom Oakley puts it. In fact he has been terribly abused in ways that become apparent as the story unfolds. His mother compounds her crimes by inflicting them in the name of the a distorted religious fanaticism.

William’s stay with Tom Oakley is redemptive for both of them. Tom, widowed forty years earlier, is transformed in the project of caring for Willie. “In his grief he had cut homself off from people,” the narrator explains, “and when he had recovered he had lost the habit of socializing.” Gruff, intuitive, and practically compassionate, he provides a stable foundation for William to develop. I found him an inspiring character.

I liked the way that kindness and generosity were depicted in the down-to-earth people of Weirwold. It was a great reminder that sometimes the most profound healing and growth can come from simple things. In an age of specialists, I found this theme refreshing.

So, what’s left? Heartbreaking, check. Inspiring, check. I also found the book eye-opening as a glimpse into a chapter of history I feel like I’m just discovering. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society focused on the British people during this era as well, though the focus was on a different locale. I’m enjoying having my awareness heightened, even though the details of bombing blitzes and evacuees are sobering fare.

This was in the YA section of the library. I wouldn’t recommend it for younger children because the glimpses of abuse and loss might be a bit much to take, even though they are counterbalanced by an ultimately joyful perspective on life. But for teen through adult years this is a captivating, highly recommended read.

 

The Boundary

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2

“The Boundary” is one of the short stories in Wendell Berry’s The Wild Birds. I reread it this week and found it as extraordinarily powerful as I did the first time over 15 years ago. It’s about Mat Feltner, a figure well-known to those familiar with the Port William community of Berry’s fiction. In this story, Mat is 80 years old and physically weak. One day Mat goes to check on a fenceline he’s worried may not be in good repair.

That boundary turns out to be in good shape, solid and well maintained by Nathan Coulter, who has shouldered much of the hard labor of the Feltner farm in Mat’s declining health. But the other boundaries Mat encounters on his afternoon walk into the woods are more permeable: the boundaries between past and present, between time and eternity, between life and death. His pleasant walk down the creek, and the labor to return, turn into a life and death struggle.

One of the themes of the tale is the presentness of the past. It’s a recurring idea in Berry’s writing, and here it’s manifest through Mat’s journey through a woods populated with ghosts, people who have worked with him along the creek and left their memory and their mark on the land. The effect is to collapse all times together, and the suggestion of an eternity released from linear time becomes even more significant when Mat thinks, time and again, “I could stay here.” But what keeps him going in the effort to get back home is his love for Margaret, waiting and worrying, he knows, at home.

I always marvel at the prescience with which Berry writes about old age. He is someone who has listened, like Andy Catlett in The Memory of Old Jack, to the stories of the elderly, and he’s learned well the paths they travel from past to present and back again. Part of the power of this story is in Berry’s ability to bring the reader into the same experience of empathy. I have the sense when I read that this tale is a commemoration of stories Berry has listened to, whether in the exact details or simply in the perfect recreation of the mind of someone inhabiting that boundary between present and past.

The potato peel book

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7

I know. Everyone was reading and talking about The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society last year, and the year before that too. I can’t say it was even on my TBR list, but I was shelf browsing at the library and there it was. So now I’ve read it.

The basic story has already been summarized many times in the blogosphere. It’s a post World War II epistolary novel about life on Guernsey during and after the German occupation. It’s also a love story between a London author and pretty much everyone she corresponds with, especially one fellow whom she finally marries.

It was an enjoyable read, and here are some of the things it got me thinking about:

  • I’m not immediately attracted to epistolary novels, but all the correspondents here are so witty it held my attention. It reminded me a lot of 84 Charing Cross Road, but with a fuller cast of letter-writers. It got me thinking about whether there are parallels between these epistolary relationships and the ones that form online. In this book the characters meet “IRL,” and no one is disappointed (my lurking fear about meeting anyone from the blogosphere in real life). Is who we are in print closer to our true selves, or further away? Are we better/smarter/more diplomatic in writing than face-to-face? These kinds of questions occurred to me as I read. (I haven’t answered them…)
  • The characters were all much too clever to be believable, actually.
  • The ending felt sudden and predictable — like the authors were playing hide-and-seek, got tired of waiting to be found out, and decided to end things quickly.
  • It was very clever, and for awhile I thought that was all it was. But it brought me to tears more than once, so beneath the entertainment was a human story that pulled my human heartstrings.
  • I learned a little about what the occupation felt like.
  • There was sort of a spiritual theme, worked out through comments the characters made about their readings and their neighbors and their life choices, and through the one stock religious hypocrite character. This was mostly a source of frustration for me, as there were no genuine people of faith featured. Even among the “bad guys” — the Germans — there was one decent character. But not among the Christians.
  • Reading. I really enjoyed the depiction of books as food for the soul, and as footholds of meaning in a chaotic time. The characters respond to their reading in non-academic, deeply personal ways, and virtually everyone in the literary society comes off looking unpretentiously erudite. Is this further evidence of my feeling that the characters are too clever to be believable? Or is it actually the case that when we read — at least, when we read the kinds of classics that these folks read — we can be raised out of sleepy passivity into a higher sphere of thought?

If I were in the habit of rating books, I wouldn’t call this a great one. But I still enjoyed it immensely. It provided for me what my favorite prof in college used to call “an encapsulating aesthetic experience.” There was an effortlessness to reading it. I can see why it has been so popular.