Lorrie Moore

If you’re following this blog with any regularity, I’m sure you’re relieved that I’m off my JCO’s A Widow’s Story bender.  I’m “recovering.”  Like they say, one day at a time…

I just had a fun weekend in Madison, which I had never been to.  It is a cool, hip, funky, populist town where everyone looks cool, hip and funky.  On Williamson Street where we were staying, I saw a guy sweeping his sidewalk whose hair was pretty much like a large, flattened broom head sticking straight up on top of his skull, held upright by some spackling substance. Very cool, hip and funky.  Every restaurant listed which local farms its food was from, and every cafe had kombucha on the menu.  Though I am certainly cool, hip and funky, the only reason I even know what kombucha is is because two women in my yoga class, an acupuncturist and homeopathic doctor, make it.  I’ve never tasted it.  For those of you not cool, hip, and funky enough to know, kombucha is an effervescent fermented tea that’s supposed to be good for you.

Being in Madison made me remember Lorrie Moore’s novel, The Gate at the Stairs, which I didn’t find particularly successful as a novel.  I love her wonderful short stories but Gate seemed disjointed, as if she had cobbled together too many things that she couldn’t meld.  Her form might be the short story and not the novel, was what I thought.  The story itself, the plot, didn’t grab me.  And there was a scene towards the end in which Tassie Keltjim, the young university student who narrates the novel, climbs into a coffin with a dead person that caused me to go, Oh Come on!

But Madison made me think about Moore, who has taught at the U. of Wisconsin there for many years. Gate is set in a Madison-like mid-western university town call Troy, “the ‘Athens of the Midwest,’” a hilarious oxymoron in my opinion, pure Lorrie Moore.  When we strolled the campus I kept hoping I’d see her.  Not that I know her, but I thought I’d recognize her from photos or a from a couple of her readings.  It’s funny how that novel, which I hadn’t read since it came out in 2009, kept coming to mind, superimposing itself on my experience of Madison.  When we ate at a nice restaurant there, I heard a faint echo, as if dinner were being narrated by Moore.

One of the characters in The Gate at the Stairs, Sarah, owns just such a restaurant as we dined in.  Tassie, who will become the baby-sitter for Sarah and her husband’s adopted baby, comments on Sarah’s restaurant:

“Le Petit Moulin. I knew of it a little. It was one of those expensive restaurants downtown, every entrée freshly hairy with dill, every soup and dessert dripped upon as preciously as a Pollock, filets and cutlets sprinkled with lavender dust once owned by pixies…I knew Le Petit Moulin served things that sounded like instruments—timbales, quenelles—God only knew what they were…The lowest price for dinner was twenty-two dollars, the highest, forty-five. Forty-five! You could get an oil-and-water bra for that price!”

I had no idea what an oil and water bra was, so I Googled it. They are bras filled with oil and water, believe it or not.  Now I want one.

Tassie grew up in the country nearby, and seeing the landscape around Madison and some of the fresh-faced Wisconsin students on campus brought to mind this passage from the novel:

“I had come from Dellacrosse Central High, from a small farm on the old Perryville Road, to this university town of Troy, ‘the Athens of the Midwest,’ as if from a cave, like the priest-child of a Columbian tribe I’d read about in Cultural Anthropology, a boy made mystical by being kept in the dark for the bulk of his childhood and allowed only stories—no experience—of the outside world. Once brought out into light, he would be in a perpetual, holy condition of bedazzlement and wonder; no story would ever have been equal to the thing itself. And so it was with me. Nothing had really prepared me. Not the college piggy bank in the dining room, the savings bonds from my grandparents, or the used set of World Book encyclopedias with their beautiful color charts of international wheat production and photographs of presidential birthplaces. The flat green world of my parents’ hogless, horseless farm—its dullness, its flies, its quiet ripped open daily by the fumes and whining of machinery—twisted away and left me with a brilliant city life of books and films and witty friends. Someone had turned on the lights. Someone had led me out of the cave—of Perryville Road. My brain was on fire with Chaucer, Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir. Twice a week a young professor named Thad, dressed in jeans and a tie, stood before a lecture hall of stunned farm kids like me and spoke thrillingly of Henry James’s masturbation of the comma. I was riveted. I had never before seen a man wear jeans with a tie.” Read More

What to read next?

In my last post, I talked about how there are a million books out there to read (and listed some places to read reviews of them).  Then I got myself in trouble by saying I wanted to give more thought to how and why I choose certain books and that I would report back.  Now I feel obliged to report back, not that I think anyone is holding his or her breath.  Turns out I don’t know why I pick books, beyond certain X factors that seem to vary from book to book.  It’s usually a combination of things that reach a critical mass: maybe the subject matter or theme; maybe I’ve loved other books by the author; or maybe I’ve never heard of the writer and am curious; maybe the title; maybe a rave recommendation from a reader/friend; maybe a glowing review; maybe it’s a book by someone I know; maybe the number of times the book crosses my radar.  There are other more mysterious X factors, no doubt, such as something about the writer’s sensibility I am attracted to, picked up almost subliminally from somewhere, or something in myself that isn’t quite conscious.  When enough of these elements come together around a certain book, I decide to read it.  Nothing too mind-blowing there.

I should state my biases up front.  I mainly read literary fiction and memoir.  I’m not proud of this, it’s just a fact.  I admire people who read more widely than I do, but when I read a book it’s probably going to be a novel or memoir.  That’s because I’m trying to write fiction and memoir myself.  There’s a never ending fascination with how other people do it and the hope that some of how they do it well will rub off on me.  Anthony Doerr puts it this way: “Reading is everything to me as a writer.  It’s where I go when I get discouraged, when I forget why it is I wanted to be a writer in the first place.  And books are where I go when I want to be reminded of the mystery and magic of our shared language.”  I read books that are going to feed the writer in me.  I’m not interested in books that aren’t well written or literary, in the sense that some attention is paid to style and language.

Right now the book I’m reading is Joyce Carol Oates’ memoir, A Widow’s Story.  I picked it because I wanted to know about the experience of becoming a widow.  I know many people who have lost their partners.   I really can’t imagine what that is like.  This past June my cousin David Bates was killed suddenly by a falling tree (June 29^th 2011 post), making his wife of  40 years an instant widow.  I have witnessed the excruciating sense of bewilderment, loss, grief, anger, and adjustment widowhood has thrust upon her.  I fear becoming a widow myself.  Reading about it is an attempt to gain some insight or perhaps preparation for what seems unimaginable, but which happens all the time.  It could happen to me.

I had read an excerpt of A Widow’s Story in The New Yorker, so was familiar with it.  At the time, I didn’t feel particularly interested in reading the whole book.  But I recently read Blue Nights by Joan Didion, about the death of her daughter and her own aging.  One of the themes I’m attracted to in books is loss.  Loss, death, aging…I’m a barrel of fun.  I read Didion because I wanted to know more about the experience of losing a child, another loss I can’t imagine.  I had read her memoir on widowhood, The Year of Magical Thinking, several years ago and reading her again somehow brought to mind Oates’ memoir.  I hadn’t read any autobiographical writing by JCO, so I was curious to see what that writing was like.  The New Yorker piece had seemed raw, unmitigated by the passage of time, as straightforward as its title.  I thought A Widow’s Story might bring me close in to the experience of widowhood and I was right.  I’m riveted by the book.  I’ll review it in a post here when I finish. Read More

Millions of Cats

As a child I loved a book called One Million Cats.  A quick Google search reveals it was a picture book written and illustrated by Wanda Gág in 1928.  It won a Newberry Honor award in 1929, one of the few picture books to do so.  One Million Cats is the oldest American picture book in print.

But enough factoids.  This is a great book!  An elderly couple is lonely and the wife wants a cat to love.  So her husband goes out to find one, and comes upon a hillside covered in “hundreds of cats, thousands of cats, millions and billions and trillions of cats.”  The old man can’t decide among all the cats which is the most beautiful.   Each seems so lovely he’d like to keep them all. He goes back home with all the cats following him.  Just imagine the illustrations!

To five year old me, this was a thrilling story.   It still is.  A million cats!  Not even one too many.  In one of those kick-in-the-pants ironies that Life loves to serve up, my sister–who was allergic to cats when we were growing up, so that we had to keep our cats outdoors (which worked in South Carolina)– now has just slightly less than a million cats.  She has about six or eight at home (strays find their way to her door with amazing radar), runs a no-kill cat shelter, and feeds feral cats at a colony, while cat-crazy me married someone who is allergic to cats and can have none.

One Million Cats came to my mind as I was contemplating writing about how people, myself included, find and choose books to read. Read More

What to read next?

In my husband’s January 18 Princeton Alumni Weekly, there’s an article by Christopher Shea entitled “The New Tastemakers,” with the subheading “Few newspapers review books these days. So who does?”

I had just finished reading Joan Didion’s Blue Nights, which I didn’t care for (so that’s all I’m going to say about it), and I needed a new book to read.  I had started several books lately that I couldn’t finish, which set me to thinking about how I find books and how I choose what to read.  It’s so fine to have a good book to read–to feel engrossed, transported, enlivened.  And it’s as bad as being bored or restless not to have a book you just can’t wait to get back to.  Maybe it’s the same thing.

The way I find books seems haphazard at best, as it probably should be. Word of mouth, Amazon reviews, New York Times Book Review, the daily Times reviews, and of course, here in the Twin Cities the  Star Tribune (known locally as the Strib) book reviews.  Shea talks in his article about how newspapers and magazines have cut back on book reviewing, shedding or radically shrinking their literary sections.  (He also talks about where people are looking these days for reviews and recommendations.  I’ll post on that at a later date.)  In the Strib we still have two full book review pages every Sunday, plus reviews several times a week.

I pulled last Sunday’s Strib Books section (February 19^th) out of recycling.  There was a large center page review of Rez Life: An Indian’s Journey through Reservation Life, by Minnesota’s own David Treuer (Atlantic Monthly Press).  On the opposite page was a review of The Operations, by Michael Hastings, about “the abbreviated career of General Stanley McChrystal and laying bare the cozy relationship among the military, the media and others with the ‘Washington psyche.’”  It was published by Blue Rider Press, which I had never heard of, but then every day brings at least one thing I’ve never heard of.  Other books reviewed were Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck, non-fiction about how humans are drawn to the dark and ghoulish, by Eric G. Wilson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux); Drifting House, by Krys Lee, a debut short story collection (Viking); Holding Our World Together, by Ojibwe author Brenda J. Child, a nonfiction book about “how Indian women have long fought on the front lines to preserve their culture’s traditions (Viking/Penguin);” The Flight of Gemma Hardy, a novel by Margot Livesey, a “modern version of Jane Eyre set in Scotland during the 1960s” (Harper).  In addition to the reviews there’s a column called “book events” listing all the readings and literary events in the area in the coming week (including three by authors reviewed that Sunday); and “Bookmark,” Books editor Laurie Hertzel’s weekly column with local book news, such as the lead-story, “Literary Speed Dating,” in which the grand James J. Hill Library in St. Paul is going to host a “single-mingle” evening, where people discuss literature with prospective dates in two-minute conversations.  Only in St. Paul…

Mon dieu!  I had been taking our books section too much for granted!   It’s really impressive, a rich resource for readers.

Laurie Hertzel, Senior Books Editor, Star Tribune (I want her hair)

I wondered how the book are selected for review in the Strib, so I emailed Laurie Hertzel and asked her if she’d mind telling me. I’d post about it, I told her, since I figured other people might be interested.  Laurie is a writer herself, the author of News to Me: Adventures of an Accidental Journalist, which won the Reader’s Choice Award at the 2011 Minnesota Book Awards (http://www.lauriehertzel.com).  She’s a great champion and supporter of our local literary scene.  Here’s what she had to say: Read More

Lost Memory of Skin by Russell Banks

What an evocative and enigmatic title Lost Memory of Skin is.  It may have been what drew me to the book originally, before I knew what it was about, along with wanting to read another novel by Russell Banks, a writer I admire tremendously. Lost Memory turns out to be an ambitious, thoughtful, morally complex and deeply compassionate novel, and while it doesn’t always succeed, it’s an amazing accomplishment. I’m glad I read it, even though it was painful.

It has one of the most fascinating and poignant characterizations I’ve read.  The Kid, a twenty-two year old convicted sex offender who has never kissed a girl, is seared in my memory.

The Kid is one of those invisible, lost souls who has nothing going for him. He’s shorter and skinnier than most young men, looks younger than he’s supposed to, lacks education and is totally adrift–the kind of guy other people ignore.  He’s makes foolish and bad choices out of ignorance, innocence, addiction (to porn) and perhaps the deepest loneliness a human can endure.  He’s addicted to watching pornography and masturbating because those are the only times he feels real.  “The rest of the time he felt as if he were his own ghost—not quite dead but not alive either. A dust bunny shaped like a person.”  I found Banks’ portrait of him layered, credible and humane.

The descriptions of his childhood are particularly poignant. It would be too simplistic to label him “neglected,” though he certainly was.  The Kid was raised by a woman who “needs men to want her but she doesn’t want men to need her.  In fact she doesn’t want anyone to need her—not even the Kid although she does not know that and would deny it if asked.  She believes that she loves her son and has done everything for him that a single parent could and has sacrificed much of her youth for him and therefore cannot be blamed for the way he’s turned out.” Read More

French Lessons by Ellen Sussman

I’ve just enjoyed what I believe is called a good read.  It was light, sweet, non-demanding and full of sex.  I read it on the way back from NYC, and it made a great airport/airplane novel.  It was also a relief after the weight of We Need to Talk about Kevin.  So I recommend it for your next trip, especially if it’s to Paris. 

 French Lessons by Ellen Sussman is set in Paris, and is built around three young people, Nico, Phillipe, and Chantal, who are French tutors.  Now let’s see if I have this right: Chantal is sleeping with Phillipe and possibly in love with him; Nico has slept with Chantel once and is definitely in love with her; and Phillipe…hmmm, I can’t remember.  The novel traces the day each tutor spends speaking French with an American client, as well as falling in love and/or having sex.  Did I mention the sex?  The first American client is Josie, a high school French teacher who has lost her married lover to a plane crash and come to Paris because she and her lover were planning their first trip away together there.  Her love affair back in the states with Simon was one of those head over heels obsessions that involved a lot of fabulous sex.  Nico, her tutor, is wonderful, actually asking her questions about herself and even listening to the answers, flirtatious, kind, sensitive, a poet and French.  They play with the idea of running away to Provence together, as Josie traces the backstory of her affair and loss. 

The second story belongs to Riley, who has lived in Paris a year, hates it, is in a troubled marriage, and has two young children.  She scores Phillipe as her French tutor, and Phillipe, being Phillipe,  ends up making love to her as apparently only the French can.  All the people in this novel have really great sex.  Everyone is young, good looking, and horny.  The men have no trouble getting it up and the women never get cystitis.   It makes you want to go to Paris and hire a French tutor.  By the end of her French lesson, so to speak, Riley discovers she loves Paris…

I suppose at this point it appears I’m making fun of the novel, but I’m not.  Not really.  Really!  I enjoyed it, sex and all.  It’s really delicious in its way, like a good French pastry.  You wouldn’t want to make a steady diet of it, but it has its appeal.  The writing is lively and I was interested in the characters and their love/sex lives and even though it seemed fantasy-like, over the top, we all need a little pain au chocolat in our lives from time to time.

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We Need to Talk about Kevin

Now that I’ve read We Need to Talk about Kevin, I understand better why Lionel Shriver’s initial agent (I posted about this on October 5, under “A Cautionary Agent Tale”) refused to try to sell it.  But I’m not willing to let that agent off the hook.  Not by a long shot.  I think it was terrible judgment, not just in hindsight because the novel became such a success (and is now a movie) but because the book has such brilliant writing, exceptional characterizations, and mesmerizing power.  I can pretty much promise you will not forget Kevin, or the novel.  It’s like a burning ember that falls on your skin and leaves a scar there.  Searing is the word that comes to mind.   

Kevin, the almost sixteen year old son, makes your run of the mill psychopath look like Jesus Christ.  He is so far along on the continuum of BAD that he falls off the edge, into a whole other category altogether.  And apparently he’s been this way since birth.  He is characterized as having an innate antipathy towards life, his own and others.  Masterfully manipulative and apparently without any of the normal human tools that allow people to relate, understand and empathize with one another, he is one of the most fascinating, complex, intelligent and amoral characters you will ever meet in fiction, though hopefully never in life.  It’s truly a tour de force characterization. 

He is pitted against his mother, Eva, who wants to feel maternal love towards him, but who is absolutely unable to, again from the moment of his birth.  Ambivalent about getting pregnant, she gets Kevin.  She has her own brilliant talent for seeing the truth about Kevin, while her husband, Franklin, can only see him through rose-colored glasses.  This makes for a somewhat absurd and to some extent annoying dichotomy, which is worked throughout the book: Eva sees Kevin as doing no right, Franklin sees him as doing no wrong. But Eva is correct: the incidents and anecdotes that dramatize Kevin’s maliciousness are so vivid, original and convincing as to make the hair on the back of your neck stand on end, the way it does when a predator is near.  One of the novel’s weaknesses is that Franklin is portrayed as stupidly blind and naïve (yet Eva keeps insisting on how much she loves him—unlikely, given that Eva suffers no fools). But the whole book is structured around these two parental views of Kevin, and to modulate either one would be to wreck the whole thing. 

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"to be sung underwater" by Tom McNeal

I fell in love with Tom McNeal’s To Be Sung Underwater from the first few paragraphs of the first chapter—and if ever there was a novel for which falling is love is the appropriate reaction, this is it, because it’s so totally about falling in love (and getting stuck there—but more on that later). 

Those first sentences were the literary equivalent for me of meeting a tall, dark stranger.  I fell in love at first sight with the voice (to mix metaphors) of the novel.  The authoritative, omniscient narrator took such powerful, confident command of the story that it freed the reader in me to give myself completely to it.  I was in over my head before I knew it.  The language and density of the prose, the encapsulation of what was to come, the themes announced and the situation introduced in these three brief paragraphs–all produced a feeling of excitement and joy in me.  I couldn’t wait to devour the whole thing.    

Here is the opening section of the first chapter:

“The swerve (to use Judith’s own term) that slipped her outside the customary course of her life derived from one of those off-hand moments in which odd circumstances and amplified emotions invite an odd and overcolored response. Amusement was the presumed objective, whatever the actual result might be.

‘It was strange,’ she said when she spoke of it, which was only once, and much later, to her friend Lucy Meynke.  ‘My life had utterly settled into itself and then this little…swerve occurred, or maybe I meant it to occur, maybe I’d actually plotted it out in one of those corners of your brain or heart you access only in dreams.’ She gave Lucy Meynke a look of actual bafflement. ‘I really don’t know.’

At the time, though, it seemed simple.  Judith was renting a storage garage for some old furniture and when, late in the transaction, she was asked her name, she gave one that was not her own, a name that in fact she hadn’t thought of in years.  A few hours later, Judith, who was not a loser of keys, lost a key.”

How I admire this opening: how loaded it is, how it stays a few steps ahead of the reader, how knowing it is.  All will be revealed, but in the author’s own good time.  I was intrigued, and already smitten.  And I wasn’t disappointed as I read on.

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Room  by Emma Donoghue is a weird book.  I’ve never read anything quite like it.  But then again I’ve never read any book written in the voice of a five year old. 

The novel must be based on the real life story of Jacyee Dugard, who was kidnapped at eleven from a bus stop near her home in California and held for eighteen years,  suffering constant sexual abuse and isolation for many of those years, and bearing two children by her kidnapper.  I watched the Diane Sawyer interview with Dugard, and I am currently #276 on the list of 802 requests at the library for Dugard’s aptly named memoir, A Stolen Life, which is high on the NYT best seller list.  I realize there is a voyeurist element to wanting to know about this experience, but beyond that, for me and obviously many others there is a fascination with how someone survives such a total assault on identity, self and will.  I was amazed by Dugard in the interview.  I don’t know what I expected–someone insane, pathetic or broken?  A total mess?   But she came across as normal, intelligent, thoughtful, and from what I could tell, pretty okay.  One thing that particularly interested me was her determination to tell/write her story.  It is the impulse of many memoirists – to take control of an experience, to hold it out there instead of inside, to see it for what it is and have others see it as you do.  I will be curious to read her memoir, not just to see what that unimaginable experience was like, but how she has processed what happened to her and what she makes of it now. 

Room, Emma Donoghue’s novel,  is written from the perspective of the five year old son of a woman, who, like Dugard, has been kidnapped, in her case at 19, and held in an 11 X 11 soundproof room by a sexual predator for the past seven years.  During that time she has given birth, by herself, to Jack, the irresistible, charming, precocious narrator of the novel.  All he knows of the world is that one small space, which he calls Room, just as he names and befriends the other limited objects and items available to him and his mother– i.e. Rug, Stove, Under Bed, and Wardrobe, where Ma sequesters Jack out of sight when she has to endure sexual visits from Old Nick, her captor.  Startlingly to Jack, Ma begins to introduce Outside, which is everything outside their room, the larger world, which he has no concept of.  They have a TV, which is Jack’s only exposure to everything outside of Room, and he can’t quite grasp that what his mother describes is different or real in a way TV isn’t. He tries to sort out what he has no direct experience of: “Bunnies are TV but carrots are real, I like their loudness…Mountains are too big to be real, I saw one in TV that had a woman hanging on it by ropes.  Women aren’t real like Ma is, and girls and boys not either.  Men aren’t real except Old Nick, and I’m not actually sure if he’s real for real.  Maybe half?” 

Jack’s mother has established a highly creative, stimulating environment for him within Room, and he’s a happy kid, constantly entertained and educated by Ma, who strives mightily to keep things as lovely and “normal” for Jack as she can.  We see Ma only through Jack’s perspective, but from our adult knowledge we grimace at what life is like for her: to be locked in 24/7 with her bright, inquisitive child whom she loves beyond life, whom she strives to protect from the ugliness and grimness of their situation and to have to be everything for him, while living in fear that Old Nick will punish her for so-called transgressions by turning off their heat or denying them groceries.  Excruciating.  And yet the book is not grim, thanks to the delightful persona of Jack, for whom the world, even in one room, is full of exciting, interesting experiences, and the total, constant love of his mother. 

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James Baldwin

Race relations, for lack of a better term, are much on my mind as I work on a novel about a lynching in my hometown of Greenville, S.C. in 1947.  I have also been irked recently by the movie “The Help” (I felt the same way about the book).  Irked, because racism in the Jim Crow South was so real, true, and terrible that I hate to see it portrayed in ways that seem to me crude, simplistic and in many ways phony. The white women are such one-dimensional caricatures that “The Help” mistakenly suggests that all white women who employed maids were simply awful people, when in fact many of them were nice enough. By portraying them as despicable, “The Help” skews the fact that racism was so pervasive and accepted that even “nice” people operated within it as if it were a given, like God and country.  You didn’t have to be a Hilly and insist on outside bathrooms.  Without, I hope, sounding like an apologist for racism, the white women I knew who had maids, including my mother, were not crude or cruel. There is no denying they benefited from the racist system, took advantage of it, and the racism they were part of was wrong and damaging in the extreme.  But the relationships I experienced between maids and white women were not the rigid, hateful, punishing ones portrayed in the movie.  It was more insidious, in a way, BECAUSE the white people weren’t simplistic villains.  So while the book/movie is correct in capturing the racism that maids endured, it does so in a way that lacks complexity and nuance to me. It creates white villains, with the exception of the young, white liberal Skeeter with whom the audience can identify  and feel superior to the AWFUL white women who treated their maids so horrendously. 

 The portrayal of the Black women I found more true to life (with Viola Davis a magnificent actress), but I don’t feel qualified to speak for how Blacks feel about those characters and depictions.  I have my doubts that maids would have been willing to tell their stories to a Skeeter.  That seems to me pure fantasy, as did a number of other plot turns—which I object to because racism was so real why create a story that falsifies in some important ways the actual reality?  While it is conceivable I suppose that a maid would put shit in a pie and serve it to a hated white employer, there is no way that that maid would TELL the woman she had eaten shit!  I mean, come on, you can’t have it both ways: Jim Crow South with the threat of violence keeping Blacks in their place…and a Black woman telling a white woman she’s just eaten her shit!  Never happen.

But maybe the broad, simplified strokes of the book/movie are what have made it so popular.  People get to have an entertaining experience in which they feel they’re learning something (and are, in a way) and get to have a satisfying emotional experience that is essentially a fairy tale.  Lots of people love it and have maybe seen the truth of racism in a way they haven’t experienced before. So that is worth something, I suppose.

Musing over all this, I realize that I don’t consider The Help actual literature, and maybe that’s why I take such issue with it. It’s pop culture.  So maybe I should accept it as that.  I posted about another novel (on June 3rd, 2011) called Four Spirits which I’m recommending to people, real literature which has a much deeper, truer depiction of the racist South and the Civil Rights movement. The characters are fully developed, complicated and complex, and even the villains are shaded to some extent.  Even though it is historical fiction, it does not falsify what could have happened.  It does what real literature does, which is feed our souls, not just offer a popcorn version of the truth. 

Then I remembered a short story by James Baldwin that I hadn’t read in years and which I suddenly had to reread as an antidote to The Help: “Come out the Wilderness.”  It’s such a powerful and moving story that captures so much complexity about so many human emotions and interactions that it makes my eyes water. You could say it’s about “race relations” but really, that reduces it in the way The Help reduces race relations, when in fact “Wilderness” is tremendously about a human being in pain, specifically a young black woman, Ruth,   who is in love with a white painter who is preparing to leave her, and whom she loves and hates with all the passion of a hopeless love affair, compounded by the racial mix.  Ruth left the South after being falsely accused by her family of sleeping with a boy when she was seventeen, with her brother saying to her, “You dirty…you dirty..you black and dirty—.”  She escapes via an older man to Manhattan, leaving behind her place and people to try to forge a better life than what was available back home.  Back home, her mother is a maid, her father works on the oyster boats, and “after a lifetime of labor, should they drop dead tomorrow, there would not be a penny for their burial clothes.”  It’s her mother’s song which gives title to the story: “And she remembered her mother, half-humming, half-singing, with a steady, tense beat that would have made any blues singer sit up and listen (though she thought it best not to say this to her mother):

Come out the wilderness,
Come out the wilderness.
How did you feel when you come out the wilderness,
Leaning on the Lord?”

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