Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

Cain murdered Abel, and blood cried out from the earth; the house fell on Job's children, and a voice was induced or provoked into speaking from a whirlwind; and Rachel mourned for her children; and David for Absalom. The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted. That is why the first event is known to have been an expulsion, and the last is hoped to be a reconciliation and return. So memory pulls us forward, so prophecy is only brilliant memory--there will be a garden where all of us as one child will sleep in our mother Eve, hooped in her ribs and staved by her spine.

Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping is revelatory--both in the sense that it was, for me, a revelation to discover a novel of such clear, confident prose, and in the sense that it communicates an apocalyptic vision of the world, one which promises a final unification of all things.

Ruth, the novel's heroine, lives in a life of constant abandonment in the remote far West town of Fingerbone. Her grandfather (in a train) and her mother (in an automobile) plunged into the same lake. Her guardian great-aunts, Lily and Nona, foist Ruth and her sister Lucille off on their aunt Sylvie, who returns from a drifter's life to take care of them.

Sylvie is peculiar. Like a transient, she sleeps on the top of her sheets, in her shoes. She seems not to care that Ruth and Lucille do not attend school. She keeps the light off in the parlor to hide the mounting collections of tin cans and old newspapers. Lucille, understandably, does not like her. But Sylvie acts the prophet for Ruth, communicating through her actions the possibility that time will bring all things back together:

Who would think of dusting or sweeping the cobwebs down in a room used for the storage of cans and newspapers--things utterly without value? Sylvie only kept them, I think, because she considered accumulation to be the essence of housekeeping, and because she considered the hoarding of worthless things to be proof of a particularly scrupulous thrift.

It seems to me that Housekeeping is the kind of book that could only be written in America, where we struggle with the consequences of fierce individualism and expansionism, and even then only in the West, which is the frontier also of that struggle. Isolated and "chastened... by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere," the town of Fingerbone longs to be knit back into that whole. Not only with the rest of the world, but with the lake it surrounds, which Ruth frequently imagines as a parallel world where the dead live, inaccessible. Even the name "Fingerbone" suggests the limitations of flesh and bone, which prevent us from joining the spiritual realm.

Sylvie's haphazard care threatens to have Ruth taken away, because like all prophets, she is misunderstood:

Imagine that Noah knocked his house apart and used the planks to build an ark, while his neighbors looked on, full of doubt. A house, he must have told them, should be daubed with pitch and built to float cloud high, if need be. A lettuce patch was of no use at all, and a good foundation was worse than useless. A house should have a compass and a keel. The neighbors would have put their hands in their pockets and chewed their lips and strolled home to houses they now found wanting in ways they could not understand.

This really striking parable becomes truth twice--once literally, when the town floods, and once figuratively, when Sylvie finally impresses Ruth into a life of drifting. Houses and homes, perhaps, are doomed attempts to connect with one's environment. I also love the bold, sharply American way that Robinson rewrites these Biblical tales, which she does even with the Gospel:

And when He did die it was sad--such a young man, so full of promise, and His mother wept and His friends could not believe the loss, and the story spread everywhere and the mourning would not be comforted, until He was so sharply lacked and so powerfully remembered that his friends felt Him beside them as they walked along the road, and saw someone cooking fish on the shore and knew it to be Him, and sat down to supper with Him, all wounded as He was. There is so little to remember of anyone--an anecdote, a conversation at table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the hear in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not meant to keep us waiting so long.

I find that piece of prose incredibly difficult to respond to in writing. Beyond its simple beauty, it is incredibly, outrageously bold, and yet, its spirit seems to me to be in keeping with the Gospel. And its hope is boundless! As Robinson tells us, "That most moments were substantially the same did not detract at all from the possibility that the next moment might be utterly different." Life can be such a patched-up, threadbare affair, but fear not:

For why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of a hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are a sleep, and even when we are so old that our thoughts have abandoned other business? What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?

04 Seven Plays Sam Shepard

This collection is all about two plays for most people: True West and Buried Child. I recommend Curse of the Starving Class too, but I’m just going to post about True West, it’s my favorite. Buried Child won the Pulitzer in ’79, so, you know, check this collection out.

While critically acclaimed, Shepard writes damn good works of drama. He creates perfect dialogue. He also writes gritty scenes that find a way of remaining real in a setting I like to imagine being surreal. The settings of his plays recreate various locales of the Southwestern United States. If you’ve ever been there, you know how enchanting and mysterious the land can be. Shepard captures that enchantment.

True West is about Lee and Austin. Austin, the younger brother, is staying at his mother’s house (she’s vacationing) trying to finish a screenplay for a Hollywood producer. Lee is a petty thief looking for an easy payday as he runs from his debts. There is little respect between these two. The fighting brother dynamic is thrown into full effect as Austin is trying to take care of the house and finish his play. The conversation centers around how each brother survives. Each thinks they have life figured out. Austin writes, and he lives on the straight and narrow. Lee has a life of crime, but he also has “true to life” stories to tell:

Austin: Nobody can disappear. The old man tried that. Look where it got him. He lost his teeth

Lee: He never had any money.

Austin: I don’t mean that. I mean his teeth! His real teeth. First he lost his real teeth, then he lost his false teeth. You never knew that did ya’? He never confided in you.

Lee: Nah, I never knew that.

Austin: You wanna’ drink? Yeah, he lost his real teeth one at a time. Woke up every morning with another tooth lying on the mattress. Finally, he decides he’s gotta’ get ‘em all pulled out but he doesn’t have any money. Middle of Arizona with no money and no insurance and every morning another tooth is lying on the mattress. So what does he do?

Lee: I dunno’. I never knew about that.

Austin: So he locates a Mexican dentist in Juarez who’ll do the whole thin for a song. And he takes off hitchhicking to the border.

Lee: Hitchhiking?

Austin: Yeah. So how long you thing it takes him to get to the border? A man his age?

Lee: I dunno.

Austin: Eight days it takes him. Eight days in the rain and the sun and every day he’s droppin’ teeth on the blacktop and nobody’ll pick him up ‘cause his mouth’s full a’ blood. So finally he stumbles into the dentist. Dentist takes his money and all his teeth. And there he is, in Mexico, with his gums sewed up and his pockets empty.

Lee: That’s it?

Austin: Then I go out to see him, see. I go out there and I take him out for a nice Chinese dinner. But he doesn’t eat. All he wants to do is drink Martinis outa’ plastic cups. And he takes his teeth out and lays ‘em on the table ‘cause he can’t stand the feel of ‘em. And we ask the waitress for one a’ those doggie bags to take the Chop Suey home in. So he drops his teeth in the doggie bag along with the Chop Suey. And then we go out to hit all the bars up and down the highway. Says he wants to introduce me to all his buddies. And in one a’ those bars, in one a’ those bars up and down the highway, he left that doggie bag with his teeth laying in the Chop Suey.

Lee: You never found it?

Austin: We went back but we never did find it. (pause) Now that’s a true story. True to life.

Ultimately Austin wants to write these true to life stories but never experienced anything himself. When the producer Saul comes to check on Austin’s screenplay, Lee pitches him a story and Saul decides that Lee’s story is what Austin should be writing. Through nine scenes, this play allows the brothers to believe they should be living the life of the other. Fighting is the only way to solve this problem. Actually, fighting is the only way to solve any problem. Three cheers for Sam!

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

"Is it your idea, then, that I should live with you as your mistress--since I can't be your wife?" she asked.

The crudeness of the question startled him: the word was one that women of his class fought shy of, even when their talk flitted closest about the topic. He noticed that Madame Olenska pronounced it as if it had a recognised place in her vocabulary, and he wondered if it had been used familiarly in her presence in the horrible life she had fled from. Her question pulled him up with a jerk, and he floundered.

"I want--I want somehow to get away with you into a world where words like that--categories like that--won't exist. Where we shall be simply two beings who love each other, who are the whole of life to each other; and nothing else on earth will matter."

She drew a deep sigh that ended in another laugh. "Oh, my dear--where is that country? Have you ever been there?" she asked; and as he remained sullenly dumb she went on: "I know so many who've tried to find it, and ,believe me, they all got out by mistake at wayside stations: at places like Boulogne, or Pisa, or Monte Carlo--and it wasn't at all different from the old world they'd left, but only rather smaller and dingier and more promiscuous."


When I began The Age of Innocence, I was surprised by how different it seemed than Ethan Frome, a book which I loved (and is reviewed here by Brent, Liz, and Carlton). That book was set among the working classes of Starkfield, Massachussetts, and I recalled it as rustic and plain, while this is a quintessential "novel of manners", set among the socialites of nineteenth-century New York City. As different as New York must seem from Starkfield, so the prevailing tone of The Age of Innocence seems as if it belongs to a different place completely.

And so I had to laugh a little when I realized that Wharton had essentially recycled the plot for Ethan Frome--just as Ethan Frome falls in love with his wife's cousin, so Newland Archer, the protagonist of The Age of Innocence, falls in love with the Countess Olenska, the cousin of his fiancee/wife May.

But Olenska is not like the young and naive Mattie, and May is nothing like Frome's domineering wife Zeena. May is a beautiful and genial, and above all else she is highly regarded by New York society, a tightly knit cabal of the independently wealthy who live by a rigid and unspoken set of rules. It is this social code that provides the conflict for the novel; when the Countess Olenska returns to New York to escape an abusive relationship with her husband, a Polish nobleman, the luridness of her situation and her ignorance of society's intricate directives cause something of a scandal. Archer begins the book as aghast as anyone, but as he befriends Olenska at May's behest, her idiosyncrasies--like her fondness for artists and writers, and others who exist outside of society's boundaries--begin to endear her to him, and the two fall deeply in love.

There is no way for me to judge the accuracy of Wharton's depiction of New York society, but I've read that it reflects the realities of the time intricately. Beneath her carefully mannered prose is a subtle but effective satire--for instance, note the way that the socialites name their children after other "great families." Archer is named after the Newlands, but has a cousin named Vandie Newland; there are Thorley Chiverses and Rushworth Thorleys and Sillerton Jacksons and Emerson Sillertons, and more, ad nauseam. All these families are intermarried, and the combined effect is of something strangely incestual, a context reaffirmed by the bond between Archer and Olenska, who upon Archer's marriage becomes his cousin.

All this shows how pathetically small New York society is, and how isolated; when a doubly-named socialite chastises another for visiting the home of a figure on society's fringe, this cabal shows itself to be tightly, laughably isolated. The social strictures provide a sort of insulation, a comforting straitjacket, and turn human interaction into something of a perverse show:

In reality they all lived in a kind of heiroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs...

Though Countess Olenska is in many ways characterized by her naivete with regards to society, she expresses a paradoxical incisiveness that provides a strong contrast:

"The van der Luydens," said Archer, feeling himself pompous as he spoke, "are the most powerful influence in New York society. Unfortunately--owing to their health--they receive very seldom."

She unclasped her hand from behind her head, and looked at him meditatively.

"Isn't that perhaps the reason?"

"The reason--?"

"For their great influence; that they make themselves so rare."

He coloured a little, stared at her--and suddenly felt the penetration of the remark. At a stroke she had pricked the van der Luydens and they collapsed. He laughed, and sacrificed them.

Wharton's writing is highly constructed, subordinate, and ornate, and when she stops to write a sentence simply, it often has tremendous power, as it does here: "He laughed, and sacrificed them." Reading it over, I think perhaps this is the moment when Archer, though he fails to realize its significance, falls in love with the Countess Olenska. In a single fell swoop, she has analyzed the van der Luydens, chieftains of the social rigeur, and deflated them. This is the sort of insight that only an outside observer can bring, and Olenska remains eternally on the outside. With a laugh, as if it were nothing but a trifle, Archer follows her beyond society's boundaries.

And yet we see what she says in the first passage about that country where they can love without labeling: It is a fiction, and those who seek to find it end up only at--what a beautiful turn of phrase--"wayside stations." New York, she seems to say, is one preposterous social apparatus in a world of them, and though she and Archer love each other profoundly, where can they find freedom?

As with Ethan Frome, The Age of Innocence is a novel of frustrated love. Archer proceeds to marry May in the middle of the book, and though he continues to see Olenska every now and then, the consummation of their relationship never seems to be any more possible. In this way, The Age of Innocence is heartbreakingly cynical, as it seems to suggest that society, no matter how pointlessly constructed or cruelly arbitrary it is, remains an eternal victor over one man or woman's heart. There is a scene toward the book's end, where Archer and Olenska escape for a moment's respite into the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

His mind, as always when they first met ,was wholly absorbed in the delicious details that made her herself and no other. Presently he rose and approached the case before which she stood. Its glass shelves were crowded with small broken objects--hardly recognisable domestic utensils, ornaments and personal trifles--made of glass, of clay, of discoloured bronze and other time-blurred substances.

"It seems cruel," she said, "that after a while nothing matters... any more than these little things, that used to be necessary and important to forgotten people, and now have to be guess at under a magnifying glass and labelled: 'Use unknown'."

"Yes; but meanwhile--"

"Ah, meanwhile--"

Even in the way that it affirms the here-and-now as precious, this absolutely broke my heart. In fifty years, what will it matter that you wore the right dress at the right party thrown by the right host, when the woman you love remains forever inaccessible?

As strangely similar as this plot is to that of Ethan Frome, it seems that the parallels end there. Frome is a hen-pecked weakling with the heart of a child who falls in love with a child; we pity him from a distance. Archer and Olenska are adults who love with great foresight and consciousness; it is easy to put ourselves in their place and despair. For that, I think, it is the better novel.

Ironweed by William Kennedy

That scab was the first man Francis Phelan ever killed. His name was Harold Allen and he was a single man from Worcester, Massachussetts, a member of the IOOF, of Scotch-Irish stock, twenty-nine years old, two years of college, veteran of the Spanish-American War who had seen no combat, an itinerant house painter who found work in Albany as a strikebreaker and who was now sitting across the aisle of the bus from Francis, dressed in a long black coat and a motorman's cap.

Why did you kill me? was the question Harold Allen's eyes put to Francis.

Ironweed is a prime example of the letdown of strong memories; some books you think of very highly at one point in your life only to find upon re-reading them that, though still good, they don't live up to the way you remember them.

Francis Phelan is an ex-ballplayer, an ex-father, and an ex-husband, but he is currently a bum. He has returned to the Albany his youth with his bum ladyfriend Helen, to do bum things like taking small jobs and drinking and sleeping in old ruined cars and drinking. This is the time of the Great Depression, and Phelan's condition is unexceptional; he lives in a subterranean bum culture where he knows everyone and is known by everyone. Francis has no illusions about the cause of his poverty: He is his own downfall. But he is also the downfall of others, and on this pair of days in Albany--Halloween and All Saints' Day--he finds himself being followed by those whose death he has caused in his life. None of these murders is indefensible--the killing of the scab was (mostly) unintentional; another bum he killed when attacked; a horse thief he simply failed to pull onto a moving train-car before he was shot in the back. And yet they are attached to Francis in death nonetheless.

The most significant of these is his son Gerald, whom he dropped as an infant, a crime for which Francis has not forgiven himself and which caused him to leave home. Gerald does not follow Francis around, but they "meet" in the beginning of the book, when Francis visits the graveyard:

In his grave, a cruciformed circle, Gerald watched the advent of his father and considered what action might be appropriate to their meeting. Should he absolve the man of all guilt, not for the dropping, for that was accidental, but for the abandonment of the family, for craven flight when the steadfast virtues were called for? Gerald's grave trembled with superb possibility. Denied speech in life, having died with only monosyllabic goos and gaahs in his vocabulary, Gerald possessed the gift of tongues in death...

Gerald, through an act of silent will, imposed on his father the pressing obligation to perform his final acts of expiation for abandoning the family. You will not know, the child silently said, what these acts are until you have performed them all. And after you performed them you will not understand that they were expiatory any more than you have understood all the other expiation that has kept you in such prolonged humiliation. Then, when these final acts are complete, you will stop trying to die because of me.

Perhaps Francis sees his life as a slow death, inching aimlessly toward the grave that others keep falling into. But perhaps it is through the bum's life--the sickness, the hunger, the decreptitude--that Francis is unconsciously repaying the immensity of his sins. Late in the book Francis revisits the house of his estranged wife, and looks on as the collected souls he has killed build a set of bleachers in the yard. Though Francis' steps toward rehabilitation are small and they seem to come without premeditation, we are invited to see them as a grand finale in which wrongs finally become righted. There is a strong undercurrent of Catholicism in Ironweed, and this is a particularly Catholic idea: To be of a bum is to wear a hairshirt for decades; forty years of saying "hail-mary."

Bits like the ones I quoted above keep the novel interesting, but they are ponderous and Ironweed never seems to come up for air. Even in Francis' rehabilitation the sense of loss is crushing, and Kennedy's slow, genealogically detailed style makes it sometimes a difficult slog. One exception is a long chapter in which we follow Helen, who has left Francis to fend for himself, as she does what bums do all day: wander and scrounge for food. Without the troop of the dead following the narrative, it becomes lighter and more fluid, and perhaps Helen is just more genuinely likeable than Francis. And I think perhaps the conceit of the dead physically following a man around is too doggedly literal; Kennedy shows Francis his ghosts to remind him that they are there, but they are given awfully little to do and too often seem untethered to present events.

Thinking back on the book now, after having put it down for about a week, perhaps my initial thoughts were unfair: Ironweed has a lot to think about, probably more for me now than it did in high school. And yet, I don't think I'll be picking it up a third time.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Here is the rare book that includes a spoiler in its very title. Before you even open to the first page, Junot Diaz informs you that his hero, the impossibly overweight, impossibly nerdy Dominican New Jerseyite Oscar de Leon, is not long for this world. Poor Oscar. Never had a chance. The only real question, I guess, is whether or not he'll die a virgin.

Of course, it isn't just Diaz that predetermines Oscar's demise, but fuku, a Dominican curse that follows Oscar's family over several generations, all the way back to the monstrous reign of Rafael Trujillo, whose specter hangs over the book even long after the de Leons have moved to America. For Oscar's mother and grandfather, fuku meant savage beatings and imprisonment at the hands of the Trujillate. For Oscar, fuku means that he is cursed to play Dungeons and Dragons while the cool kids are at parties; it means while he's catching up on his anime everyone else is getting laid--a lesser fuku, you would have to admit, though perhaps not by the degree you would suppose. Oscar lives a life that, while marginal, is uniquely American; Diaz shows us how cultural ideas can translate strangely across nations and generations, yet remain unmistakably relevant. Though he is wheedled by his family and friends for being un-Dominican, it isn't until he returns to the Dominican Republic, compelled by possibly requited love, that the fuku can be broken.

And as compelling as Oscar's story is, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao can be a frustrating read because too often Diaz lets everyone else get in the way. The middle section of the book is cored out to accommodate lengthy discourses on his sister, his mother, and his grandfather, and while those stories are interesting in their own right, leaving Oscar to the endpapers of his own book seems somehow unjust. I found myself thinking of two other books which deal with the same cultural collisions with less mess: One is The Joy Luck Club, which packages each character's story into neatly stacked chapters. The other is another Pulitzer prize winner, Middlesex, which, while by no means a great success, at least has the sense to build a family story chronologically to create some sort of narrative thrust.

But Oscar Wao, coño, what a mess. It reminds me of one of those plastic novelty slugs filled with water--you know, the ones that fold over themselves like an elongated donut so that you can't hold onto them*. And this one's sprung a leak. There is an underlying pattern, I'm sure, that Diaz had in mind by heading backward in time with each successive chapter only to rocket back to the beginning, but the result is maddening. I kept expect to return to Oscar, who is the book's only truly interesting character, but instead I kept getting rewarded by another trip in the Delorean (and here's where Yunior, Oscar's roommate and narrator, would have provided a much more obsure example of a time machine to color the narrative).

On the micro level, too, Oscar Wao is unwieldy--Diaz writes in a unique twist on that hyperactive, barely stable post-modern dialect that is peppered with oblique sci-fi references, unnecessary Spanish, lengthy footnotes, and muddled metaphors. It's hard not to admire its breathtaking energy, but it's the kind of style that works only once and I fear it will inspire a thousand would-be imitators. Behold:

And who knows what might happen to the girl among the yanquis? In her mind the U.S. was nothing more and nothing less than a pais overrun by gangsters, putas, and no-accounts. Its cities swarmed with machines and industry, as thick with sinverguenceria as Santo Domingo was with heat, a cuco shod in iron, exhaling fumes, with the glittering promise of coin deep in the cold lightless shaft of its eyes.

Yanquis and pais I find forgivable, but why subject us to the teetering construction that is sinverguenceria instead of "shamelessness?" And then there's cuco, which as far as I can tell suggests "cuckoo" but more likely refers to a mythical bogeyman-like monster, this one "shod in iron" like a robot. And notice how that last sentence, as evocative as it is, lacks a subject or lets one--"its cities swarmed with machines and industry"--be lost in the shuffle. "The glittering promise of coin deep in the cold lightless shaft of its eyes" is a jumble of half-metaphors. This isn't a sentence; it's a heap of jargon. I'm not even going to mention the lack of quotation marks in dialogue.

I wanted to like this book, but it is elusive. It's as if too often Diaz wants us to love this book for its manic nature, its quirkiness and affability, but it is difficult to love Oscar and his book simultaneously. Oscar himself is slow-moving, ponderous, and deep; his Brief and Wondrous Life is, regrettably, none of those things.



*There has to be an official term for these. I don't know what they're called so I can't find a picture of one.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

Middlesex tells the story of Cal(lie) Stephanides and his family, several generations of it. Cal is a hermaphrodite, a person with both male and female sexual characteristics, and the book traces the gene that made him what he is.

From his grandparents' unusual courtship and exodus from Greece in the wake of Turkish Invasion, to his parents' taboo pairing, I found the stories of Cal's family very interesting, and it's a good thing too, since Cal's actual story only takes up about one-third of the book's nearly 530 pages. A lot of the reviews I read complained about this, but it didn't bother me, probably partly because I knew nothing about the book before starting it except that I liked the cover and Eugenide's previous book, The Virgin Suicides.

As you might expect, there's some pretty hosed-up stuff in the book, from some horrific violence during the escape from Greece to the dryly medical explanation of Cal's condition. His first sexual encounter, the growing sense of dread that someone will eventually learn his secret, the anticipation of when Cal himself will realize he's different—all of these combine to make the book compulsively readable.

The ending is very well done and quite affecting, and I think Middlesex probably ranks as one of the best modern novels I've read this year. If you're not too bothered by disturbing imagery and you don't mind sprawling narratives, check it out.

Edit: I'm finally caught up. Take that, Nathan.

The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty

Cast:
Judge McKelva - A kindly old judge whose surgury for a detatched retina goes wrong
Laural McKelva - The kindly judge's daughter, in town to support her sickly father
Wanda Fay - Judge McKelva's boorish second wife

This is pretty much the entire cast of The Optimist's Daughter. I purchased this book at a library book sale for a quarter, partly because I'd heard of Eudora Welty and partly because this book won the Pulitzer Prize.

Well, on one level, it's not too difficult to see why The Optimist's Daughter appealed to the Pulitzer committee: It's got both death and self-discovery, some regional humor and commentary, and a slow-moving plo that probably has a lot going on beneath the surface. The prose is prety without being overwrought, and the first part of the book, while Judge McKelva is recovering from surgury for a detatched retina, moves along at a nice clip, and fosters a fine sense of dread. The downside is that, once the Judge dies, the narrative movement in the book halts almost completely. Although the entire novel is only about 120 pages long, the last 60 pages moved at a crawl as either a) Fay does somehing cruel and thoughtless and Laural reacts to it by running off to be by herself or b) Laural has some personal revelation that never packs the power we sense it should.

I'll be honest, I may have gone into the book with the wrong expectations, but I read through waiting for a revelation that never happened, following characters I didn't care much about. There were a couple spots where the writing was powerful enough to make up for it, but for the most part, The Optimist's Daughter was too lethargically paced for me. It's not a bad book, but I don't think it's for me.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

The Bridge of San Luis Rey tells the story of a bridge that collapses in the early 18th century between the cities of Lima and Cuzco in Peru. A Franciscan monk named Brother Juniper witness the incident and decides that this tragedy provides him a perfect test case to prove that we live by God's plan, and that there are no true accidents. Accordingly, he investigates the lives of the five people who perished on the bridge, and goes so far as creating a chart of their goodness and usefulness to compare to those who survived.

That, however, is only the frame story--the bulk of San Luis Rey is three tales which describe the five victims of the bridge collapse: The Marquesa de Montemayor, Esteban, and Uncle Pio (also perishing are the Marquesa's orphan ward Nina and Uncle Pio's student-to-be Jaime). The three stories are finely intertwined, and share many other characters in common, principally a character named the Perichole, a reknowned (and historical) Peruvian actress. The Marquesa is a widely belittled public figure whom the Perichole ridicules during a performance (but, we learn later, the Marquesa's letters to her daughter in Spain become treasured as a literary achievement after her death). Esteban is the bereaved twin brother of Manuel, a poor orphan copies letters for and is in love with the Perichole (before he dies of gangrene). Uncle Pio is the Perichole's benefactor, to whom she entrusts her son Jaime as a student. There are other recurring characters, like the Abbess and orphanage director Maria del Madre Pilar, and the Spanish Viceroy Don Andres de Ribera, but the Perichole is the closest thing that San Luis Rey has to a main character.

Ultimately, Brother Juniper is unable to come to a conclusion regarding the plan that sent these five to the great beyond, and the book he writes is condemned as heretical. The Bridge of San Luis Rey, too, seems to lack a certain answer regarding why they had to die this way, but there is no doubting that there is an interesting pattern at work in the interwoven threads of the story. When the Perichole and the Marquesa's daugter, Dona Clara, come to serve in the Abbess Maria del Madre Pilar's abbey, there is the suggestion not that their dedication to God in the face of suffering is the result which justifies the tragedy, but that at least there is some faint echo of purpose and design.

I liked this book, though at a tiny 110 pp. it seemed a little inconsequential--which is quite the opposite of what it intends, I think. That however, is probably just my hang-up. It did win the Pulitzer prize in 1928.

All Aunt Hagar's Children by Edward P. Jones

Edward P. Jones won the Pulitzer Prize for his previous work, The Known World, which I believe was his first novel. Prior to that he had written Lost in the City, a collection of short stories, as is All Aunt Hagar’s Children.

Jones uses a wide variety of writing styles throughout this book. ‘Spanish in the Morning’ is told from the perspective of a kindergartner who skips a grade in Catholic school. ‘All Aunt Hagar’s Children’ is a brilliantly written piece of detective fiction, similar to that of Walter Mosley’s. The main character and narrator of the story, is convinced by his elderly mother and her group of friends to look into the death of the son of one of the women. It was ruled a drug overdose by the police, but there was plenty of evidence to suggest otherwise.

‘Root Worker’ was one of my favorite stories, in which a medical doctor comes to terms with her mother being healed by a root worker (at that time, thought to be nearly synonymous with a witch doctor). ‘Blindsided’ was an interesting story about a young woman who unexpectedly lost her sight while riding a bus to a Sam Cooke concert. By far my favorite story was ‘The Devil Swims Across the Anacostia River’, which was about a woman who met the Devil (sans horns and pitchfork) in a grocery store.

I like reading collections of short stories for a number of reasons. And there is something unique about the stories in Hagar. Although few of them are longer than 40 pages, they read like full-length novels. Jones is so adept at developing his characters that it hardly feels like reading short stories. Two things are central to all of these stories: the African American experience and Washington, D.C. Ranging throughout the 20th Century, each of the stories either takes place in D.C., or involves the area in some way.