The Suffrage of Elvira by V. S. Naipaul

Foam's ebullience depressed Harbans more. The bargaining with Baksh had shaken him and he feared that Chittaranjan too might demand stiffer terms. Moreover, he was nervous about the Dodge; and the sweet drink and rock cakes he had had were playing hell with his inside.

'You shy, Mr Harbans,' Foam said. 'I know how it is. But you going to get use to this waving. Ten to one, before this election over, we going to see you waving and shouting to everybody, even to people who ain't going to vote for you.'

Harbans shook his head sadly.

Foam settle into the angle of the seat and the door. 'Way I see it is this. In Trinidad this democracy is a brand new thing. We is still creeping. We is a creeping nation.' He dropped his voice solemnly: 'I respect people like you, you know, Mr Harbans, doing this thing for the first time.'

Trinidad, at the time of V. S. Naipaul's The Suffrage of Elvira, is a newly independent and democratic state. Elections are being held, but no one has ever stood for them before, much less managed a campaign. There are no polls, no TV advertisements, no rallies--but there are vans, loudspeakers, and lots and lots of wheeling and dealing. The novel centers on an election between Sujurpat "Pat" Harbans, a Hindu merchant, and a Black Trinidadian known simply as "Preacher." The racial breakdown of the vote in diverse Trinidad is obvious, but there are many more votes--belonging to Muslims and "Spanish"--left up for grabs. Harbans enlists the young Foreman "Foam" Baksh as his campaign manager, which sets off a series of comic enterprises that mostly end with Harbans writing a check or a petrol voucher. Someone is getting rich off this election, but it isn't the candidate.

Naipaul became a much more "serious" writer with his later works, which are so often thoughtful and beautifully written investigations into the postcolonial spirit. But for my money, he was never better than at the beginning of his career, when he wrote these comedies set in Trinidad. The Suffrage of Elvira sits nicely between Miguel Street and A House for Mr. Biswas, the novel that made his career--all being vernacular-heavy novels that depict small-potatoes Trinidadian strivers. The irony from all of them comes from the presentation of Trinidad as a remote outpost; the election between Harbans and Preacher may share certain elements with English parliamentary elections, but England's a long ways away, and how many MPs owe their seats to fears that a puppy is imbued with obeah witchcraft? (This subplot, in which Foam's little brother nicks a newborn puppy and hides it in their storage room, leading to fantastic rumors, is maybe the funniest thing in the whole book.) It seems to me that Naipaul in his later work explored the anger and resentment that emerge in the spirit of the postcolonial subject, who knows how little he measures up to his colonizers, but these books are lighthearted because no one really seems to know or care.

"We is a creeping nation," Foam tells Harbans, and I think that's probably pretty close to Naipaul's view as well. There's something admirable, even honorable, about Trinidad's first forays into the world of electoral politics. But Naipaul captures well how, no matter the size of the country or how long it's been a democracy, elections turn not on clashing ideals but petty personal conflicts and jealousies, as with the breadfruit tree whose roots are in the yard of Ramlogan the tavernkeeper, but which drops its fruit in the yard of Chittaranjan the goldsmith. And it captures how everybody, even down to the lowest taxi driver wanting his ten dollars in petrol vouchers, wants to get his thumb in the pie.

Mice 1961 by Stacey Levine

Though Jody required the younger one to stay indoors during the day, it was typical for neighbors to see Mice hurtling down Reef Way or through neighborhood side streets at sunset. Perhaps the girl's racing around in the evenings satisfied a need.

In the small apartments those months, I watched the half-sisters near-always, impatient to be part of their togetherness and clashes both. Soon after moving into the apartment, I acquired the habit of breathing them in, of trying to draw goodness from one sister, then the other. Among family, satiating cuddles, from what I understood, could arise at breakneck speed: I waited.

Stacey Levine's Mice 1961 is about two half-sisters, living in south Florida after the death of their mother. One is Jody, the elder, and the other is Mice, whose improbable name comes from her pale white skin, cotton-colored hair, and thick glasses. The sisters are alike in some ways, so much so that they often seem like the same person, but in others, they are quite different, Jody the anxious caretaker and Mice in her own world, making crystal radios and hiding in wells. The girls, and Mice especially, are the subject of much gossip in their small suburban outpost of Miami, and though opinions differ, many seem to believe that there's something not quite right about Mice, that her strange appearance is connected somehow to her diffident nature and her unwillingness to work. Mice is tormented regularly by a series of teenagers who are simply known as "the teenagers," although, in a stroke that shows just how weird the novel is, one of them turns out to be a 28-year-old who's just kind of hanging out at the high school.

By far the most interesting thing about Mice 1961, for me, is the position of the narrator, Girtle, who occupies a strange kind of position in the girls' household as a maid or factotum, doing odd jobs and cleaning. The truth is that Girtle (what a name!) seems to have inveigled her way into the house by simply asking to be there; her origins are obscure, though she tells us that she once hopped a fence to escape an orphanage. Girtle longs to be part of the sisterly bond between Jody and Mice, and she even tries to peel Mice away from Jody by way of promising to take her to a remote cabin. As a narrator, Girtle manages to disappear, often very literally, hiding and skulking around and trying not to be noticed. Much of what Girtle is able to report is because she is literally unseen, not noticed by the townspeople, and often not by Jody and Mice, either. More interesting still, Girtle has a recurrent premonition that someone she calls "the helper" is soon to arrive, a figure who will come to further Mice's narrative as the protagonist of the story, perhaps by taking her away from Girtle. When a smooth-talking James Dean type with a secret connection to (what we know will be) the Bay of Pigs invasion, we're not even shocked that Girtle turns out to have been correct.

Mice 1961 has so many fascinating parts, and it's written in a slightly alien prose that keeps the narrative vigorous and captivating. But why is the middle of it so tedious? A huge section of the book takes place during a town party at a local bakery, where the villagers come in bearing cakes and pies (and in one case, "blue water"), gossiping about Mice and Jody but all sorts of other people as well. Some of these townspeople are memorable and some are not, but together they seem as if Levine is trying to give us a sense of the somewhat cloistered town in which the sisters live, one of those mid-century commuter towns that end up as a kind of panopticon of good manners. Girtle records it all fastidiously, but I felt again and again that I wasn't sure what I was supposed to be getting out of it. Like Jody, I kept wondering: Where's Mice? 

Carnality by Lina Wolff

We knew what kind of show it was, my wife and I, so we've got no grounds to play the innocent. It's just you'd think with a nun behind it there'd be limits, some kind of safety net. Not because I'm a believer. I don't believe in any religious communion or system. But an institution has always got something to lose, if only its self-image, which is why there are things you never believe it capable of doing. What we'd both heard about Lucia was that she could work miracles. I don't believe in miracles, but Soledad insisted that a miracle was exactly what we needed at that point: some vast, unbelievable miracle that transformed everything.

Bennedith is a Swedish travel writer on a month-long paid trip to Madrid. Looking for meaning, she takes on another role caring for a man who suffers from severe Alzheimer's--gratis. At a bar, she meets a man named Mercuro who inveigles his way into her life, and her furnished flat, telling her a strange story of woe: having cheated on his wife Soledad, he turned to a television series called Carnality, helmed by the mysterious Miss Pink and Mister Blue and their unseen patroness, a nun named Sor Lucia, to help him fix the rift between them. Sor Lucia's solution is simple: because Soledad needs a heart transplant, Mercuro can fix what he has done by offering her his own heart. In fact, by signing the waivers for the show he has already made the agreement to do so, and it is in fleeing the pursuing transplanters that Mercuro has ended up in Bennedith's arms. Bennedith is at first repulsed by Mercuro, then compelled. His own story of irrevocably fucking up has some resonances with her own, not least of which the way she shamefully loses her job with the Alzheimer's patient. So it's no surprise that they end up in each other's arms, literally.

The title Carnality takes in all kinds of fleshy meaning. There's Mercuro's carnal lust, of course, but there's the carnality, too, in the sense of carne, meat, as in the heart that Mercuro is compelled to cut out and give away. The last half of the book is a long series of letters from Sor Lucia, the patroness of Carnality, explaining to Bennedith (who is in jail after a series of complicated events involving a reckless Swedish party boater--go figure) her childhood as the stepdaughter of a cruel butcher during the Spanish Civil War. Sor Lucia's missing thumb is rumored to be from a pig's bite, but she explains that it was actually cut off by a man seeking vengeance for her stepfather's crimes. It's this experience--butchering, being butchered--that makes Lucia an asset at the convent, and gives her a kind of necessarily mercilessness. The story of the TV show Carnality is a story of that mercilessness, although one can see in Lucia's letters to Bennedith that cracks have begun to appear in the nun's moral certitude. Moral questions, Carnality, suggest, are tied up with the body as well as the soul.

What I liked most about Carnality was how unsettled it was. It constantly seemed to be transforming from one kind of book into another one, and I never really knew where it was going to go next: from Bennedith's listlessness and ennui to Mercuro's bizarre tale to their adventure with the evil boater, then to Lucia's letters and history. So I was a little bit disappointed, as I suppose would be inevitable, at the way the various threads were tied together at the end. I actually found that I wanted Carnality to remain mysterious, perhaps a fiction of Mercuro's head--Bennedith has never heard of it--rather than getting the detailed history of how Lucia came to be at the head of the mysterious television show. To Wolff's credit, she ties everything together skillfully, and the end brings the various themes of mercy and violence together really well--but I wonder if there was another version of the novel that stayed as unsettled and weird as it was at the beginning.

Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi

The Whatsisname was now at a loss for what to do. He knew his mission was essential to kill, to kill new people every day, but he no longer had a clear idea who should be killed or why. The flesh of the innocents, of which he was initially composed, had been replaced by new flesh, that of his own victims and criminals. He thought if he took too long avenging the victims in whose name he was acting, the body parts he had taken from them would decompose in situ. It would be the end of him, and he would be free of this world.

A suicide bomb goes off in American-occupied Baghdad. Hadi, a local junk merchant, picks up the pieces of bodies and stitches them together into a single corpse, thinking that perhaps the authorities will give the corpse a real burial, unlike the pieces of people that litter the street. But the next day, the corpse has disappeared, animated--as we learn--by the spirit of another victim of the bombing, who has been separated from his own body. Soon, Hadi realizes that the creature he's made is connected to a series of killings in the news. The creature, now known as Criminal X or Whatsisname, is busy killing the people who are responsible for the deaths of those of whose parts he is constructed. When one part is avenged, it falls off, and Whatsisname must take new pieces from the dead, but this only complicates his mission, mixing up the identities of victim and criminal, and soon he even resorts to killing people himself.

Frankenstein in Baghdad is an attempt to capture the cruelty and widespread violence of Iraq under the American occupation. The Americans, the displaced Baathists, the religious fundamentalists in al-Qaeda, are all are responsible for widespread slaughter that allow something like Whatsisname to emerge. At first, it's an image of the lack of respect and dignity afforded to the dead in a place where murder has become commonplace--what Hadi desires for the corpse is not revenge, but simple burial. But soon it becomes an image of the way that violence proliferates and metastasizes, expands past the limits one might think to place on it. You can see Saadawi's attempt to capture the landscape of a particular time and place in the large cast of characters that converge around the creature, policemen, journalists, astrologers, etc., etc. There are Iraqi Christians and Jews as well as Muslims; in one funny and pointed scene, a poster of a hadith is torn away to reveal a statue of the Virgin Mary; when the statue is destroyed it reveals a Jewish menorah. There is more, Saadawi seems to be saying, to Baghdad than violence; there are traces of a pluralistic society that has curdled in the face of fundamentalism and war.

I thought this novel was fairly effective. The image of the monster is clever and apt; Saadawi avoids getting too much into the explanatory weeds of how the creature is born or operates, but the way in which it is consistently regenerated by violence--the very violence it seeks vengeance for--is a fresh way to express an old and true idea. There were times I wish that the narrative were focused more on Whatsisname and less on the constellation of supporting characters--I found it difficult to care about the journalist Mahmoud's lust toward his boss' paramour, for instance--but for the most part, it worked for me.

With the addition of Iraq, my "Countries Read" list is now up to 122!

The Last Ride of the Pony Express by Will Grant

The more I learned, the surer I became that I was bound to ride the trail. How else could I attain an encompassing grasp of the Pony Express without riding the old mail route? Anything short of doing so was shirking from the truth: that the only way to fully understand the breadth and nature of the Pony Express was to horseback it from one end to the other. It emerged as a challenge, a pinnacle of horsemanship that was high and dangerous. But if I could pull it off, I'd land in rare company. Any horseman worth his salt would agree: the Pony Express is an apex of American horsemanship and to trace its course would be nothing short of transcendental. And so I talked myself into it. Some people look for answers in a library; I'd look for mine between the ears of a horse.

The Pony Express was really something: ten days to deliver a piece of mail between Missouri and California. It took a collection of brave and skilled riders, some not much more than kid, and by writer Will Grant's calculus, thousands of horses, each of whom was pushed to cover about ten miles between stage stops. It's an even more amazing feat when you consider that, when Grant rode the length of the Pony Express with his horses Badger and Chicken Fry, as recounted in The Last Ride of the Pony Express, it took well over one hundred days. Grant's goal, as he puts it, is not just to ride the Pony Express trail to understand the West as it was, but the West as it is: meeting with the ranchers, farmers, and homesteaders who still make up the West's human geography today. Along the way, he explores the history of the American West, but also the problems that face the west today: feral horses, water shortages, and factory farming. 

I enjoyed The Last Ride of the Pony Express; there's almost no chance I wouldn't. I love travelogues, and I love the American West. So it might be considered a kind of praise when I say: this book should have been a lot longer. Grant skillfully weaves three threads together, the physical landscape of the journey, the human landscape--the people--and the history, but I often felt that I never got enough of any one. More than that, I'm thinking of William Least Heat-Moon's River-Horse, about an equally massive undertaking, crossing the entire United States by water. A book like this ought to have the kind of heft and stature that the feat does. Instead, it felt to me like the experience of the ride was left somewhere outside the page. Grant explains that we don't really know that much about the Pony Express, which existed for only eighteen months, so part of that might be the lightness of the historical record. Surely part of it also the pressures of the modern publishing industry, who aren't interested in Least Heat-Moon sized tomes.

OK, enough quibbling. I really did enjoy the way that Grant brings two visions of the West, one modern and one historical, to bear on his incredibly journey. The most interesting and human part of the book might actually be Grant's sojourn among the Peruvian sheepherders of Nevada, whose hospitality is unparalleled, even in a book where people regularly open up their ranches for Grant and his horses to camp in. That's a vision of a new West, but also not so different (as Grant explains) from the Basque sheepherders who once dominated the area. Ultimately, the book gives us a sense of a frontier that is still changing, even as it remains one of the United States' most enduring places of legend.

South Riding by Winifred Holtby

Far into the night she sat writing letters, drafting memoranda. She dragged any member of the Higher Education Committee whom she could lure into her buildings from cellar to garret, exposing their enormities. Her energy was unremitting. If the South Riding was not prepared to build a new school for her, she would make this old one a perpetual torment. And always as she planned and wrote and argued, she saw Councillor Carne in her mind's eye as the apostle and ringleader of reaction, the author of false economies, the culprit really responsible for leaking taps in the science room and blackbeetles in the basement. Because of this, it was a little difficult to banish the thought of him completely from her consciousness; but at least she never forgot to remember him with resentment.

Is there such a thing as the "Great Local Politics Novel?" If they're taking nominations, I might suggest Winifred Holtby's South Riding, a novel about a Yorkshire region and the city council who decides on issues of public health, housing, and finance. One of the most respected members of the local political scene is Robert Carne, a conservative farmer who has had to sell most of the furniture out of his hereditary estate in order to pay for the treatment of his mentally ill wife. Carne is the principal opponent of Sarah Burton, the new headmistress of the local school, who needs the city council and its concomitant organs to approve the building of a new school. Carne disapproves of the idea, but more than this, he stands for all the forces that stand against progress and change. What happens next except, of course, Sarah's hatred for Carne becomes an obsession, and that obsession turns to ardent love?

OK, it sounds silly. In fact, what it reminds me of most is--forgive me--Parks and Rec, a story about the importance of local politics that centers on an alliance between two people, in this case Ron Swanson and Leslie Knope, whose friendship transcends their differences. The viewpoint of South Riding is the same insofar as it posits that both Sarah Burton and Robert Carne are figures of good despite their opposed political programs, and that the love that might be conjured between them is a force possible of transcending those differences. It threatens to be cheesy, but Holtby succeeds by virtue of not diminishing the actual importance of the politics involved, and by giving the romance between Sarah and Carne an air of Romeo and Juliet-esque tragedy.

But Robert Carne and Sarah Burton are only one part of the novel, which has a six-page inventory of characters in the front. Holtby presents the political life of the South Riding by introducing councilors, aldermen, socialists, tavern-keepers, laborers, teachers, children, preachers, etc., etc. One of the most critical plotlines involves Lydia Holly, the star pupil of Sarah's who has to drop out of school in order to take care of her many siblings after the death of her mother. It's clear that local politics means something to someone like Lydia; it is the engine that might mean the difference between a scholarship, and escape, and another life wasted in the trap of poverty and motherhood.

Much of the political wrangling in the book involves a scheme to put what is (I think) a kind of council house somewhere in the riding, and the dishonest speculation of greedy figures who want to use the scheme to enrich themselves. It's a little funny how easily this maps on to the local politics of our modern day, so much of which is about whether to build housing and where. One question at hand is: can social good come out of self-interest? Not, perhaps, in the libertarian way of the free market that engineers the most efficient social outcome, but in the way that flawed and even corrupt people may do good despite themselves. I'm not sure. Ultimately, the position of South Riding seems to be that whether it's noble or venal and hopeless, local politics is the most important politics tehre is.

Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth

On the other hand perhaps it was that he drew her to him in the dark, held her close, and gave her to know that while he could never feel just the same respect for her, he loved her nonetheless. They kissed. Tenderly together they rehearsed their secrets; long they lingered in the Sphinx's Den; then he bore her from the Jungle, lovingly to the beach, into the water. They swam until her tears were made a part of the Earth's waters; then hand in hand they waded shoreward on the track of the moon. In the shallows they paused to face each other. Warm wavelets flashed about their feet; waterdrops sparkled on their bodies. Washed of shame, washed of fear; nothing was but sweetest knowledge.

The first story in John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse is written from the perspective of a sperm having an existential crisis. How can you have faith when you know that only one "swimmer" among billions will make it to the promised land? And is there even a promised land--an egg--at all? It's classic Barth: first of all, it's funny. Secondly, it operates via layers of irony and metaknowledge; one must understand how the ironies of the sperm's existence point back to the self of the reader. But there's a real humanity underneath in the way that explores the difficulty of understanding one's cosmological place when by their very nature the larger forces, be they God or the universe or the possessors of testicles and ovaries, are beyond our understanding. It is maybe the best story--not a good sign for a collection when the first story is the best--but actually I think I slightly preferred "Petition," written from the perspective of a conjoined twin cursed to ride eternally on his brother's back, asking the King of Siam for help in severing them. Like "Night-Sea Journey," the sperm story, I enjoyed how slowly, by design, I came to understand who and what was speaking to me.

Lost in the Funhouse is most famous for its title story, about a trip to the Maryland sea shore where Barth's stand-in, Ambrose, gets--well, you know. The story is famous for its metafictional elements, which call attention to the narrative choices, and the narrative failings, of the author, even going so far as to introduce a diagram of Freytag's pyramid. This is all purposely deflationary; I think even Barth would agree it's a paragraph like the one above, from another story about Ambrose, in which he imagines a relationship with an older girl, that really stir the spirit. But in "Lost in the Funhouse" Barth questions what it that's happening to us when our spirit is stirred, whether that spirit-stirring is an honest exchange. There may not be so much difference between Ambrose tricking himself into happiness by telling himself a story and the reader who lets himself be tricked. Be that as it may, I found "Lost in the Funhouse" to feel stale. It is, as Brent said, "the OG" in a way, but sixty years of postmodernism has produced, I think, more interesting and effective ways of exploring the same ideas. The subsequent stories, "Life-Story" and "Title," which take these ideas to their most abstract and intricate ends, I felt to be absolutely dreary reading.

Much better, then, are "Menelaid" and "Anonymiad," a pair of stories that draw from Greek myth to explore the nature of storytelling. "Menelaid" is a particularly difficult read, in which Menelaus tells a number of stories to Telemachus that involve quoting the discourses of others so that eventually ten or twelve sets of quotation marks are nested inside one another and you don't know who the hell is saying anything. But I really enjoyed the story's suggestion that, when Menelaus wrestles with the shape-shifting god Proteus (as I guess happens in the myth), it destabilizes the entire story, if not the world: how do we know the Menelaus that ends up with Proteus in his arms is not actually Proteus himself in Menelaus' guise? And if Proteus could be Menelaus, why not Helen, or Telemachus--or the reader? 

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

Later, when I was living in New York, I would make the trip back to Sacramento four and five times a year (the more comfortable the flight, the more obscurely miserable I would be, for it weighs heavily upon my kind that we could perhaps not make it by wagon), trying to prove that I had not meant to leave at all, because in at least one respect California--the California we are talking about--resembles Eden: it is assumed that those who absent themselves from its blessings have been banished, exiled by some perversity of the heart. Did not the Donner-Reed Party, after all, eat its own dead to reach Sacramento?

The title essay in Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem precedes itself. About the hippie convergence on the Haight-Asbury neighborhood of San Francisco, it stands in for a popular recognition of the era's failures, and its curdling into something more dissolute and sinister. A step on the road from Woodstock to Altamont. And before reading it I had a general idea that it reflected in some way Didion's own brand of conservatism, which in turn reflected the nation's rightward turn as the ideals of the 60's petered out. But reading it, it must be said that what is most remarkable about it is the way that Didion absents herself from the narrative, declining to pass judgment or evaluation on the hippies with whom she's embedded, as if San Francisco were Fallujah. It is the hippies, instead, who implicate themselves, as with one couple whose faith in psychedelic drugs extends to doping up their toddler. Of course, this is all a kind of feint, a maneuver that reveals just how good a writer Didion really was--a way of hiding her hand. One must admit that, when some of the Haight-Asbury "Diggers" refuse to share information because they fear Didion to be a "media poisoner," that they have something of a point.

One point that Didion makes--or perhaps suggests by assemblage and arrangement, because she often demurs from making points as we typically think of them--is that the hippie movement was a children's movement. A considerable number of the people who converged on Haight-Asbury were literal runaways, and in Didion's telling, it seems to be this that gives the movement is sense of hope and energy, like a children's crusade. But Didion also depicts it as a children's world, bereft of adult pragmatism and sagacity. Even those adults who appear in "Slouching Toward Bethlehem," like the couple that give acid to their toddler, have a kind of childlike innocence, which is to say stupidity. "We were seeing the desperate attempt," Didion writes, "of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum ,no longer pretend that the society's atomization could be reversed." Which is to say, yes, these people are idiot kids, but who let them out of the house?

One way of reading "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" is one vignette in a series of essays about California, along with "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream," about a woman who may or may not have set her husband on fire in San Bernardino, and "Notes From a Native Daughter," an exploration of growing up and leaving Sacramento that is, I think, the collection's best piece. "John Wayne: A Love Song," another of the collection's highlights, is also a California story, though about the California that infiltrates our dreams through the engines of Hollywood. (Like the hippies, Didion gives Wayne and his hangers-on the rope to hang themselves; the image is of an aging star surrounded by sclerotic yes-men.) No doubt Didion writes best about California because it's what she knows best, but I think her best pieces are all about place, including "Letter From Paradise," which explores the way that the burgeoning tourist vision of Hawaii conceals a Hawaii that is deeply entangled with the military and the prospect of war. I also really enjoyed a typically acerbic essay called "Seacoast of Despair," about the grand mansions of Newport, Rhode Island. Didion's sense of place isn't unimpeachable--I thought her essays about the Southern U.S. in North and South were a strange misfire--but it must be said that she has a way of peeling back one understanding of a place to reveal something else underneath, whether it's California, Hawaii, Rhode Island, or Sonora, Mexico.

That said, I am developing an annoying and contrarian take on Didion that I think few will agree with: her fiction is better than her non-fiction.

The Gales of November by John U. Bacon

This is when the Fitzgerald's unique characteristics--the modular construction, the use of welds over rivets, the extraordinary flexibility of the hull, the lowering of the Plimsoll Line, and whatever damage she might have suffered over Six Fathom Shoal--would all be tested by the once-in-a-lifetime conditions on Lake superior. The fully loaded Fitzgerald had only 11.5 feet of freeboard on a good day, and this was not a good day. The question lo longer was whether the Fitzgerald could withstand such relentless punishment, but how long before she succumbed.

The first few times I heard Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," I'm pretty sure I thought it was about some late 19th or early 20th century shipwreck. I had no idea that it was about a ship that sank in 1975, just a few months before the song was released. Is it the song, or something else, that gives the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald the air of an old myth? Certainly, what captured Gordon Lightfoot's attention--the struggle of human courage against the merciless lake, the ship's status as the largest and most famous on Superior, the way it vanished without a trace, the phrase "storm of the century," the heart-rending detail of the bell ringing 29 times at the Maritime Sailors' Cathedral--are the elements that still make the story such an enduring one, on the Great Lakes and beyond.

John U. Bacon's book about the Edmund Fitzgerald is pure dadslop (complimentary). It's the kind of book you give an uncle for Christmas. But it also tackles a pretty serious challenge, which is that, because there were no survivors, the story of the Fitzgerald's wreck is actually a difficult one to tell. Bacon solves this problem partially by padding the book in several predictable ways: extensive prefatory chapters about the history of shipping on the Great Lakes, other shipwrecks, and lengthy profiles of a dozen or so of the sailors who went down on the Fitzgerald--lengthy, if you'll forgive me saying so, even for the human face they provide to the tragedy.

Once the ship leaves on its fateful final trip, though, I found the book gripping. Bacon does an excellent job dissecting the evidence in order to present and evaluate the theories about what happened to the Fitzgerald, and the ultimate impression is of a ship caught in a series of compounding difficulties, some preventable and some not. No one could have stopped the warm front moving up from the West Coast that created a "perfect storm" and fifty-foot waves, but it seems clear that the Fitzgerald was shipping with too much weight, pushing for one last run in a season when storms become too strong for most shipping. Decisions which must have made sense in the moment likely doomed the Fitzgerald: trying to avoid the storm by taking an unfamiliar northern route, which drove it over a poorly-charted shoal, slowing the ship down, which gave it more maneuverability in unpredictable conditions--but which also gave water more time to poor through open hatches or a rent in the hull. The perfect storm, it seems, includes not only the atmospheric conditions but the profit motive that drives recklessness. Ernest McSorley, the captain of the Fitzgerald, is described by Bacon as the most trusted and reliable on the Great Lakes--but it wasn't enough.

Mostly, the book made me deeply sad. A hundred things had to go wrong for the 29 people on board the Fitzgerald to lose their lives; if any one of them had gone right instead, many of them would still be alive today. Bacon notes that shipping practices today are more heavily regulated, weather forecasting and communication with ships is much improved. God willing, that means that the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald will stay what it is--a legend and a warning.

State of Grace by Joy Williams

Omit, omit and one day you will be down to a funny, white and quite lifeless seed. I see it as a sort of heart of palm myself. In the groceries, they sell them in tins at outrageous prices. In New York restaurants, I hear, they do the same. Actually the stuff is swamp cabbage, easily hacked from an ugly and useless weed that covers the ground of the South, common as pennies. But we're all game and gullible as tourists in this life. No one is able to tell us anything. The soul is a heart of palm and living is a messy salad with everything in it being similar but less interesting, less necessary as you proceed. The trick is not ignoring this discovery after you've made it. Do not be a polite guest.

Kate, the protagonist of Joy Williams' first novel, State of Grace, lives in a college town on the Gulf Coast. She lives in a sorority house, though she doesn't actually seem to be in college (is anyone in this college town in college?), and then she lives with her partner, Grady, who loves only her, along with his Jaguar coupe. The baby she's carrying, we quickly learn, is not Grady's but her father's: a holy rolling reverend from Maine who shows up out of the blue to re-cement his too-intimate relationship with Kate. We learn through flashbacks--if you can describe the fluid chronology of State of Grace in such terms--that Kate and her father were loathed by their mother, who instead heaped her love on a daughter she accidentally killed in a car accident. Car accidents: at some point, Grady wrecks that Jaguar, and Kate is left to face the problem of her pregnancy alone while Grady battles for his life in the hospital.

Here's a half-baked theory: Joy Williams and Cormac McCarthy had remarkably similar careers. Both started out writing fiction in the Southern Gothic mode; both found their voice as they moved away from this milieu toward the American Southwest, as Williams did with 99 Stories of God and The Quick and the Dead. Of course, that overstates the case, because Williams kept writing about Florida to great success, especially in books like Breaking and Entering. But early on both authors wore their influences a little too much on their sleeve, in both cases Faulkner, though Williams seems to draw quite heavily from Flannery O'Connor as well. State of Grace both is and isn't recognizably Williams, to me. The narrative malleability, the inability to write a bad or boring or even merely functional sentence, they're all here. But the novel spins and plods. It's too internal and self-regarding, and it strikes me as a version of Williams that hadn't yet learned to harness her stylistic richness to a mode that moves forward. And the father figure, while enigmatic and interesting, seems picked up right out of Flannery and not like a character from a Williams novel at all.

But there are flashes here of real Joy: I especially liked a subplot in which Kate is persuaded by one of the sorority sisters to "borrow" a leopard from a local menagerie with the help of her friend, Corinthian Brown. You can imagine how well that works out. The scariest thing, actually, about the book, is not the way the friend is mauled--another disaster along the lines of those that strike Kate's sister and Grady, victimized by the world's primal savagery--but the whisper campaign that comes afterward about how they caught and killed the "n---er" who they held responsible. You can recognize in this moment the seed of a lot of Williams' future fiction, not least an abiding interest in the world of animals as it intersects with the world of human beings. I wish more of the novel had been like that.