Cuyahoga by Pete Beatty

My brother's stories are more apple cider. They are good to drink but you will not forget yourself entirely. Wholesome tales, without too many fricasseed widows. True mostly--I will not lie any more than is wanted for decency. Simple and moral, easy to grab, the better to encourage someone over the the head with. Not too quiet--you must not fall asleep. Let us have commerce and racing horses. Progress and the mastery of nature. Swap swords for axes and plows. Let us have tenderness but also a dash of cussedness and tragedy. All in the manner native to Ohio.

"Tall tales" emerged out of the country's first frontier: the woodlands of the interior and Midwest. Think Paul Bunyan, clearing the trees for civilization. Pete Beatty's debut novel Cuyahoga focuses on a tall tale character named Big Son, whose story is narrated by his brother Medium Son, also known as Meed. Big Son's deeds are legendary: he rastles Lake Erie, fells hundreds of trees at a stroke, and climbs a two-mile ladder to see what a cloud is made of. But Big Son lives, unfortunately, in a world that is becoming less myth, less frontier, and more civilization, and that's an uneasy place for a tall tale to live. Big Son wants nothing more to marry the love of his life, Cloe Inches, but how do you marry a tale? And who will give a myth a real job, and money to live on?

Big is the tutelary spirit of Ohio City on the banks of the Cuyahoga River. The book's larger plot focuses on the controversy between Ohio City and Cleveland over who will build a bridge over the Cuyahoga; Cleveland manages it first and sets the tolls. "Two Bridges or None" becomes the rallying cry of the Ohio Citians, and they enlist Big Son in building a bridge, which he does in a matter of days. But of course, Big's bridge is built more of myth than wood or steel, and it collapses in a grand tall-tale fashion. Big's problem is that once the frontier is gone, the figure from the tall tale is no longer needed. What Ohio City needs is industry, expertise, civilization--it needs, in a sense, realism. Beatty emphasizes this point with a funny aside about Johnny Appleseed, depicting him as a cider-swilling drunk unable to handle the transition from his an economy of small homestead orchards to the mass production of food. Big Son is not alone; the country is leaving its tall tales behind.

I was really impressed by Cuyahoga. It's a little scattershot and rambunctious, but it's shaggy quality well matches that of the tall tales that are its inspiration. Books that puncture the myths of the American frontier, even cheekily or ironically so, are not so unfamiliar, but I don't think I've ever seen someone do such a deep exploration of this particular aspect of American myth, perhaps because the time frame--that doldrum period between the Revolution and the Civil War--looms so little in the popular imagination. More than anything, I was impressed that Beatty is able to keep the bit going, and able to keep it from being just an interesting premise. The layers layer well: the jealousy of ordinary Meed toward his supernatural brother; a subplot about a devious grocer intent on blowing up the Cleveland Bridge; the various tall-tale figures and creatures, like the treacherous "night pigs." Facsimiles of newspapers and bulletins add to the story rather than seeming like empty exercises in period style, and the 19th century voice is just anachronistic enough to feel as if it speaks to modern ears.

What Cuyahoga revealed to me is that American myth didn't disappear; it just went underground. The devious grocer, nicknamed Dog, describes seeing General Washington as a young man: an emaciated, toothless figure. We made him into a god with our stories, Dog suggests, but perhaps we did worse: we sapped the vitality of the man by taking what we wanted from him. Big Son belongs to a passing era, and his tragedy is that he's unable, like the other myths of America, to transform or be disguised, or hide away in a story more appropriate to the cynicism of the day.

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson

The boy is walking through the street of his town. He is thinking of the future and of the figure he will cut in the world. Ambitions and regrets awake within him. Suddenly something happens; he stops under a tree and waits as for a voice calling his name. ghosts of old things creep into his consciousness; the voices outside of himself whisper a message concerning the limitations of life. From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy. With a little gasp he sees himself as merely a leaf blown by the wind through the streets of his village. He knows that in spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt in the sun.

Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio might be the ur-text of that dreaded contemporary beast: the collection of linked short stories. Set in a town much like the one Anderson grew up in in northern Ohio around the turn of the 20th century, Anderson's stories are linked by the presence of George Willard, a young teenager and the only employer of the local newspaper, who by virtue of his vocation is privy in a way no one else is to the private lives of Winesburgians. Winesburg is a conventional sort of place, an every-town; Anderson emphasizes this--I have no idea if intentionally--by naming every other character Will or Tom or some variation thereof. But the people that populate the stories are anything but unconventional; or, perhaps it would be right to say that they are conventional in that they reveal what eccentricities lie beneath the conventional surface of every small town dweller.

George is a sensitive man, a deep thinker. He is young, and coming into many revelations about himself and his place in the world. (The virtuoso passage above is George, coming to a realization about the role of happenstance in his life, and its brevity.) Like many sensitive men, he feels that he alone is sensitive, and feels more deeply than others. But Winesburg, Ohio suggests that everyone feels this way, as if they are a little too strange for the world around them. Some of the Winesburgians are genuine oddballs, like the savage proto-incel Wash Williams, who insists to George that all women are dead inside, or Doctor Reefy, who keeps a pocket full of balled-up papers and seems to have zero patients. Others are just anxious about being oddballs, as in the story "Queer," about the son of a unpopular shopowner who becomes obsessed with the idea that other people think he's weird. He flirts with a friendship with George, thinking the newspaper man can put his story right, but then pushes him away; convinced--for no reason--that George, too, thinks he's "queer," he rushes him in the night and attacks him--thus becoming the thing he fears.

I loved the stories in Winesburg, Ohio that deal with longing and desire. George pines for a small sequence of girls, each of whom pines for him or someone else; they are all in love with love, as the saying goes, but unable to really love or even see the objects of their affection. One of the most powerful stories is "Adventure," about a woman who believes her boyfriend when he tells her he will come back to marry her. She waits and waits, until she realizes that she has grown old waiting (old in 1910 terms, so, like, thirty) and rushes out naked into a rainstorm as a kind of cathartic release, or collapse. The story "Loneliness" captures a timeless truth when one character tells George, "I wanted her and all the time I didn't want her"--the great ambivalence of human connection.

Winesburg, Ohio sounds like it ought to be one of those dreary 19th century realist works, something on par with Theodore Dreiser or Sinclair Lewis. (Though I do like those books, I think you have to admit they are a little tedious and unimaginative stylistically.) But it really stands shoulders above those; in places its quite strange and modernist-sounding. In other moments it resembles Willa Cather, who had just published her first novels when Winesburg came out in 1919. Like Cather, Anderson captures a time and a place--a small Midwestern town at the turn of the century--but the truths within feel as true as ever.

During the Reign of the Queen of Persia by Joan Chase

If we met Aunt Grace as she went about the farm on her long solitary walks, we--still dancing and running, coming out of the flowing, dazzling pleasures of the brook, the embrace of vines and roots, the sting of grasses--would fall into silence. Then talk awhile, but carefully, self-consciously, answering her few questions, her smiles with our smiles. At the edge of our awareness we glimpsed the white wrapping at her throat, breathed carefully so we wouldn't smell the abscess underneath. There in the dust-silted track by the barn, ankle-deep, we buried our bare toes, sprayed geyser figures into the air to fall away. While we talked with her, it seemed that our hearts burned within us, as if we were with someone who had come to love the world, inexpressibly yet without entitlement. We made some excuse and ran away. Left her alone to concentrate her entire being toward making manifest the sufficient love of God.

The "Queen of Persia" in Joan Chase's novel is Gram, the matriarch of a large Ohio family and the ruler of her farm house, so called because of her imperious nature. The farmhouse is a woman's world: although various men have become attached to it through marriage--Uncle Neil, Uncle Dan, even Granddad, a hard-drinking old bastard who prefers the company of his cows--they seem to occupy an outside orbit, around Gram's many female children: Aunt Libby, Aunt Rachel, Aunt Elinor, Aunt Grace. Another generation, Libby's daughters Celia and Jenny and Grace's daughters Katie and Anne, grow up in the farm house, coming slowly to understand their forebears as they do.

The One Big Trick of the During the Reign of the Queen of Persia is that the novel is narrated by all four of the younger girls at the same time, as part of a "we" that moves through the farmhouse, observing the older characters. This allows Chase to "peel" off narrators as needed, as she does, for instance, in the novel's first section, where the eldest Celia begins to separate from the other three as she gravitates toward the attentions of men. It's impressive how well this trick works, actually, moving between first and third persons, the individual and the collective.

"Celia," the first section, is actually the last, chronologically speaking. From there, the novel moves backward in time, reintegrating Celia into the narrative foursome, and taking up what might be said to be the real thrust of the novel: the slow decline and death by cancer of Aunt Grace. It is Grace's illness, actually, that brings the various characters together, those who live in the farm house and those who don't, and the illness's demands bring out the complexities of the various characters: the hardheaded fatalism of Gram, the hopeful religiosity of Aunt Elinor, who applies the Secret-like precepts of her newfound Christian Science to Grace's condition, the cynical clowning of Grace's desperate husband Neil. It's Neil that delivers, after Grace's death, a resentful speech we realize is a bitter truth, referring to his daughter Anne, but also the entire family:

"Nothing else anyone will ever try to do for her will ever mean anything, never be enough. She'll always be dreaming about this place and this time, looking backward. Could be all of us should have gone on and died right along with Grace. Might none of us will ever be quite alive again."

On the back, the New York Review of Books compares During the Reign of the Queen of Persia to Marilynne Robinson (not really) and Alice Munro (yes). That's rarefied company, but well-earned. Even beyond the nifty perspective shifting, Queen of Persia is filled with effective prose. Chase has a special ability to describe the look on a face. There's Uncle Dan's face, which "looked as though it had rained all his summers, his eyes gray from clouds that passed over his heart." And Aunt Rachel's, which, as Grace is breathing her last, "shone as though it were a shell clarified in the sea." And I was floored by, after a description of Grace's wasting and mastectomy, the girls' thought: "We wondered how she could still looks so alive with all that gone."

In the Heart of the Heart of the Country by William Gass

For we're always out of luck here. That's just how it is--for instance in the winter. The sides of buildings, the roof, the limbs of the trees are gray. Streets, sidewalks, faces, feelings--they are gray. Speech is gray, and the grass where it shows. Every flank and front, each top is gay. Everything is gray: hair, eyes, window glass, the hawkers' bills and touters' posters, lips, teeth, poles and metal signs--they're gray, quite gray. Cars are gray. Boots, shoes, suits, hats, gloves are gray. Horses, sheep, and cows, cats killed in the road, squirrels in the same way, sparrows, doves, and pigeons, are all gray, everything is gray, and everyone is out of lock who lives here.

William Gass' novella "The Pedersen Kid" is one of those stories--or, I guess, novellas--that stick with you a long time; it chills the blood beyond the effective description of the Midwestern winter, chills it like the kid of the title, found outside the narrator's house in a snowbank nearly dead. The narrator, too, is a child or a teenager, and the sight of the frozen "Pedersen Kid" stripped naked, dead-looking, being rubbed by the family's workman Big Hans, unsettles him. In a brief moment of wakefulness, the Pedersen Kid tells an ambiguous story of a gunman who's trapped his family in their root cellar, where they will surely freeze if they haven't been shot. Together, the narrator, his alcoholic father, and Big Hans go to investigate, and the brutal winter may be as dangerous to them as the gunman.

(OK, a spoiler alert from here on.) Although the gunman is never seen, he does seem to be real: the narrator hears the shooting death of both his father and Big Hans as they crouch outside the Pedersen house in the snowbank. The gunman leaves, but comes back after the narrator slips into the house, and much of the drama of the novella's final third is purely psychological: the narrator never goes into the root cellar to see if the Pedersen family is really there, though his imagination provides what appears to be an essentially impeachable truth. He senses that he and the "Pedersen Kid," recuperating in his own house, have been swapped or traded for one another. Because he and the Pedersen Kid are equivalent, the death of the Pedersen Kid's family precedes and has ensured his own. What the narrator experiences in the house as he waits for the gunman is not, in the end, fear, but joy--he's been freed from the cruelties of his father and the predations of Big Hans, who is subtly suggested to have been sexually abusing the narrator.

It's an astonishing, frightening story. It's united with the other pieces in In the Heart of the Heart of the Country by the motif of the intense Midwestern winter. It's there in "Icicles," a novella about a real estate agent who becomes obsessed with the row of perfect icicles that have formed along his porch. He, Fender, has a boss named Pearson whose maxim is Everything is Property, and whose totalizing aggression reminded me of Shrike in Miss Lonelyhearts. Fender takes Pearson's maxim to heart, which is both affirmed by icicles on his porch--beautiful things which belong to his "property" and thus to him--and threatened by it--because the icicles are fundamentally fragile and liable to be snapped off by warming weather or mischievous children. Like "The Pedersen Kid," "Icicles" is primarily psychological; what "happens" is mostly contained within Fender's mind as he grapples with the possibility that he, too, is property, and yet the evanescent nature of the icicles suggests that might not as assuring or permanent a belief as one might expect.

But I think my favorite is the title piece, an extended description of Gass' hometown of "B," Indiana. Gass describes B and the larger Midwest as a gray and dreary place--you get the sense that it never experiences a season that isn't winter--and yet, in that grayness and dreariness there is much to capture the attention. Gass leaves no room for any cant about rural living--he calls the idea of farmers living close to the land "a lie of old poetry"--but also describes as being far superior to the hot and crowded life of cities, "swollen and poisonous with people." Though the piece--story? novella? essay?--is largely descriptive, it's addressed to a lover whose unexplained absence touches every scene and experience. To me, it's his kind of piece that allows Gass' tremendous verbal capacity to breathe, without getting caught up in the necessities of event and plot. It allows the reader to luxuriate in descriptions of "snow without any laughter in it, a pale gray pudding thinly spread on stiff toast"; and of the slinking cat, "is long tail rhyming with his paws."

Perfect Enemies by John Gallagher and Chris Bull

I came across this book while doing research for a paper I was writing about the gay rights movement in Cincinnati. One of the chapters, entitled "Brushfires: Antigay outbreaks in Cincinnati, Georgia, and Texas," was particularly helpful. I hung onto the book, planning on reading the rest of it, lost it, and began accruing late fees from the UC library. Sweet. I found the book last night and figured I might as well finish it before returning it.

Written by two newspaper journalist, Perfect Enemies details the political battle over gay rights in the 1990s. While it is clear that the authors know more about those advocating for gay rights than they do about their conservative Christian opponents, both sides are presented and treated rather even-handedly.

The book is comprised of eight chapters, each of which started out as a newspaper article. Each chapter highlights a specific battle over gay rights: Colorado's Amendment 2, gays in the military, the 1992 presidential campaign, Cincinnati's anti-discrimination ordinance, etc. I found the book incredibly interesting.

What's that you say? This book's not pretentious enough for you? Well did I mention that the main character's name is Self, that it is really just one long poem, or that it was translated from the original Mandarin Chinese by a blind monk?