A Last Look at Fifty-One Lives: Marion Winik, "The Glen Rock Book of the Dead"

The Glen Rock Book of the Dead by Marion Winik

Back when I first moved to Austin, Texas, I already knew about the little band of local celebrities. Where most of the locals kept their eyes peeled for Matthew McConaughey or Sandra Bullock down on 6th Street or watched for Willie, Jerry Jeff, or Marcia at the Broken Spoke; I was a little different. When browsing the shelves at Book People or fondling the produce at Whole Foods or Sun Harvest, I always kept one ear open, listening for a distinctive velvet growl. The Austin celebrity I was always hoping to meet was Marion Winik.

Alas, Marion moved away from Austin; and a few years later, so did I. Not long after she left, the frequency of her commentary on NPR's All Things Considered dwindled and I heard that voice redolent of whiskey and cigarettes no more. Widowed in 1994 (the story she spins out in First Comes Love), Winik remarried some six years later, moved to small-town Pennsylvania, and began a new phase in her life - perhaps even growing up just a little... but she still writes, thank the Lord, as she proved with her 2005 collection of essays titled Above Us Only Sky (the title’s from John Lennon’s “Imagine”). After a three-year hiatus, Winik returned with a vehicle that’s a little bit spiritual, a little bit weird, a little bit funny – and a whole lot of interesting.

In her latest, a tiny volume that might well be described as Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology as told by a female Jack Kerouac, Winik shares fifty-one vignettes of people (mostly) she has known; people who have since “moved on.” They’re dead – hence the title, The Glen Rock Book of the Dead, a riff on the Tibetan Book of the Dead cross-bred with Winick’s post office address in southeastern Pennsylvania. Just as the deaths of those we know leave the survivors feeling the full spectrum of emotions, Winik manages to share that same breadth of experience. No matter whether she’s writing about her cat, her father, or her son’s second-grade teacher, she manages to capture not just the essence of the dearly departed but also the fundamentals of her understanding of the person and his life. Some deaths left her sad, a few left her puzzled – and at least one left her angry that she could no longer berate the deceased.

Most of the fifty-one subjects are identified not by name, but by some characteristic that defined their relationship. Her first husband, Tony, is The Skater; her father, The Driving Instructor. Many of the characters who’ve passed through Winik’s tumultuous life will be familiar to those who’ve read her memoir or her collections of essays including The Skater and his friends, all dead of AID;, and The Clown, dead by his own hand in Austin. An ominous number of Winik’s friends from her twenties and thirties (and perhaps forties) died of overdoses (though one died when hit by a bird while motorcycling in Mexico). The Glen Rock Book of the Dead isn’t all dark and dreary, however: Marion shares many a pleasant memory – there’s a paean to the insouciant King of The Condo (an Austin alley cat named Rocco); and then there’s a memorial to a little pink house at Catina and Moulton in New Orleans, casually killed by that bitch, Katrina.

Perhaps the most poignant is her vignette of The Competition, a fellow memoirist with whom she shared an alma mater and a messy life – except that she’d never met the woman, didn’t know her from Eve...

When I heard the eulogy on NPR, saw the obituary in The Times, I was blindsided. Lung cancer, 42, are you kidding me? Now she was in my mind even more of the time, When I fell in love with a miniature dachshund a couple of years later, I finally read her chronicle of interspecies passion, but all I could do about it now was hug my dog. That summer I was back in Providence where we’d both gone to school. It was June and the students were moving out, their belongings in piles on the sidewalk. There among the stereo speakers and economics texts, I found a miniature Blues Clues armchair for my daughter, and on the ground beside it, a paperback copy of Drinking: a Love Story. I snatched it up and hugged it as if it were written by my sister. The one I never met. [Caroline Knapp, author of Drinking: a Love Story and Pack of Two, died in 2002. She and Winik never met.]

You might think the subject odd; you might be put off by the references to homosexuality and drug use. You might merely think, who cares about her optometrist, who died when she was eleven? So what if her first father-in-law was a Quiet Man? Why should we care about the deaths of her second husband’s three brothers? We’ll not go all John Donne on each other here – let’s just acknowledge that Marion Winik has the skill, the words, the heart to make us care about these people.

copyright © 2009-2019 scmrak

Margaret Atwood's "The Year of the Flood": You'll Hear that Final Whimper...

The Year of the Flood - Margaret Atwood

With the exception of limericks about Nantucket and perhaps Poe’s “The Raven,” there may be no bit of poetry more familiar to those who received an education in the USA during the mid-twentieth century than the final stanza of T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men.” Say it with me: “This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.”

A flourishing sub-genre of fiction is entirely devoted to predicting whether Eliot was right – it could be a bang, after all – and to just how that inimitable whimper might come to pass. Though the method of civilization’s passing might be secondary to the plight of the scattered survivors, the genre of post-apocalyptic fiction still must address the instrument of our demise – hence Eliot’s verbal musings. On the “bang” end of the spectrum authors have postulated rogue comets and mindlessly diabolical asteroids; alien invasion; or nuclear holocaust (e.g., Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon) – sometimes with but the barest of hints (c.f. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road) about the events. The “whimper” contingent leans more toward environmental upheaval, plague (Stephen King’s The Stand), or both. And then there’s Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, in which a thoughtful author predicts that the proximal cause of mankind’s unhappy fate will be his own unrelenting hubris. For The Year of the Flood, Atwood reprises her dystopic vision of mankind’s future; this time as seen through the eyes of a handful of survivors – survivors of “the waterless flood.”
Toby survived the waterless flood partially because she’d prepared for such an eventuality – building a hidden store of provisions and medicinal herbs – and partially because the schoolmarmish, fifty-something herbalist had the good luck to be living in a secure high-end health spa. Ren survived by accident: when the plague hit, she’d been quarantined after possible contamination by one of her “clients” at the high-end sex club where she worked a trapeze act. This is their story…

Toby and Ren have shared history, believe it or not. They’d spent several years together as members of God’s Gardeners, a sect that seems to have been created by mating the Amish with PETA – the central tenets of the faith are to avoid the use of modern conveniences and to never eat anything with a face or a mother. The Gardeners celebrate a different saint each day, saints like Dian Fossey, Euell Gibbons, and Terry Fox; and live simple lives amid beehives and rooftop gardens. All the while, “modern civilization” swirls around their little colony – a dystopian hell in which gargantuan corporations have taken over even the last vestiges of government, and therefore may comport themselves pretty much as they please. When the only police or military agency on the planet is CorpSeCorps – the corporate security corps – the question of “who’s minding the minders” pretty much becomes moot. Meanwhile, the Corporations sequester their scientists and technicians in secure compounds where they gleefully develop “new and improved” product after “newer and more improved” product to peddle to the rest of humanity, those called the “plebes.” Filled with the bored, the uneducated, and the chronically unemployed; the plebelands are a sea of hedonism and violence upon which the scattered islands of the compounds float uneasily. The billions of plebes subsist on a diet of SecretBurgers (the secret is where the meat comes from), get their health care from HelthWyzer, get their rocks off at Scales & Tails (Ren’s employer, a division of SecksCorp), and the women dream of a spa weekend at ANooYoo (where Toby’s a manager). Obviously, the txtg gnrshn named the businesses.

And then one day the world changed: a particularly pesky new bug got loose and the corporations couldn’t manage to get it under control. And when the dust cleared, the only survivors were the few who’d been isolated when the plague struck – a surprising number of them Gardeners… The Year of the Flood tells the same story as many another post-apocalyptic novel: a small band of survivors struggles to find food and shelter, and fights off the criminals who flourish with the disappearance of social order. Where Atwood’s saga differs is in the construction of her plot: instead of a sharp break when “the flood” occurs, Atwood’s content to let her story wander back and forth across that line in flashbacks of varying lengths – mostly how Ren and Toby got to this point; less of how the planet got in such a state. As in her seminal novel The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood spends little effort on answering procedural questions – the “how” and the “why” are explained in just a few toss-off sentences. She is instead content to let her audience read between the lines of a 400-plus page social commentary – which makes it no less biting, when all is said and done.

The “universe” of The Year of the Flood is the same as that of Oryx and Crake, right down to the appearance of a handful of characters in both tales – The Snowman, narrator of Oryx and Crake, shows up as a teenaged Jimmy; Crake slips into the plot several times as Glenn; and Oryx even shows up once – as do the Crakers, the post-modern humanoids Crake designed and gave to Oryx to “train.” Though they share the same universe, however, with its manmade piggoons, rakunks, liobams, multicolored Mo’Hairs, and phosphorescent lumiroses; The Year of the Flood stands resolutely alone.

A superb example of Margaret Atwood’s renowned ability to spin a tale that both entertains and enlightens, The Year of the Flood is one of those rare books that can take its reader through the full range of emotions. By turns dryly witty, terrifying, thought-provoking, and heart-warming; Atwood’s latest is one you simply shouldn’t miss. As you're reading, you can hear that whimper...

copyright © 2009-2019 scmrak

John Sandford, "Rough Country" - Virgil Flowers Returns (if Anyone Cares)

Rough Country by John Sandford

Erica McDill paddled her canoe out to watch the eagles return to their nest at sunset. She never came back. Virgil Flowers was on a boat of his own when he got the call, only a couple of hours into a big muskie fishing tournament. Virgil never came back, either. The difference was that, a few hours later, a very alive Flowers stood looking at a very dead McDill.

In Virgil Flowers' experience, murder is usually about sex or money; and McDill seemed to have plenty of both. The Eagle's Nest Lodge near Grand Rapids (the one in Minnesota, not the one in Michigan) began as a family joint; but a while back the owners had converted the Lodge to a high-end, women-only resort and the place had thrived. Though not officially a hangout for wealthy North Woods lesbians, a good chunk of the clientele had always been either full-time residents or visitors to "the island," McDill among them.

Nothing back home in St. Paul looked suspicious and the setting of the killing seemed to indicate a local, so Virgil began his investigation by nosing around the Eagle's Nest and the Grand Rapids lesbian community - a community that substantially overlapped with the local music scene. That overlap was mainly due to one person: the top local band's lead singer, Wendy Asbach, a brash, brawling blonde C & W type with a set of pipes to die for. So, the number one question: did McDill die for them?

Virgil Flowers commenced to do what Virgil does best: he poked his nose into enough people's business and turned over enough rocks to build a case, and then he let nature run its course. Witness and suspect interviews were a little tougher than usual for Virgil this time, though, since the cop who looks like a surfer dude (blond hair that's a little too long, tight faded jeans, and a string of rock concert tee shirts) figured out that good looks and an "Aww, shucks, ma'am" style just didn't seem to work as well on these particular women. Well, they worked fine on one of ‘em's sister: now, if he could just get his cell phone to stop ringing at all the wrong times...

Rough Country, John Sandford's third Virgil Flowers novel (after Heat Lightning and Dark of the Moon), finds Lucas Davenport's go-to guy still wandering around Minnesota's back roads in a state pickup truck, pulling a private boat. He's also still more inclined to leave his sidearm under the seat of the truck than under his arm, and he still has enough of an anti-authoritarian streak to sleep with witnesses and the occasional suspect - that he doesn't this time is probably more a result of the sexual preference of most of the women in Rough Country than for lack of trying. Given the small-town setting of the McDill murder, Flowers truly doesn't have much to work with - and that means neither does Sandford. A single red herring is pretty much all that separates readers from an open-and-shut case, and identifying the killer on about page 100; even with the stinky fish it's still close. So Sandford has to find other ways to pad out the plot. I lost track how many times Flowers had to backtrack because his chief local source, Zoe Tull, "neglected" to tell him yet another interesting factoid - one of which in fact turned out to be important, but the rest of which were just more distractions. All of that means that, while the two previous novels featuring Virgil were not only fun, they were also good mysteries that kept readers guessing. This time, though, the fun factor is just as prevalent but the mystery element is pretty ho-hum.

As ever, Sandford keeps up a running patter for his character . Clearly, Virgil was ADD as a child (consider that he doesn't sleep, and he doesn't  seem to be able to concentrate on anything for more than a couple of minutes at a time - except fishing). We learn that Virgil detests the Dixie Chicks (probably more a Clear Channel thing on Sandford's part than a music critic thing, since Virgil thinks Leann Rimes is the bomb); we also get minor insights into his three ex-wives. Unlike the previous two novels, though, Virgil has little luck with the ladies this time - however Sandford spins Virgil's frustrations into an amusing secondary thread. The problem with Rough Country, unfortunately, is that this thread is almost as engaging as the murder mystery. For that, Virgil loses half a star...

Find Rough Country at eBay

It's Got "a Lot of Bad, Bad Words in It": Whale Talk, by Chris Crutcher

Whale Talk by Chris Crutcher (2001)

Rumor has it that for most people, “high school” turned out to be little more than a variant spelling of “hell” – head cheerleaders and varsity quarterbacks excluded, I guess. I can’t speak from experience: my usually well-ordered memory seems to have misfiled most of what happened during my teens. I don’t know why, but the few lingering scraps seem to suggest that the rest is hidden out of willful self-defense. The renowned young-adult author Chris Crutcher, however, clearly does not suffer my peculiar memory malady: oh, no, Crutcher clearly remembers high school just fine, in all its excruciating, humiliating, embarrassing detail. He’s been making a living remembering those years for a couple of decades. Not only does he remember them, he shares them in all their glory – and Whale Talk is one of his best.

Somewhere in northeastern Washington, not far from Spokane, lies the town of Cutter. This bucolic little logging burg is, like many an American small town, proud of its high-school athletes; though Cutter might take things to extremes. As are most small western towns, Cutter is pretty homogeneous, which is just a fancy way of saying that almost everybody who lives there is White and Anglo-Saxon, and most are at least nominally Protestant. Cutter just happens to be where T. J. Jones lives with his adopted parents. The name on his birth certificate is “The Tao,” having been named after her favorite book by the birth mother with whom he spent his first two years. Considering that “Tao” is pronounced “dow,” it’s easy to see why The Tao Jones goes by a nickname (especially after the DJIA shed about a third of its value last year). T. J. also happens to be what lots of locals call a “mongrel” (a little further east in Idaho, he’d be called a “mud person”): his birth mother was Caucasian and his birth father (“the sperm donor”), Afro-Japanese. Sort of like Tiger Woods, T. J. Jones is a walking advertisement for what geneticists call “hybrid vigor,” ‘cause T. J. Jones has it all. A superb natural athlete, intelligent, and also darned good-looking; T. J. is everything one expects in a homecoming king – except perhaps he’s a little, errr, dusky. Oh, and he can have a wicked temper. Luckily, T. J. has a fantastic support system in his parents, his girlfriend Carly, and his therapist/friend, Georgia Brown (one of the other two people of color in Cutter) – otherwise he might have gone postal by his late teens.

Not all of T. J.’s classmates are so lucky. Like every school, every town – heck, every group of more than three people - there are students at Cutter High who are marginalized by their so-called peers for having the unmitigated gall to be “different.” Different can mean just about anything: developmentally disabled or super-intelligent, overweight, stick-like, painfully shy; anything that makes a kid stand out is grounds for exclusion… and worse. T. J. knows all about this exclusion stuff; having missed birthday parties and had dates broken because the parents of would-be friends don’t want “one of those people” in their homes. He’s getting through it, though, thanks to that support system.

When approached by his Senior English teacher to start a varsity swim team, T. J. is initially dubious. That’s for good reason: sure, he can swim; but not only does Cutter High not have a pool, there’s just one in the whole town (at the All Night Health Club), and it’s not exactly Olympic quality. And then T. J. has a brilliant idea… and soon Cutter High School has its first swim team ever. Only it’s a team composed entirely of the misfits, the marginalized, and the otherwise excluded – it’s a team with only one swimmer and no hope of ever winning a meet. Swim-team captain T. J. Jones has set his sights far higher than mere athletic accolades, however. He intends to give his six teammates something that the rest of their classmates have been trying to take away from them since first grade: their dignity. And so, the Cutter High swim team takes to the water: besides T. J., there’s a swimmer who weighs over three hundred pounds, one who’s the ultimate geek, one who’s a weight-lifting singer, one who’s so “average” that he just plain disappears in a crowd, one developmentally disabled, and one who has a weird limp and the baddest attitude ever – for darned good reason. Throw in a homeless man who sleeps in the health club at night as assistant coach, and you have all the ingredients of the most heartwarming sports story since Robert Redford blew out the stadium lights in “The Natural.”

If only it were that simple… but of course, it’s not.

Remember that T. J. is a “person of color”? Well, there are plenty of people in this corner of Washington who don’t much care for any color but lily-white – and chief among them is Rich Marshall, owner of the local lumber mill and the biggest cheese in Cutter’s alumni club. He spends more time roaming the halls of CHS with the football team than he does in his company office – and every time he sees T. J. Jones, something nasty just has to happen. See, Rich’s high school girlfriend Alicia left him and went away to college, then came back to Cutter with a mixed-race daughter. Rich married Alicia “anyway,” but little Heidi is collateral damage in a relationship that goes past dysfunctional to dangerous. When T. J. first meets Heidi, she’s attempting to scrub the “dirt” off of her arm – an arm almost exactly the same shade of brown as his.

T. J.’s senior year at Cutter High will be a delicate and sometimes dangerous balancing act for him and everyone around him: his swim teammates, his family, and little Heidi. It’s a year that will give him the strength he needs to be someone – perhaps someone great – and it’s a year that will take away one of the most precious things he has. To characterize Whale Talk as merely a “coming of age” tale is almost an insult to the growth T. J. Jones undergoes. One pretty much knows what to expect when opening a young-adult novel written by Chris Crutcher: the protagonist will be an athletic high-school boy who doesn’t quite fit into the rigid caste system of his small high school. He could be a jock – the king of the jocks, probably – if he wants, but he finds the jocks small and shallow. He has great (a) great parent(s) and somehow makes a connection with that one teacher who puts him on the right path; meanwhile thumbing his nose at those adults who’ve never outgrown their high-school attitudes. He participates only in those interscholastic sports in which he competes against himself – track, swimming, cross-country – even though he could be an all-around athlete. He has a smart, slightly quirky girlfriend with whom he hasn’t had sex. And he knows in his heart of hearts that the people who run the cloistered little world of his high school are complete idiots. Chris Crutcher’s books are all that way; more like a prix fixe meal than a la carte…

That’s pretty much the outline of Whale Talk, like Running Loose and Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes before it (and, I’d wager, Chinese Finger Puzzle and Athletic Shorts, too). But even though the basic concept of his young-adult novels doesn’t stray far from the one central theme of “Be Your Own Person,” each novel also has its own flavor and its own set of issues. In the case of Whale Talk, the flavor is definitely chocolate – and the themes are much darker. Front and center is racism; the ugliest form of hatred – here directed not only at a strapping teenage boy but also at a little girl. Another theme is that of violence, violence for its own sake and violence born of ignorance – especially physical abuse of a wife or girlfriend… or a child. Crutcher does not pull any punches in Whale Talk – you are hereby warned not to come to this book looking for sanitized dialog or simple, happy-days solutions. The ending… is not as happy as it could be.

Whale Talk gets pretty rough. Crutcher has never been one to pull any punches when it comes to his plots or dialog. He’s softer on organized religion this time than he is in his other books I’ve read; though he still takes some shots at other favorite pastimes of the social conservatives. Such “problems” are never the reason that books like this are challenged – and Whale Talk has been challenged regularly ever since its publication in 2001. The reason that’s stated most often is “profanity”: I haven’t any idea what number he or she reached, but I can guarantee you that some stick-up-the-butt type somewhere has gone through the book counting and can tell you exactly how many “dirty” words are in the text. Then he went and screeched to a school board somewhere about how “we don’t let our children talk like that at school, so you shouldn’t make them read those words.”

The shame is, that while the dirty-word counters are making their little marks on a tally sheet somewhere and just about foaming at the mouth over the language, they aren't reading the rest of the words – and so they’re not getting the point. There are some sections of Whale Talk that are incredibly difficult to read, to be sure. The first scene between T. J. and little Heidi is a race between breaking your heart and turning your stomach – yet it is the utter realism of hideous words coming from the mouth of a child, the instant knowledge of what a little girl’s life must be like, that gives this scene power rarely seen in adult fiction – much less young adult writing. One courageous educator in Alabama said of complaints about the language in this book, “[the message of this book] is more important than the language used.” Cooler heads don’t always win, however: s/he was, of course, eventually overruled…

Whale Talk is a tough read, one that your teenager may well find disturbing. It isn’t disturbing because it uses “a lot of bad, bad words”; as a school board member in Decatur, Alabama, would have it. Whale Talk is disturbing because what’s in there is utterly, entirely possible.