Salinger, J.D. (Jerome David) 1919-2010

J.D. Salinger and I go way back.  It was he who stuck “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a poor sinner” into my little brain.  Yep, this is that damned Jesus Prayer that drives Franny Glass bonkers in Franny and Zooey.

As much as I hate the man for giving me that ear worm, i’m sad to see him gone.

My good friend The Hamster has the best remembrance of the man I’ve read.  Go check it out http://wheresmyhockeymask.blogspot.com/2010/01/indeed-today-is-perfect-day-for.html

Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

-W.H. Auden, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”

I’ve been thinking a lot about poetry and politics.

This is one of those recurring themes in my thought life. I’m an idealist who masquerades as a realist, but I cannot shake the belief that good art can shake the system to the core.

On the other hand, I fancy myself an artist, or at least a fella who likes to play with language. And, as such, I have always harbored a deep respect for Oscar Wilde’s apology for the uselessness of art.

The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved.

No artist has ethical sympathies.

I believe Oscar. Of course, loving beauty got him two years hard labor. Maybe he was more ethical than he thought. Maybe it was his ethics that ran him headlong into the authority of the day. And perhaps his art helped to (eventually? still going on?) bring down the ethics that put him in prison.

But poetry makes nothing happen.

Auden’s words about Yeats.

And here is Yeats, taking swipes at and then steps toward Irish Nationalism. He turns his Nobel acceptance into an opportunity to promote Ireland:

“I consider that this honor has come to me less as an individual than as a representative of Irish literature, it is part of Europe’s welcome to the Free State.”

Ahhh, but the Yeats I love is the Yeats with “a faerie hand in hand,” the romantic Yeats. Or that dark lyrical pessimism of Adam’s Curse: “we’d grown as weary hearted as that hollow moon.” Gorgeous. The beauty that needs no moral.

Poetry makes nothing happen…

And maybe Auden’s point is that politics, the give and take, the back and forth, it goes on with our without our art. But it sure don’t hurt to try and make something happen. Maybe the attempt to make something beautiful, and in that way to make something happen, maybe this is a windmill worth chasing.

Senator Blanch Lincoln has royally pissed me off.

Yesterday Senator Lincoln announced that she would be a cosponsor of the Murkowski resolution that prevents the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases. (Read the news here.)

I do not normally wade into politics on the blog.  Most of my political opinions I reserve for friends over a few frosty brews.  I do, however, keep up with the political fray and there are some issues that I care about passionately.  Climate Change is one of those issues.  There is simply no excuse for not acting now.

Throughout the Bush administration Republicans resisted taking action on climate change and said, “the science is not in yet.”  We know now this was a lie propagated by the oil and natural gas industry.

Now the naysayers are coming at it from a different angle.  “We have to take it slow so as not to wreck our economy.”  Bullshit.  We can accomplish strong climate change legislation AND strengthen our economy. What these folks really mean is “We need to protect the oil and natural gas companies who have given millions to our reelection campaigns.”

Blanche Lincoln, Arkansas senator since 1998, is among those senators.  I didn’t want to believe it.  I wanted to believe her website where she says:

Most importantly, I believe our country should focus on a long-term investment strategy in renewable and alternative energy sources, which will pave a road to energy independence.

Or how about this one:

Having been raised in a seventh generation farm family in Arkansas, I grew up with a love of nature and a great respect for the conservation of land and water resources.  I value our environment and want to find ways to best protect it for wildlife and for our enjoyment.”

Senator Lincoln has clothed herself in this narrative of the humble little farm girl who just loves the natural world. She’s done so even as she’s taken more and more money from the Agri-business industry, which has effectively killed the family farm she claims to love, and the Oil and Gas Industry, which is destroying both our economy and our environment.  (Don’t even get me started on her refusal to support a public option for health care, even as she pockets thousands of  dollars from Blue Cross Blue Shield).

If you want to see who is donating to Senator Lincoln check out the Federal Election Commission for a comprehsive list.  Open Secrets, a governement watchdog organization, also provides a summary view if you don’t feel like wading through the thousands of donors.

The text of the resolution is not yet up on Thomas.gov. It will be there once the EPA issues their rules. You can check out the Congressional Register if you’d like to read what Alaskan Senator Lisa Murkowski has to say for herself. It is shocking that someone who is so obviously in the pocket of the energy industry can say with a straight face that she is concerned for the American people. The words I have for this hypocrisy are not kind, and I’m biting my lip as I write this. (The ruling yesterday of the currently ultra-corporate dupes in the Supreme Court just further demonstrates the deep rift between “we the people” and our government).

If you live in Arkansas, call Senator Lincoln and tell her to withdraw her support for the Murkowski Resolution.  Visit her website lincoln.senate.gov. Her telephone in Washington is 202-224-4843 . Calling may not matter, she’s too deep in the pockets of corporate interests, but she should at least know that her constituents see her for what she is: another cog in the greed machine.

R.I.P. Donald and E. Lynn

I am the database jockey for a medium sized library. My title is Technical Services Supervisor, and my tasks are legion, but one of my primary jobs is to attend to the library’s catalog. A library catalog is a giant relational database that connects information about authors, books, and ultimately people like you and me who use the library.

In this role of database jockey, every year I have the gruesome honor of tallying up all the dead authors and entering their death dates into our catalog.

You have probably seen this before when you search for an author. You search for “Hemingway, Ernest,” and the catalog returns “Hemingway, Ernest, 1899-1961.” Well, when Ernest was alive the entry would be “Hemingway, Ernest, 1899-” A person just like me entered that 1961 sometime after Hemingway’s death.

Not every author gets a date. In general only authors for whom there is a conflict receive a date. So, if there are two Hemingway, Ernest’s out there the dates distinguish between the two. This rule doesn’t always seem to apply, however.

This week I’ve been stamping out the dead. Making sure that those who need it get the death date. It was a big year for literary dead, though, imho, the only real luminary to die this year was John Updike. Nevertheless, many lesser lights were extinguished.

Among those lesser lights, two were connected to the great state of Arkansas, where I call home. Donald Harington and E. Lynn Harris.

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To say that Harington was “connected” to Arkansas is an understatement. Harrington was born in Little Rock, went to college at the University of Arkansas, taught at the same for years prior to retirement, and, perhaps most significantly, he mined his experience of the state for the material of Stay More, Arkansas.

Stay More, a place as vivid as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, formed the setting for each of Harington’s 15 novels. Harington takes the raw stuff of life in the Ozarks and twists it into literary fiction. In an interview with Edwin Arnold Harington says:

The hillbilly is already a creature of myth.
Alas, then, I also am not a hillbilly. I am too educated to be a hillbilly. Like the lawyer who gives up his career to write crime novels or the doctor who gives up practicing in order to write medical novels, I forfeit my hillbilliness in order to write novels about hillbillies. It is some consolation that certain characteristics of hillbillies - fierce independence, shyness coupled with loquacity, a wry if not sardonic sense of humor - remain in my bloodstream, remain in my genes, and permit me never to forget what it is like being a hillbilly, at the same time that the deprive me of complete objectivity about hillbillies. I can’t laugh at hillbillies because I am still laughing too hard with them.

Harington never achieved commercial success, despite the fact that each of his books was met with critical praise. Maybe, he will undergo that transformation that death sometimes brings an artist, but until then he remains one of the greatest writers no one’s reading.

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E.Lynn Harris, by contrast, was no stranger to commercial success. He was a NY Times Bestselling author ten times running. His books garnered millions. But Harris was not a pulp writer or a literary profiteer. No, he had a story to tell.

Harris’s novels all deal with handsome African-American men on the down low, fellas who are struggling to come to terms with their sexuality, their masculinity, their identity. Harris took up this theme well before it was popular, and he did a damn good job writing convincing romance stories on a topic that still makes people squirm.

I’m prone to like Harris, though I’m not a huge fan. Like me, he was born in the dirty ol’ town of Flint, MI and like me he is a transplant to Arkansas. I’ll miss knowing he’s out there keepin’ it real on the down low.

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Fare thee well E Lynn. See ya on down the road Don.
Harington, Donald 1935-2009.
Harris, E. Lynn 1957-2009.

I’m a two pack a day man, smoke like a fiend
Like a burned out bearing in a bad machine
I cayn’t breath in the mornin’ till I get myself a cigarette lit
Say, Daaaa aaaad Blame, anyways a man cayn’t quit.
–Roger Miller

I did not meet her as a teenager, as so many others do. True, I saw her often, flirting with the gutter punks and metal heads, men, women, she was indiscriminate, flirty bitch, and I was not attracted to her. I was NOT.

Paul introduced us. He had not known her very long, but he invited her along one night. We had no plan. It wasn’t a formal date. Just friends, feeling the first flush of adult independence but with nothing to do except drive around that dirty Indiana river town. Five of us drove out to the river. There was Paul and her, Kelly and Jenny, and myself. They all knew her better than I did, and I was uncomfortable around her, awkward, but I wanted to get to know her. I wanted to impress her, show her how cool I was. I didn’t know then how easily impressed she was.

There, on the banks of the Ohio, our first kiss. My head was a mason jar of frenzied fireflies. Ecstasy.

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Summer of ‘96 I packed all my belongings into my little red Sentra. Rix later christened my Sentra the S.S. or Smoking Section, but she had not gotten that name yet, her upholstery still smelled new, like petroleum jelly.

The S.S. and I winded our way to Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, making stops along the way in St. Louis, Hot Springs AR, Glenwood, AR, and Norman, OK. In the time it took to get from Evansville, IN to Fort Worth, TX, I fully committed to tobacco, and on that trip, I switched my allegiances from cigarettes to the pipe. This was a decision made on a whim as I rolled through a drive-thru smoke shop in Hot Springs. There I bought a corncob pipe and a pouch of Prince Albert. The pipe I named Quennie.

Queenie and I snaked our way through the Ozarks, puffing and laughing, light headed. This was when one puff still gave me the lightening bug feeling. Empty one bowl, tapping her out on the side of the S.S.. Fill another. Empty another bowl, tap tap tap. Fill another. Puff, Puff, Puff. Later that night I sat around a campfire with Luc and Irys and we passed her around, taking turns. There was something sad in the air that night, like fumes of Auschwitz, and the tepee was cold despite Queenie’s presence.

How could I know then that I would scarcely spend a night without her for the next twelve years.

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I don’t smoke, and I don’t chew, and I don’t go with the girls that do.
~anonymous

I knew immediately when I arrived on the campus of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary that i had made a mistake in coming there. A quick review of the bumper stickers in the dormitory parking lot told me all I needed to know: “My Boss is a Jewish carpenter,” “We Vote Pro-life,” “In Case of Rapture, this Vehicle Will Be Unoccupied.” But in that election year, the top-rated bumper sticker was “Dole/Kemp ‘96.” Even in the height of my religious fervor, I despised jingoistic Christianity and hated this identification of evangelical Christianity with the Republican party, and SWBTS, the largest Christian seminary in the world, was, at that time in history, the seedbed of jingoistic, politicized Christiainity.

Smoking was anathema. No one smoked on campus. In fact, all SWBTS students were required to sign a pledge saying that we would not smoke or drink alcohol. I broke that pledge within two seconds of my arrival. I violated the pledge at least five times a day during my brief stay. I was afraid, though, of getting kicked out of graduate school, so I smoked in secret.

If smoking is an ice cream sundae, smoking in secret is the whipped cream and cherry on top. The secret makes the smoke delicious. My favorite place to smoke was the Denny’s on University Avenue in Fort Worth, and it was here that I would spend my nights and early mornings for the one and one-half years that I endured SWBTS.

My habit was to go the seminary library and check out books of theology that had been blacklisted from classroom reading lists. Then I would take these books to Denny’s and devour them along with twenty cigarettes. Yes, cigarettes. Queenie demanded too much codling. She was a demanding lover. She needed constant attention, cleaning, accessories. Ciggies only needed a light, and Armando, the manager at the Denny’s was always good for a light. He was sweet on me.

Then one rainy Tuesday afternoon, I couldn’t handle SWBTS anymore. I was sitting in my Southern Baptist History class. Earlier that morning at Denny’s I had finished a book about the recent history of the Baptist Convention. I read about the so-called “purge” of liberalism; I read about the back room deals (one wonders what might be different had those rooms been smoke filled); I read about all the subterfuge and jockeying for power, and I was illuminated. “I am not a Southern Baptist anymore.” I left class, got in the Smoking Section, lit a cigarette, and drove the ninety-miles to Waco, TX where I enrolled at the Truett Seminary. They didn’t care that I smoked, or at least, they didn’t make me sign anything saying I wouldn’t. True, they were still Baptists, but they were kinder, gentler Baptists. Joining their ranks brought catharsis for a time. To celebrate, I sat on the banks of the Brazos and smoked half a pack in the rain.

The Best Book You’re Not Reading

Pamela Ryder is a writer’s writer.

A quick Google blog search proves the point. Every writer-blogger has something good to say about Ryder.

Ryder’s story collection Correction of Drift also finds its place on many a young writer’s short list of recent and influential books. Lydia Peele, whose story collection is a similar tour de force, mentions Ryder’s book in a NYTimes interview and says the book “defies definition either as a story collection or a novel, but lies lyrically and refreshingly somewhere between the two.”

Correction of Drift is ostensibly “historical fiction.” Ryder retells the story of the kidnapping of Charles and Anne Marrow Lindbergh’s baby, the subsequent investigation, and trial.

Prior to reading, I did not know anything about the Lindbergh kidnapping other than that the kid got napped. There is, however, nothing pedantic in Ryder’s fictionalized interpretation of events. She is not writing a veiled history book. Instead, Ryder uses the Lindbergh kidnapping as a way of exposing this grand human comedy/tragedy.

This is, I suppose, what all writer’s seek to do: convey something of our human plight. Saying Ryder “exposes this grand human comedy/tragedy” now seems trite. So much Blah Blah Blah.

I cannot do Ryder justice. She’s good. Just good. She gets inside skulls. She disregards the maxim to “write what you know.” Instead she writes what she visualizes. Writes what she has only heard about, intuited. She takes a risk. A 189 page risk. And whether she succeeds or fails, depends on one’s definition of literary success.

Irony of ironies: I picked up John Grisham’s latest book, a collection of short stories titled Ford County. Grisham’s book will appear in every library in the country with multiple copies and a hold queue as big as it’s carbon footprint. Ryder’s book I struggled to find. She’s published by the University of Alabama Press. I finally got Correction via Inter-Library Loan. It came to me from the Austin Public Library in Texas (being a librarian has its advantages). Yet of the two story collection, Ryder’s is the more moving. Her’s is the one that attempts to grab the reader with the beauty of language.

But I’m rambling.

I’ll have more to say about Grisham’s Ford County after I’ve finished with it.

Confession: I troll the internet for youngish writers that I’ve never heard of. My Google Reader is chalk full of contemporary fiction blogs. One of my favorites is the NYTimes Papercuts Blog, and I particularly like their semi-weekly segment Living With Music. Here they give a writer the chance to list his or her top ten songs, usually stuff that’s had some affect on their writing. Most of the writers are young novelists from NYC.

This is how I came to Amy Koppelman.

Koppelman–look at that photo–looks like the quintessential NYC hipster writer: a Columbia MFA pedigree, a retro-tshirt, and a damn good playlist.

Koppelman has published two novels: I Smile Back (2008) and A Mouthful of Air (2003). I read ‘em both, in reverse chronological order.

The two novels bleed together like blood brothers. In I Smile Back, Laney is a middle-aged mother living in the suburbs of NYC and teetering on the brink of the mental abyss. In A Mouthful of Air, Julie is a younger version of Laney, a twenty-something mother living in NYC and trying to overcome her own ennui, a world weariness that, at the opening of the novel, has just manifest itself in a suicide attempt.

Both Julie and Laney are acutely aware of the absence in their lives of their fathers, an absence that Koppelman frequently evokes with narrative flashbacks. Both also struggle with the very notion of happiness: what does it mean to be happy? Both delve into the world of psychoanalytic recovery. Neither recovers.

Laney has two children, a beautiful car, loving husband. Julie has 1.5 children but is otherwise a match. Neither work. Both have domestics to do that which their angst finds unbearable, viz. take care of their children, their home, their lives.

Both have husbands who are practically non-Characters: always supportive, always ready to stand by their lady even after rehab or a suicide attempt. Both are committed to the idea of “family” and domestic bliss: “Let’s be happy, baby. Please, let’s just be happy.”

Halfway through I Smile Back I thought: “Now it’s the women’s turn.” American Literature is littered with stories of angst-ridden white male urbanites. Babbit, Rabbit, Portnoy, Herzog, all of them bemoaning the domestication of the White Man and his almost purposeless existence. Do I dare to eat a peach?

I thought Koppelman might have a refreshing perspective.

Kate Chopin, anyone? I remember sitting in a Denny’s in Fort Worth, TX after finishing the Awakening, chain smoking Camel Filters, and trying not weep in front Armando, the manager who was sweet on me.

But Koppelman’s characters are more caricature than flesh. There seems to be no affection between writer and character, and, quite the opposite, one senses a bit of judgement, as if Koppelman, fresh from a high school reunion, went straight home to write about the washed up homecoming queen she saw there.

Possibly, I’m being uncharitable. Maybe Koppelman herself is that homecoming queen. I know nothing of her biography that I didn’t read on a book jacket; nevertheless, wealthy, depressed urbanite is not the image she projects.

I read for those moments when a story takes me out of myself (as with the Awakening). I want words on a page to lead me into lives not my own. I want some mythos. I am not typically judgmental about what kind of world a writer leads me to. I like fucked up lives and unhappy endings as much as normal, happy ones. The trip there is the pleasure. I am as addicted to this feeling of leaving the body as I am to tobacco.

Reading Amy Koppelman was like smoking a candy cigarette: a puff of white powder and a useless gum, the image of smoking without the guilty pleasure.

Michael Ondaatje is best known for his book turned movie The English Patient.  Yet before he wrote The English Patient, Ondaatje penned In the Skin of a Lion, a hypnotically evocative novel set in 1920’s Toronto.

The Subject Heading in WorldCat for In the Skin of a Lion says, “Poor—Ontario–Toronto–Fiction.” Assigning subjects to fiction inevitably falls short. A story that can be summed up with a simple subject is not one I want to read. It’s true that welded to the frame of Ondaatje’s novel are the poor, immigrant laborers who have come to Toronto for a better life, yet, missing from this explanation, is the purity and force of Ondaatje’s words. He writes like an animistic god, inserting visions in his reader’s brain.

Here is social justice novel. Here is historical fiction, but mostly, here is a lyrical  exploration of living. What motivates a person to be active in the world, to fight injustice? Ondaatje asks. Then he answers with a series of images, vivid, luminescent.

I sought out In the Skin of a Lion because of an NPR story I heard over the summer. Part of the You Must Read This series. The commentator, Kamila Shamsie, called the novel “gloriously intoxicating.” She was so effusive about this book that I felt compelled to check it out.

I was disinclined to like Ondaatje. I had not read any of his work, but I was one of the only people—it seemed—that thought the movie the English Patient was a beautiful waste of time. Ondaatje’s career, I thought, rested solely on the fact that he had the good fortune of selling the rights to a mediocre story, turned Oscar winning movie.

I read the first few sections of In the Skin of a Lion with this chip on my shoulder. I constructed eviscerating reviews in my head. Found myeslf, mumbling things like “Oh, please,” as Ondaatje layered words upon words. Gradually, my criticism faded. I began to get involved with the characters. I started thinking about them when I was working, driving home, falling asleep. And when I thought of them, my thoughts were heavily textured things, weighty with both imagery and emotion. Anger, Love, Justice, Sex, Death. In the Skin is ripe with all the stuff of life, and Ondaatje got under my skin. He won me.

I cannot recommend this book more highly.

Chairman Mao is edited by the imminent sinophile Howard Goldblatt. Goldblatt is that type of scholar who oozes love for his subject, and one senses this in his selections for Chairman, a book that, despite its title, is far from political. In his introduction, Goldblatt explains this:

Mao must have know that the only truly dangerous writing in a totalitarian society is that which ignores politics altogether, literature that serves art, not society

This thought forms the fulcrum on which these stories teeter. These are not political diatribe, but are rather the art of a generation emerging from the morass of an overly politicized society.

The collection is a bit dated. It was published in 1995, and most of the stories were written in the immediate aftermath of the Tiannamen Massacre. Yet there is here a playfulness, an emerging sense of a literary aesthetic, that stokes my already growing excitement with contemporary Chinese fiction.

A few stories stand out:

“The Brothers Shu,” by Su Tong

This story solidifies my belief that Su Tong is China’s greatest living writer. In a manner characteristic of his stories in Raise the Red Lantern (the title story of which is my least favorite Su story) and Rice, Su gets into the minds of two families who live in a small town in rural Southern China. Tong is to Southern China and Chinese Literature what Faulkner is to the Southern U.S. and American Literature, viz. its master story teller—both advocate and critic and a damn fine wordsmith. Su’s brilliance lies with his characters and his compassionate submission to their whims and fancies. The man tells tragedy with a mix of humor and matter-of-fact narration that gets deep in your mind. His stories take on the shape of memory.

“When I Think of You Late at Night, There’s Nothing I Can Do: Five Tales of the Wen Clan Cave Dwellers,” by Cao NaiQian

There is still in Chinese literature a palpable connection to the land. In much of the literature of China, both past and present, an agrarian realism looms over the storied landscape. The best of Chinese writer’s know how to tap this feature and use it as the fourth-wall in their stories, without ever touching the subject in a direct thematic way. Cao’s story does just this. Laying forth five stories of men in love. The tragedy of love in China is a theme that reoccurs (see the earlier review of Ha Jin’s Waiting), and Cao manages here to vivify the notion, shifting the narrative voice from active to passive, moving in and out of the landscape of these five men, and, in much the same way as Su Tong, leaving the reader with images branded in the mind.

“Fritter Hollow Chronicles,” by Wang XiangFu

In this story, Wang plays with story telling itself. He writes as a amateur storyteller who is trying to tell a tale of his small rural village. The story is one of murder, old grudges, pride, and success, and while the story reveals much about the structure of post-Cultural Revolution villages, it also manages to inspire with its humanity and brutality. Good stuff.

Barnes and Noble Gets It Right.

My friend Anthony is–to put it mildly–a bookslut.    The type of fellow who has so many books that when he buys more, he has to hid them from his wife because she’ll get mad.   (That’s Gin Phillips to the right, though, not Anthony.  More on her ins a minute.) Not content with mere collecting, Anthony has turned his addiction into an admirable scholarly pursuit.  His research focuses not on the content of books as much as human interaction with books.  How we feel about books, and why/if we are attached to the physcial manifestaion of words known as the book.  Anthony calls this the “book object,” and he’s even got a wonderful blog about his personal explorations into book objects (http://onbooksandbiblios.blogspot.com/).  Anthony and I sometimes wrangle about the future of the book.  I believe that there will come a time (behold it approaches) when we will get most of our words in some paperless fashion, and I do not lament the passing of the book.

The contents of a book excite me more than the book itself.  The physical book to me is more of an annoyance (but yes, I am a librarian) that you have to take care of, store, lug around from town to town.  Book objects are things that Thoreau would say are “easier got than gotten rid of.”

The book-object problem is accentuated, in my mind, by the dubious practices of the publishing industry.  Books today are designed to wear out, fall apart, and the crappy content that’s published in these book objects is not worth the CO2 released from the trees the book-objects are printed on.  (eg I saw a book at the Friends of the Library book sale today titled Jesus, CEO that purported to reveal the secrets of Jesus’ business management style).

Admittedly, I am a hypocrite.

I have felt that titillating surge—so much like an awkward and unexpected pubescent erection—when I walk into a massive bookstore. The smell of book objects. The racks and racks of books on every topic. The covers in colors or lacking colors, artful,sometimes playful. AND, most importantly, I have salivated over the amazing bargains. They buy one get one deal. The $1 Dover Thrift editions of the classics.

If the publishing industry has gone a-whoring, then the big box bookstores are their pimps. Sometimes, these corporate stores even get in directly on the whoring. Barnes and Noble is the worst offender. B&B cranks out their own editions, in disarmingly handsome hardback, of the classics. I admit to having bought a few of these over the years. And B&B’s sheer purchasing power allows them to discount their books at rates that make it hard to say no.

Yet, sometimes, they get it right. And this is a post about Barnes and Noble getting it right.

Every year, I can count on getting at least one B&B gift card for my birthday or for Christmas. One of the perks of being a librarian is that everyone thinks you always want books as a present (which isn’t too far off the mark, really). For the last two years, I’ve used these gift cards toward the purchase of quality hard-back fiction, mostly of authors who probably don’t sell that much hard-back fiction (btw, if you want to support authors and NOT publishers, then buy first-run hard-backed fiction. This is really where an author makes his/her money. The acid-washed paper-backed editions are a publishers wet-dream because this is where they can take someone’s intellectual property, crank it out quickly and cheaply, and rake in the profit).
Barnes and Noble has a program called Discover Great New Authors, and this is where they get it right. One of their picks for this year is Gin Phillips and her new novel The Well and the Mine. The rightness of this pick almost attones for their past sins.

The book explores the world of coal-mining Alabama in the 1930’s. Phillips narrates her tale through the shifting perspectives of members of the Moore family, a family living in the type of dignified poverty popular in seventies TV shows like the Waltons or Little House. There’s the strong, working-class father who is both rough and gentle. Mr Moore has that time of wisdom that sees it as nothing to bail out a colored friend, but who has trouble thinking on the deeper issues of racial injustice. Ma is that type of maternal figure who sacrifices all for her family and does so without quarrel, without question. She is the flattest of all the characters in the book. The children round out the Moor family: two girls and a boy. The oldest girl is the beauty. The youngest is the boy, Jack, who is the scion, the only son, and though he is the youngest, Phillips chooses to time-shift from time to time, as Jack picks up the story looking back over that time from his vantage point of middle age. Tess, is the middle child, not as pretty as her sister, but more spunky. One senses that Tess is Phillips favorite child, for she seems to get the grandest treatment in the story.

A story like this , with a cast of characters that leans so closely toward archetypal cliches, could easily get so syrupy that it sends one into a diabetic comma. Yet Phillips eschews oversimplifying the life of this family, and she does so largely by sticking to the facts. The narrative facts of the story, that is.Portions of the story where other writers might be tempted to moralize, Philips simply tells the tale, or rather lets her characters do the talking. Much like Harper Lee’s classic—one of my all-time favorites—there is a strong theme of maturation at work in the Well and the Mine. This is a family growing up in a difficult time. That is all. It is not a more difficult time than any other; it is not a more romantic age. It is simply a different time. The story a human story.

But to get back to my original point: the success of this book is made more astounding by the fact that, as wonderful as the story is, no major publisher picked it up. No Random House, no Viking, no Knopf. The Well and the Mine was published by Hawthorne Books, a independent publishing house in Portland, OR (http://www.hawthornebooks.com/). Hawthorne says of itself: “we’re serious about literature. We suspected that good writers were being ignored and cast aside as a result of consolidation in the publishing industry, and in 2001 we decided to find these writers and give them a voice.” Three cheers for Hawthorne: Hip Hip Horrah! Each of their books is printed in durable paper-back with handsome cover-art and book-marking flaps. Barnes and Noble’s pick of The Well and the Mine gives me a shred of hope for publishing and for the literary arts in general. It makes me feel that maybe book-objects are still a worthy obsession.

Your move, Anthony.