Mary TallMountain, Snatched away (#Review)

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Mary TallMountain’s “Snatched away” is the ninth story of fourteen in the anthology, Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers, that I’ve been working through this year. It, like the previous three, was published in the 1980s, in 1988 in this case.

Mary TallMountain

Anthology editor Bob Blaisdell provides minimal information about her. He gives her heritage as Athabascan, Koyukan and Russian on her mother’s side, and tells us she was born Mary Demoski in Alaska in 1918, and died in 1994. Wikipedia’s article on her describes her as “a poet and storyteller of mixed Scotch-Irish and Koyukon ancestry” (Koyukon being Alaska Native Athabascan). Later in the article Wikipedia also mentions her Russian heritage.

Wikipedia provides more background, though not as much as on some of the other writers I’ve read in this anthology. She didn’t start writing until she was in her 50s, which means the 1970s , and she was part of the Native American Renaissance. However, the works listed seem to be primarily poetry, and there’s no discussion of her prose writing. It describes her main themes as being Native and Christian spirituality, including a connection to nature. It also tells us that she was given up for adoption when she was 6, by her tubercular mother, who knew “she would inevitably die” from the disease. It was not a happy experience for TallMountain. Her step-father was abusive, and she was forcefully dislocated from her culture.

TallMountain’s whole life was a challenge – from the unsurprising alcoholism, given her difficult childhood, to serious health problems, including cancer and a stroke.

“Snatched away”

“Snatched away” is told through the eyes of a white man, Clem, who has an Athabascan partner, Mary-Joe, and two children, though this is only slowly revealed. The framing story takes place over a day, in the 1920s, as Clem manoeuvres his way down the Yukon river, meeting rivermen and reflecting on his life. Through him, TallMountain tells of the culture of Athabascan river people whose survival depends on their river, fishing and hunting skills:

Quick dark silhouettes against the greens of alder and cottonwood, the Indians were part of sky, river, earth itself: they wove their dories through tumbling water, poled schools of darting salmon, strode like lumberjacks. Born rivermen, Clem thought with respect. Still, the river was a tough customer. In the seven years he’d been here, ten men and boys had downed between Nulato and Kaltag.

The river might be tough, but it is nature, and its spirit and theirs are entwined. The more problematical thing is the impact on their lives and culture of the arrival of white people, particularly with their diseases like small-pox and tuberculosis.

TallMountain doesn’t gloss over or romanticise life, before or after the arrival of the whites. Rather, she tells it as it is. Early in the story is a scene, told in flashback, in which Clem spends an afternoon on the riverbank with locals, young Andy, who had later drowned, and Little Jim. They see a bundle rolling fast down the river and, on his asking what it is, Clem is told it’s a “Baby. Throwed away”. A common practice in the “old time” for imperfect babies, with a “bum leg” maybe, or “head mashed”, it happened less now, but women will still do it, he’s told, if the baby is “too bad”.

Death pervades the story, actual or intimated – from the babies and the drownings to the aforementioned diseases – but its handling is unsentimental.

From the opening paragraph describing the Yukon as being in a “fierce, frowning mood” to the end when Clem’s “words are snatched away by the wind”, it is the river that controls the story. Its power and potential to both sustain with fish and birds and to kill, and its associated spirituality, are evoked through the people Clem interacts with on his journey – like the consumptive Floyd out hunting mallard and Willy the fisherman who “looked as if he had always been there” and who tells Clem “you got to watch that river” – and through Clem’s physical struggle to keep his boat upright and on course. The river is a living thing, and should never be underrated. Nor perhaps, should be the Woodsman, an Athabascan bad spirit about which Clem asks Willy. It’s a joking reference, but with a tinge of something else all the same, given soon after this Clem senses “something besides fish alive, out there in the river”.

There is clearly an autobiographical element to the story, with Clem’s partner, like TallMountain’s mother, contracting tuberculosis and the local doctor offering to adopt the children, just as Tallmountain had been. Clem is bothered, but philosophically believes “it will all work out in the wash”. Will it? Much is left open in this story.

Like many of the stories in the anthology, “Snatched away” is at least partly about the intersection of cultures. TallMountain, like many of the authors, is of mixed heritage, and in the little I’ve found about her on the Internet, she was comfortable with that. In fact I found an Interview with her in which she describes herself as an “inbetween”*, by which she means having “a connection between two different cultures” to which must be done justice. As Clem fights his way down the river, he thinks about his own heritage and background, as well as of the Athabascan people. As he tires, he sees the faces of his wife and children “wavering” in the mist. But, his specific pronouncement about “Indianness” just after this – “what difference now, how much the blood is mixed” – felt sudden and a bit out of the blue.

It may be that TallMountain was more poet than storywriter, but I did still enjoy the story, even if more for its gorgeous writing about the river and its people than for its narrative coherence. And it has been anthologised more than once, which says something.

* Joseph W. Bruchac III, “We are the inbetweens: An interview with Mary Tallmountain”, Studies in American Indian Literatures, Series 2, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Summer 1989), pp. 13-21

Mary TallMountain
“Snatched away” (orig. pub. 1988)
in Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2014
pp. 65-74
ISBN: 9780486490953

Monday musings on Australian literature: Series or standalone?

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I started my recent post on Shelley Burr’s crime novel Ripper with a statement that crime novels are often written in series and that I am not a big series fan. Ripper looked at the start to be a standalone novel, but a few chapters in the protagonist from her first novel Wake appears. From then on, his voice is irregularly alternated with the novel’s main voice. But, more on that anon.

When I started reading Ripper, then, and thought it was going to be a standalone novel, I considered starting my post with singing the praises of standalones, but then, finding it wasn’t as it seemed, I shelved that issue for another day – like today. I did a little browser searching on the topic and found some useful discussions. They included ideas I’d considered, but some new ones too.

This topic is not specifically Australian, but there are many Australian crime novelists, and most of the ones I know, which is a smidgeon of what’s out there, write series. Crime is not the only genre in which series are common, of course, but it’s the one I’m using to exemplify the issue.

Here is a small selection of Australian crime, mostly authors I have reviewed or would like to read:

I have also read some Australian stand-alone crime – Emily O’Grady’s The yellow house and Emily Maguire’s An isolated incident, being examples. These are more likely to be promoted as “literary crime” as against “genre crime”, though the distinction is loose and not necessarily helpful.

Anyhow, here are some ideas on the subject…

On series

Dorothy Johnston, Through a camel's eye

My non-preference for series is based on a few things, the main one being that I read to hear different voices in different settings about different people, places and ideas. Series novels tend to be set in the same place and milieu, with some continuing characters. Another reason is that I like to be challenged by different approaches to story-telling a story, but series novels tend to follow a formula. It might be a good formula, the writing and characterisation might be great, but it risks becoming familiar rather than challenging or exciting.

These reasons relate in fact to what the Kill Zone named as the single biggest advantage to a series, for both writer and reader. Series, they say, provide “comfort food for the imagination”. However, they also recognise the risk that series can become formulaic.

Another issue for me is the amount of backstory that novels in series tend to include. I guess that’s for readers who start a series in the middle, but if you have read the previous novels, it can be irritating. The Kill Zone suggests that this backstory aspect is a challenge for writers too: “How much backstory does the author include in subsequent books without boring the dedicated series fan or confusing the mid-series pick-up reader?” Good question. The Career Authors site looks at it this way: “You want to make sure,” it says, “that each series title is a potential standalone, so that you can tell readers you don’t have to read my books in order!”

British crime writer Carol Wyer writes about the work involved in writing a series. She says:

You’ll need to know your characters inside out, especially those who will appear in each book, and you must continue their personal stories, weaving them in between each storyline and… you need a theme, one that permeates each book and links them all. It must be something that hooks your readers, so they will want to read the next book, maybe another overriding storyline or simply reader investment in each of your main characters.

She has “notebooks and manilla files” for every character, recording their likes and dislikes, how they pronounce things, and so on. The Career Authors site also describes in some detail what writing a series involves for an author. You can’t kill the main character off, for example!

Still, says Wyer, “the rewards are huge” because authors are usually bereft when they end a book and have to “say goodbye to the characters”. With a series they don’t have to!

On standalone

Emily Maguire, An isolated incident

I’ve already implied why I like standalone novels. The Kill Zone, looking at it particularly from the series author’s point of view, says that “the advantage of writing a standalone … is it can bring on a breath of fresh air for you and the reader”. A standalone, that is, lets a writer explore or experiment with new approaches, techniques, subjects, and it lets the reader see new talents in a loved writer. However, the Kill Zone warns writers to not stray so far from their norm that their fans won’t recognise them.

On a Kindle discussion board, I found the warning that “standalone genre novels can be harder to sell”.

Happy mediums

Series vs Standalone looks like an either-or situation, but, is there a happy medium? Well, yes, there is. One is the approach that Shelley Burr took in Ripper. It is set in a different location, and has a different main protagonist, but the protagonist from her first novel plays a subsidiary investigating role from another location. The Kill Zone, in fact, suggests something like this when it recommends that authors could “touch on something” in their new book that had “appeared in a previous series”.

Dervla McTiernan, The ruin, book cover

The other idea, one that has a foot firmly planted in both camps is the “trilogy”. While she didn’t frame it in terms of this debate, Dervla McTiernan, in the meet-the-author event I attended, said about writing her Cormac Reilly trilogy, that she didn’t want to write a long procedural series, because they tend to be episodic without overall narrative arcs. She wanted to challenge her character Cormac; she wanted him to have a narrative arc which would see him changed by the end. That said, she did admit that Cormac might re-appear some time in the future!

Some sources

I found a few discussions on the internet that made some good points regarding the series vs stand-alone debate. The main ones were the Kill Zone blog (a joint blog), Carol Wyer, and Career Authors.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, whether you are author or reader. Do you prefer one or the other, or don’t you care? Over to you …

Shelley Burr, Ripper (#BookReview)

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When I started reading Ripper, Shelley Burr’s follow-up novel to her bestselling award-winning debut novel Wake (my review), I thought about crime novels, about how they are often written in series and how I am not a big series fan. Ripper looked to me like a stand-alone novel – and it is, somewhat! I say somewhat, because a few chapters in we come across one Lane Holland.

The plot thickens…

Lane Holland, I thought. I know that name. Sure enough, Lane Holland is the private investigator protagonist of the aforementioned Wake. However, he is not the prime investigator in this novel, because he is in prison as a result of his previous investigation. (You’ll need to read Wake to find out more!) The result is an intriguing crime novel in which we have our prime, self-appointed amateur investigator, Gemma, plus the police working away in the background, and Lane who is pulled into the investigation by his prison governor, Patton Carver. Yes, you’ve guessed right, the plot thickens – except I haven’t really told you about the plot yet.

Ripper is set in a fictional town called Rainier, which, as Burr confirms in her acknowledgements, is partly based on the town of Tarcutta. Seventeen years before the novel opens, three murders had occurred in this little country town, the last one outside the door of Gemma’s little teashop. She – and the town – have never fully recovered from these events. The town has stagnated under its black reputation, and Gemma herself suffers PTSD from what she had experienced. Now a tour company has arrived wanting to run a true crime or dark tourism walking tour of the Rainier Ripper’s murderous path, but Rainier’s residents have mixed feelings about the idea. On the eve of the trial tour aimed at garnering their support, the tour operator is killed in what looks like a copycat murder. It has to be copycat because the Rainier Ripper is in prison, the same prison as Lane Holland. As I said, the plot thickens, and part of the thickening springs from why prison governor Carver is interested.

Once again, I enjoyed Burr’s story, because once again it is more than a crime story, exploring issues like the impact on a small town of having a reputation for violence, the impact on people who have been close to a violent crime, the idea of dark tourism, and the murky world of police investigations and the ways in which confessions are elicited. I am not an expert but Burr’s research into the relevant issues, including prison life, felt thorough but lightly applied.

I also enjoyed Burr’s characterisation. Gemma and Lane are well-evoked. Other characters are necessarily more sketchy, but they are individualised enough to lift them above pure stereotype, to make them feel true. There is an engaging exploration, through Gemma’s daughter and her friends, of how teenagers cope with a complex adult world. There are some truly “tangled” family relationships in the town. There is some diversity, including a non-binary teen and a Wiradjuri woman, which Burr introduces without trying to appropriate other experiences. There are farmers, business people, pub owners, and doctors whose lives are entwined through marriage and murders. It’s a lot to convey, and there are plenty of names, but I rarely got lost!

Ripper has some similarities with Wake, in addition to also belonging to the rural noir sub-genre. It’s told through roughly alternating third person voices (Gemma and Lane); the protagonist is privately investigating; and it deals with a cold case, which involves a missing person. But it is significantly different, too, including the fact that Gemma is an amateur unlike Wake‘s Lane, and that it is set in a different place with different issues to confront. This means that it is not formulaic, which keeps us readers on our toes. We can’t assume anything about where Burr is going.

Now, I am not a big plot-follower, by which I mean I don’t put serious brainpower into trying to work out who dunnit. Rather, I read crime like I read most books, that is, with a focus on the characters and the issues being explored. But of course, I can’t help following the actual plot, particularly when the characters have engaged me and I want them to fare well. In Ripper, I worked out one of the plot twists, but it had several – like those Christie and Christie-like TV shows I watch – and they left me for dead. They did make sense, though, which is the important thing.

On the basis of her manuscript for Wake, Burr won a two-book deal with Hachette, and Ripper is the second book. I do hope she is offered more book deals because, while there is absolute closure on this book’s crimes, there is also a clear hint at the end about where a next book might go – and I’m intrigued. Burr is a clever writer, with her wits about her. Ripper’s readers will guess the main investigation Burr plans for her next novel, but what will the context be this time? What will be the issues? Time will hopefully tell.

Shelley Burr
Ripper
Sydney: Hachette Australia, 2023
346pp.
ISBN: 9780733647857

(Review copy courtesy Hachette Australia)

Monday musings on Australian literature: Elizabeth Webby (1941-2023)

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This might be a first for me, an obituary-style post for an academic/literary scholar rather than for an author. However, this post seemed appropriate as, Elizabeth Webby, who died last month, is someone whom I’ve mentioned several times in my blog due to her having written in areas that are of interest to me. Specifically, these areas were colonial Australian literature and contemporary Australian writers, particularly women writers. I heard about her death from the Association of the Study of Australian Literature, for which she was a founding member and of which she was President from 1988 to 1990.

A significant legacy

Julieanne Lamond, current president of ASAL and co-editor of its online journal, Australian Literary Studies, has posted a tribute to her on ASAL’s website. It is well worth reading, because it outlines her major roles and achievements, which include her being Professor of Australian Literature at the University of Sydney from 1990 to 2007. This involved her “supporting works of scholarly infrastructure including the AustLit Database, numerous scholarly editions, and the online Australian Poetry Library”. I have often used AustLit (albeit much of the content is paywalled) and the Australian Poetry Library (which seems not to be currently available, perhaps due to lack of ongoing support?) Webby also edited the Southerly literary journal for over a decade.

However, my “experience” of Webby has also been more specific. While I had come across her before, I became seriously aware of her through The Cambridge companion to Australian literature (1996), which she edited. This book is a little different from those “companion” style books which contain alphabetic encyclopaedic entries related to their chosen topic. Rather, it comprises essays which provide a partly chronological, partly thematic, survey of Australian literature starting with “Indigenous texts and narratives”. It works, in other words, more like a text book or history than a reference book. I often dip into it, when I am researching specific aspects of Australian literature, and find it sometimes useful sometimes not, depending on how well my particular interest has been covered.

However, I had came across Webby earlier via her essay on colonial poets in Debra Adelaide’s A bright and fiery troop (1988), which is another book of essays on Australian literature, but this one limited to 19th century women writers. It’s another book I often dip into when researching earlier writers.

Both these books, though, were in my ken before I started blogging. Skip a couple of decades to 2018 when I wrote a Monday Musings post titled Literary culture in colonial Australia drawing on Webby’s work. It was fascinating research, both for what she found and for the sorts of sources she used and their varying levels of completeness. Then in 2021, I wrote another Monday Musings on the Irish-Australian poet, Eliza Hamilton Dunlop (1796-1880), using research by Elizabeth Webby and another academic, Anna Johnston. These are just two examples of Webby’s work but, as Lamond of ASAL writes, her research interests spanned the breadth and depth of Australian literature, from early colonial literature, through early 20th century writers like Miles Franklin and Barbara Baynton, and mid-20th century ones like Patrick White, to those more contemporary to her own times like Frank Moorhouse, Elizabeth Harrower and Joan London. She was also, apparently, a loved and respected teacher, academic supervisor and mentor.

All this is important and significant, but another measure of who she was can be found in the funeral notice for her in the Sydney Morning Herald where can be found the following request, “In lieu of floral tributes, please consider a donation to the Indigenous Literary Foundation”. Presumably that was her own request – or from her family based on their knowledge of her passions. Either way, it’s the icing on the cake. Vale, indeed, Elizabeth Webby.

Pat Barker, The women of Troy (#BookReview)

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I shocked my reading group last week when I announced during our discussion of Pat Barker’s novel, The women of Troy, that I was tiring of feminist re-imaginings of historical women. This is not to say that I didn’t enjoy the novel, and it is definitely not to say that I am not interested in novels addressing feminist issues and concerns. It is simply to say that mining the past for the wrongs of the past, while perfectly valid, is starting to feel a bit repetitive, and consequently, also perhaps a bit reductive.

In the last couple of decades, the Classics seem to have been particularly popular for authors to revisit. I can point, in my own reading, to Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (my review), and more recently to authors I haven’t read like Madeline Miller and Natalie Haynes. These authors have all re-imagined women’s roles from the Greek classics. A somewhat different, because non-feminist, re-imagining is one that relates closely to Barker’s novel, David Malouf’s Ransom (my review). In it, Malouf explores the visit Priam makes to Achilles to beg for the body of his son Hector. This event occurs before Barker’s novel starts, but it – particularly how the characters interpret it – underpins Barker’s plot.

So, let’s get to Barker’s novel. It starts with the fall of Troy but it mostly occupies the time during which the victorious Greeks, eager to return home with their spoils of war, which include the titular women of Troy, are unable to leave because they need the right weather to sail. However, it’s not coming because the gods are offended. The Trojan King Priam’s body has been brutalised and left unburied – by the now-dead-Achilles’ son Pyrrhus, who is emulating his father’s treatment of Priam’s son Hector.

Barker evokes the scene well, detailing life at the encampment along the bay, which includes the households of Greek heroes and kings – like Agamemnon and Odysseus – and the women’s quarters where the captive Trojan women are being kept. The warriors, who are fine when they are fighting, are restive, while the women are trying to survive this nightmare. Three voices carry the story, the main one being the first-person voice of Briseis, who had been Achilles’ “prize of honour” but is now married to his trusted companion Alcimus. She tells her story from 50 years hence. Her voice is occasionally interrupted by one of two third-person male voices who speak from their present, the aforementioned Pyrrhus, and the out-of-favour seer, Calchas. In fact, it is Pyrrhus who opens the novel.

“nobody would believe a girl capable of doing it” (Briseis)

Barker knows how to tell a compelling tale. She unfolds the plot at a steady pace, building up the tension in the encampment through strong imagery and tight description. I particularly loved her use of birds to both convey tone and further the themes. Chief among these were the ever-present crows who, Briseis tells us partway through the story,

were everywhere now, and they seemed so arrogant, so prosperous … Almost as if they were taking over.

Above all, though, it’s Barker’s characterisation that engaged me, her ability to invest her characters with humanity – including the brutal Pyrrhus who at 16 years old is young, unconfident and struggling to live up to the reputation of his father Achilles. Briseis, the spoil of a previous war and now carrying Achilles’ child, is more privileged than the newly captured Trojan women, but she needs all her wits if she is to keep them as safe as she’d like, particularly the independent Amina who is determined to defy Pyrrhus and give Priam the burial he deserves.

One of the ways Barker creates these relatable characters is to use contemporary and often highly colloquial language, which I admit I initially found off-putting. I don’t usually bother much about anachronism in historical fiction, so it tickled me that our reading group member who tends to be the most critical of anachronism was the main defender on this occasion. She argued that the language of The Iliad, for example, is poetic, rather than realistic, and that, given we don’t know the language of the time, Barker’s earthy approach – with its expressions like “poor cow”, “as you would”, and “fat lot of good” – is valid. Fair enough – and, in fact, I did find myself able to go with the flow, once I’d attuned myself.

There were other moments, too, though, where the language felt a bit clunky, but they were not enough to spoil what was a page-turning read about the politics of war, of enslavement and of genocide, a story in which the victors take the women for their own and aim to kill all surviving Trojan males:

They weren’t just intent on killing individual men; they meant to erase an entire people.

It’s a grim and brutal world. As Briseis tells us near the beginning, “the only thing, the only thing, that mattered in this camp was power – and that meant, ultimately, the power to kill”. 

But, there are some things that the victors, for all their swaggering physical power, overlook or can’t control. One is the greater power of the gods, and the other is the women. Barker shows how women, in being so ignored, so underestimated, so under the radar, can in fact exert some agency exactly because of this. It’s not an ideal way to be, but when needs must you do what you have in your arsenal.

You don’t need to have read the first book in the trilogy to appreciate this novel. I hadn’t. And, while the kernel of a sequel can be seen in its ending, The women of Troy has enough closure to make it work as a stand-alone novel. I wouldn’t call it a must read, but for those interested in looking at Greek myths from a different angle, there is much to “enjoy” here.

Pat Barker
The women of Troy (Troy trilogy #2)
Penguin Books, 2021 (Kindle ed.)
309pp.
ISBN: 9780241988343

Monday musings on Australian literature: 2023 Mark and Evette Moran Nib Literary Award shortlist

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Occasionally, as you know, I use my Monday Musings post to make awards announcements, particularly if the announcement is made on Monday, as this award usually is. And so it happened again today, a Monday, that the shortlist for this award was announced.

I have written about it before and so if you are interested to read about its origins and intentions please check that link. In a nutshell, it celebrates “excellence in research and writing”, and, like the Stella Prize, it is not limited by genre. However, given its research focus, nonfiction always features heavily.

The new thing, though, that is worth sharing in today’s post is that in April this year, Waverley Council which manages the award announced that the winner’s prize had doubled in value from $20,000 to $40,000, thanks, they say on their website, “to an ongoing multiyear commitment by the award’s principal sponsors, Sydney philanthropists, Mark and Evette Moran, Co-Founders/Co-CEOs of the Mark Moran Group”. This is a significant prize. The Council’s announcement also said that it had “also increased the People’s Choice Prize to $4000 and will be offering six shortlist prizes of $1,500 each”.

The Award is also supported by community partner Gertrude and Alice Bookshop and Café.

The judges for the 2023 award are Katerina Cosgrove (author), Jamie Grant (poet and editor), and Julia Carlomagno (publisher).

The 2023 shortlist

  • Alison Bashford, An intimate history of evolution: The story of the Huxley family (family biography, Allen Lane)
  • André Dao, Anam (debut novel, Hamish Hamilton) (Brona’s review)
  • Jim Davidson, Emperors in Lilliput: Clem Christesen of Meanjin and Stephen Murray-Smith of Overland (dual literary biography, The Miegunyah Press)
  • Fiona McMillian-Webster, The age of seeds: How plants hacked time and why our future depends on it (science nonfiction, Thames & Hudson Australia)
  • Ross McMullin, Life so full of promise: further biographies of Australia’s lost generation (multi-biography, Scribe)
  • Brigitta Olubas, Shirley Hazzard: A writing life (literary biography, Virago, on my TBR)

Waverley Council Mayor, Paula Masselos, said that the shortlist was chosen from more than 230 nominations, a number that, she said, reinforces “the importance and gravitas of this award”.

As commonly happens with this award, life-writing features heavily in the shortlist, with just one work of fiction. It is not as diverse as other awards are increasingly becoming, but most of these books wold interest me.

The winner of the overall prize and the People’s Choice Award will be announced on 9 November. For information on how to vote for the People’s Choice Award, check out the shortlist announcement page.

Do you know any of these books?

Six degrees of separation, FROM Wifedom TO …

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Woo hoo, our house is sold (though not quite off our hands), and spring has sprung down under (just), so the Gums are feeling ready to begin the next stage of our lives. We are relieved, but, you know, it’s acceptance that we are on the downward trajectory – to put it bluntly, so let’s just get to Six Degrees. If you don’t know how this meme works, please check host Kate’s blog – booksaremyfavouriteandbest.

The first rule is that Kate sets our starting book. In August it’s another book I haven’t read, Anna Funder’s Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s invisible life. It is about Eileen O’Shaughnessy who married Orwell in 1936 but has been barely mentioned in biographies of Orwell. Funder set out to discover why.

Anna Funder's Stasiland bookcover

Now, it appears that some of my links have been a bit obscure lately. So, in deference to regular commenter here, MR, who wants a fighting chance to work out my links, my first one this month is an obvious one, Stasiland (my review), which is another non-fiction work by Anna Funder.

Helen Macdonald, H is for hawk

Stasiland was well-reviewed when it came out and was shortlisted for many awards. It won at least one of those, the 2004 Samuel Johnson Prize for the best non-fiction writing in the English language. Ten years later, in 2014, Helen Macdonald won the same prize for her book, H is for Hawk (my review). FYI, in 2015 this prize was renamed, the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction.

Macdonald writes about training, and hunting with, a hawk, while she works through her grief for her father who died suddenly. A very different work about a hawk is Australian writer D’Arcy Niland’s short story, “The parachutist” (my review) though we do also see the hawk in hunting mode.

Book cover

In “The parachutist”, the hawk preys upon an innocent young kitten who is oblivious to the danger of a predator from the skies. Chris Flynn‘s novel Mammoth (my review) also includes a predator from the skies, Pterodactylus, who tells the other “characters” in the novel, “I was referred to as the Reptilian Eagle, an apex predator who dominated the skies. It would have been a compliment, had it not come from the mouths of maniacs”. (The maniacs were the Nazis.)

Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable creatures

Pterodactylus, like many characters in Mammoth, is a fossil. Another historical fiction novel (if you can call Mammoth historical fiction) that deals with fossils is Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable creatures (my review). It tells the story of the early 19th-century fossil collector, Mary Anning.

Jane Austen, Persuasion

Mary Anning’s collecting work focused on the marine fossil beds in the cliffs at Lyme Regis. Some of you, on hearing this, will immediately guess my last link, and you would be right. It is to Jane Austen’s Persuasion (my post on volume 1), in which a significant (and memorable) event occurs in the same place. 

My post this month started in England with Kate’s choice and ended there, but in between we visited Germany and Australia, and we traversed a wide expanse of time from pre-history to the 21st century. We also, unusually, spent a bit of time in the animal kingdom.

Now, the usual: Have you read Wifedom? And, regardless, what would you link to?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Masterpieces of fiction, 1910-style

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A straightforward post this week, and one shared in the spirit that readers love lists of books. This list is not Australian (despite my posting it in my Monday Musings series) but it was shared in multiple Australian newspapers in 1910 which makes it part of Australia’s literary history, don’t you think?

The list was headed in most newspapers as “A short list of masterpieces of fiction” and the explanation provided was essentially this, “An American paper offers the following as an excellent though, of course, limited list of the best books for one to read”. The papers don’t value add, so we don’t know which American paper produced the list or under what circumstances. However, I thought it was a fun one to share because it’s not just a list of recommended books, but of the “best” in different categories. Here they are:

William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair
  • The best historical novel — Ivanhoe (Sir Walter Scott, Scottish) 
  • The best dramatic novel — The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas, French)
  • The best domestic novel — The vicar of Wakefield (Oliver Goldsmith, English)
  • The best marine novel — Mr. Midshipman Easy (Frederick Marryat, English)
  • The best country life novel — Adam Bede (George Eliot, English)
  • The best military novel — Charles O’Malley (Charles Lever, Irish)
  • The best religious novel — Ben Hur (Lew Wallace, American) 
  • The best political novel — Lothair (Benjamin Disraeli, English)
  • The best novel written for a purpose — Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe, American)
  • The best imaginative novel — She (H. Rider Haggard, English)
  • The best pathetic novel — The Old Curiosity Shop (Charles Dickens, English) 
  • The best humorous novel — The Pickwick Papers (Charles Dickens, English) 
  • The best Irish novel— Handy Andy (Samuel Lover, Irish) 
  • The best Scotch novel — The heart of Midlothian (Sir Walter Scott, Scottish)
  • The best English novel — Vanity Fair (William Thackeray, English)
  • The best American novel — The scarlet letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne, American)
  • The best sensational novel — The woman in white (Wilkie Collins, English) 

And:

  • The best of all — Vanity Fair (William Thackeray, English)

I was interested, and infuriated, that the authors’ names were not included in the over ten published versions I saw, so I’ve added them in parentheses. I don’t care whether readers at the time knew the names of the authors or not, the authors should be identified. It is a little soap-box issue of mine that there is often not enough recognition of the authors of the books we read. This is why I always start my review posts with the name of the author not the title of the book. It’s my little bit of literary activism!

Like all such lists, this one is interesting for what is and isn’t there. Where are Austen or the Brontes for example, while other authors like Dickens and Scott appear twice? Clearly their popularity hadn’t waned. More to the point, perhaps, why only one non-English language book? No Russians, for example? It’s also interesting to see which books have dropped off the radar. Does anyone know Mr Midshipman Easy for example? Wikipedia tells me that it’s been adapted to film twice,

The “best” categories also tell us about the interests and reading habits of the time – “best pathetic novel” anyone? Or “best religious”? Or “best novel written for a purpose”? And so on.

Anyhow, I’ll leave it there … and ask you,

Just for fun, what categories would you suggest for a similar list today?

Source: The first paper in which I saw the list was Victoria’s The Elmore Standard, 12 February 1910.

J.D. Vance, Hillbilly elegy (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 35 Comments

I did something recently that I haven’t done for a long time. I picked up a book from a remainder table. It was at the National Library bookshop, and I was waiting to meet a friend for lunch. The book was J.D. Vance’s memoir Hillbilly elegy: A memoir of a family and culture in crisis, and on its front cover was a review excerpt from the Independent, which said “profound … a great insight into Trump and Brexit”. I was intrigued, and embarrassed that I had not been aware of this “international bestseller” – unlike many of you I suspect.

So, I started reading while waiting for my friend and was engaged. On the first page of his Introduction, Vance tells us that the cover of the book says memoir, but he’s only thirty-one and has accomplished nothing great, nothing that would justify a complete stranger paying money to read about him. Then comes the point, he had written the book, he said, because he had achieved something quite ordinary. He had graduated school, then gone to university and Yale Law School, something that doesn’t happen to people like him, to white people who grow up poor in an Ohio Rust Belt steel town. This is the sort of socio-cultural story that interests me.

Then I hit a little block. I wrote about it to my American friend – we always share our reading – and she filled me in on Vance (born in 1984). Anti-Trump in 2016, he has since back-flipped and is now not only not anti, but actively, and visibly, pro-Trump. He is, in fact, as of 2023, a Republican Senator and Trump supporter. Hmm … well, I kept reading, though admittedly after a little pause. I’m glad I did because I learnt quite a lot – about American white working class culture, specifically Appalachian hillbilly culture, and how it can lead to the sort of thinking that can make something like Trump happen. But, the book was published in 2016, so it doesn’t necessarily explain what is happening today.

The memoir

As a memoir, Hillbilly elegy follows a typical misery (or poor-boy-done-good) memoir trajectory. Born into a dysfunctional family with an addict mother and a procession of “father” figures, Vance was headed for a life of similar struggle and little hope. He provides a colourful and warm-hearted but also clear-eyed picture of the Kentucky-based Appalachian hillbilly culture from which he’d come, and of those from it who migrated, as his family did, to the now declining factory towns of Ohio. Of all the American books I’ve read over the years, this was not a story I knew, and I found it fascinating – in both the parts that were unique and those that were universal to disadvantaged families (in western cultures anyhow), namely the poverty, the lack of opportunity, the lack, even, of awareness of what could be striven for (let alone how to do it). This lack of awareness and know-how are, in a way, the real kickers.

As is common in this genre, Vance survives with the help of others, most notably his maternal grandparents, Mamaw and Papaw to whom he dedicates his book. He credits Mamaw’s (and his mother’s, in fact) commitment to the importance of education, along with the help of others who recognised something in him, as being what got him through. It’s a common story in one sense, but the particulars of this one – to do with the hillbilly culture and his individual circumstances – make it worth reading.

At the end of the book, Vance acknowledges the help of various people in writing this book. These include someone called Charles Tyler who forced him “to hone in on a few core themes”. Those themes are evident from the beginning, and they stem from an interrogation of his cultural background, its derailment and how it operates to hold people back. It’s a believable story, and I enjoyed reading it, partly because he brings the place and the people to life and partly for the truths he shares, because there are truths there, truths that confirm some of my own sociological studies into disadvantage back in the 1970s.

The sociology

However, it’s also in the sociological analysis that I was most challenged. Vance describes in detail the problems his culture faces – the poverty and lack of opportunity, the drug addiction, the broken families, the violence, the complicated relationship to work – but the conclusions he draws are what’s interesting.

An example is his discussion of his culture’s understanding of success, which they put down to one of two factors: the luck of being born into wealthy families, or talent. As most hillbillies don’t come from the former, they ascribe success to being smart, meaning “hard work doesn’t matter as much as raw talent”. He analyses this a little, providing some nuance, but it seems that in his mind work ethic (or lack thereof) is an issue. He raises it first in his Introduction where he describes his experience of working on the floor of a tile distribution business and seeing poor work ethic firsthand. This and similar experiences (including seeing welfare gaming in operation) drove this book, which he says is about “a culture reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible … a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it”.

My friend wrote during our discussion by correspondence that he seems to come more from the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality than one acknowledging the role of outside help, such as from the government. Vance does talk about all the help he received – indeed he says he wouldn’t be where he is now without it – but it was from family, friends, and mentors, meaning personally-based, not from the government. The message feels confused. He clearly appreciates how difficult it is for people who grew up like he did to get ahead on their own, but his analysis of the remedy feels narrowly simplistic:

Public policy can help but there is no government that can fix these problems for us.

and

I don’t know what the answer is precisely but I know it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.

These are valid points – to a point. Change does need to come from within, but that can rarely happen independently. Serious support is needed, and it needs to be systemic, and structural, from without as much as from within. Vance understands issues like lack of opportunity and ignorance. These things can’t be easily fixed from within. It doesn’t seem like Vance sees that (or, didn’t then, anyhow).

I wasn’t far into Hillbilly elegy when I was reminded of another poor-boy-done-good memoir, Rick Morton’s One hundred years of dirt (my review). However, while Vance has gone on to join his country’s ultra-right, Morton, who was also born in the mid-1980s, has gone in a very different direction. A journalist, his expertise is social justice, and he regularly calls government to account for its failings. His understanding of opportunity and social inequity feels more nuanced to me, but that may be because I agree with his way of thinking about these issues, and how they might be addressed. I could ask why these two men who came from such poverty-stricken backgrounds are so different in their thinking, but I’d only be conjecturing (albeit with some basis in fact) so let’s just leave that thought hanging.

I’m glad I read Hillbilly elegy. Vance cares deeply about his culture, and his stories of real people who are genuinely hurting engaged my heart, but he also provided insight into a way of thinking about these issues that I little understood.

J.D. Vance
Hillbilly elegy: A memoir of a family and culture in crisis
London: William Collins, 2016
264pp.
ISBN: 9780008220563

Monday musings on Australian literature: Thoughts on literature’s moral purpose

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I struggled with titling this post because I don’t want it to sound like a thoroughly thought through treatise on the topic. However, I jettisoned my original plan for today’s post to respond to Angela Savage’s question on my CWF post on the Robbie Arnott interview because it seemed worth exploring.

If you haven’t read that post, the gist is that Robbie Arnott talked about why he writes fiction and what he likes to read. Responding to a question about whether fiction does something, he made clear that for him it does (or at least that he would like it to.) Fiction, he said, can expand our consciousness, can make us feel things. We come away a different person after reading it. In this way fiction shapes who we become. Later in the interview, he talked about there being a moral aspect to everything we do, which for him, includes writing. This translates into his feeling a strong responsibility, for example, to tell stories about the land in a way that improves our country. My response to this was that I loved Arnott’s absolute commitment to fiction – to its ability to change us, and to its moral (but not didactic) heft.

Enter the lovely Angela Savage, award winning novelist, former director of Writers Victoria, and current CEO of Public Libraries Victoria who comments occasionally on my blog. She commented on the post with:

Interestingly, I just read an article arguing against the premise that literature/fiction needs to be moral or change us. Would be interested in your opinion.

The article appeared in last Friday’s The Conversation, and is by Dan Dixon, Adjunct Lecturer at the University of Sydney. It’s titled “Friday essay: what do publishers’ revisions and content warnings say about the moral purpose of literature?” It was inspired by two recent issues: the controversy about the rewriting of passages from authors like Roald Dahl to remove “potentially offensive material”, and the “precautionary measure” being adopted by some publishers of adding content warnings and disclaimers to some older books.

It’s a thoughtful piece, and I recommend it to you because I only going to discuss bits of it here, the bits that relate to my answer to Angela’s question.

Dixon makes the point that the media only becomes interested in literary stories when there are “moral concerns” and that these discussions are part of a “moral battle which encourages the application of the same ethical criteria to books that might be apply to elected officials or ministers of religion.” He then suggests that writers’ festival programs demonstrate that we “struggle” to talk about books on any other terms.

Dixon looks at the economic drivers behind these controversies and how they can commodify books. He recognises that literature is affected by the marketplace but argues that it also pushes back against that. Do read his argument if you are interested. Meanwhile, I want to focus on his exploration of what literature is about.

A common question, he says, is:

is there a necessary connection between a work’s literary value and its moral quality? When we read a book do we expect a degree of moral instruction, as to how we should or should not live?

He believes this is a worthwhile question, but that it is not the only question. Literature is more than this. Indeed, he argues that limiting discussion to moral debates encourages “definitive judgements” which enables us, he says, to

avoid what Keats described as negative capability: “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”.

This is where I want to come in, because I am perfectly happy with what Dixon calls “the unpleasantness of irresolution” – and so, I believe, is Robbie Arnott. In Limberlost, for example, Ned’s daughters confront him with being a farmer on stolen land. Arnott believe it was important for Ned to be confronted with this fact, that to ignore the issue would not be real. But he offers no resolution, no moral closure; it just sits there, as it often does in life.

I’m not sure what Arnott meant exactly by his statements, but I think he’s right that there’s a moral aspect to everything. However, I don’t think he means, as a result, to provide the moral answers. In fact, I’m confident that he knows there aren’t necessarily any, or at least not easy ones. Rather, I understood him to mean that he is aware of the moral implications of the way we live and wants to include those in his books, because that’s real. This is subtly different from saying there must be a moral to the story (to literature, to any art).

Now, I’ll return to Dixon and some things he says about literature. First:

The best literature can be spiky, ambiguous, difficult, cruel, strange, unpredictable, hectoring and unpleasant. It is not the job of a book to ease the life of its reader. Reading a good book might mean having a terrible day, a day in which you are scared, sad, distressed. 

I can agree with this. Arnott’s point that you come away changed could work with this!

Then Dixon says:

But literature does not have an obligation to be useful; we do not have to learn anything from it. It need not produce anything except a readerly response.

I also agree with this. My belief is that, at the purest level, the only thing literature (art) needs to be is whatever its creator wants it to be. It is then up to the reader/viewer/listener (whatever the art form is) to decide whether they appreciate the art. I know this is simplistic as creators are, for a start, constrained by any mix of economic, legal, social, political and practical factors, but this is my theoretical starting point.

Returning to Dixon one more time, he says near the end of his piece that “any argument that treats literature as fundamentally therapeutic, self-improving or society-improving, risks reducing literature to self-help”. This is a bit trickier, but I think it hangs on the word “treat”. And it takes me back to my previous point. If I argue that literature doesn’t “need” to be anything, then by definition I should not “treat” it as needing to be something. I can, however, prefer literature that tries to improve or change things. A fine line perhaps but I think it’s defensible.

I therefore like Dixon’s conclusion that the best way to think about literature might be as a “conversation”. He expands this to say that conversations “can be morally nourishing or deadening … neither good nor bad”. Seeing literature this way suggests for him that “reading resembles conversation … an ongoing exchange between reader and writer”. Which brings me back to Arnott who sees novels as a two-way communication between author and reader, one in which he’d love to know whether what he feels resonates with the reader. 

I hope I’ve answered Angela’s question, and I also hope I have accurately represented Arnott in terms of the question. What do you think?