American writers

Sigrid Nunez, The vulnerables (#BookReview)

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Sigrid Nunez has been on my radar for a long time. So, why now? I blame Jonathan (Me Fail? I Fly!), since it was his post on Nunez’s latest novel, The vulnerables, that captured my attention and encouraged me to make now her time. What an intriguing book! I have no idea whether it is like her other books, but it certainly captivated me.

What exactly is it, was my first question? A novel, says its subtitle. Its probably best described as autofiction, but it did feel at times like a book of essays. In fact, late in the novel, our narrator who, like Nunez herself, is a writer, refers to Virginia Woolf and her aspiration

to invent a new form. The essay-novel. Chapters of fiction alternating with nonfiction chapters, “a terrific affair” that would include, well, everything: “satire, comedy, poetry, narrative . . . And there are to be millions of ideas but no preaching—history, politics, feminism, art, literature—in short a summing up of all I know, feel, laugh at, despise, like, admire hate & so on.”

On the next page, Nunez writes of Annie Ernaux who told her diary that “Tonight, I know I have to write ‘the story of a woman’ over time and History.” And so she did, some twenty years later. Ernaux’s book, says Nunez, is “a personal narrative spanning the period between 1941 … and what was then the present day, 2006: the autobiography of a woman that was also a kind of collective autobiography of her generation”.

Both of these encapsulate, to some degree, what Nunez is doing in The vulnerables. I like essays, so I enjoyed the “essay-novel” feel of this book, including its cheeky toying with where the boundaries are in what she is doing. And, I like personal narratives, not to mention the idea of a book being “a kind of collective biography” of a generation.

Nunez and I are of the same broad generation, although with some significant differences given she was born in New York in 1951 to a German mother and a Chinese-Panamanian father. But, we are both women of a certain age and so were designated “vulnerable” at the start of the pandemic, which is where the novel opens – in the northern spring of 2020. It is here, early on in the pandemic, when she is “breaking the rules” by going out and about too much, that a young friend admonishes her, telling her, “You’re a vulnerable … And you need to act like one.”

There is so much to write about in this book – her exploration of our generation, and how we are seeing things in these last decades of our lives. The discussions our narrator has with her friends about gender, for example, mirror mine, as does her awareness of the changes that come with ageing. Her concern about what happened in American politics in 2016, and its ongoing implications, mirror that of many of us. As do her references to racial and social injustice, the climate crisis … and so on. All heightened, here, by the pandemic, whose uncertainties shape the book’s tone. But, I want to focus on one particular aspect, her exploration of writing.

Our narrator is, as I’ve said, of a certain age. She’s seen a lot of life, and a lot of writing, and here she ponders, though her lively stream-of-consciousness style, the role, meaning, and form of writing. She begins with the opening sentence – “It was an uncertain spring” – from Virginia Woolf’s The years. But, just a few paragraphs on we are told that one of the first rules of writing is to “never open a book with the weather”, albeit our narrator has “never understood why not”. Between the opening sentence and this statement, she admits that she remembers almost nothing about Woolf’s book, and then writes that:

Only when I was young did I believe that it was important to remember what happened in every novel I read. Now I know the truth: what matters is what you experience while reading, the states of feeling that the story evokes, the questions that rise to your mind, rather than the fictional events described.

I felt right then and there that this was going to be a book for me. I rarely remember plots, but frequently remember how books made me feel, how I reacted to them.

Why are you making things up?

The vulnerables is deceptively simple. Our narrator takes us into her confidence about what is happening to her, and what she is thinking, as she moves through those early days of spring and into lockdown stage, when she accepts the task of pet-sitting a miniature macaw named Eureka in a classy New York apartment, only to find herself sharing this role with a disaffected, but opinionated Gen Z son of friends of the apartment owner. She calls him Vetch, a prickly metaphoric contrast to the old-lady flowers, like hydrangeas, that she had previously regaled us with.

Woven through this loose plot, are our narrator’s thoughts on a range of subjects. It has a relaxed stream-of-consciousness feel, but is, nonetheless, formally stylish, using subtle repetition, metaphor, sly humour and literary allusions, to develop her ideas. It’s also erudite with frequent digressions that explore anything from the relevance (or not) of Dickens and what, say, J.M. Coetzee thinks about writing, to a discussion of My octopus teacher and of how the events of 2016 stopped speculative fiction author William Gibson in his tracks. This might feel random at the start, but the links are there, and the ideas – the questions – slowly build. It’s the sort of book that invites you to go with the flow, and if you do, you will eventually not only see the pattern, but will also have been both entertained and inspired to think.

What most inspired me was Nunez’s exploration of what sort of writing is most relevant now. She shares the thoughts and experiences of many of the great writers of the last century or so – Virginia Woolf, Annie Ernaux, Joan Didion, J.M. Coetzee, to name a few. Early in the novel she quotes Coetzee who said that what comes in late life to many writers is “an ideal of a simple, subdued, unornamented language and a concentration on questions of real import, even questions of life and death.”

Then, late in the novel, in a wry comment about the pandemic and its distinction between “essential” and other workers, she notes that of writers, the only ones deemed essential were the journalists. She seems to agree, writing that “silence all the journalists and we’d have the end of human rights”. And, more pointedly, she responds to the question of whether there is still a place for fiction, with:

Growing consensus: The traditional novel has lost its place as the major genre of our time. It may not be dead yet, but it will not long abide. No matter how well done, it seems to lack urgency. No matter how imaginative, it seems to lack originality. While still a powerful means of portraying human character and human experience, somehow, more and more, fictional storytelling is coming across as beside the point. More and more writers are having difficulty quieting a voice that says, Why are you making things up? 

There is fear about “the growing use of story as a means to distort and obscure reality”. But, in her subversive way, Nunez explores both sides. She writes of her time with Vetch, saying

… even now I sometimes find myself talking to him. But when I do he is never ‘Vetch.’ Always his real name. His sweet name.
But how could any of this have really happened? I must be making it up.

Does it matter whether she’s making it up or not?

It is a little before this, that our narrator discusses Woolf’s thoughts about creating her new form, “the essay-novel”, and then teases out what we might want now (including a funny dig at reader’s guides for book clubs). It’s not simple or straightforward – indeed, it’s paradoxical, it’s “elegy and comedy” combined – but, in the end, what she has written is a novel. A strange, or different, almost essay-novel it may be, but there, I’d say, is your answer.

Sigrid Nunez
The vulnerables: A novel
London: Virago, 2023
250pp.
ISBN: 9780349018096

Duane Niatum, Crow’s sun (#Review)

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Duane Niatum’s “Crow’s sun” is the tenth story of fourteen in the anthology, Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers, and moves us into the 1990s, where we will remain for the next two stories before ending up in the early 2000s.

Duane Niatum

Anthology editor Bob Blaisdell provides more information about Niatum than he does for some of the writers, but I am supplementing that with information from Wikipedia and the Poetry Foundation. Variously described as a poet, fiction writer, playwright, essayist and editor, Niatum was born in 1938 in Seattle, Washington, to a Klallam (Salish) mother and Italian-American father. After his parents divorced when he was just 4, he spent a lot of time with his maternal Klallam grandfather, from whom he learnt tribal ways and oral traditions. He is an enrolled member of the Klallam Tribe (Jamestown Band).

At 17, Niatum enlisted in the United States Navy, and served in Japan. On leaving the Navy, he did his B.A. in English, at the University of Washington, studying with poets, Theodore Roethke and Elizabeth Bishop. He then earned his M.A. at Johns Hopkins University, and a Ph.D. in American culture from the University of Michigan.

Poetry was his main love, it seems. Wikipedia states that he “established himself as one of the most influential promoters of Native American poetry”. He edited a Native American author series at Harper & Row Publishers, producing two “influential anthologies”. He has published essays on Native American literature, and his poetry has been translated into many languages.

The Poetry Foundation says that his “writing is deeply connected with the Northwest coast landscape, its mountains, forests, water and creatures” and that “the legends and traditions of his ancestors help shape and animate his poetry”. However, it is a short story, of course, that Blaisdell has chosen for his anthology.

“Crow’s sun”

I’ve now read a couple of Niatum’s poems at Poetry Foundation, but none that specifically illuminate this story. “Crow’s sun” presumably draws from his experience in the Navy as it deals with a young sailor named Thomas sentenced to 30-days in the brig. I’m not saying that the story is autobiographical. It may be – I don’t know – but my point is that his Naval experience, and its treatment of people of colour, is sure to have informed the story.

The narrative takes place over one day. It starts with Thomas, just one year into his service, waiting to be taken to the brig and ends with him behind bars. Not a lot of action, in other words, but a lot goes on. This is a story about systemic racism. Thomas, we learn, had let his mother and step-father talk him into enlisting under-age, a common story for youths of colour with limited opportunities. In his case, he’d already been kicked out of home after he’d “stopped his step-father from beating up his mother in a drunken brawl”.

Once in the Navy, things don’t go well. Thomas “cannot fathom why sailors 17 to 70 live in some dream of future glory, which is the oldest myth of the military”. We are not told what Thomas has done, but it appears, from Shore Patrolman Cook’s advice as he delivers Thomas to the brig, that Thomas has been treated harshly:

“This hole’ll be your home for thirty days, Thomas. And buddy, you’d better watch your mouth in this joint. Do your time with your trap shut, until you’re running free. Don’t act the wise-guy. I don’t like your face, Thomas, but I don’t think those hicks from the base were right. You’re a punk, but who isn’t at your age. They went too far. I believe burning a man at the stake’s too much like what like what I left in Alabama.”

This surprises Thomas, because Cook, who “is a spit and polish sailor married to the idea that blind obedience to orders is the only law”, has never really liked him. His advice, then, means something, and Thomas thanks him for it. The rest of the story tells of his admission interview with the Brig Warden – and we get the full measure of the racism he is likely to experience. The Warden aggressively violently enforces his will. He calls Thomas, insultingly and erroneously at that, a “wetback”. He ridicules Thomas’ name insisting it should be “Pancho Villa or Willy Garcia”. I don’t need to continue because you’ve surely seen or read enough scenes like this to get the gist.

What makes this story is how Thomas handles the situation, which is to call on the wisdom of his grandfather. At the first sign of the Warden’s aggression:

The muscles in Thomas’ face tighten; his eyes thicken; narrow into tiny moons peering from behind a shield of fern. He sways slightly; stiffens his whole body, not sure what to expect from the man closing in. Grandson to Cedar Crow, Thomas feels his fingers change to claws, to a wing of thrashing spirit flying wildly inside his ear. (Be calm and steady now. This man could be your enemy. Know his every move. Break him like a twig if he tries to harm you. Be the Thunderbird of our song. I am Crow, your father.)

From here on, Thomas draws on his grandfather’s wisdom to assess and manage the situation. There is violence but he sees death is not on the cards. We learn that many Klallam people had lost faith in their beliefs and practices, but not Thomas. His late grandfather, “the quiet man of family, sea and forest had counselled him well”. From here to the end, where we leave Thomas standing in his cell, we observe him watching and responding to the Warden and drawing on his spirit wisdom.

It’s a strong story about the power and value of knowing your culture.

Duane Niatum
“Crow’s sun” (orig. pub. 1991)
in Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2014
pp. 75-83
ISBN: 9780486490953

Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead (#BookReview)

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Barbara Kingsolver’s latest – and multi-award winning – novel, Demon Copperhead, was inspired, as I’m sure most of you know, by Charles Dickens’ autobiographical novel, David Copperfield. Indeed, Demon Copperhead opens with an epigraph from that novel:

“It’s in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present.”

This could be an argument for writing historical fiction, and is certainly relevant to Kingsolver’s political intent, but for the novel’s protagonist it’s far more personal. Several times through the novel Demon refers to the point at which things changed – usually for the worse – but it’s two-thirds through where he makes it clear

Where does the road to ruin start? That’s the point of getting all this down, I’m told. To get the handle on some choice you made. Or was made for you. […]

In my time I’ve learned surprising things about the powers stacked against us before we’re born. But the way of my people is to go on using the words they’ve always given us: Ignorant bastard. Shit happens.

But, I’m jumping ahead here … so let’s back up a bit. I started by referencing the fact that the novel was inspired by David Copperfield, and it was inspired by it for one very good reason, which Kingsolver explains in her Acknowledgements:

I’m grateful to Charles Dickens for writing David Copperfield, his impassioned critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on children in his society. Those problems are still with us. In adapting his novel to my own place and time, working for years with his outrage, inventiveness, and empathy at my elbow, I’ve come to think of him as my genius friend.

So there you have it. Kingsolver has transferred Charles Dickens’ London of the early to mid-nineteenth century to Lee County Virginia from around 1990 to 2004 or so. While Demon struggles to make something of his life against all odds, not recognising or accepting until later that those odds were stacked against him from the start, Kingsolver, like Dickens, is a reformer doing her best to ensure that we will see from that start just how stacked those odds are at every level. I was expecting the book to be primarily about the OxyContin/opioid addiction crisis but it is much broader than that. It’s about poverty and the intergenerational trauma that this engenders – and how this helps lay the foundation for something like OxyContin to take hold.

“What matters in a story is the heart of its hero” (Demon)

I admit that I was not initially keen to read this novel. Not only is it very long, but I’ve read (and, yes, enjoyed) Barbara Kingsolver before, and I have higher priority books on my TBR. However, it was my reading group’s first read of the year, so of course I read it. It’s not a perfect novel, but Demon’s voice was so engaging and the translation of Dickens to Appalachian America is so pertinent to contemporary politics, that I’m glad I read it.

I can see, though, why it’s one of those divisive novels that engenders strong feelings one way or another. For a start, translating Dickens to contemporary times is risky. Dickens’ novel, being published in serial form, is long and episodic, with a large cast of characters, a touch of melodrama, and a lot of detail. A big, baggy, monster in other words. This style does not necessarily suit contemporary readers, but this is what you get with Demon Copperhead.

Like Dickens’ novel, Demon Copperhead wears its heart on its sleeves, meaning it’s not subtle. It can be didactic at times, as in Mr Armstrong’s lessons on capitalism and coal mining companies and Tommy’s discussion of historical truths. Its large cast of characters aren’t quite stereotypes but many are clearly typified by their behaviour – the bad characters who manipulate and use others (like stepfather Stoner, foster-father Crickson, and anti-hero Fast Forward), the weak characters who are well intentioned but can do more harm than good (like Coach), the kind hearts who pick Demon up when he’s down but can’t properly guide him (like the Peggotts), and the shining lights who try to set him on the right path but know he has to decide for himself (namely June and Angus).

In other words, Demon Copperhead is an in-your-face novel, which could be alienating. However, what kept me engaged was the character of Demon himself. Born to a junkie mother and orphaned at 11 when she ODs on oxy, he has a vivacity, an openness, and a heart that you want to see survive, despite setback after setback after setback. He’s “resilient”, a survivor, which is something those around him see early on. This is not to say, though, that he will survive, because even survivors need a hand, and this is what Demon sometimes gets, sometimes doesn’t, and, distressingly, sometimes eschews because he is determined not to be helped, to make his own decisions, to be his own man.

Regardless, once Demon had me, I was in. I have lived in Virginia (albeit very middle-class northern Virginia) and I have driven through various parts of Appalachia. I am interested in the culture, and, having recently read JD Vance’s Hillbilly elegy (my review), I am interested in how it is playing out in contemporary America. Kingsolver explores the role played by big pharma in targeting poor Appalachian regions with their painkillers, at a time when the region was suffering from the callous withdrawal of coal companies*. She shows how socioeconomic factors like these, combined with systemic failures in child welfare, not to mention poor educational opportunity, and the ongoing ostracism of “hillbillies”, contribute to the rise of MAGA politics in the USA.

She also shows the opposite, because while Demon is aware of the factors that work against him, he also sees what can sustain – good people offering the right support, the best parts of rural traditions, and nature, whose benefits are both spiritual and practical. The question is, are these enough? Or, what is needed to make them enough?

You have probably noticed by now, that I am not doing my usual sort of review here. This is partly because, being a multi-award winning Barbara Kingsolver novel, Demon Copperhead has already been written about ad infinitum, and partly because I wanted to tease out my own feelings about such a polarising novel. Yes, I can see – even agree with – some of the criticisms. It’s long and detailed, is didactic in places, and is not what you’d call subtle – rather like Dickens, in fact. However, the power of the story and its accompanying messages, combined with Demon’s utterly captivating voice, got me over the line. Kingsolver, I’d say, does her epigraph proud, whichever way you read it.

* One of my reading group members share an article about this very issue in a January 28 article in The Guardian.

* For a more traditional review of the novel, do check out Brona’s.

Barbara Kingsolver
Demon Copperhead
London: Faber & Faber, 2022
644pp.
ISBN: 9780571376490 (eBook)

Shirley Hazzard, The picnic (#Review, #1962 Club)

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As I have done for most “year” reading weeks*, I decided for 1962 to read a short story by an Australian author. I read two, in fact, and may post on the second one later.

Today’s story, though, is Shirley Hazzard’s “The picnic” which I found in an anthology edited by Carmel Bird, The Penguin century of Australian stories. It was my mother’s book, which Daughter (or Granddaughter to her) Gums gave her for Christmas 2006. I’m glad she kept it when she downsized. Shirley Hazzard is a writer I’ve loved. I have read three of her books, including the novels, Transit of Venus and The great fire, but all of this was long before blogging. I have mentioned her on the blog many times for different reasons, but an early one was in my Monday Musings on expat novelists back in 2010.

Who was Shirley Hazzard?

Hazzard (1931-2016) is difficult to pin down, and can hardly be called Australian given she left Australia in 1947 when she 16, returned here briefly, but left here for good when she was 20. Wikipedia calls her an Australian-born American novelist. As I wrote in my expat post, Hazzard didn’t like to be thought of in terms of nationality. However, she did set some of her writing in Australia, and did win the Miles Franklin Award in 2004 with her novel The great fire, against some stiff competition.

According to Wikipedia, she wrote her first short story, “Woollahra Road”, in 1960, while she was living in Italy, and it was published by The New Yorker magazine the following year. This means, of course, that “The picnic”, first published in 1962, comes from early in her writing career. Her first book, Cliffs of fall, was published in 1963. It was a collection of previously published stories, including this one. Her first novel, The evening of the holiday, was published in 1966, and her second, The bay of noon, was published in 1970, but it was her third novel, The transit of Venus, published in 1980, that established her.

She is known for the quality, particularly the clarity, of her prose, which, it has been suggested, was partly due to her love of poetry

“The picnic”

It didn’t take long for me to discover that “The picnic” is the second story of a linked pair, which were both published in The New Yorker in 1962. Together they tell of an affair between the married Clem and a younger woman, Nettie, his wife May’s cousin. The first story, “A place in the country”, concerns the end of the affair, while in “The picnic” the ex-lovers meet again, eight years later. They are left alone by May, probably deliberately thinks Clem, while she plays with their youngest son down the hillside.

This is a character-driven slice-of-life story in which not a lot happens in terms of action but which offers much insight into human nature – and into that grandest passion of all, love.

In 2020, The Guardian ran a review of Shirley Hazzard’s Collected stories, edited by Hazzard biographer Brigitta Olubas. Reviewer Stephanie Merritt writes that “Hazzard’s recurring themes here – enlarged upon in her novels – are love, self-knowledge and disappointment”. From my memory of Transit of Venus in particular, this rings true. And, it is certainly played out in “The picnic”.

So, love, albeit a failed love, is presumably played out in the first story, but in this story it is still present in its complicated messiness. The two ex-lovers look at each other uncomfortably. Self-knowledge is part of it, but it’s not easily achieved for Clem for whom self-deception has also powerful sway. There’s resignation about love – “an indignity, a reducing thing” which he sees can be a “form of insanity” – and about marriage, which involves “a sort of perseverance, and persistent understanding”. There’s also a male arrogance. He didn’t, he realises, “know much about her [Nettie’s] life these past few years – which alone showed there couldn’t be much to learn”. By the end of his reverie, he comes to some self-understanding, despite earlier denials, about his true feelings and about the decision he’d made. Whether the reader agrees or not, he feels he has “grown”.

Nettie’s reveries tread a roughly similar path. There’s not a lot of regret to start with. She sees he is nearly fifty, and with “a fretful, touchy air”. She sees his self-deceptions, and his caution, and yet her feelings, like his, are conflicted. For her, too, love is a complicated thing:

… one couldn’t cope with love. (In her experience, at any rate, it always got out of hand).

What I haven’t conveyed here, because you have to read it all to see and enjoy it, is the delicious way Hazzard conveys their internal to-ing and fro-ing, through irony and other contradictions. They say nothing to each other, but in their thoughts and observations, while they rationalise what happened and why it was right, they reveal their true feelings. Love and disappointment or disillusion live side by side, never quite resolved.

The story is told third person but from shifting perspectives. First Clem, followed by Nettie, reflect on their situation at some length. Then, in a surprise switch, the short last paragraph moves to May, whose feelings neither of them had seriously considered in all their internal ponderings. But Hazzard makes sure we see them. This technique reminded me of Kevin Brophy’s very different short story “Hillside” which does a similarly powerful switch of perspective in the last paragraph. In both cases, concluding with the perspective of someone who is both outsider but very much affected by the situation just nails it.

Not only did I enjoy this story, but I’m very glad to finally have Hazzard reviewed on my blog.

* Read for the 1962 reading week run by Karen (Kaggsy’s Bookish Rambling) and Simon (Stuck in a Book). This week’s Monday Musings was devoted to the year.

Shirley Hazzard
“The picnic” (orig. pub. The New Yorker, 16 June 1962)
in Carmel Bird (ed.), The Penguin century of Australian short stories
Camberwell: Penguin Books, 2006 (first ed. 2000)
pp. 178-185

Susan Glaspell, A jury of her peers (#Review)

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One of my retirement activities is to co-ordinate a little band of volunteer indexers at the National Film and Sound Archive. Not only do we do useful work for the Archive, but we get to socialise a little with our peers, meaning we talk about what we are watching, listening to, and reading. Recently, one of the team sent me a short story to read. He “raved” about it, he wrote in the accompanying email. Well, I have now read it and I’m mighty impressed too. It’s by an American writer and appeared in one of the those annual best short stories volumes, this one for 1917.

Susan Glaspell

The author of the story, as you will have worked out from the post title, is Susan Glaspell (1876-1948). I had never heard of her, but fortunately she has a decent-sized Wikipedia page which you can read, but I’ll give a brief summary here. She was a playwright, novelist, journalist and actress. Indeed, she and her husband founded America’s first modern theatre company, the Provincetown Players. Wikipedia then says, and I’ll quote because why try to paraphrase it:

First known for her short stories (fifty were published), Glaspell also wrote nine novels, fifteen plays, and a biography. Often set in her native Midwest, these semi-autobiographical tales typically explore contemporary social issues, such as gender, ethics, and dissent, while featuring deep, sympathetic characters who make principled stands. Her 1930 play Alison’s House earned her the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Wikipedia has much more to say but essentially, like many women writers, her star faded, partly Wikipedia says, because her “strong and independent female protagonists were less popular in the post-war era, which stressed female domesticity”. However, from the 1970s on – we all know about this revival don’t we – she started to regain traction. Now, she is recognised as a “pioneering feminist writer and America’s first important modern female playwright”.

All this might clue you in to why I so enjoyed her story.

“A jury of her peers”

Kindle ed.

“A jury of her peers” is quite a long short story, but it engrosses from the beginning because of how Glaspell slowly unfolds the story, incisively developing, as she goes, a number of ideas that still speak to us today. We readers work out fairly quickly what has likely gone on, but our fascination lies in how the two women protagonists come to their understanding of the matter, how they try to resist what they have intuitively guessed, and what they decide to do about it. Overlaying this are the assumptions made about them (and about women in general) by the men involved, which adds a social dimension to the moral one. It’s a wonderfully complex story. It’s no accident that the main action takes place in that women’s domain, the humble kitchen.

The story, according to Wikipedia again, was loosely based on the 1900 murder of a man called John Hossack which Glaspell covered while working as a journalist. She originally wrote it in 1916 as a one-act play, Trifles, for the Provincetown Players, before turning it into a short story. Later, it was adapted for an episode of that 1950s TV series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and into a 30-minute film by Sally Heckel in 1980.

The plot is simple. A farmer, John Wright, has been murdered, and his wife, the diminutively named Minnie, taken into custody, the day before the story’s action takes place. The story opens with Sheriff Peters and the county attorney Mr Henderson picking up the Wrights’ neighbour, farmer Mr Hale, who had called in the death the day before. Their aim is to visit the scene to look for evidence that might explain what had happened, that might provide a motive. In the buggy is the sheriff’s wife Mrs Peters who is coming along to collect some clothes for Minnie. At the last minute, Mrs Hale is asked to join them, at the request of Mrs Peters who appears to need some support in her sad task.

So, this band of five arrive at the Wrights’ “lonesome-looking place” and, while the men go in search of their evidence, the women remain in the kitchen-living area to get those items Minnie had asked for. As they do, they start to notice things around them – providing insight into Minnie’s life and state of mind – and slowly they piece together an understanding of what had happened. These two women don’t know each other well, so they are cautious with each other, sometimes moving “closer together” in solidarity, particularly when the men appear at intervals and invariably belittle women’s skills and knowledge, but other times drawing apart, uncertainly feeling each other out as they simultaneously feel out their own thoughts and feelings.

The practical farmer’s wife Mrs Hale increasingly senses what sort of life Minnie had led, and feels guilty, criminal even, about never having visited her, but she is uncertain about how the timid-seeming, law-abiding Sheriff’s wife is reacting. However, every now and then she catches in Mrs Peters “a look of seeing into things, of seeing through a thing to something else”. Eventually, they connect, “in a steady burning look in which there was no evasion, no flinching”.

It is so beautifully done, with barely a wasted word or description, with every interaction carrying weight, with perfect use of metaphor (involving birds, cages, and knots) and irony. It reminded me, just a little, of Pat Barker’s The women of Troy (my review), another story in which men underestimate women, to their detriment (though they may not always know it). And so, in this story, a number of issues are explored, including morality and natural justice versus the law; gender and men’s superior, condescending dismissal of women’s skills and knowledge; neighbourliness and guilt; and female solidarity.

“A jury of her peers” is a subversive crime story, one that wowed me, for its subject matter, particularly given the time it was written, and for its sure, unflinching writing. I’m impressed that it was chosen for an annual best anthology by a man – but perhaps that’s me being condescending now. Whatever! I would love to read more Glaspell.

Susan Glaspell
“A jury of her peers” (orig. pub. in Every Week, 5 March 1917)
in Edward J. O’Brien (ed.), The best short stories of 1917 and The yearbook of the American short story
Boston: Small, Maynard and Company, 2014
pp. 256-282
Available online at Hathitrust

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

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

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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

Rayna Green, High cotton (#Review)

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With Rayna Green’s short story, “High cotton”, we pass the halfway mark in that anthology I’ve been posting on over the last few months, Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers. We are also getting closer to the anthology’s publication date of 2014, so these chronologically listed stories are starting to bunch up in their dates. The previous two were both published in 1983, with “High cotton” being published just a year later in 1984.

Rayna Green

Again, I’m mostly using anthology editor Bob Blaisdell’s intro and Wikipedia to introduce the author. Blaisdell’s intro is brief, as usual, but it is he who formally clarifies Green’s identity as a Native American, explaining that her “Native background, through her father, is Cherokee”. Identity, as we’ve come across already in this collection, can be problematical so I was a bit unsure when Green’s Wikipedia article didn’t explicitly provide her tribal affiliation, as I’ve found for our preceding authors. As this anthology specifically contains stories by Native American writers, I do want to identify how each writer fits into this.

Wikipedia’s article on Green (b. 1942) isn’t completely silent. It does imply her heritage, describing her as the “first American Indian to receive a Ph.D.” in Folklore and American Studies, and stating, near the end, that she was “a founding member of both the Cherokee Honor Society and the American Indian Science and Engineering Society”.

Continuing with Wikipedia, I was also surprised that, unlike for our previous writers, Green is not introduced as a writer, but as a curator and folklorist – at the Smithsonian Institution, among other organisations – and as having worked in academia. Duke University is more useful regarding her writing career. In 2008, it said that she had written or edited four books and published “many essays on American Indian representations, American Indian women, American identity, American Indian material culture, and American Indian food and foodways”. The page also says, and this was of particular interest to me, that

Several of her short stories and essays on Native women and American identity have been widely reprinted and have served as standard reading for twenty years in courses in women’s studies, American Indian studies, and American studies (e.g., “The Pocahontas Perplex: The Image of American Indian Women in American Culture,” “The Tribe Called Wannabee: Playing Indian in Europe and America,” “Magnolias Grow in Dirt: Southern Women’s Bawdy Humor,” and “High Cotton”).

This seems like a good point to move to today’s short story …

“High cotton”

“High cotton” is a tricksy story. For a start, it is framed as a story within a story, which suggests that storytelling is one of its concerns. There is also the challenge of the Oklahoman Tahlequah vernacular that is used in the telling. Finally, there are complicated relationships, and, dare I admit it – identities – to unravel. I’m not sure I completely got them all, but that I think it part of the point about identities: To what extent are they what you are born as and to what extent what you choose?

The story-within-the-story concerns Rose who, in effect, gets the better of those who have made her life hell – the Baptist Church and her abusive alcoholic white husband Will – by emulating Jesus to encourage said husband to convert to Christianity and preach the word. The story turns to almost pure farce at this point as Rose prances around the bedroom in a cloudy, white nightgown exhorting her out-of-it husband to repent his ways. She can’t believe that he doesn’t recognise her, but she does such a good job of it that he does indeed repent and go on to preach the word while, in a pointedly ironic twist, she goes on to support herself by selling the very liquor that had made her life a misery. And, she stays away from the church.

Framing this is Grandma (Rose’s sister, I think) telling the story to Ramona (a great-niece, I think). Green opens her story with:

Is everything a story? Ramona asked her.

To which Grandma replies, somewhat cryptically:

It is if a story is what you’re looking for – otherwise it’s just people telling lies and there’s no end to it.

While Grandma waits for Ramona’s response, Ramona is watching some “purple cockscombs” through the kitchen door. This ends the opening paragraph so, hmmm, what do these “purple cockscombs” signify, as they seemed too deliberately placed there to mean nothing. They are flowers, but my first thought was of the cockscomb strutting about in foolish pride. My web search retrieved several, often paradoxical meanings. Symbolsage.com provides a good description, summarising them as symbolising “love, affection, silliness, partnership, individuality, strength”. Green could be calling on some of these, and/or on that “cockscomb” image of showy emptiness.

Perhaps more relevant to focus on is the black snake that runs across another character’s foot out in the cotton fields. The snake doesn’t bite her – a Cherokee named Gahno – but the event results in pandemonium and change that involves, over time, the women working on the cotton fields leaving. This infuriates the German plantation-owner Poppa, particularly when his daughter (Ramona’s mother) marries Gahno’s son: “Betrayal was bad enough, but race mixing was worse”.

It is only after we are told all this, and after Ramona has doctored Grandma’s iced tea with some “boogered Indian” whiskey, that we hear the story of Rose and Will. Grandma is quite the storyteller:

Rose got all the church women to pray and pray over him, week after week, and they kept poor Jesus awake yelling about Will’s sinful state. The more they prayed and hollered over him, the more he cussed and drank. And that made them pray more. You know how them prissy Baptist women is, honey—wouldn’t say shit if they had a mouthful—and they like to drove everyone to the ginmills and shake dance the parlors before long. But everyone was more disgusted with Will.

By the end of the story Will has been dead some years, and Rose “had turned Indian just as sure as she’d turned away from Christians”.

To conclude, we return to the aforementioned snakes. Grandma tells Ramona that Rose “always figured, just like Gahno, that snakes were meant to warn you, and she took the warning”. As for stories? Well, they may be lies or they may be what Grandma calls them, “snakebite medicine”. “High cotton” is an intriguing story. Green evokes a lively scene, and explores with dark humour the complexities of multiracial communities where personalities and cultures clash, but I did have to read it several times to work out who was who. If anyone else has read it, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Rayna Green
“High cotton” (orig. pub. 1984 in That’s what she said: Contemporary poetry and fiction Native American women, ed. Rayna Green)
in Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2014
pp. 59-64
ISBN: 9780486490953

Jack D. Forbes, Only approved Indians can play made in USA (#Review)

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The title of the next story in Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers is almost as long as the story itself. Well, not quite, but, occupying just two pages in the anthology, it is a short short story. It was first published the same year, 1983, as the previous story, “Turtle meat” by Jospeh Bruchac III, but is very different in tone.

(I apologise to those of you who were expecting my next post to be on Chris Flynn’s Here be Leviathans. It is coming, soon, but I had to put it aside for my end-of-July reading group book, and I do want to do it justice.)

Jack D. Forbes

Again, I’m using anthology editor Bob Blaisdell’s intro and, mostly, Wikipedia to introduce the author. Forbes (1934-2011), says Wikipedia, was an historian, writer, scholar and activist who “identified as being of Powhatan-Renapé and Lenape descent”. He is best known for his role in establishing one of the first Native American studies programs at the University of California Davis. He also cofounded D-Q University, “a prominently Native American college in Davis, California”. His activist career started in the early 1960s, when he became involved in the Native American movement, which, Wikipedia explains, “asserted the rights to sovereignty and resisting assimilation into the majority culture”.

Blaisdell introduces his story with this: ‘”Only approved Indians can play made in USA” is almost too sad to be funny, but funny it is’. Or, is it?

“Only approved Indians can play made in USA”

I enjoyed this story because of the way it addresses that issue that can dog First Nations peoples in colonial settings, that of proving indigeneity, which feeds into ideas about identity. It’s an issue I’ve discussed here before, including in First Nations writer Anita Heiss’ Am I black enough for you (my review), and in the essay “Channelling Mannalargenna” (my review) by the non-Indigenous journalist Kathy Marks.

In her book, which is a few years old now, Heiss shares the working definition of an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person used by Australia’s Federal Government:

An Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander is a person of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent who identifies as an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander and is accepted as such by the community in which he “or she” lives.

I share this purely for background purposes to this story. I am not going to get into the Australian situation because it’s not an issue I have followed recently. It was particularly problematical in Tasmania in recent decades, but I believe that much of that has now been resolved, to the extent that self-identifcation and community recognition are the accepted criteria.

Meanwhile, though, Heiss’s comment is relevant to Forbes’ story which concerns an All-Indian Basketball Tournament, and the two teams that are about to play, one from Tucson and one from the Great Lakes. Many people had come to watch, “mostly Indians” we are told, with many being relatives or friends of the players. There was betting, and “tension was pretty great”. The issue is that the Tucson players are, in general, much darker. Many also have long hair, and some have goatees or moustaches. A rumour starts from the Great Lakes camp that they are Chicanos, not Indians. (If you know your American geography, you will know that Tucson is in southern Arizona, so not far from Mexico, while the Great Lakes are up there near Canada.)

Anyhow, this is a serious point because, as the story goes, the Indian Sports League’s rule is that “all players had to be one-quarter or more Indian blood and that they had to have their BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] roll numbers available if challenged”. The Great Lakes players, coming from a big Midwestern city, are all over this:

they all had their BIA identification cards, encased in plastic. This proved that they were all real Indians – even a blonde haired guy. He was really only about one-sixteenth but the BIA rolls had been changed for his tribe so legally he was one-fourth.

You can feel the tongue firmly planted in the cheek – the satirical tone – here can’t you! They challenge the Tucson players, many of whom, as it turns out, can speak their language. None of the urbanised Great Lakes players could, but they claim this proved nothing. Only the BIA card did! The story is short and you can read it at the link below.

“Only approved Indians can play made in USA” is a clever, and oh-so succinct story that draws on recognisable conventions of competitive sport to produce a satire that explores the role of regulation and law in people’s lives, the way power can be wielded, and its potential for destabilising cultural heritage and disrupting solidarity. The ending is particularly biting because after the Great Lakes team has had its way, the last word is given to a white BIA official. That tells you all you need to know about this story.

Jack D. Forbes
“Only approved Indians can play made in USA” (orig. pub. 1983; also published in Forbes’ collection, Only approved Indians: Stories, 1995)
in Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2014
pp. 57-58
ISBN: 9780486490953

Available online at genius.com

Joseph Bruchac III, Turtle meat (#Review)

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I’m continuing to work through the stories in Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers. With this post, we jump from 1968 to 1983, which mens we are getting close to contemporary territory. The story is “Turtle meat” by Jospeh Bruchac III.

Joseph Bruchac III

As before, I’m using anthology editor Bob Blaisdell’s intro and Wikipedia to introduce the author, though in this case Blaisdell is extremely brief. Bruchac was born in 1942 and, says Wikipedia, “identifies as being of Abenaki, English, and Slovak ancestry” with his Abenaki heritage coming from his grandfather. He writes poetry, novels and short stories, with “a particular focus on northeastern Native American and Anglo-American lives and folklore”, and is the director of a press which publishes new Native American writers. He is also a performing storyteller and musician.

This post’s short story, “Turtle meat”, was first published, according to Blaisdell, in 1983, in an anthology titled Earth power coming: Short fiction in Native American literature, which was published by the Navajo Community College Press. It was published again in Bruchac’s own collection, Turtle meat and other stories, nearly a decade later in 1992.

“Turtle meat”

Wikipedia’s description of his focusing on “northeastern Native American and Anglo-American lives and folklore” certainly rings true for this story. Blaisdell introduces the story this way, “In this strange great story about an elderly Native American who has been living for years with a debilitated woman, Bruchac writes one of the most extraordinary fishing scenes in literature”. That sure sets up some expectations. It is also a bit misleading because “the debilitated woman” is simply old. She hadn’t always been so.

The story concerns Homer LaWare who, when the story opens, had been Amalia (Mollie) Wind’s hired hand for decades after she had kicked out her husband and come for him. There’s a little sense of “Driving Miss Daisy” here except we are on a farm and life is more earthy than Miss Daisy’s refined life with her Black American chauffeur. To start with, Homer and Mollie have been lovers from the beginning, even though Homer always slept in his cot in the shed – his decision it seems, because “it’s the Indian in me”.

The point at which the story starts, both are showing their age. The story opens with Mollie calling out to him because she needs help getting off the toilet. He comes in from the once-farmed but now overgrown field, and “gently” lifts her, reassuring her that she’s not old, that it “must of was just a cramp. Nothing more than that”. This opening scene tells us a few things – that they are old, of course; that they are comfortable with each other; and that he is sensitively attentive to her physical and emotional needs. We also learn that she has retained ownership of the farm that had originally been her father’s, and that Homer is happy with that: “It’s the Indian in me that don’t want to own no land”. Her grasping husband, Jack Wind, had been sent packing, and her “no-good daughter” had not been seen for years.

The central part of the story describes Homer’s fishing expedition – his catching (and cleaning) several yellow perch, and then an old snapping turtle. It’s a battle – it was easier when he was young “and his chest wasn’t caved in like a broken box” – but he does it. Finally, having been out longer than he’d expected, he returns home, muddy and bloody, to find Amalia missing. Where is Amalia, and why is her daughter – who has “Jack Wind written all over her face” – sitting in Amalia’s rocker?

In one sense, “Turtle meat” is a traditional story of ageing parents and grasping children, but it is imbued with a different sensibility. Homer’s battle with the turtle recalls other literary battles between fishermen and their prey, but in this case it is not only about Homer confronting his age, but is also symbolic of the battle Amalia simultaneously faces. I suspect, too, that the choice of a turtle has specific cultural references for Bruchac, given turtles seem to feature often in his writing.

It’s a great story, as Blaisdell says, but what makes it particularly so is the writing. The characters are more than just types. There’s a natural dignity to them, with an individuality that is conveyed mostly through dialogue – and in Homer’s case, also through his thoughts expressed via italics. The descriptive writing is tight and fresh. And it has a quiet humour. Take, for example, Homer out on his boat:

He looked in the water. He saw his face, the skin lined and brown as an old map. Wattles of flesh hung below his chin like the comb of a rooster.

“Shit, you’re a good-looking man, Homer LaWare,” he said to his reflection. “Easy to see what a woman sees in you.”

How can you not warm to such a character and such writing?

Unfortunately, I don’t think this story is available online so you’ll just have to believe me that it’s another one worth reading from this anthology.

Joseph Bruchac III
“Turtle meat” (orig. pub. 1983)
in Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2014
pp. 50-56
ISBN: 9780486490953