Book Reviews

Willy Vlautin

Harper Perennial

Spare, bleak tale deepens, touches to the core

From the first chapter, you know you’re in Steinbeck country, and I don’t mean the Salinas Valley.

Charley Thompson is a lonely and alone fifteen-year old who, traveling around with his father, never stays anywhere long enough to finish a school year. When they show up in Portland, Charley hangs out at the nearby Portland Meadows racetrack and begins working for Del Montgomery.

Through Charley’s eyes, we are introduced to the seamy, underside of horse racing, of drugged horses, and owners like Del who runs them into the ground until they can’t run anymore, then sells them for dog food. One of his horses, Lean on Pete, becomes Charley’s only friend.

When his dad is badly beaten and taken to the hospital, Charley is truly on his own, and,  stealing Pete, he sets out for Wyoming to find his only aunt.

This is a bleak, gritty novel, deeply moving, at times heartbreaking. One longs for a grace note of humor, a glimmer of hope, a touch of kindness, something to redeem humanity. Like Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, or McCarthy Cormac’s The Road, such bleak, cheerless tales deepen us and touch us to the core. This, too, is life, they seem to say.

Vlautin, a Scappoose singer and songwriter as well as author of three books, has a lean, spare prose style reminiscent of Raymond Carver, which is not an accident. He describes the impact on him of discovering Carver: “I started writing as hard as I could from that moment on. The stories just started pouring out. I had all this sadness and darkness on my back, and I didn’t know what it was. I was just a kid. But Carver opened it all up.”

Charley’s seeking a home could be a metaphor for the journey each of us is on: crossing a desert, essentially alone, where hope remains forever a faint figure—possibly a mirage—on the horizon.

It may sound like an odd recommendation (You got to read this book! It’s really bleak!) but when we read writers like Steinbeck, Carver, Cormac, and Vlautin, they open us up to the sadness and darkness on our own backs. And perhaps that’s why we read them.

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (May 15-June 14, 2011). Reprinted with permission.

Brian Doyle

Oregon State University Press

Author plays with words in loopy, lyrical Mink River

Listening to most writers tell it, writing is three parts agony to one part ecstasy (still, it’s the ecstasy that keeps us writing.) Reading Brian Doyle’s novel, Mink River, one gets the impression that for him writing is play—sheer, simple, joyful play. He uses words like children use Legos to create worlds from their imaginations.

Editor of Portland Magazine, Doyle is an award-winning essayist and the author of ten books of nonfiction. His essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Orion, and the annual Best American Essays anthologies. This is his first novel.

One senses this playfulness from the first page, as he introduces the fictional town of Neawanka on the Oregon coast where there are—“No houses crying out to be the cover of a magazine that no one actually reads anyway and the magazine ends up in the bathroom and then is cut to ribbons for a fourth-grade collage project …”

One can almost hear him chuckling, entertaining no one more so than himself, as he describes its “long relaxed streets that arrive eventually where they are headed but don’t get all fascist and linear and anal like highways do.”

At times loopy, at times lyrical, this is writing for the sheer joy of playing with words, as when describing an eagle—“As he sails over the grocery store he whirls and snatches a whirling piece of cardboard, and he flapflopflaps down the street triumphantly, big as a tent, you can almost hear him thinking I am one bad-ass flying machine …”—or when describing the “little frenetic testy chittering skittering cheeky testy chickaree squirrels.”

As in true play, adult rules of grammar and punctuation are suspended during recess. Sentences run on and on without ever stopping to take a breath, as if commas, semi-colons and periods were being rationed and hadn’t been available that particular day he was writing. But in this punctuation-challenged text one begins to hear the cadence and rhythm of the storyteller’s voice.

The characters start as types in folktales—the man with thirteen days to live, the old nun and her crow who recites the Psalms, the man who beats his son—names are almost incidental. We learn who these people are by the stories they tell.

As a novel, Mink River isn’t so much a story as a testament to storytelling, and its power to enchant and enthrall and project us into other worlds.

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (March 15-April 14, 2011). Reprinted with permission.

Mark Twain

University of California Press

Mark Twain in memory mode

Mark Twain is Americans’ most beloved writer, whether they have read him or not. Ernest Hemingway famously pronounced The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to be the Great American Novel, and there have been few other contenders for the title. Huck has become an icon of American culture.

Mark Twain, the pen name and alter ego of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, has himself become an icon, personifying America: humorous, bitter, wise, naïve, idealistic and mercenary, and shrewd. One senses Huck in his heart.

On the centenary of his death (1910), the University of California Press released Autobiography of Mark Twain, a mammoth 736-page book, and the first of three volumes.

The work sprawls as he talks about whatever interests him that moment, and we float along on his stream of consciousness in memory-mode. Here is the Twain who wrote the lyrical Tom Sawyer, full of boyhood adventures and promise; and here is the Twain who wrote the bitter Letters from the Earth, despairing of the human experiment which was “probably a matter of surprise and regret to the Creator.”

This is not for those who want an introduction to his life (See Justin Kaplan’s Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain or Ron Power’s Mark Twain: A Life for excellent biographies.) This is for admirers of this most American of American writers, those who are already familiar with his life and experience a quiver seeing drafts in his own handwriting. This “autobiography” fills in gaps and provides nuance and texture to the man’s life.

One is also struck how Twain speaks to our times, whether railing against Jay Gould and the other greed-meisters (“The people had desired money before his day, but he taught them to fall down and worship it”), or arguing against American imperialism. He finds it brings out the worst in us as a people. He opposed the Spanish-American War which had largely been orchestrated by the Administration and the press (sound familiar?), and he is outraged at the brutal atrocities and massacres committed by U.S. soldiers against the Filipinos in their fight for independence (“The enemy numbered six hundred, including women and children—and we abolished them utterly, leaving not even a baby alive to cry for its dead mother.”) One suspects that he would not have been shocked by My Lai or Abu Ghraib—but still outraged.

Perhaps it’s not that Twain speaks to our times; perhaps the times don’t really change all that much.

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (March 15-April 14, 2011). Reprinted with permission.

 Hilary Mantel

Picador USA

Rich historical novel gives fresh slant on battle for the soul of Tudor England

As Mark Twain noted, all history is written in prejudiced ink. It just depends on who is telling the story.

Wolf Hall, winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize, England’s top literary award, takes the well-known story of King Henry VIII’s attempt to get an heir (read: son) to succeed him on the throne and secure the Tudor reign.

But author Hilary Mantel gives the story a fresh slant by telling it from the viewpoint of Thomas Cromwell, one of the great bad guys in English history, he who was responsible for beheading the “man for all seasons,” the saintly Sir Thomas More (consecrated by the Church in 1935.)

In Mantel’s telling, there are no saints. It is a brutal, ruthless world where king and pope are battling for the soul of England.

This rich historical novel assumes the reader’s familiarity with the politics and the players of the time—the king, Anne Boleyn, Cardinal Wolsey, Archbishop Cranmer—and the court intrigue, plotting and scheming by the different parties.

Perhaps not surprising, coming from Cromwell’s perspective, the book provides an unflattering portrait of More, who is seen here as a merciless and intolerant burner of heretics—“I always forget, he thinks, how More neither pities himself nor takes pity on others.” (Recommended reading: The Life of Thomas More by Peter Ackroyd offers a more balanced view that shows the man to be neither saint nor villain but a product of his time.)

Cromwell himself is portrayed as a fixer. His job is to do the bidding of his master of the moment—first, Cardinal Wolsey, then the king. Eminently practical, he seems to be a man without any principles—except loyalty—at a time when other men were willing to die, or more preferably, to kill and torture for their religious principles. In the company of such fanatics, a man without principles seems almost sane and humane by comparison.

And torture there certainly was. One wonders at the mind that could design such hideous means of bringing a sinner back to God. It makes Dick Cheney’s waterboarding look like child’s play (granted, an evil child but still…)

Finally, we are left with history’s love of irony: all this fuss and bother, burnings and beheadings, to get a male heir, only to end up with a daughter on the throne—Elizabeth I—who became the greatest of the English monarchs.

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (February 15-March 14, 2011). Reprinted with permission.

Greg Mortenson

Penguin Books

 Moving, inspiring tale of an ordinary man making an extraordinary difference

H. G. Wells summed up history as “a race between education and catastrophe.” This is nowhere more evident than in the developing world today.

In his bestselling book, Three Cups of Tea, Greg Mortenson relates how, in an unsuccessful attempt to climb K2 in 1993, he became lost and would have died had he not been found and cared for by villagers. In gratitude for saving his life, he promised to return someday and build the village a school.

Since that time, with only his quiet, respectful manner and the Islamic invocation, As-Salaam Alaaikum (“May peace be upon you”), he has built over 140 schools and 60 temporary refugee schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

As he says in his new book, Stones into Schools, his story has always struck him as “the chronicle of an ordinary man who inadvertently bumbled into an extraordinary place.” It is the story of a man who found his calling.

His work testifies to the “ripple effects of female literacy:” Where women are educated, the quality of health increases, infant mortality drops significantly, and girls tend to marry later and have fewer children. (For the fathers, there is an economic incentive: “Her bride-price, thanks to her education, has now shot from five to fifty adult rams.”)

Also, not unimportant, educated Muslim women are more likely to withhold their blessing of their sons who wish to join a militant jihad. Three Cups is now mandatory reading for all military commanders in Afghanistan.

Mortenson concludes, “Simply put, young women are the single biggest potential agents of change in the developing world—a phenomenon that is sometimes referred to as the Girl Effect and that echoes an African proverb … ‘If you teach a boy, you educate an individual; but if you teach a girl, you educate a community’.”

Stones is the stronger of the two books—certainly more dramatic, including descriptions of life under the Taliban’s harsh theocracy, the attack on the World Trade Center, and the horrific 2005 earthquake in Pakistan.

But I also found it more inspiring as it tells the stories of “ordinary people,” living on the edge of subsistence who seek education as the key to their children’s future. It is these people who daily inspire Mortenson. He writes, “When ordinary human beings perform extraordinary acts of generosity, endurance, or compassion, we are all made richer by their example.”

Indeed we are, Greg.

As-Salaam Alaaikum.

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (January 15-February 14, 2011). Reprinted with permission.

Spike Walker

St. Martin’s Press

A shipwreck, a raging storm, and the harrowing Alaskan rescue that became a legend

If there is a male counterpart to Chick Lit, it must be this kind of book. A guy’s book.

Northwest writer Spike Walker, author of Nights of Ice, Coming Back Alive, and Working on the Edge, has crafted another harrowing real-life thriller about man (there are no women in this story) against nature.

On December 8, 2004, the 738-foot freighter, Selendang Ayu, lost its engines in the midst of a raging storm off Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. Without power, the giant ship began drifting toward the treacherous coast, certain to be broken up by the gale-force winds and mountainous, 35 to 50 foot waves.

Two H-60 Jayhawk helicopters from the Coast Guard station at Dutch Harbor set out to rescue the ship’s twenty-six sailors. Dropping rescue baskets from 100-200 feet above the freighter, the helicopter crew began pulling up the men one at a time.

When one of the Jayhawks has to return to its base due to mechanical problems, the remaining helicopter continues removing the last nine sailors. Then, in the midst of a perfect rescue operation, nature throws them a curve.

A giant wave suddenly comes out of the night, slamming into the freighter, and shooting a wall of water several hundred feet into the air, totally swallowing the helicopter, and washing it from the sky.

A second smaller H-65 Dolphin helicopter makes a dangerous launch from a nearby Coast Guard cutter, setting out to rescue the rescuers.

Walker has once again written a breath-taking, heart-pounding, white-knuckled (let’s see, what other clichés can I throw in here?) gripping adventure. It’s not surprising his books inspired the hit television show, The Deadliest Catch.

He writes with a you-are-there immediacy, often times replaying the same critical moment from different points of view: of the commander of the Coast Guard cutter, watching the helicopter falling from the sky; the pilot as his copter stalls and begins to drop toward the churning sea; the young rescue swimmer on the doomed ship, watching the helicopter plunging down toward him.

This is stirring stuff, a guy’s book, about raw courage, endurance, sacrifice, and, too, about male bonds that go as deep as love.

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (November 15-December 14, 2010). Reprinted with permission.

Robert Michael Pyle

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Mariposa Road takes Grays River author on personal quest

Bob Pyle’s most recent book is about a lot more than butterflies.

In 2008, he set out “to travel the continent and see as many North American butterflies…as I possibly could in one calendar year.” He set the goal for himself of 500 species.

During that year he crisscrossed the United States in Powdermilk, his 1982 Honda Civic hatchback, as well as hopping up to Alaska and over to Hawaii on his quest.

As with any significant journey, there is the ostensible purpose—for example, leaving home (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), or returning home (The Odyssey)—and then there is the journey itself, which is the real story.

On his road trip, he writes about the people and places he visits—a cabin in the Big Sur area where Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti once gathered, and Graceland where he pays silent homage at Elvis’s grave. Along the way, he meets colleagues who share his passion (“This is my religion, this butterfly,” says a friend, Koji Shiraiwa) and everywhere he rejoices in nature and natural things. The reader might want a naturalist’s handbook alongside Pyle’s to picture the flora and fauna that he’s seeing (cinquefoil, starflowers, horsetail and hermit thrush.)

The author of fourteen books, including Chasing Monarchs, Where Bigfoot Walks, and Wintergreen, this Yale-trained naturalist and Guggenheim fellow is a thoughtful observer of what he is witnessing— “Many’s the time when I wished I could go back and see these creatures through a child’s eyes. Or, as Bob Seger put it, ‘Wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.’”

In the end, he tallies 478 species, and returns to his Grays River home where he reflects on his year’s journey—“Most of my trials were fun, some funny, and always survivable …(O)ne naturally asks, What did I learn?  How am I changed?”

That’s a very personal discovery, one that often can’t be put down on paper, for somewhere along the way one has become the journey.

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (October 15-November 14, 2010). Reprinted with permission.

Naseem Rakha

Broadway Books/Random House

The Crying Tree reflects pain and grace intermingled

Could you forgive the person who killed your child? Would you even want to?

That is the question that Naseem Rakha initially poses in her novel, The Crying Tree. But as the story develops, the question of forgiveness becomes more complicated.

In 1985, Irene and Nate Stanley, recent transplants from Illinois, have a normal family life in eastern Oregon with their two children, thirteen-year old Bliss and fifteen-year old Shep. And then one afternoon Shep is killed in the course of an apparent home robbery.

His murderer is Daniel Robbin, a nineteen-year old who has a troubled past of foster homes and run-ins with the law.

Such tragedies uncover a family’s fault lines, where they are likely to fracture, and we watch the family come apart. Irene sinks into a paralyzing depression for years; she and Nate now simply inhabit a marriage; Bliss grows up on her own, her parents too traumatized by their loss to give her the emotional support she needs. The life they knew has been shattered forever and Irene’s one desire is to see Daniel Robbin executed.

Nineteen years pass and her wish is finally granted. Robbin will no longer appeal his death sentence. But by this time Irene has moved on, if not from her grief, from her need for revenge and Daniel Robbin’s life.

As the execution date approaches, some nagging questions begin to crystallize in the reader’s mind—Why did Nate so abruptly uproot his family from their farm in Illinois to eastern Oregon? What was the tension between father and son? Most unsettling, how do we square the brutal murderer of Shep with the gentle, reflective and remorseful man now in prison?

We get to know Robbin through the eyes of Tab Mason, the penitentiary superintendent and the one responsible for overseeing the execution. As we read on, we sense that something doesn’t ring true.

The book is about forgiveness and redemption, yes, but it’s also about families and the secrets family members keep from each other. As the full story unfolds of what happened the day Shep died, the initial question of forgiveness becomes much broader: Can we finally forgive each other? Can we finally forgive ourselves?

Shakespeare reminds us that mercy is “twice bless’d; It blesseth him that gives and him that takes”—which doesn’t mean that it can’t be painful, to give and to receive mercy.

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (September 15-October 14, 2010). Reprinted with permission.

 
Muriel Barbery
Translated from the French by Alison Anderson

Europa Editions

Contemplative page-turner captures the joy of finding a kindred spirit

This is an unlikely candidate for an international bestseller: not much of a plot, little action, and the two main characters are hardly the stuff of great literary heroines—

Madame Michel, a cheerless concierge, by her own description, fat, ugly and fifty-four, and Paloma, a precocious twelve year-old, “ripe for despair," planning her suicide.

Living in the same building, both are hiding who they really are: Paloma dumbs down to her peers’ level, while Madame Michel plays the television loudly so people think she is mindlessly ensconced on her couch, while actually immersing herself in the delights of art that moves one to tears.

The life of the mind, for all its riches, is inherently a lonely life. Reading this, I was reminded of Emily Dickinson’s poem that begins:

I’m nobody. Who are you?
Are you nobody too?
Then there’s a pair of us.
Don’t tell—they’d banish us, you know.

A mordantly humorous satire, the book moves between the musings of a very bright, very observant pre-teen, offering her “profound thought for the day” (“We mustn’t forget … that a lifespan is pathetically short, one day you’re twenty and the next day you’re eighty”) and the reclusive concierge’s reveries (“We cannot cease desiring, and this is our glory, and our doom. Desire! It carries us and crucifies us …”) Both are highly attuned to the human comedy as we make “our laughable way through life.”

Then, into their lives comes Monsieur Ozu, a refined Japanese gentleman who not only mirrors elegance, but in a way, bestows it. Madame Michel reflects: “This morning … I was surprised to discover that I am not who I thought I was.”

I have a theory as to why this book is so popular: I think it speaks of a particular kind of outsider, the pretender wearing his or her banal camouflage, trying to blend in; and testifies to the power of art—whether literature, painting, film, or music—to resurrect, re-invent, and rescue one from the insanity and absurdity of the everyday workaday world.

Not a compulsive page-turner like those other titles on the bestselling list, with their pierced, tattooed hacker heroines, or vampire boyfriends, Hedgehog is more a contemplative page-turner, capturing the loneliness of the long distance thinker, and that sublime joy—deeper than love—when one discovers a kindred spirit (Then there’s a pair of us), and for a moment one is no longer alone.

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (July 15-August 14, 2010). Reprinted with permission.

David Mitchell

Random House

Historical novel offers gripping, fascinating "travel guide" to Japan and the past.

“The past is a foreign country,” L. P. Hartley famously noted. “They do things differently there.”

Too often historical novels are simply modern stories dressed up in period costumes; the best historical fiction becomes a travel guidebook to that foreign country of the past.

In David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, we are transported to Japan in 1799, where for over two hundred years, the Japanese have successfully sealed off the country from the contagion of Western religion and ideas. The one point of contact with the outside world is Dejima, a man-made island in Nagasaki Bay, where employees of the Dutch East Indies Company are confined to conduct their trade.

The book opens with a harrowing scene, immediately grabbing the reader. But then it lapses into a long stretch of scene setting, and introduces a bewildering array of Japanese and Dutch characters, most with unpronounceable names (Uzaemon, Ouwehand, Aibagawa, Gerritszoon) which may understandably cause the reader to lay the book aside. And that would be a shame, for this is a gripping and beautifully written work. 

The story is told mainly through three characters: Jacob de Zoet, a young, honest clerk, sent to audit the records for suspected embezzlement—To the Dutch inhabitants of Dejima, embezzlement isn’t so much a crime as a way of life, which he now threatens.

Orito Aibagawa, a midwife and the daughter of a respected doctor, is disfigured.

Jacob falls in love with her “beautiful, burned face,” as does Uzaemon Ogawa, an interpreter to the Dutch who has imbibed forbidden Western ideas.

Orito is sold to the powerful Abbott Lord Enomoto, who collects deformed and otherwise unmarriageable young women for his monastery, about which terrible rumors circulate (Depravity Alert.) Uzaemon sets out to rescue Orito from this “nunnery of freaks,” and the story ratchets up from there.

In addition to a compelling story, Mitchell steeps us in the past: how people related, how they understood the world, the arcane lore of their medicine—Want to know how they removed kidney stones in the eighteenth century? (Trust me, you don’t.) 

The author of Cloud Atlas and Ghostwritten, Mitchell has twice been shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Man Prize. In Thousand Autumns, he has written a fascinating travel guide to two foreign countries: Japan and the past—where, in both, they do things differently.

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (August 15-September 14, 2010). Reprinted with permission.