God's Little Acre by Erskine Caldwell

Despite my somewhat lukewarm response to Tobacco Road, it made enough of an impression on me that I had to try another Erskine Caldwell book. Having now finished God’s Little Acre, I’m still not sure what the appeal is, the characters are mostly despicable, selfish and lazy; the writing isn’t particularly evocative or revealing or poetic. I think what frustrates me with Caldwell is that I can not identify what, if any?, point he is making with his novels. That people are stupid, narrow-minded and spiteful? That lust takes precedence over any sort of social decency or dignity? Families are fraught with treachery, betrayal and violence? I just really don’t know what to make of Caldwell’s writing. Am I looking for and expecting too much?

Pluto was anxious to get back to Georgia, and Griselda was frantic. She did not know what Buck might do to her for not returning home immediately, and it frightened her to think about it. She was glad to stay as long as she could, though, because it was the first time she had ever been in Horse Creek Valley, and the feeling of the company town gave her a pleasure she had never before experienced. The rows of yellow company houses, all looking alike to the eye, were individual homes to her now. She could look into the yellow company house next door and almost hear the exact words the people were saying. There was nothing like that in Marion. The houses in Marion were buildings with closed doors and uninviting windows. Here in Scottsville there was a murmuring mass of humanity, always on the verge of filling the air with a concerted shout.

God’s Little Acre, like Tobacco Road, revolves around a struggling family living on a failing farm. Ty Ty Walden (Caldwell has a knack for great character names, I’ll give him that.) is the patriarch of the family, forsaking the usual cotton growing in order to dig up his land in the hopes of striking gold. His sons, Buck and Shaw, assist him with the physical labour but without the belief of their father. Ty Ty’s daughter, Darling Jill (see what I mean about character names?!) is a promiscuous young lass being primed for marriage to the bumbling candidate for sheriff, Pluto Swint, but her interest in him depends largely on the proximity of other potential suitors. Buck’s wife Griselda is lauded as being the most attractive woman in the land, mainly by her father-in-law no less. In town, Will Thompson is fighting a battle with the cotton mill unions and drinking too much and running around on his wife, Ty Ty’s other daughter, Rosamond.

“Nothing started it, Pa,” Shaw said. “And it wasn’t about sharing the gold. It wasn’t about anything like that. It just happened, that’s all. Every time that son-of-a-bitch comes over here he invites a beating. It’s just the way he talks and acts. He acts like he’s better than we are or something. He acts like he’s better because he works in a cotton mill. He’s always calling Buck and me countrymen.”

The story is so lurid and overwrought that I don’t know what to make of it. Ty Ty wrangles an albino to help divine the location of gold on his property, the family take some trips in to town to gather Will and Rosamond for help in digging for gold, Pluto follows around a bit complaining that he should be on the campaign trail, the women sleep around, the men sleep around. Jealousy abounds, avenged usually with acts of violence. If I sound a little nonchalant about the narrative, it is because I just don’t feel anything about it. The writing is functional, it doesn’t make me think about things in a new way, it never extends beyond what is happening, but it compels me to keep reading. However, I want more from the books I read than to find out what happens next, Caldwell!

And yet, in spite of this confused response, I find myself eyeing off the other Erskine Caldwell books the local library has buried in their stacks?

Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell

Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road examines the harsh poverty in the daily life of the Lester family. Jeeter Lester is a failed sharecropper whose family are starving and all but two of his seventeen children have abandoned him. Jeeter’s sister, a widowed preacher, arrives and lures his son Dude into marriage.

Jeeter Lester is such a curious character. He is driven by a faith in nature, a faith in God, despite numerous setbacks which he solely accredits to the work of God; but it is a misguided religious faith, almost an excuse for not taking responsibility for his own livelihood. Then there is the faith of preacher Sister Bessie, whose religious devotion does not seem to be any more active that Jeeter’s. Her motivation for marrying Dude is unclear, the marriage doesn’t seem to benefit her – and this is a tale devoid of all love, marriage is a business transaction.

Pearl would not talk. She would not say a word, no matter how persuasive Lov tried to be, nor how angry he was; she even hid from Lov when he came home from the coal chute, and when he found her, she slipped away from his grasp and ran off into the broom-sedge out of sight. Sometimes she would even stay in the broom-sedge all night, remaining out there until Lov went to work the next morning.
Pearl had never talked, for that matter. Not because she could not, but simply because she did not want to.

There is always the undercurrent of suggested violence, especially against women. Lov and his child bride Pearl Lester, all of 12 years old and refuses to speak to or sleep in the same room as him. The position of women in Tobacco Road is perplexing. They are wives who fail, according to their husbands, their duties both around the home and sexually. Ellie May and Sister Bessie are physically deformed: Ellie May with her reparable harelip (which Jeeter keeps talking about how he will take her to get it fixed, but after eighteen years still hasn’t managed to provide for her), Sister Bessie with her absent nose – just two black holes in her face. The male characters continually point out these physical attributes, often claiming that it prevents them from being able to find a man. This continual degradation of the female characters made me feel uncomfortable.

The novel sometimes appears to be repetitive – characters repeat the same action or speak the same words over and over. At first I thought it was lazy writing, reducing the characters to mere simpletons with very little internal, emotional processes; but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed that this repetition worked to keep them within the vicious cycle of poverty. Jeeter talks about how all he needs is a mule and cotton seed – at least once each chapter – but he just doesn’t have the motivation or means to actually do it. Talking about it, knowing the way out, but being unable to translate that into action keeps the Lester family in their state. Jeeter prides himself on maintaining tradition, without realizing that it comes at the expense of progress.

I have been waiting for this one for a few weeks now – I know, impatient – and was worried it wasn’t going to arrive at all – I know, paranoid – but it did and I’m pretty sure I will love it. There are photos of Carson and Reeves I haven’t seen before, and a happy snap of Carson and Tennessee which is really beautiful. Also, it includes a collection of letters sent between Carson and Reeves during World War 2 when Reeves was stationed in Europe. The parts I’ve allowed myself to read seem very sweet, very touching.

• Illumination & Night Glare: The Unfinished Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Carson McCullers

I’ve been rather well behaved on the book buying front for a while now, the local library is having a big pre-loved/ex-library book sale this week and I’m expecting to donate a fair amount of cash for their efforts. It is all in the name of charity though, so, come on, as if I could possibly say no!

Suzanne Munshower over at the Guardian contemplates e-book versus printed books:

One aspect of the electronic reader that tempts me – and I’m an old fuddy duddy so I have to admit it might be the only one – is its space-saving ability. Is there a reader out there who doesn’t occasionally feel crushed by possessing too many books?

My sister moved out this week and we did a bit of a swap. Two James Dean prints – which she has been bugging me about for years – and my small bookshelf for a larger bookshelf. How could I resist the lure of a bigger bookshelf? At the moment though, while her old room gets cleaned out, all of my books, ALL 456 OF THEM, are stacked in piles around my room. Some of them are manageable and have been for a while, but the rest of them are in a chaotic mess waiting to be re-shelved in their new home. Sigh. So yes, the possibility of crushing by Penguin paperback is at an all time high at the moment.

The fortieth anniversary of the death of Jack Kerouac prompted this article about his legacy. The article is not particularly enlightening but some of the comments are thought-provoking. I, myself, love Kerouac. That said, I have never finished On the Road. (To add to the guilt, I own two different copies of it, as it was originally published, and the original scroll version.) I’ve read a number of his other books and loved most of them, but I’ve never actually made it to the end of On the Road. It’s not out of a dislike or boredom, I’ve just never actually finished it. I’ve read halfway many, many times. I’ve even read half of it out loud to a friend but … you get the idea. Does this make me a terrible Kerouac fan? I don’t know, but I love his writing and energy in his other books, and I’m always intrigued by new appraisals and interpretation and re-tellings of his life, misunderstood or not. Possible reading goal for for 2010: to FINISH reading On the Road, possibly even both versions?

(Now that I think about it, I’m the same with Bret Easton Ellis; I’ve read and loved all of his books but have never made it all the way through American Psycho. Weird.)

Congratulations to everyone who completed the 24 hour Read-a-Thon this weekend! I had intended to participate but real life plans kind of interfered. Thanks to all the cheerleaders that stopped by just in case I was participating, maybe next time I’ll actually do the reading marathon, I would really love to.

Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk

Cassie Wright is a pornstar past her prime. In order to go out with a bang (ahem!) she plans to film her attempt to break the world record for serial fornication. Six hundred men.

Snuff zooms in by giving us the perspective of four individuals involved in the proceedings: Mr. 72, Mr. 137 and Mr. 600; and Sheila, Ms. Wright’s personal assistant and the mastermind behind the project. It takes a while for the book to really distinguish the voices of the three men, whereas Sheila’s voice is always clearly defined. The three men start as a blur – minor representations of the collective jerk jockeys (Sheila’s term, but her constant use of similar slang terms is amazing.) – but through their interactions with one another they do steadily reveal their personalities. This could potentially make a great play; a character study of three men and a woman in a green room for a pornography film.

Cassie knew Marilyn’s secret name, the person Monroe dreamed of being. Not the baby-talking, hip-swinging blonde. Monroe dreamed of being respected, an intellectual like Arthur Miller, a respected, Stanislavsky-trained actor. A dignified human being. That’s who Monroe would become as she traveled without makeup, without designer clothes borrowed from a movie studio, with her famous hair tied under a scarf, hiding behind horn-rimmed reading glasses. It was that plain, intelligent, educated actress who called herself Zelda Zonk. When she booked airplane tickets or registered in hotels. Zelda Zonk. Who read books. Who collected art. That was who Marilyn Monroe, the blonde sex goddess, dreamed of being.

It is Chuck Palahniuk, so it is coarse, aspects of the pornography business are explained in great detail. There is an undeniably adolescent fascination with the flesh and all things bodily. By writing about the contentious subject of pornography there was an opportunity to explore some of the finer arguments surrounding it – briefly mentioned through Sheila’s point of view, but that all falls by the wayside very quickly in favour of advancing the story. The plot makes you think you know where it is going, proves you correct, but then twists things so suddenly that you almost feel naïve for believing you knew what was going to happen.

Six hundred dudes. One porn queen. A world record for the ages. A must-have movie for every discerning collector of things erotic.
Didn’t one of us on purpose set out to make a snuff movie.

But, that is what also makes it so much, dare I say it, fun to read. Things don’t go exactly as you imagined them, but then there is that horrifying realization when you see where it is actually headed. To reveal too much would be to ruin the enjoyment offered by Snuff.

(Also, it introduced me to the exploits of Roman empress Valeria Messalina. I do enjoy the way that Palahniuk weaves together moments and figures of history into his narratives.)

If you could ask your favorite author (alive or dead) one question … who would you ask, and what would the question be?

"Why, Jess, honey, I'd be delighted."

My instant response is to ask my girl Carson McCullers something, but I can’t think of any one thing that I could possibly ask her. I’m not really interested in where authors get their stories from, because I know that it is such a personal and inexplicable process, but I would like to hear about her creative process. Personal questions are invasive, and it is possible I already know too much about her. How did she feel about achieving great literary success at such a young age? What was it like living at 7 Middagh Street? Tell me more about those summers with Tennessee Williams?

How about I just settle for: “uh Ms McCullers? Would you care to join me for a drink or two and a chat?”

(Although, that is a bit like answering the three wishes question with “three more wishes”, isn’t it?)

Monkey Grip by Helen Garner

Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip explores the loosely defined relationship of a young couple in Melbourne during the mid-seventies. Javo, a young man hooked on hard drugs, does something hurtful – sleeps with someone else, steals, takes Nora for granted, lies; Nora gets angry, stews in her rage for a while, maybe sleeps with someone else, goes away for a little while. Nora and Javo’s paths cross again and her anger and hatred melt away at the sight of him, all too easily forgetting all the damage and pain that he has caused her. This cycle repeats itself over 245 pages.

Dear Javo, there’s a few things you ought to know, mostly involving things like elementary courtesy. Eh? Like saying hullo; like not making that ludicrous adolescent gap between how you behave toward me at night when we sleep together and how you act in public as if we hardly knew each other. Don’t get me wrong: I can recognize a desperate man when I see one. I don’t want a flood of attention. Just hullo would do, so I don’t have to wonder if I’ve been hallucinating other times we’ve been together. Good luck to you, Javo, I like you, but you give me a hard time. Still like to see you, sometime.

I liked reading about my hometown of Melbourne thirty years ago; at one point Nora visits a bookshop and walks a few blocks to a pub – a path that I myself have walked many times over the years. The mention of street names and places gave me a sense of pride of place, a brief moment of recognition. I expected to really like this book – I enjoyed the film adaptation – but it was just dull. Given the cyclical and destructive nature of the patterns of behaviour that Nora and Javo continued to fall into, there was no way to escape it, no real way to conclude the narrative. The end felt weak and bland; given what we know about Nora’s behaviour, surely we can surmise that her and Javo (or, Javo and junk) will, eventually, be drawn back together again? Monkey Grip gives the distinct impression that we are not supposed to see this inevitability as sad or immature or desperate, but as romantic.

Another week, and no newly acquired books. This week I’ve been too focused on studying to do much book buying or reading, but once all my assignments are done I’m sure I’ll get back into it again. I’m about halfway through my assignments, the last couple should be fairly straight-forward. Hopefully I’ll be back in the swing of things by the end of the week. Until then; STRESS! ANGST! PREMATURE HAIR LOSS! CAFFEINE! HARVARD STYLE BIBLIOGRAPHIES! ARGH!

I do, however, also tend to always waste a lot of time online scouring and discovering all sorts of fascinating bookish links.

• What do Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice (review) and Grand Theft Auto have in common? A lot more than you would suspect according to Matt Selman.
• A veteran soldier returns books to Germany, 64 years after having taken them as an 18 year old in World War 2.
• After another blogger questioned the use of a snippet from one of his blog reviews on the cover of a book, Mark Sarvas asks, do blog reviews belong on the covers and blurbs of books?
• Word Lily took a trip to Willa Cather‘s hometown – Red Cloud, Nebraska – and posted a beautiful set of photos of the area.
• Gus Van Sant and Bret Easton Ellis are working together on a film about Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake.
• A look at the use of visual literacy and reading comics.
• A multi-perspective article about the differences between reading electronic and paper texts.

Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote

Other Voices, Other Rooms was Truman Capote’s first published novel; Summer Crossing was written earlier, but the manuscript was believed to have been lost or destroyed until it was rediscovered in 2005. The story of how the manuscript came to be published is more interesting than the novella itself. A semi-autobiographical coming of age novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms is lusciously poetic and attuned to the pains associated with growing up.

After the death of his mother, Joel Harrison Knox – much accepted as a stand in for Capote himself – receives a letter from his father beckoning him to stay with him in rural Alabama. Once there, living in a faded and decaying mansion with his stepmother Miss Amy and the decadent Cousin Randolph, the father is curiously absent. As Joel settles into his new residence and becomes acquainted with a number of increasingly strange characters, the truth gradually reveals itself.

He had reached the garden by following a path which led round from the front of the house through the rampart of interlacing trees. And here, in the overgrown confusion, were some plants taller than his head, and others razor-sharp with thorns; brittle sun-curled leaves crackled under his cautious step. The dry, tangled weeds grew waist high. The sultry smells of summer and sweet shrub and dark earth were heavy, and the itchy whirr of bumblebees stung the silence. He could hardly raise his eyes upward, for the sky was pure blue fire.

Capote is greatly skilled in building a foreboding sense of dread and unease. As Joel gets to know the characters and they reveal their peculiarities to him, there is an overwhelming impression of a sinister hand at work. His friendships with tomboy Idabel and the household servants Zoo and Jesus are all too briefly explored; I would have loved to have spent more time with these characters. Zoo, in particular.

But there was no prayer in Joel’s mind; rather, nothing a net of words could capture, for, with one exception, all his prayers of the past had been simple concrete requests: God, give me a bicycle, a knife with seven blades, a box of oil-paints. Only how, how, could you say something so indefinite, so meaningless as this: God, let me be loved.

The final third of the novel is fuelled by an unrelentingly frantic energy; the line between reality and imagination is frequently blurred beyond all recognition, and the novel takes on a hallucinatory tone. This part was my favourite, the writing is vigorous and captures the imagination in a vivid and memorable way. Capote’s descriptions of the natural landscapes are really magnificent and evocative. Although Joel has to leave behind a part of himself as he becomes immured in the complex world of adult relationships and family dramas, the writing is really special. Sparkling, but with a hint of dirt as well; it lacks the relative lightness of Breakfast at Tiffany’s but it works in Other Voices, Other Rooms‘ favour.

A few ebay purchases arrived this week, a pay day and an unusually restrained visit to the Federation Square book market.

• The First Third by Neal Cassady
• Jack Kerouac: A Biography by Tom Clark
• Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture by Douglas Coupland
• Sanctuary by William Faulkner
• Jack’s Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac by Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee
• Hunger by Knut Hamsun
• Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers (review)
• The Collected Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker

This week I’ve been reading The Sandman comics/graphic novels/whatever your preferred term of endearment/books by Neil Gaiman. Immensely enjoyable, but I don’t feel adequate reviewing them, I don’t know how to speak about them. Maybe a summary post when I finish all of them off? I’ve also just started Truman Capote’s first published novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms. Although, I am expecting McCullers’ unfinished autobiography – Illumination and Night Glare – to arrive this week and I can see myself ignoring everything else and devouring that quite easily in a day or so. I don’t really know what I’ll find myself reading next.

How do you choose what to read next? Do you plan your reading ahead of time, knowing what book you will be picking up next, or do you act solely on instinct?

Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers

McCullers second novel, Reflections in a Golden Eye, is set in an army camp during peace time. It concerns the relationships between five key figures – repressed and confused Captain Penderton, his unsatisfied flighty wife Leonora, who is having an affair with Major Langdon, whose wife Alison is suffering great mental and physical exhaustion. Outside of them is Private Williams, somewhat simple and quiet, but menacing. As with all of McCullers’ work it deals with the nuances of spiritual isolation, the ways in which we find ourselves completely alienated despite and because of our surroundings.

Reflections in a Golden Eye is set up as a tragedy from the very beginning, we are well aware that one of the characters is going to meet a violent end at the hands of another. Some of the imagery here is utterly horrific, but it shapes our knowledge of the characters. The novella is brutal in the refusal to soften these stark elements of the human psyche. Shockingly violent, in both actions and private thoughts. These lives are burdened with intense hatred for each other that it controls their entire spiritual beings disallowing them to fully comprehend themselves.

Captain Penderton, who on the whole had lived a most rigid and unemotional life, did not question this strange hate of his. Once or twice, when he awoke late at night after taking too much Seconal, he made himself uncomfortable by thinking back over his recent behaviour. But he made no real effort to force himself to an inward reckoning.

Captain Penderton is the most intriguing character, with his slow and painful realization of his attraction to the quiet soldier Private Williams which manifests itself in an absurd form of hate. This hate reveals itself because it is a frustrated attraction which can never be fulfilled. The closest that Penderton comes to self-realization, is when Langdon comments that his servant would be a better person if he acted normally, to which Penderton bitterly responds:

‘You mean,’ Captain Penderton said, ‘that any fulfillment obtained at the expense of normalcy is wrong, and should not be allowed to bring happiness. In short, it is better, because it is morally honourable, for the square peg to keep scraping about the round hole rather than to discover and use the unorthodox square that would fit it?’
‘Why, you put it exactly right,’ the Major said. ‘Don’t you agree with me?’
‘No,’ said the Captain, after a short pause. With gruesome vividness the Captain suddenly looked into his soul and saw himself. For once he did not see himself as others saw him; there came to him a distorted doll-like image, mean of countenance and grotesque in form. The Captain dwelt on this vision without compassion. He accepted it with neither alteration nor excuse. ‘I don’t agree,’ he repeated absently.

It is typical McCullers’ in that it is unspeakably bleak, and delves into the darkest emotions. Knowing of McCullers’ personal life, and her dedicating Reflections in a Golden Eye to Annemarie Schwarzenbach – who she was immensely attracted to, but who constantly rejected her advances – speaks volumes about where she is coming from, and relates to the concept which she would come to struggle with in her later work The Ballad of the Sad Café, the eternal disparity between the lover and the beloved. I think it is a book that is going to benefit greatly from future re-readings.

(Yes, that is Elizabeth Taylor on the Penguin Modern Classics cover. A film version, starring Taylor and Marlon Brando and directed by John Huston was filmed in 1967. It is available to watch on YouTube.)