Monthly Archives: October 2020

New York Novels, Region by Region — Part Four!

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New York! New York! As we continue our stroll through novels for every region of our Empire State, WHAT can represent New York City? Burr? Ragtime? The Waterworks? All-Of-a-Kind Family? Cities in Flight? Auntie Mame? The Cricket in Times Square? The Taking of Pelham One Two Three? The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge? A thousand other tales of America’s literary, cultural, and financial capital? Well, let’s take a plunge!

With apologies to Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, I choose Wonderstruck (2011) by Brain Selznick to hint at New York’s cultural glories. Two world’s fairs… Broadway… silent movies… the Museum of Natural History… and an independent bookshop… all weave together in the story of a newly-deaf boy finding his born-Deaf grandmother. Two time periods alternate, just as “graphic novel” sections alternate with text sections. Maybe it especially resonates with me and my life-long mild-to-moderate hearing loss, but I find it at once comforting and overwhelming.

Jean Merrill’s The Pushcart War (1964) is a juvenile, and yet it captures something of the struggle to keep the city human – a struggle personal and cultural, but also political, economic, and social. Published at the height of a conflict epitomized by Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, The Pushcart War pits pushcart vendors – some of the city’s least significant humans (financially, economically, socially, politically, geographically) against ever-more monstrous trucks steamrolling through the streets. Resistance is so subtle that the truck faction doesn’t even notice — at first.

Winter’s Tale (1993) by Mark Helprin is the tale of a fantasy New York (and maybe all views of New York are in some way fantasies). Peter Lake, cast adrift as a baby by immigrant parents being refused admission, raised by semi-wild dwellers in a salt marsh and exiled by them to turn-of-the-century New York, is forced into crime by city gangs and rescued by a supernatural white horse – a horse that he finally realizes has come to him in order to be freed. It’s a long book, and its magical-realism isn’t for everyone. But let it flow, and you’ll feel some of the city’s magic, along with the city’s grit.

A more prosaic magic abounds in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000) by Michael Chabon. The title characters are teens, first cousins in immigrant families, who become architects of the brand-new medium of comic books, and the even-newer genre of superheroes. It’s a great American novel, sprawling from Prague to New York to Antarctica, taking in comic books, immigrants, stage magic, American Jewish life, refugees, the Holocaust, World War II, the Empire State Building, Al Smith, the golden age of radio, and the postwar suburbs, yet never setting a foot wrong. Wow. (By the way, comic-book giant Dick Ayers, who lived in Pulteney and attended school in Hammondsport during the 1930s, was one of Chabon’s sources.)

Speaking of Wow – I first read Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) by James Baldwin as a teenager, and I’ve read it at least once since. Wow. A mountain of a novel: a Black novel, an American novel, a religious novel, a New York City novel. A human novel. The Grimes family lives a life of crushing conflict – how could it be otherwise, for an American Black family in the first half of the 20th century? But there is also conflict, even abuse, WITHIN the family. There’s conflict in the church that Gabriel Grimes pastors. And teenaged John recognizes, and is troubled by, conflicts within himself, conflicts that we can see are pulling him away from his church and his family. For now he can only see himself, and express himself, in religious terms. But as he dances in the Lord, SEEMING to fall even deeper into his stepfather’s world, he begins to dance away from his upbringing.

On a brighter and lighter side, we end our City list and our State list with Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) by Truman Capote. Maybe most people know it through the movie, but the book’s better. In a lot of ways, we can tie it to The Great Gatsby, on Long Island – bright these folks may be, but they’re also brittle. We can smile our way through Tiffany’s, but we need at the same time to see how shallow, how hollow these people are. You can find yourself in a great city, but you can also hide yourself there. For all their failings and even their wrongs, the people in Go Tell It on the Mountain are twenty times better than the characters in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

So – that’s our list, through every region of the state! If you’ve got better choices, comment or let me know! Happy reading!

New York Novels, Region by Region — Part Three!

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For the past two weeks in this space, we’ve been looking at novels that represent various regions of our Empire State. And for the ADIRONDACKS, my thoughts turn to A Northern Light (2003), by Jennifer Donnelly. It’s based on, or at any rate inspired by, a 1906 murder in an Adirondack resort… and yes, I know that Theodore Dreiser already plowed the same ground, back in 1925.

The protagonist, Mattie Gorkey, is only on the fringes of the murder; she happens to work at the resort where the victim stays, has a few conversations with her, and comes into possession of her letters. Mattie’s main conflict revolves around her place in her family, and in society. She has a chance to go to Barnard College, but her widowed father insists that she stay home and help operate the farm. Is she, like murdered Grace Brown, destined only to be acted upon, and never herself to take action? The same questions revolve around her African American classmate, and the young friend whom she helps through the agonizing birth of twins.

And for a change of pace, we might also mention Laura Ingalls Wilder’s slice-of-life Farmer Boy (1933), the story of her husband Almanzo’s childhood in Malone. It… is… slow… but it’s also long! If that doesn’t sound promising, just take it as it is, the story of a nine-year old’s life on the farm – hard-working, with its frustrations, but in a good family and a good life.

Down in the CATSKILLS AND HUDSON VALLEY I’m cheating a little, with two short stories by Washington Irving: “Rip Van Winkle” (1819) and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820). Irving was consciously helping build an American literature in and for the new republic, but always with an eye to Europe where the money and prestige were. He drew from history and folklore, but created NEW legends for the new country.

Most of us know the stories. Lazy Rip Van Winkle manages to sleep for 20 years, awaking to find his world utterly changed – who, for instance, is this George Washington that everyone talks about? Instead of making himself useful, he ditched his hunting trip to play at ninepins with Henry Hudson’s supernatural crew, drinking their magical brew and paying the consequences.

Ichabod Crane, the unpopular schoolmaster of Sleepy Hollow (near Tarrytown), fancies himself the ideal mate for wealthy 18 year-old Katrina Van Tassel, but has a rival in Brom Van Brunt, a classic conflict of Brunt’s brawn and Crane’s hypothetical brains. Brom regales a harvest party with a ghost story, and as Ichabod Crane nervously wends his way home by night through tree-shrouded Sleepy Hollow he finds himself pursued by a headless ghost on horseback – pursued out of sight, our of the story, out of Katrina’s life, and apparently out of human ken.

In a much more modern mode, when we think of LONG ISLAND of course F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) springs to mind. There’s a whale of a lot more to Long Island than we find in Gatsby’s pathetic circle, and yet it captures a certain level of Long Island life.

MANY people describe reading Gatsby as a lifechanging experience. I don’t see it, myself, but I guess I was brought up in a different mindset. I DO see it as a very good novel, even if I can drum up only limited sympathy for the characters. These are the people of whom Fitzgerald would later write, after Lindbergh’s flight to Paris, “For a moment people set down their glasses in country clubs and speakeasies and thought of their old best dreams.” But in the end, he observed, “we would all have one more.”

Next week – New York, New York! It’s a hell of a literary town!

New York Novels, Region by Region — Part Two!

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Last week in this space we looked at my nominations for representative novels about various regions of our Empire State… western New York, Rochester, Southern Tier, and the Finger Lakes. Now we’re ready to move on!

For CENTRAL NEW YORK, where else would we turn but to the “Leatherstocking” novels of James Fenimore Cooper? The Deerslayer (1841) and The Pioneers (1823) in particular are set around Lake Otsego, with The Pathfinder (1840) on Lake Ontario and The Last of the Mohicans (1826) around Lake George.

“J. F.” was a Cooper of Cooperstown, giving him plenty of local color in his settings, and he had a fine rich imagination. Even given the fact that the novel was just being invented, we wince a lot reading them – Mark Twain was scathing, a couple of generations later. But Cooper was perhaps America’s first novelist, and he concentrated on American settings, American characters, and American themes.

He also created Natty Bumppo, “born by the seashore” but living his life in the great forest, and ending it on the faraway prairie. Untutored, but deeply read in the book of nature, drawing his morality from nature, never settling down, Natty moves west with the frontier. John Wayne never would have existed without Natty Bumppo. But Natty Bumppo did it far, far better.

For the MOHAWK VALLEY, of course we turn to Drums Along the Mohawk (1936), by Walter D. Edmonds. The 1939 movie’s exciting, but it doesn’t do the book justice. The Mohawk was pretty much the limit of white settlement/invasion in the days leading up to the American Revolution, and as such became a lightning rod when fighting broke out. Fictional and historical characters weave in and out of fictional and historical events, in a novel that pioneers in facing the complexities and contradictions of private and public life in those dramatic days – rather than just wrapping it all in a flag.

Speaking of complexities, conflicts, and contradictions… for the CHAMPLAIN VALLEY, challenge yourself with Kenneth Roberts’s 1933 Rabble in Arms, which revolves around that great American hero – Benedict Arnold.

And so he was, once… as the narrator says, “He was a bright and shining sword in the days when America’s swords were oh, so few.” Having been driven away from Quebec after an overland anabasis from Maine, Arnold builds a fleet from scratch on Lake Champlain, ambushes the British fleet and fights a successful delaying action against them, then later joins forces with General Gates to lead two successful battles at Saratoga, ending in the capture of an entire British army… perhaps the turning point of the Revolution. (In 1957, the Kenneth Roberts received a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation for his novels… the previous recipient had been Carl Sandburg, almost forty years earlier.)

It’s kind of interesting that Rabble in Arms, Drums Along the Mohawk, and Carl Carmer’s Genesee Fever (in last weeks blog) all came out between 1933 and 1941. All of them are big, sweeping, “warts and all” frontier novels, from a time of vast crisis when a transforming America was groping for its roots, but was also beginning to face its crimes. And all of them, of course, are rooted in Fenimore Cooper’s works, although very different from them.

Stay tuned, there’s more to come, but let me ask this: has anyone yet written the Haudenosaunne novel? Has the Haudenosaunne James Baldwin, Sherman Alexie, Sholem Aleichem yet found his or her voice? If not, then speed the day.

New York Novels, Region by Region — Part One!

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As a P.T.S.D. Person, I sometimes (often) have trouble falling asleep, so some nights I create little mental games to disengage my brain. A few weeks ago I started making lists of a representative novel (or two) for each state, beginning with Maine, and fell asleep before I got anyplace near the Mississippi River!

I very QUICKLY decided that for our Empire State, I needed a book or two for each region! So just for fun, here’s what I came up with… though there’s plenty of others that would qualify. Feel free to “comment” your additional choices!

FOR WESTERN NEW YORK: City of Light, by Lauren Belfer (1999). City of Light revolves around several poles, one of which is the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. With an inexhaustible supply of power from nearby Niagara Falls, the “Pan-Am” lit up the night like no place on earth had ever been lit.

But there are several other poles as well: the place of women in society; the power and/or vulnerability of women; the evolution of race relations; the proper basis of charity; and the changes foreshadowed in the new industrial-technical age… all mixed into a matrix of crime and mystery.

FOR ROCHESTER: Yobgorgle: Mystery Monster of Lake Ontario, by Daniel Pinkwater (1979). We read this comedy juvenile at home, shortly before we learned we’d be moving to the Rochester area! We quickly (and perhaps baselessly) assumed that Fred’s Fat Pig was a stand-in for Tom Wahl’s. There’s plenty of local color (including the Secret Room at the library), lots of pop culture, a seasoning of folklore, and a dollop of cryptozoology – classic Pinkwater daffiness.

FOR THE SOUTHERN TIER: Genesee Fever, by Carl Carmer (1941). Centered on Bath, Genesee Fever makes Charles Williamson and Jemima Wilkinson major historic players to counterpoint the fictional leads. It’s set in the 1790s, during the first white exploitation of the area, including the downstream traffic by river arks. There are some geographic howlers, about which western New Yorker Carmer surely knew – the protagonist rides horseback round trips between Bath and Jerusalem twice a day; three men set out from Bath on foot at dawn, arrive near Mount Morris by early afternoon, and have enough energy left for a major brawl – and these jar with us who know the land so well. But presumably he “edited” the landscape for dramatic purpose, and whatever his motive, he left us an engaging and loving story about our home and its history.

FOR THE FINGER LAKES: Hocus Pocus, by Kurt Vonnegut (1990). Eugene Debs Hartke lives on the smallest and coldest of the Finger Lakes… on one shore a private college for the dyslexic children of the rich, on the other a for-profit prison for the children of the poor. Fired (for pessimism) from teaching at the former, physics teacher Hartke crosses the lake to teach basic literacy at the latter… to glumly learn that the main consequence of this increased literacy is an increased circulation of anti-semitic tracts. After a mass breakout destroys the prison, the COLLEGE becomes the prison… Hartke becomes the warden… Hartke becomes an inmate… hocus pocus.

FINGER LAKES RUNNER-UP: Ithaca Falls, by Steve Thayer (2015). Retired police detective John Alden pursues a serial killer across the bridge at Ithaca Falls, crashing though time into the life of Cornell University in 1929. He now has obligations, and tragedies, in both time periods, set against the backdrop of men who have dedicated their lives to the education of the young.

More to come! We’ve still got most of the state to cover!