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!