Now, I'm in catch-up phase. I have 4 books(5 if you include the first Robertson Davies book that is part of a trilogy in which the second novel won)to write about before I continue to move forward on my reading...

Book #101 was In This Our Life by Ellen Glasgow. It won the Pulitzer in 1942, and was also made into a movie directed by John Huston, starring Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland. This book is about family drama at its worst, and about lost dreams, lost times and lost lives. This novel is about the Timberlake family: the patriarch Asa, the mother, Lavinia, and the two daughters, Roy and Stanley. Men's names for female characters struck me as highly interesting, especially for a novel written in 1942. There is never any indication on behalf of the father and mother as to why they gave their daughters two male names, but there is also no indication on behalf of the author. Except perhaps for this: both female characters have strength, in their own ways, and even then, strength of character could be construed as a male-dominated attribute. Who knows.

Anyway, the entire novel is told from Asa Timberlake's point of view. Asa's family was extremely wealthy, but his parents' fortunes began to go downhill and his father took his own life, leaving the family at the mercy of relatives. He has a nowhere job at the factory which his father once owned, which is now owned by the uncle of his wife, Uncle William. It is clear that Asa's marriage is terrible, and he pretty much can't stand his wife, who is an invalid. Or rather, had a hard time dealing with the real world, and decided to check out physically instead. It appears at points that she is actually possibly more physically capable than she lets on, she just needs people to take care of her. Lavinia was used to a higher quality of living before she married Asa, and it seems that even now, over 20 years later, she still isn't over that. Asa, miserably unhappy, but trying not to be, lives his life vicariously through his grown daughters(both in their early 20s) and through his weekend trips out to the country to see Kate, the widow of his best friend, Jack.

Though the words of the novel are permeated by Asa's sense of loneliness and loss of time as he becomes an old man, the novel's action centers around Asa's two daughters, Stanley and Roy. As the novel opens, Stanley is to marry Craig, an attorney, and Roy is already married to Peter, a surgeon. Stanley(played by Bette Davis in the movie version) is complete and total trouble, though. She always wants what she can't have, and it appears that she needs to be at the center of attention at all times, or at the very least at the center of male attention at all times. She seduces Roy's husband Peter, and they run off together. This is hugely scandalous of course, but also downright mean of her to do. Of course, Stanley insists that she's in love with Peter, but it's pretty clear that she's just in love with attention. Asa realizes this in his narration, but there is not much he can do about it. Lavinia, his wife, is obsessed with Stanley and her beauty and everything that she stands for. To Lavinia, Stanley has everything that she didn't have as a young woman, and that jealousy/desire towards her own daughter has become over the years akin to idolatry. Uncle William, too, worships Stanley. He gives her a car, and other income so she can continue to be sheltered, because he feels like it's something she needs. Asa has much internal frustration towards this. He watches his elder daughter, Roy, begin to self-destruct as her marriage has fallen apart and due to the scandal that her sister has run away with her husband. Both Asa and Roy see Stanley for what she really is, but it seems that no one else really does.

Roy, played by Olivia de Havilland in the movie version, becomes quite the pillar of strength. Though shaken by the loss of her now ex-husband, who eventually, either through his own weakness of character, or guilt, or self-loathing or whatever, commits suicide, and drives Stanley back into the welcoming arms of her mother and uncle; Roy, makes an active and valiant decision to find strength in stoicism, and rebuilds her life. She hardens her heart in a survival mechanism, but finds herself befriending and eventually engaged to Stanley's jilted fiance, Craig.
It is at this point that Stanley returns home, a widow to a suicide. Roy and Craig's lives have been doing well enough, Asa even has some hope for the future of his favorite daughter, and though Lavinia has up until this point been pining the loss of Stanley, that's not really anything new, of course. Once again, Stanley is at the center of attention; pouty and tearful and subject to whatever tranquilizers a doctor can give her, she makes everyone cater to her needs. Roy is resentful, and rightfully so, Craig is also finding himself feeling sorry for Stanley and possibly seeing his feelings resurge. What a f---ing mess.

Stanley is a homewrecker, pure and simple. She is a hurricane that leaves destruction in her path, wherever she goes. And the end (SPOILER ALERT), makes this even clearer. She goes out in the rain in her car, driving fast and recklessly and hits and kills a small girl. She blames the entire incident(claiming she was in bed the whole time and that she wasn't even in her car), on a young black servant that the family has, and that he took the car out. The tragedy in this is that the family suspects that Stanley is at fault, but feel a need to protect her, as well as this young black man had such great promise and was going to go to university and eventually become a lawyer himself. The nights that he has to, as an innocent, spend in prison, do him in mentally and his dreams are over, all because of Stanley. Ugh.

Asa, as an old man is resigned to his fate, and to making the best of whatever snatches of happiness he can find. Roy is the one who, rightly so, is full of rage at how unjust everything is. This is quite the dramatic novel, full of emotion and family strife. It also depicts loneliness very well, and how you can live in a house full of people and still feel like you are all by yourself. If there is any theme that I have seen as a recurring one throughout the now 104 books that I've read, it's loneliness, and how the characters, representing the human condition in all its various facets, deal with that internal struggle. This book is no different, and there are several quotes which are related to this theme.

In the first quote, Roy is talking to her father...

"'I wonder...' she began and then broke off with a laugh. 'I suppose it is easier,' she continued after a pause, 'when the bottom drops out to drop with it. Mother is always saying that the bottom has dropped out of everything.'

He chuckled under his breath, as if he were afraid Lavinia might resent an improper sense of humor. 'A great tradition is an expensive luxury,' he said. 'Falling back on the past may lend inspiration, and it may also lead to gradual hardening of the arteries.'" (44)


The second quote is when Roy has decided to let Peter go, in her heart at least, to Stanley.

"'Poor Father.' Her voice wavered, but the next instant she had regained control of it. 'If you love me, you must leave me alone. I have to work things out in my own way. I have to save myself as I can. It may not be the right way, but it's mine.'

That was only the truth. Her enemy, he knew, was within the heart; for she was at the mercy of some antagonist more hostile than the mere abstraction called life. Her own will must bear her up; she must fight her inner conflicts in solitude. She belongs to another age, he thought; she is a part of the future, and I am still encrusted with the outworn shape of the past. I cannot share either her joy or her grief; all I can do is stand aside and sympathize from a distance. She is stronger than any of us, and finer in many ways; but she lacks tenderness--or is it merely imagination? She is riding a single virtue, the new gallantry, too hard--perhaps to self-destruction. Who knows? He felt that he had come suddenly to the brink of a precipice; and he could not see into the gulf that divided two hemispheres. Was it light there? Was it darkness? Was it another dawn? Or was it but a quite old ending masked as a new beginning?" (148-9)

Also, a quote when Asa goes to visit his beloved Kate, whom he dreams of leaving Lavinia for.

"'In a minute. I'll tell Martha.' She went into the house; and turning away, while Pat and Percy leaped and circled in front of him, he crossed the ragged lawn, beneath dappled shadows of elms, and stood waiting for Kate to come out. The river path, trailing across the meadows, was lost in billowing waves of asters, golden-rod, and life-ever-lasting. There was no wind, and the October sunshine, pouring down from the stainless blue of the sky, kindled the variegated bloom into a running flame, misted over with smoke-colored pollen. 'It can't last,' he thought. 'Time comes, time passes.' But what was time? An element or an illusion? Flow or duration? And how deep was the gulf that divided yesterday from today, or today from tomorrow? The scene was so breathless, so drowned in stillness, as if in a well of being that it seemed to him his pulses had ceased their vibration. Not only time but life itself was suspended. Nothing moved. Nothing passed. The drifting pollen, the bird on the flower, the bronzed leaves on the elms, the shadows asleep on the grass--all these things were as motionless as is the pause between the flow and ebb of a tide, or the breath between the thought and the spoken word...

Then, suddenly, movement stirred in the air above, and again the scene came to life. A straggling line of crows wavered in curves out of the sky, while below them, their shadows skimmed so close to the ground that the meadows appeared to move and breathe with them in slow pulsations of light. Yes, it had to change, he said aloud to himself. Everything changes. Nothing is ever the same again." (187-188)

And then there is the point when Roy and her father are talking about Stanley for about the umpteenth time.

"'She's a broken thing, and she hasn't your courage.'

'Everybody keeps saying that.' She flushed angrily. 'It sounds as if the only good of courage is to make you pay for what other people can't--or won't--stand.'" (305)

And here Asa talks to himself after he gets angry with Lavinia.

'"Well, lie down, and I'll put on the coffee' He couldn't hurt her, that was his weakness. He couldn't bear hurting things. And yet, he knew, that only by hurting her could he defend his own sense of right, of justice, of inward integrity. Is it true, he asked himself wearily, turning away, that there comes a crisis in life when inhumanity alone can serve the ends of humanity? Is it imperative, at such moments, to reach not only beyond one's lower impulses, but even beyond one's better nature? Could a principle betray one as well as an appetite? He was too old to believe tha. Right was right, wrong was wrong, or his universe fell to pieces. I do not know where I am going, he thought. I cannot see a step before me; but I must go on." (399)

Much of the book is like this, with characters like Roy and Asa, struggling to have a life while people like Lavinia and Stanley, soul-suckers, consistently put obstacles in their way, that prevent them from having a happy life. At the end, even Craig gets confused and feels himself falling for Stanley once again. It is at this point that Roy runs off into the night, with plans to go to the ciy, but doesn't get very far. She ends up spending the night with a disfigured man, and realizes someone who is even lonelier than herself....

Ellen Glasgow's novel, made into a movie with powerhouses like Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland(Billie Burke, Glinda in The Wizard of Oz plays Lavinia), is largely forgotten in today's world. It is, however, a great book on family drama, something that is certainly, as stipulated in the Pulitzer requirement, an aspect of American life. Why it is forgotten, I'm not sure, except that it has had the fate of many other novels from that era, that just get lost. Though sometimes I thought that black people were portrayed in a little bit of a romantic kind of way, there was something about a young black man, despite the odds in the South at that time, trying to climb his way out of his station. The fact that idealistically it doesn't work makes it almost all the more real...Worth the read? Yes.

Today is the day that I write about finishing book #100, which I finished approximately 2 weeks ago now.

BOOK 100! BOOK 100! BOOK 100!!!!

I feel like there should have been some kind of a ticker tape parade or something to follow me around after I finished it, instead I had a large feeling of self-awe, but also a lot of stress and some depression, as I still have quite a few more to read. I received a few positive emails back after I wrote a mass email to my friends and relatives describing my accomplishment, but it still didn't lessen the load in terms of how I feel about all of this. Am I crazy to continue to pursue working on something this huge? Is it a pipe dream? Will absolutely nobody care? Does it really matter? Is it too much freakin' information? Will it really liberate me as much as I hope?

In the past 2 weeks, all of these questions have plagued me a great deal, and caused not just a little anxiety about my future regarding "the project". By calling it that, it makes it seem so ominous...I feel like I need time, and lots of it, to be fair to the books, and myself, and work on this goal. Many adults don't even read 100 books in their lifetime, let alone 100 of the greatest novels of the last 100 years (though that is a debatable point). I am at a loss as to what to do. I want to quit my job, and devote my life to this full-time, but I have no alternate income with which to do that. I am not independently wealthy, and I'm not moving back in with my parents. At this point, I just need to keep on trucking and hope that maybe around Christmastime I will be close enough to my goal to start to look for some kind of agent. How does one even do that???
Argh. Well, I suppose I should just keep trucking along and cross those bridges when I get there. I have a week of vacation coming to me, and I will spend it relaxing, reading and catching up on whatever writing I can hopefully accomplish. It's my time to just stop and read...

Back to book #100. Book #100 was fittingly enough, William Faulkner's The Reivers. Fitting enough for several reasons, I suppose. What I wrote in the email to my friends was that monumental milestones deserve to be marked by monumental writers, which of course I believe Faulkner very much is. It was also important to me to have a writer that I love so very much, and who has shaped much of my outlook on Western literature be that line in the sand that needed to be drawn. I suppose if I still had a Toni Morrison book or if Harper Lee had written another novel, I would have had a tougher decision to make as to who would be #100. As it stands right now, Faulkner's A Fable will be my final book in the project. It's a tough read, from what I've heard, and I think it would give me great satisfaction to finish off with a difficult, yet rewarding read.

I had, frankly, forgotten about Faulkner's writing style, and about what it feels like to read his style. Actually, let me re-qualify that. I hadn't forgotten about his writing style, but I HAD forgotten about what it feels like to be immersed in his books. Because, of course, that is exactly what it is like to read a Faulkner novel. It is like going to a country where you perhaps only half understand the language, like Germany or the Netherlands, where you have maybe heard a handful of words before and recognize some of the food that the waiter puts in front of you when you eat in a restaurant, but you're never exactly sure what's going on and are at the mercy of whatever situations arise while you there. You are immersed in a world that is swirling with activity all around you, but over which you have very little control or any idea as to what will happen next. Much like life, I suppose. You have to have a lot of patience to read a Faulkner novel, and that is what I had forgotten. I spent much of the novel reminding myself of the reward that would come at the end of this particular book, and I also made sure that I didn't read the book unless I had a decent chunk of time in which to do it, and focus. William Faulkner's writing always requires a great deal of focus. Just read 20 pages of The Sound and the Fury and you'll see what I mean.

The Reivers won Faulkner the Pulitzer Prize posthumously. Unless I am mistaken, there is only one other time so far that a Pulitzer was awarded posthumously in the fiction category, and that was for Confederacy of Dunces(which I have yet to read), a book that was finally published years after the author's suicide, at the urging of his mother. By the time that The Reivers won the Pulitzer, though, Faulkner had already been awarded a Pulitzer for A Fable and had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Reivers is a good novel, I'm just not sure how I feel about it in relation to As I Lay Dying or The Sound and the Fury, which are, as far as I'm concerned, AMAZING. But, it has many of the qualities of Faulkner-ian writing that I love so much, and is an entertaining read.

The Reivers is about a road trip. Faulkner does a great job with road trips, which in non-fictional life as well are rarely free of some kind of excitement or even disaster. As you mentioned, Kate, what Faulkner novel isn't about a road trip? If As I Lay Dying is probably the quintessential disastrous road trip, The Reivers is like the Deep South version of Ferris Bueller's Day Off. The story is told in flashback form, about a man when he was a small child, growing up in an indistinct period of time in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, a county that Faulkner made up, to resemble Oxford, Mississippi and the surrounding area where he lived. The entire novel doesn't span more than a few days. Lucius, the main character, as an older man gives some background on the people who will figure more prominently in the road trip as it continues throughout the novel, but the events that take up the meat of the novel definitely don't last any longer than a week. Lucius Priest's maternal grandfather dies, and the parents have to go away to the funeral. The children are sent to stay with an aunt, but Lucius, an eleven year old boy seduced by the idea of adventure by his father's half-native servant, through a web of lies, deceives his aunt and goes of on a road trip of an unprecedented nature...:) The events are those that only Faulkner could envision and write about. The two men, one certainly more schooled in the world than the other, have a rough time getting to Memphis, but they do, and on the way discover another servant who is a stowaway in the car. Ned is the one who causes the big troubles. When they are all supposed to be spending the night at the whorehouse that Boon is familiar with, Ned sells Lucius' grandfather's car, a car that the grandfather wasn't too into but had as a status symbol mostly. He sells the car for a horse. Now, how the hell is everyone supposed to get back home? Thus the adventure of the novel ensues. In order to get the automobile back, they decide to travel to Parsham and race the horse, to win enough money to buy back the car...It is hilarious, and confusing at times, but even though it is quite bizarre, it is also highly believable.

Perhaps Faulkner's greatest gift to Western literature, and maybe the reason why so many people have a hard time stomaching him, is his ability to write how we really think, and how we really tell a story. When you're telling a story to a friend of yours over coffee or over the phone, it's full of stops and starts, and asides, and "don't you remember so-and-so? They used to date so-and-so.", etc. Human beings rarely tell a story linearly, unless they are set up to do it in some kind of show format, like the storytellers of old, or in a play or a movie. These however, are all staged. Faulkner, who I believe truly mastered the stream of consciousness technique, brings this style of writing into his characters' storytelling methods, as in The Reivers. Faulkner's writing is very, very real. And, I think this method is very condusive to realizing the wealth and depth of human emotion. I suppose, however, that what I also wish is that it was a style of writing more people were used to, so that more people in this era could appreciate him. He is not without some faults; as I read this particular book, perhaps it is because I'm older and a little wiser than I was when I first started reading Faulkner at the tender age of 17, but his characters could be construed as racist, and some things that are said by the characters are brutal observations of the world, perhaps opinions of the author. One could also argue, however, that he is using his characters to depict the world in which they lived in all of its varieties of truth, as unsavory as that may be at times. The South, and the rest of the U.S. for that matter, is full of racists, of bigotry, of hatred, and as we all know, it is best to bear witness and decide not to take that path ourselves, than it is to just shove our heads in the sand and pretend it's not happening.

Great quotes are found here, that are funny and blunt, and nowhere near as long as the ones from Vanderhaeghe's book.

The first one is a when Lucius, as an old man is talking about Mr Binford, who could be considered the pimp of the "boarding-house" that Lucius as an 11-year old boy and Boon and Ned are at. He says:

"There were more than enough places at the table, even with Otis and me. Minnie was still bringing things, all cold--fried chicken and biscuits and vegetables left over from dinner, except Mr Binford's. His supper was hot: not a plate, a dish of steak smothered in onions at his place. (You see? how much ahead of his time Mr Binford was? Already a Republican. I don't mean a 1905 Republican--I dont know what his Tennessee politics were, or if he had any--I mean a 1961 Republican. He was more: he was a Conservative. Like this: a Republican is a man who made his money; a Liberal is a man who inherited his; a Democrat is a barefooed Liberal in a cross-country race; a Conservative is a Republican who has learned how to read and write.)" (101-102)

Another one that I like was Lucius' statement about mules. He launches into a big ranking of several animals and their level of intelligence, of which I won't reproduce all of it, since it is extremely long, but the first paragraph is particularly great.

"You were born too late to be acquainted with mules and so comprehend the startling, the even shocking, import of this statement. A mule which will gallop for a half-mile in the single direction elected by its rider even one time becomes a neighborhood legend; one that will do it consistently time after time is an incredible phenomenon. Because, unlike a horse, a mule is far too intelligent to break its heart for glory running around the rim of a mile-long saucer. In fact, I rate mules second only to rats in intelligence, the mule followed in order by cats, dogs, and horses last--assuming of course that you accept my definition of intelligence, which is the ability to cope with environment, which means to accept environment yet still retain at least something of personal liberty." (113-114)

This next quote I felt like I needed to put down, because it was particularly repugnant to me. But, one of Faulkner's characters said it, and I'm sure that there are some men who feel this way.

"'...And meanwhiles, stop fretting about that gal, now you done said your say to Boon Hogganbeck. Hitting a woman dont hurt her because a woman dont shove back at a lick like a man do; she just gives to it and then when your back is turned, reaches for the flatiron or the butcher knife. That's why hitting them dont break nothing; all it does is just black her eye or cut her mouf a little. And that aint nothing to a woman. Because why? Because what better sign than a black eye or a cut mouf can a woman want from a man that he got her on his mind?'" (249)

Another quote that I liked was from Ned, the black man who gets Boon and the young Lucius into this mess. He's explaining to Colonel Linscomb about how the series of events actually transpired.

"'With my people, Saturday night runs over into Sunday.'

'And into Monday morning too,' Colonel Linscomb said. 'You wake up Monday morning, sick, with a hangover, filthy in a filthy jail, and lie there until some white man comes and pays your fine and takes you straight back to the cotton field or whatever it is and puts you back to work without even giving you time to eat breakfast. And you sweat it out there, and maybe by sundown you feel you are not really going to die; and the next day, and the day after that, and after that, until it's Saturday again and you can put down the plow or the hoe and go back as fast as you can to that stinking jail cell on Monday morning. Why do you do it? I don't know.'

'You cant know,' Ned said. 'You're the wrong color. If you could just be a nigger one Saturday night, you wouldn't never want to be a white man again as long as you live.'" (276)

The last quote I'll put in here comes only a few pages from the end of the novel...It is when Lucius finally has to face the facts with his grandfather, after everything has been sorted out and resolved, post-horse race.

"'Come here,' he said.

'I cant,' I said. 'I lied, I tell you.'

'I know it,' he said.

'Then do something about it. Do anything, just so it's something.'

'I can't,' he said.

'There aint anything to do? Not anything?'

'I didn't say that,' Grandfather said. 'I said I couldn't. You can.'

'What?' I said. 'How can I forget it? Tell me how to.'

'You can't,' he said. 'Nothing is ever forgotten. Nothing is ever lost. It's too valuable.'

'Then what can I do?'

'Live with it,' Grandfather said.

'Live with it? You mean, forever? For the rest of my life? Not ever to get rid of it? Never? I cant. Dont you see I cant?'

'Yes you can,' he said. 'You will. A gentleman always does. A gentleman can live through anything. He faces anything. A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences, even when he did not himself instigate them but only acquiesced to them, didn't say No though he knew he should. Come here.'" (286)

It is not uncanny to me that both book #99 and book #100 have a theme of boys growing up and learning about how the world really works, and where their sense of morality fits in. Young Lucius has much to grapple with as he ends up being the jockey in the horse race, but also comes to the defense of a whore on behalf of her lady-ness(for lack of a better term). I went on a road trip in order to move out here, with two other people who are still very dear friends to me, and I learned a lot about them, and myself. Faulkner's The Reivers showed the characters in his Pulitzer prize-winning work something about themselves, too.

Since my last posting, I have finished three more books, bringing my grand total of novels read for the project up to 101. I am currently in the process of finishing Willa Cather's One of Ours, a Pulitzer winner from the 20s. In the next 48 hours, however (at least this is the plan), I am going to write about 99, 100 and 101. That way I can get caught up before I go on a much needed vacation.

For book #99, I read Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Englishman's Boy. I was a bit apprehensive in reading this book, only because I read the Canada Reads selection a few years ago, which was Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Last Crossing. I dunno. The book was not that gripping, and felt oddly similar to Rudy Wiebe's A Discovery of Strangers which I read right around the same time, and which I felt, if I was to compare, was a better novel(and won the Governor General). That being said, I'm glad that I had that disappointing experience, because I think my expectations for another Vanderhaeghe novel were substantially lowered. The Englishman's Boy was excellent. Page-wise it is not an exceptionally long novel (333 pp.), but it is rich and full of story, of character development, of prose that makes you think. I think what I also liked about the book was that the subject matter was different from what normally shows up on the lists, as well as it spanned both the U.S and Canada, fitting for a project like mine.

The novel The Englishman's Boy has two different narrative strands that weave together in the end to create a complete picture. In the beginning, we are faced with some unsavory "cowboys" (though I wouldn't necessarily go as far as to give them that lofty qualification), who go to sleep for the night in the U.S. prairies and Native Americans steal all of their horses. It is the decision of the head of the gang, Hardwick, to pursue the Natives, eventually into the Canadian prairies, get the horses back and seek revenge. Related to this story strand is a young boy, left to his own devices in the world, who is the servant to an Englishman coming to the Prairies to seek adventure and fortune, possibly to escape some kind of situation at home that he would sooner forget. The Englishman, while staying a saloon, dies from illness, and the "boy" is left once again to his own devices. He takes the Englishman's guns and clothes, leaves behind nearly all of the rest of his master's possessions including the overwhelming amount of his money; takes some to pay the innkeeper, leaving the rest as a way to cover the funeral, and heads out, alone. He has a tough exterior, and a fierce desire to protect himself, but inside he is still very much a boy learning how to be a man. In a saloon, where he stabs a man who threatens him, is where he meets Hardwick and his gang, and at this point he has a home base, and a job: to travel with the men and help get the horses back.

The novel takes a dramatic shift forward an undetermined amount of years, but at the minimum about 30, to Hollywood in the 1920s, when talkies were still not quite available, but when the U.S was mesmerized by all things silver screen. What an era! Cecile B. DeMille, Goldwynn and other men who formed the production studios that we now all know very well are mentioned, as well as female actresses like Gloria Swanson and Mary Pickford. This is before Graummann build his now famous Chinese theater, and has an Egyptian one instead...I can tell you that before I read this book, I had very little knowledge about Hollywood, especially in the era before the talking pictures, but now I at least have a vague idea. At the center of this very young town, in the reader's eye at least, is a young man from Saskatchewan, who has come to Hollywood to make a living, a fortune, perhaps, and while looking after his mentally ill mother. This particular man is a scenerist, writing out the cards that the audience will read on-screen, that will fill in the gaps that cannot be provided because there is no speaking. Through a series of circumstances, he makes the acquaintance of a wealthy newcomer to Hollywood who has bought out a production company, and who has a quixotic eye for film. He wants to make the GREAT American Western...He wants to tell the story of the American West as history has meant for it to be told. He wants its grittiness, its authenticity, its truth, to shine through the camera lens. Our narrator is to be his detective, and search out a man that Damon Ira Chance believes to hold the secrets to an old West, an uncultured, tough-as-nails West. This man is Shorty McAdoo, a sometime cowboy extra in Hollywood Westerns of the time. Producer/Director Chance wants our narrator to find him, and get him to tell his story, which will subsequently become the Greatest Western Ever Told(at least up until that point).

As the opening narrative of the Englishman's boy and his involvement in what is to become one of the bloodiest massacres of the Canadian West, the Cypress Hills Massacre, continues to unfold, so too does the story of our narrator Harry with his discovery of Shorty McAdoo, and his embroiling in Hollywood politics of the 1920s. Eventually Harry convinces Shorty to tell his story, and it goes to Chance, who changes it to suit his needs, enraging Shorty and deeply troubling Harry's sense of morality. We the readers don't know what the left-out details are until much later, when more of the Englishman's boy's story is revealed. And, as the gut-wrenching, vomit-worthy details come to light, we see the Englishman's boy, and in a parallel, Harry 30 years later, struggle with their sense of right and wrong, of justice and fairness in a world that seems all too corrupt. Choosing the moral high road leaves both characters in a far worse position, and the movie gets done without them. The outcome is not without its own tragedy, however.

There were many great characters in this book that I haven't yet mentioned, some of which are fleshed out more than others, but all of them drive the narrative forward. Rachel Gold is my particular favorite, probably subconsciously for me because she is a woman and I always love strong women characters amongst a male majority. Rachel Gold writes screenplays in a misogynistic environment where she is outnumbered both in sex AND religion. She is described as stunningly beautiful by Harry(who is unabashedly and not so secretly head over heels in love with her), and definitely catches the eye of many men in Hollywood. She churns out pulp-y screenplays so that she can save up money to write the great American novel that she knows she never will. But, she is charming, in an educated Dorothy Parker-esque way, and takes no shit from anyone, still maintaining a heart for Harry and his ill mother. She is also a particularly easy way for Vanderhaeghe to show the anti-semitism starting to bloom in the film industry as Jews of many different backgrounds came out to start production companies and direct films. A foreshadowing, too, of the shake-out of the world as Hitler began to take power nearly 10 years later.

There are many other great characters. Harry's mother, trapped in her mind, staying in a home outside of Hollywood. Vanderhaeghe's description of her scrubbing one particular spot in the window is heart-wrenching in its detail. The Englishman's boy's friend named Grace, is also a great secondary character. There is Fitzsimmons, Chance's right hand man, who is a piece of shit, but every book needs a Judas of some kind.

At the heart of this novel is what we are forced to do as human beings when we come to a moral crossroads, and how we live with ourselves when we make our choice. Some people survive despite being dealt a bad hand or even despite making poor choices; some others crumble under the weight of their bad judgement. Others still receive their karmic come-uppance. Ultimately, it is up to all of us as humans to wrestle with our demons as we can and hopefully they shape us, not destroy us.

There are, as always, a few quotes that I thought were particularly good.

The first is when Chance is talking about his hero, D.W. Griffith, explaining his philosophy to Harry.

"'And then there is something else Mr. Griffith taught us by example. How to make a profit from fact. No motion picture since has approached the profitability of The Birth of a Nation. It was pure genius on his part to advertise his motion picture as fact. Americans are a practical people, they like facts. Facts are solid, they're dependable. The average American feels foolish when he enjoys a made-up story, feels sheepish, childish, a mooner, a dreamer. But entertain him with facts and you give him permission to enjoy himself without guilt. He needn't feel swindled, or hoodwinked, a hick sold a bill of goods by a carnival barker. He prefers to feel virtuous because he's learned something useful, informed himself, improved himself.

'You mark my words, Harry, there'll come a day when the public won't swallow any of our stories unless they believe them to be real. Everybody wants the real thing, or thinks they do. Truth is stranger than fiction, someone said. It may not be, but it's more satisfying. Facts are the bread America wants to eat. The poetry of facts is the poetry of the American soul.

'Of course, he qualifies, 'the facts in picture-making must be shaped by intuition.' He pauses dramatically. 'I learned that at the feet of Bergson. I am a Bergsonian,' he declares, a little like Aimee Semple McPherson might declare she is a Christian.'" (18-19)

The next quote is from Rachel, and it definitely gives one a taste of who she is and what she believes...

"'The true test of any scenario,' Rachel was fond of saying, 'is to read it to a cameraman. Cameramen are invariably Irish and invariably drunk. If they can grasp the plot, the moral, the theme of your simple tale through an alchoholic haze, you can be assured you have struck the proper intellectual level. If one of these sons of the Emerald Isle happens to weep upon hearing your masterpiece, what can I say except - El Dorado! A word to the wise. Never consult a story editor about your script. Story editors are people who once harboured higher literary ambitions-such as writing fiction for one of the better women's magazines. A house divided against itself cannot stand, Vincent, and story editors are cracked from top to bottom, conscience-stricken souls who berate themselves for selling out for a mess of pottage. They are whores who delude themselves they only lent their cherries, not irretrievably lost them. I, on the other hand, know exactly who popped me, when, where, and for how much.'" (36-37)

(Rachel by the way divides men into two categories: menschs and gigolos...:))

Another quote is the producer/director Chance speaking again. He is a little Welles-ian, but Orson Welles would have only been a child when this book takes place. Chance is a pretty unlikeable dude, but he does have interesting things to say.

"...Sitting through Griffith's picture is like sitting through one of those dark summer nights when a thunderstorm breaks: instants of brilliant illumination when the the things which flash before your eyes - a tree waving in the wind, a river in spate, your bedroom chair - burn into your brain in a way they never would in the steady, even light of day. There is no logical explanation as to why or how this happens. Images take root in your mind, hot and bright, like an image on a photoplate. Once they etch themselves there, they can't be obliterated, can't be scratched out. They burn themselves in the mind. Because there's no arguing with pictures. You simply accept or reject them. What's up there on the screen moves too fast to permit analysis or argument. You can't control the flow of images the way you can control a book - by rereading a chapter, rereading a paragraph, rereading a sentence. A book invites argument, invites reconsideration, invites thought. A moving picture is beyond thought. Like feeling, it simply is. The principle of a book is persuasion; the principle of a movie is revelation. Martin Luther was converted in a lightning storm, a conversion accomplished in the bowels and not the mind. A lesson for all of us in this business to remember.'

I am interested in what Chance has to say. It must show in my face; he leans forward in his chair, lowering his voice. 'Birth became America's history lesson on the Civil War. For the first time, everybody, rich and poor, Northerner and Southerner, native and immigrant, found themselves pupils in the same history class. A class conducted in Philadelphia and New York, in little Iowa theatres and converted saloons in Wyoming. The movie theatre became the biggest night school any teacher had ever dreamed of; one big classroom stretching from Maine to California, an entire nation sitting at Griffith's feet. In New York alone, eight hundred thousand people saw Birth, more people than there are students in all the colleges in all the states of the Union. Think about it, Harry. If Lincoln was the Great Emancipator, Griffith is the Great Educator. Whatever bits of history the average American knows, he's learned from Griffith. Griffith marks the birth of spiritual Americanism.'

'And what is this spiritual Americanism, Mr. Chance?'

'Perhaps it can't be defined in words, Harry. Pictures come closest to capturing its meaning. I am a patriot. I was raised a patriot and I will die a patriot. But for years I was troubled by the question, Why have the American people produced no great art? The Germans gave the world their music. The Romans their architecture. The Greeks their tragedies. We recognize the soul of a people in their art. But where is the American soul? I asked myself. Then it dawned on me. The American soul could not find expression in these old arts because the spirit of the American people was not compatible with them, could not be encompassed in them.' Chance shoots me a victorious look. 'You see? The American spirit is a frontier spirit, restless, impatient of constraint, eager for a look over the next hill, the next peek around the bend in the river. The American destiny is forward momentum. What the old frontiersman called westering. What the American spirit required was an art form of forward momentum, an art form as bold and unbounded as the American spirit. A westering art form! It had to wait for motion pictures. The art form of motion!'" (107-108)

Another great part of the book I loved is a discussion between Rachel and Harry about Chance's vision on film.

"She ignores my question and fires back with one of her own. 'And what's the American sprit, Harry?'

The best I can do is one word. 'Expansive.'

'Oh, that nails it, Harry. Just expansive?'

'And everything the word implies. Energy, optimism, confidence. A quicksilver quality. Like the movies themselves. Chance says the movies are the only thing that can capture the American spirit because they are like America herself. It makes a kind of sense to me.'

'Quite the theory, Harry. But for myself, if I want a dose of the American spirit I'll go to Whitman, Twain, or Crane before Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.'

'You're missing the point. Chance wants to make films that are the artistic equal of Leaves of Grass. He might fail but he's go the guts to try. Besides, how many people have read Leaves of Grass in Mencken's Sahara of the Bozarts? Or anywhere else in this country for that matter? And what about the tenements and the ghettos? Immigrants can't read English. Whitman is for the elite. But everybody goes to the movies. It's the movies that have the chance of making everybody - the immigrant, the backwoods Kentuckian, the New York cab driver, maybe even the Ivy League professor - all feel the same thing, feel what it means to be American. The Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are all very well, but constitutions make states, they don't make a people.'

'And you're a Canadian, Harry. So why is a Canadian so concerned about teaching Americans how to be American?'

'Because I chose this place. And I'm not the only one in Hollywood. America's Sweetheart, Mary Pickford, was born in Toronto; Louis B. Mayer came from Saint John, New Brunswick; Mack Sennett was raised in Quebec. Canada isn't a country at all, it's simply geography. There's no emotion there, not the kind that Chance is talking about. There are no Whitmans, no Twains, no Cranes. Half the English Canadians wish they were really English, and the other half wish they were Americans. If you're going to be anything you have to choose. Even Catholics don't regard Limbo as something permanent. I remember when the ice used to break up on the South Saskatchewan. We'd be woken up in our beds in the middle of the night by a noise like an artillery barrage, you could hear it all over the city, a great crashing and roaring as the ice broke apart and began to move downriver. At first light, everybody would rush out to watch. Hundreds of people gathered on the riverbanks on a cold spring morning, the whole river fracturing, the water smoking up through the cracks, great plates of ice grinding and rubbing against the piles of the bridge with a desperate moan. It always excited me as a kid. I shook with excitement, shook with the ecstasy of movement. We all cheered. What we were cheering nobody knew. But now, here, when I listen to Chance, maybe I understand that my memory is the truest picture of my country, bystanders huddled on a riverbank, cheering as the world sweeps by. In our hearts we preferred the riverbank, preferred to be spectators, preferred to live our little moment of excitement and then forget it. Chance doesn't want Americans to forget to keep moving. I don't think that's ignoble.'" (180-182)

The descriptions in this book are priceless, but the dialogue, as I've tried to capture, seems to say the most thematically at least to me right now, and for my memory's sake. The last quote I picked was because of its anti-semitism. I thought it was an important theme to look at. Chance here is speaking to Harry.

"'Was it something I said about the Jews that got you up on your high horse, Harry? Fitz tells me you're romantically involved with a Jewess - Rachel Gold I think he said her name is. Now I have no objections to such alliances when they are purely physical ones. Surrender your body to a woman if you must, but remember to keep your independence and integrity intact. I suspect this woman has been a bad influence on you. The Jews are a sentimental and emotional people, Harry. We need only look at the pictures they make to confirm it. Which is why they are so dangerous. The morality of necessity - of survival - has no room for sentimentality. The Bolsheviks are not sentimental. The Fascists are not sentimental. The Americans who made this country were not sentimental. Far from it. Do you need proof? While I was researching our picture I made a point of reading the diaries and journals of early traders and settlers. One entry in particular made a great impression on me. It was simply two lines written on September 30, 1869. 'Dug potatoes this morning. Shot an Indian.' That was all. It was not accompanied by any tortured self-examination of conscience. Because the diarist knew his enemy would not have indulged in anything of the kind if he had killed him. The Indian, we might say, was a Bolshevik in a loincloth. Kill or be killed. They both understood compromise between them was impossible.'

'Perhaps it was not up to the Indian to compromise. Ever consider that?'

'What would you advocate, Harry? Offering your throat to the knife because you might be wrong? History deals us our hand and we must play it. We do not choose our enemies. Circumstances choose them for us. I see the enemies who threaten my country. But I refuse to offer my throat to them.' He tips forward in his chair, one hand resting on the bed. 'I am not preaching anything new, Harry. I am only saying what Christ and Abraham Lincoln said before me, 'A house divided against itself cannot stand.' That is a fact.'" (295-6)
(295-296)

What makes the book so much more complex is that the person that Harry Vincent admires the most for the longest time, Damon Ira Chance, is the one who ultimately sells out on the story, doesn't tell the whole truth for the sake of Hollywood and betrays the morales that he seeks to uphold. This destroys Harry in a way, on a personal level, as Chance doesn't become the Whitman of the film industry at the time, but rather selfishly caters to his own vision rather than to that of the greater film-going good. It is Shorty McAdoo and his friend, the has-been cowboys living on the fringe of society who display a level of integrity that leads to their own ruination, but is also brave.

This is a great book, and definitely one that I would not have read otherwise. I'm tired, and cashed out for writing for the night.

After finally compelling myself to plow through The Collected Stories of John Cheever despite the queasiness that was lodged in my stomach the whole time(Don't you ever get nauseous when you read about something that hits just a little TOO close to home?), I have now been dragging my feet on publishing a blog on the 1979 Pulitzer prize winner. Especially on the heels of an extremely tough conversation with my mother no less than 24 hours after I finished the 693 page tome, my mind has been reeling all week from the process of mental digestion.

John Cheever is arguably one of the best short story writers of all time, or at the very least of modern American literature. I can certainly vouch for his artistic talent; The Collected Stories is everything up to that point in 1979, and it is an incredible body of work. Each story is finely hewn, Cheever uses the pen like a woodworker uses a lathe. What is difficult for me, however, is Cheever's subject matter. John Cheever does an amazing job depicting suburbia and all its MANY pratfalls, hidden secrets, infidelities, mental illnesses and general brokenness. When one reads him, one is reminded of many cliches, the first one to come to mind being, "people who live in glass houses..." When asked what John Cheever writes about(as many people asked when they saw me carrying around a bright red hardcover book roughly the size of your average dictionary), I was rather blunt: "it's about people who have too much money or spend too much money trying to pretend they have it, who drink too much, pay too little attention to their children, and are generally unfulfilled both sexually and intellectually. " Can you imagine 693 pages of that?

Ironically, when I mentioned that I was reading Cheever, two friends of mine who are avid NPR listeners and fans of "This American Life," told me, separately of course, that they had heard something on Cheever in the past few weeks. Apparently, he was a closet bisexual, who had a fairly terrible marriage with his wife, but despite this, held it together with her for over 40 years and had 4 children with her. Another cliche comes to mind, one about an apple falling from a tree??? This cliche applies to me and my reading of Cheever as well. What we have here is WASP families who live on the outskirts of NYC(or sometimes in it), living their shitty, miserable, but overall wealthy existences. Welcome to my mother's childhood life and upbringing. My mother's parents could have stepped out of a John Cheever story...that is why the stories turned my stomach so. It's hard to read about something disturbing and sad that you've witnessed so close at hand. These stories made unhappy childhood memories flood to the surface of my brain, forcing me to choke back a vomit of very depressing thoughts. It was a hump I had to work hard to get over, and about halfway through I decided I had to move past it, and appreciate each short story as it was written and NOT see my family in each one. That was a terrifically hard task, and I can't say I removed myself completely and successfully, but the effort was there, and I began to enjoy the stories more as I refused to allow myself to grow depressed by them. I had to constantly say: "This is not my life now, nor will it be..." From my lips...:)

Okay, not all of the stories are about unhappy suburbanites, though an overwhelming majority of them are...which in and of itself is novel; Cheever was writing in an era when people hid their inadequacies from their neighbors and flitted from cocktail party to cocktail party pretending that their life was PERFECT. The fact that he writes about this hypocrisy so openly is at once sadly autobiographical but also brutally honest. Was America ready for that? I don't know, as I wasn't even born in 1979, and I'm not always sure the general American public is ready for it now. If Glenn Beck can convince conservative America(i.e. FOX NEWS watchers)that another terrorist attack is imminent, then it has become clear to me that fantasy is what most Americans cling to, not the cold hard truth of desperately unhappy neighbors, friends and selves...

61 stories are in this collection, some of which had never been previously published. I don't know exactly what to say at this point, except, READ THE FUCKING BOOK. You don't have to read all of the stories, just a few...There are some that are particularly poignant, like "The Hartleys", and "O Youth and Beauty!", as well as "The Geometry of Love" and "The Swimmer". "Goodbye, My Brother," the first story in the collection, is a tribute to the splintered family; the kind where one sibling just doesn't mesh with the rest of the clan. It is this loneliness and the inability of the family to come to terms with this situation that drives them apart permanently. John Cheever is especially adept at characterizing human loneliness. Perhaps I am just highly sensitive to this, I suppose, because I am recently single, though I can attest to the fact that there were many times while in my last relationship that I felt extremely lonely even while I was with that person; this is something that Cheever's characters also feel quite often. I have, actually, for an overwhelmingly majority of my existence felt lonely; thoughts are not always a comfort, in fact, often they crowd. Reading as much as I do probably does not help my cause much either.

The copy of The Collected Stories that I have is a first edition hardback in excellent shape. It has a bookplate in the inside cover, indicating that it was part of a personal collection, and it was well taken care of; it has a library plastic jacket on the outside, and notably NO Pulitzer Prize stamp on the front. This one is a keeper. Also on the front inside cover, underneath the plate was taped a little bio of John Cheever, complete with a snapshot of his broadly smiling face. For someone who sounded so depressed internally, he surely puts on a good facade.

I'm not sure what most people would want to know about this collection when I publish my work on this project. I do think that Cheever deserves his spot on the Pulitzer list if only because of the subject matter being an integral square in the quilt that is the American literary canon. This is such a dense collection that several essays could come out of it. When I am done, I may have to skim(!!) it again. What I do think, though, is that I like him A LOT better than Richard Ford/Philip Roth...Even though Cheever was most likely a middle-aged white dude when this collection was published, the book doesn't entirely center around the middle-aged white dude experience. Thank G-d!

Whole stories of John Cheever are amazing and worth excerpting. Until I read this collection, I had only ever read one story by him in my poetics class at McGill, called "Reunion". It was in this collection, and remarkably one of his shortest stories in the volume. Interesting to read it again after all these years and since it fell on page 518, also interesting to read it after having read so many others of his stories. I was thinking that I must be one of the only 28 year olds in America to have read all of John Cheever's stories...that could be depressing or interesting, depending on how you look at it I suppose.:). So...short of excerpting entire stories, there were a few quotes that really stood out and are worth putting down...

The first quote is from a story called "The Sorrows of Gin" in which a young girl, named Amy, runs away from her family because she is afraid that she will be in trouble because she clears her father's house of all the gin so that he won't become an alcoholic (even though he pretty much is).

"The voices woke Amy, and, lying in her bed, she perceived vaguely the pitiful corruption of the adult world; how crude and frail it was, like a piece of worn burlap, patched with stupidities and mistakes, useless and ugly, and yet they never saw its worthlessness, and when you pointed it out to them, they were indignant. But as the voices went on and she heard the cry 'Police! Police!' she was frightened. She did not see how they could arrest here, although they could find her fingerprints on the empty bottle, but it was not her own danger that frightened her but the collapse, in the middle of the night, of her father's house. It was all her fault, and when hse heard her father speaking into the extension telephone in the library, she felt sunk in guilt. Her father tried to be good and kind--and, remembering the expensive illustrated book about horses that he had brought her from the West, she had to set her teeth to keep from crying. She covered her head with a pillow and realized miserably that she would have to go away. She had plenty of friends from the time when they used to live in New York, or she could spend the night in the Park or hide in a museum. She would have to go away." (207-208)

Another quote that I loved was from the story "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill" in which a suburban husband, terrifically low on funds, steals from his very wealthy friends in the middle of the night, and spends the entire story dealing with the psychological consequences of his actions.

"I walked around the streets, wondering how I would shape up as a pickpocket and bag snatcher, and all the arches and spires of St. Patrick's only reminded me of poor boxes. I took the regular train home, looking out of the window at a peaceable landscape and a spring evening, and it seemed to me fishermen and lone bathers and grade-crossing watchmen and sand-lot ball players and lovers unashamed of their sport and the owners of small sailing craft and old men playing pinochle in firehouses were the people who stitched up the big holes in the world that were made by men like me." (262-3)

This next quote is from "The Bus to St. James" in which a husband has an affair with a married woman who is the mother of some children that go to his daughter's school. This particular quote comes after his wife has found out about the affair and he and Mrs. Sheridan(his mistress) are watching their children at their dance lessons. It is from the man's point of view, as the whole story is.

"From the sidewalk in front of the dancing school they could hear the clatter of the piano. The Grand March had begun. They moved through the crowd in the vestibule and stood in the door of the ballroom, looking for their children. Through the open door they could see Mrs. Bailey, the dancing teacher, and her two matrons curtsying stiffly as the children came to them in couples. The boys wore white gloves. The girls were simply dressed. Two by two the children bowed, or curtsied, and joined the grown people at the door. Then Mr. Bruce saw Katherine. As he watched his daughter doing obediently what was expected of her, it struck him that he and the company that crowded around him were all cut out of the same cloth. They were bewildered and confused in principle, too selfish or too unlucky to abide by the forms that guarantee the permanence of a society, as their fathers and mothers had done. Instead, they put the burden of order onto their children and filled their days with specious rites and ceremonies." (284)

From "The Country Husband," about a man who is dissatisfied with his life and lusts after the teenage babysitter, but this quote is in reference to a neighborhood girl Gertrude who is always hanging around when she is not supposed to be(at everyone's houses):

"There are times when the lines around the human eye seem like shelves of eroded stone and when the staring eye itself strikes us with such a wilderness of animal feeling that we are at a loss. The look Francis gave the little girl was ugly and queer, and it frightened her." (338)

Another great quote is at the beginning of "The Death of Justina."

"...Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos(no less) and we can accomplish this only by the most vigilant exercise of choice, but in a world that changes more swiftly than we can perceive there is always the danger that our powers of selection will be mistaken and that the vision we serve will come to nothing. We admire decency and we despise death but even the mountains seem to shift in the space of a night and perhaps the exhibitionist at the corner of Chestnut and Elm streets is more significant than the lovely woman with a bar of sunlight in her hair, putting a fresh piece of cuttlebone in the nightingale's cage. Just let me give you one example of chaos and if you disbelieve me look honestly into your own past and see if you can't find a comparable experience..." (429)

Only two more, I promise! This one is from "The Brigadier and the Golf Widow" in which the Brigadier is a man named Charlie who has an affair with a Mrs. Flannagan, who claims to have never had an affair before, but Charlie is blinded by his lust...

"Of course she was right, he thought. She had her self-esteem to maintain. Her pride, he thought, was so childish, so sterling! Sometimes, driving through a New Hampshire mill town late in the day, he thought, you will see in some alley or driveway, down by the river, a child dressed in a tablecloth, sitting on a broken stool, waving her scepter over a kingdom of weeds and cinders and a few skinny chickens. It is the purity and the irony of their pride that touches one; and he felt that way about Mrs. Flannagan." (503)

The last quote I liked was the first paragraph in "The Geometry of Love" one of the aforementioned stand-out stories. In this one, Charlie Mallory(a different Charlie from the previous story) uses Euclid's geometry theorems to make sense of his crappy life, and to make himself feel better when in moments of panic about the downward spiral of certain situations he finds himself in. In this paragraph, though, he has not yet discovered the power that Euclid will hold in his life.

"It was one of those rainy late afternoons when the toy department of Woolworth's on Fifth Avenue is full of women who appear to have been taken in adultery and who are now shopping for a present to carry home to their youngest child. On this particular afternoon there were eight or ten of them--comely, fragrant, and well dressed--but with the pained air of women who have recently been undone by some cad in a midtown hotel room and who are now on their way home to the embraces of a tender child. It was Charlie Mallory, walking away from the hardware department, where he had bought a screwdriver, who reached this conclusion. There was no morality involved. He hit on this generalization mostly to give the lassitude of a rainy afternoon some intentness and color. Things were slow at his office. He had spent the time since lunch repairing a filing cabinet. Thus the screwdriver. Having settled on this conjecture, he looked more closely into the faces of hte women and seemed to find there some affirmation of his fantasy. What but the engorgements and chagrins of adultery could have left them all looking so spiritual, so tearful? Why should they sigh so deeply as they fingered the playthings of innocence? One of the women wore a fur coat that looked like a coat he had bought his wife, Mathilda, for Christmas. Looking more closely, he saw taht it was not only Mathilda's coat, it was Mathilda. 'Why, Mathilda,' he cried, 'what in the world are you doing here?'" (594)

With these quotes one can see how marvelous a writer John Cheever is, but also how well he captures human sentiment and emotion, I think. Though he is quite depressing, it is also inspiring to read his work. He clearly took his potentially terribly lonely and debilitating personal life to write terrific fiction that can speak to a wide audience and remind us that we actually are not alone when our fervent and sometimes dark desires and thoughts threaten to consume us...And that's all I'm going to write about him for now.

I'm not sure what's wrong with me. I can't come up with what I really think about Mr. Ames Against Time, the 1949 Governor General Winner for fiction. I feel a writer's block coming on, or perhaps it's already here. Am I too excited by the prospect of another female winner for the Pulitzer(that's not Joyce Carol Oates or Toni Morrison) or too depressed due to my reading of John Cheever's Collected Stories? I dunno.

Well, I do know that this book, Mr. Ames Against Time, by Philip Child, struck me as a little bit melodramatic. Just a wee bit. Perhaps that is what put me off to it. I can't say that I hated it, because I didn't, and it is rare that I hate a book that wins one of these prizes, for I try so very hard to like them at least a little bit. I just didn't love it. It didn't knock me off my feet. Right now I need a KNOCK ME OFF MY FEET kind of book, too.

Mr. Ames is an elderly gentleman who has a son who is involved with the wrong man, the local gangster/hustler. Mr. Ames wishes that his son would be removed from this life, and even goes to the man, Sol Mower, and begs for his son to be released from his service. It is not meant to be, and the situation becomes rapidly worse for everyone involved. Mower has his eyes on Mike Ames' fiance, the beautiful Bernie Avery. Bernie and Mike want to get out from under Mower's thumb, but before that can happen, Mower is poisoned to death and in the throes of dying, names Mike as his killer. Mr. Ames is present for this deathbed confession, and when called to the witness stand, being the ever honest person he is, he confesses that this is what he heard. It, in effect, sends his quite innocent son to the gallows. Mr. Ames spends the rest of the book trying to discover who is the real killer to save his son from the fate that he feels he is completely responsible for. This involves Bernie's father, Moulton Avery, a drunk and hanger-on of Sol's, and Arthur "Smoke," a sometime hitman/two-bit crook/sociopath that is also involved with the Mower enterprise. Smoke was saved as a young boy from the clutches of that which plagues his family(his family is famous for having the criminal gene according to the book)by Mr. Ames, so he feels a little bit indebted to him, but Smoke also doesn't want to go to jail himself. It is his love for Bernie first, but also in the end he caves to what is right.

Child's novel focuses on all the characters in the book as they go through their own personal struggles in order to attempt to save Mike Ames from the gallows or to save themselves from that same destiny. The internal psychological struggles are well-posited, and interesting, but perhaps it is the writing that is too much. It reminds me a lot of when my sister and I watched A Summer Place over ten years ago now. Everyone, for the most part, knows the theme from
A Summer Place, composed by Max Steiner; it's so completely and totally over the top that it sends shivers down your spine. The movie, however is also just like that. At the time(the movie came out in 1959, 10 years after Mr. Ames was published out), it was extremely risque, and was even rated X for its then explicit immoral content. My sister and I wanted to see it(I'm actually pretty sure it was just me who wanted to see it, and my sister, just wanting to spend time with me, wanted to see it mainly for that reason), and found ourselves laughing at and spoofing the over-emotional aspects of the film. This is odd for me, because I usually eat things of a romantic nature up, I've always been a huge Gone With the Wind/Anne of Green Gables/Pride and Prejudice fan, I love the romantic composers with their big, blowsy, over the top pieces. For whatever reason, Mr. Ames Against Time didn't do it for me. Maybe I felt it was trying a little too hard?

One of the other difficulties I had with the book was the fact that I was never really sure exactly where it took place, in Canada or even in the States. My guess is that it took place in the city of Toronto, but that is only an educated guess. This takes away from the book a little, in my opinion. One of the things that can be wonderful about the prize novels is that when they are situated in a specific location, it shows the inner workings of a people in an area, and not only how people are unique to a particular location, but how humankind is NOT unique to a particular location, and despite where we live, we all go through similar struggles with our sense of self, and how we fit into the greater, universal community of people. Mr. Ames definitely focuses on the latter, but because I didn't feel grounded in the former, I spent a few pages going, "Where the fuck does this take place?" so that was wasted energy on my part I suppose. Another difficulty I had with the book was that I struggled to fit it into a prize-winning context. Most books I can at least find something that fits it in nicely(i.e. this is the book about politics, this is the book about the French-Canadian/English-Canadian struggle, this is the book about interracial marriage in the South, etc.), this one I had a hard time figuring out its place. Perhaps, though, that its place is the universal struggles we all face as we come to terms with our lives and the choices that we make. In that case, I guess I can throw this novel a bone.

There were some really thought provoking quotes in it, though. The first one that I liked was when Mr. Ames' landlady is talking to Bernie Avery about a woman's place in society and how much it totally sucks, and how she may have to sleep with Smoke to get information out of him in order to save Mike.

"'Mike's your man, ain't he?' demanded Prancy. 'All right, then, you gotta shoot the works for him. Listen, Bernie, a woman's job ain't play in this world. Bearing babies, bringin' them up, keepin' your man going', givin' life and helpin' them you love to die, stickin' to them and seein' em through come what may--that's a woman's job. A hard, sweatin;, heartbreakin' job, Bernie, and a dirty job sometimes too! Men never see things like they really are. Always makin' dreams about things. Makin' gods out of themselves and ladies outa women!'" (180).

At one point Smoke is running away, after he watches another character, Gipsy, die and gets the real story of his mother from the nurse who took care of her before she died. Smoke has big time abandonment issues towards his mother. The quote is:

"He began to run down the alley. But why he ran he could not tell. For what was the good of running; you couldn't get away from yourself." (218)

My spirituality has become especially heightened in the past nearly two years, but certainly in the past six months. And Mr. Ames at one point in the book seems to think a little bit like I have now for quite a while, possibly my whole life. I like what he thinks here:

"...Supposing, thought Mr. Ames, we were able for only one instant to forget the ending of life; or supposing, even if only for one instant we could feel with all our being that everything we suffer and all the mistakes we make and the sins we do that corrupt and alter us--do not change us forever, but are like chisel cuts carving stone into something that has a wonderful meaning." (236)

A few pages later he continues this thought.

"Leaving the underworld gloom of the shop Mr. Ames looked up toward the clear sky which people thought of as empty space without end except for the stars and planets, and he wondered where prayers were answered from. For answered they were sometimes, though how or by "whom," or why sometimes they were not answered, Mr. Ames did not know. He did not believe that God would put out His finger to stop the minute hand of a watch in order to prove something to Mr. Ames. You could not "see" God and He did not give "signs." All the same, perhaps He did put out His finger and stop time, working a miracle through men's hearts and minds. "Working it in my mind, giving me courage," thought Mr. Ames. "The watch stopping at twelve isn't a sign; that was chance, coincidence. No, not quite. Everything has a purpose, and that was to make me think--what I've just thought."(238)

And a few pages later...

"...No. A new soul for Mr. Avery--or rather a freed soul. Out of his agony, freedom. Out of his agony and out of ours (since we are all bound together beyond separation)--freedom.

And it seemed to Mr. Ames, at that instant, that the birth of all living souls was one birth--all one birth. A life was born--no, say rather, life itself was born. It was a thing to make you stop still and quiet in sudden awe when at last you really understood that prayer was answered from that same place wherever it might be (though all you could see with your eyes was blue, empty sky) from which life itself came into this planet of lifeless rock. Surely the one was as much a miracle as the other, and perhaps, even, they were the same miracle, coming from the desire of the Spirit...And time. Why, if this is so, then there is all the time in the world, thought Mr. Ames suddenly. Or rather, there isn't any time at all, really; only eternity. Is it all planned from the beginning, even the anguish?

[]

'As if we were all one person,' he muttered. 'so that a lost soul is a soul lost from us all, something strayed from our Maker's Wholeness, that must come back some day.' (241)

The last quote is a little bit of a similar thought process to an idea in Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, one that I very much subscribe to when looking at and living my own spiritual life. According to it, when the world was created, G-d took the fresh new light he had made and poured it into each of the vessels of the spheres of the universe. But the light was too powerful and the vessels shattered and burst and the light spilled out all over the universe, embedding themselves in everything. Since then, the light has always strove to return to the Source, and when we do a mitzvah(a good deed) we awaken the sparks of light and the light rises, returning to the Source. In this way, we can start to heal the brokenness of this world, with one mitzvah at a time, as G-d redeems us.

This book has a clearly Christian message, which is made all the more emphatic by a poem written(by the author??) and included at the end as a "Postlude" called "Descent for the Lost", where it talks about the relationship between Judas and Christ, and how Judas challenges Christ's love for him because of what he did to his G-d. In this way, I suppose you could look at Mr. Ames as kind of a Christ-like figure and Smoke as the Judas in the novel, though at the end, Smoke as Judas redeems Mike Ames and therefore Mr. Ames, but also, in the effort of saving a child from a burning house, does a mitzvah, and perhaps is himself redeemed. Who knows, right?

P.S. This blog was actually finished on April 25th though it will have a date of 4/21 or something attached to it. Plus, all the formatting is totally fucked up and I have no idea how to fix it. I will try at a later date to do so. My apologies to anyone forced to read it.:)

Listening to music that I love, in a house that's clean is supposed to make me be motivated to write about one of my very overdue Governor General winners...Ha! I've been procrastinating by reading newspaper articles, showering, playing hand after hand of solitaire. However, I got an email from The Globe and Mail regarding a piece not by Lynn Crosbie, but about her. I had to read it, and THAT was what motivated me to write. I think Lynn Crosbie is one of the most brilliant writers out there, and whenever I get a chance I read her weekly piece in The Globe, a cutting look at society and celebs in our crazy facebook-obsessed world. This article that was about her poetry, however, was about a found poem in her novel Paul's Case, about the Paul Bernardo murders. I probably will never read the book, unfortunately, not for lack of wanting to engage with her prose, but because the subject matter is a little tough for me. The found poem, was so killer(literally), that I felt compelled to put on Tori Amos, and plow through some writing. Maybe at some point, I can be my own version of Lynn, cuttingly writing about books, in a way that makes OTHER people read them.:)

Didn't someone tell me recently that books are dead?

Alan Sullivan's Three Came to Ville Marie, won the Governor General in 1943. The copy I read is the second book that was retrieved from Oklahoma, this one from Oklahoma City University Library. This book is in such rough shape it has a sticker on the front that says that it is too fragile for the bookdrop. Lovely. It's also quite a few weeks overdue at this point. All the more reason to write about it.:) Sullivan's novel is interesting because it is about Canada before it actually really became Canada. It is about Quebec when it is still called New France, when the Iroquois Nation was constantly fighting the Hurons and the French for territory, when the English were encouraging this all, and biding their time, waiting for when it would be their turn to do the shit-kicking. A few years prior to Sullivan's publication, in 1939, Franklin D. McDowell published a novel entitled The Champlain Road, which won the Governor General that year. It is another book that has gone off the radar, and it is, ironically enough, about the same time period, though it is more about the relationships between the priests sent to convert the Natives, rather than the average person trying to make a life for themselves, which is more what Alan Sullivan's work is about.

This is a pretty interesting time period, one that not too many people concern themselves with, I assume, hence the reason why these books are not talked about or read, but it's a formative piece of Canadian history, and how can we know where we're going if we don't know where we've been? I think settling an area is so crucially significant to how an area/country becomes itself, and for whatever reason, westward expansion is what the Americans especially and Canadians as well, focus a lot of their attentions on. Well, the first non-Native people had to arrive sometime, and someone should talk about it at some point...

Three is about three people, Paul de Lorimier and Jules and Jacqueline Vicotte, and how the interconnection of their lives leads them to the New World. The novel's backdrop is first the farmlands of Brittany, but then the realm of courtly intrigue, and finally everyone makes it to the wilderness of the LaChine region of Quebec. Paul de Lorimier is a farmer in Castellon, a wealthy farmer, who is due to marry the daughter of the local aristocrat, named Jacqueline. He is hopelessly, helplessly in love with her, but she is not so enamored. At the start of the novel, she is still sitting on the fence, so to speak, and is not sure if she wants to marry Paul or not. Her mother wants her to, her father(much in the guise of Elizabeth Bennett's father in Pride and Prejudice)wishes for her to marry for love and do what she wants. This is when Jules Vicotte arrives into town, an old school chum of Paul's. Paul is at once overjoyed to see his friend(Paul has no family at all, his parents are both long deceased, and his only "father" as it were is the local Abbe, a good friend and confidante), but soon, Jules will betray Paul by whisking Jacqueline off of her feet. When Paul surprises the two together in a passionate embrace, he throws Jules into Jacqueline's family pond. This leads to a duel(when do we read books that have duels in them anymore? How sad...), in which Paul is unable to hurt his friend(out of a sense of loyalty, etc.) and leaves mid-duel in disgrace. It is after that when he is brought to Versailles and given audience to the King's mistress. It is she, who after speaking with men who have just returned from New France, including Frontenac himself, suggests that Paul start a new life for himself in the wilderness of what is now known as Quebec. There is brief thought of him entering the priesthood, but he instead chooses to be a farmer in Lachine, Quebec, which, back then, was complete and total wilderness(this is the late 1600's remember), but has now been incorporated into the city of Montreal as its own borough, bordered by the borough of LaSalle, and the city of Dorval(which houses one of the city's largest airports). On a complete and total side note, this is all reminding of me of when Emily and Chris and I went to Harlem to visit Alexander Hamilton's house...back in the day(hey! He was part of a duel too!!!), he had tons of land and his house was in the country, now his house is bordered by some of the shittiest parts of New York City...

Back to the story/plot synopsis. I like Paul de Lorimier a lot. He reminds me of myself in some ways, a broken person who is looking to start a new life, but who has many inherently wonderful characteristics that he doesn't necessarily believe in. Paul picks up his own manservant and two native slaves(slaves that he doesn't want but feels compelled to have due to social norms) and begins creating a thriving farm. Little does he know, that the Iroquois nation, which has been quiet for so long, is planning a large revolt, using his slaves as spies/plants, in that regard leaving his farm as the only safe one. Paul doesn't know this as he leaves his farm with a local priest for a trip. He discovers as he cruises down the St. Lawrence, farm after farm burnt to the ground, men and children scalped, burned, crucified; pregnant women with their stomachs cut out, unborn babies in the dirt next to them. You may think this is gruesome, terrible; but I am also forced to think about all of the other atrocities that have been committed by the White majority in wars for civilizations. The natives were rightfully threatened, and then launched back in full attack. WWYD?

Paul and the priest are attacked, and left for dead. It is when they are floating in their own bloodbath that a new ship, sailing from France, carrying Jules and his wife, Jacqueline, discovers their bodies. Jacqueline was the apple of the King's eye, as he was looking for a new mistress. His permanent mistress wanted to get Jacqueline out of the way, and the King wanted to get Jules out of the way, so they both got sent to New France by the King's mistress, unbeknownst to the King...but that is the other plot of the story.

Plot summary and detail can go on forever, so I think I will stop it now. When the three are reunited together, it makes for more plot intrigue, but it also shows the reader who the characters really are. These are the true pioneers of North America, people who fought every single day to stay on their land, who had to be brave. At least, Paul is this man. He is a fucking survivor, and proves himself as he etches a stronghold for himself in the turmoil of late 17th c. Quebec. Jules is a gentleman, who is very upset to be in Quebec, feels it beneath him at first, but then realizes that he is not cut out for it, and that New France takes no prisoners. It is Jacqueline who is the one who changes the most, but, for the better. There are two quotes that I love, that stay with me always...but are not from this book. One is from a Jeanette Winterson novel called Lighthousekeeping, in which one of her characters says, "You can't be another person's honesty, but you can be your own." The other is from the first Harry Potter movie, in which Dumbledore says to Harry, "It is not our abilities that show who we truly are, it is our choices." It is when Paul goes off to defend New France against the Iroquois people and lives through harrowing torture, while Jules, well...I shall leave you to discover that, that shows the reader who Paul really is.

I suppose I have to say that I'm not necessarily in agreement with colonization and westward expansion in the way in which it was done. Perhaps I'm too much of a peace-lovin' freak to think that you can move somewhere else and not have to convert people or kick them out, you can just live next to them and co-exist. I can't say that I totally disagree with it though, because had colonization and westward expansion not happened, I would probably not be living in the city of Seattle writing about books that took place hundreds of years ago. I am one of those people who moved out West from the East, following the Oregon Trail, looking for a life that was better, or at the least so very different that it would allow me the chance to be my own honesty. I made an almost entirely clean break; I moved out here with a down payment on an apartment, no job, not knowing a soul. Nearly 5 years later I'm closing in on Pulitzer/GG number 100, with a decent job working for a major corporation, in a lovely apartment, finding myself with a life that seems to have taken me totally by surprise. It's a good life, it's not always an easy one, but it is mine.

Paul de Lorimier is one of the literary heroes of colonization, and a man who should be remembered in the prize list, for he is one of, what would eventually be, the first French Canadians. Why this book is forgotten and shelved away in the annals of dust-covered former award winners escapes me, except perhaps for the fact that people are too obsessed now with what is new and different that they have a hard time being reminded of the history that got us here. When I picture Lachine, the Lachine before it became Montreal(like Hamilton's house before Harlem), I will picture the little village of Ville Marie, with Paul de Lorimier standing in front of his small log house, flowers blooming in the front, fields full of crops in the distance, holding a musket in his hand, his quiet eyes searching, his face aged from torture and hard work, but his body stalwart and calm. It is an image that I will hold for myself whenever I need to be reminded of who I am and where I come from.

This is the last post for me for the evening...It's already after midnight, and I'm struggling to stay awake, but I really need to do this work, it's just a load off my shoulders that needs to happen, and I can't be buried under library fines forever...I need to write about Kildare Dobbs' Running to Paradise. This, like The Able McLaughlins that I just wrote about, was less than memorable. I had high hopes for this collection of short stories, hence one of the reasons why it was the first in my round of recent interlibrary loan requests that I made. Some dear friend of mine, please remind me in the not too distant future to NOT PUT ANYTHING ON LOAN REQUEST FOR AT LEAST A FEW MONTHS. I need to blow out some of the stuff in my house, and I'm actually really wanting to read some non-Pulitzer stuff at some point soon(Effigy and Alligator anyone???).

God, my head is screaming...I'm trying to remember, too, and not close my eyes.

Kildare Dobbs gets major bonus points for quoting Yeats at the beginning of his book, and one sees where he could have gotten the title of this collection of short stories that are loosely based around his life growing up as an Irish boy, who eventually moves to Canada.

"The wind is old and still at play
While I must hurry upon my way,
For I am running to Paradise;
Yet never have I lit on a friend
To take my fancy like the wind
That nobody can buy or bind:
And there the king is but as the beggar." (W.B. Yeats: 'Running to Paradise')

Dobbs's stories are interesting from an anecdotal standpoint, but not necessarily from a literary standpoint. Though, if we're going for completion of a canon here...I still don't really know why this was picked, actually. I did enjoy the stories for story's sake, like I enjoy going out with a friend for coffee and hearing about their week. Am I going to get a Governor General winning novel out of the excursion? Probably not. Stories of interesting merit were: "John's Castle" which was about a childhood friend of Kildare's who still maintains one of the only castles in one piece in county Carlow Ireland. It's all due to the butler, who with the help of his ladyship, allows the then fledgling IRA to store their weapons in the castle so that it won't be destroyed by them at a later date...Smart, very very smart. Also, "A Benediction of Bishops" is cute because it is about Dobbs as a boy, deciding that in order to be cool he has to collect something that is different. He decides to collect bishops, like they are baseball cards. The only thing is it's not like they make cards out of bishops...So, it's more like the stories he has of knowing the bishops that he can bring to the lunchroom table of his school...He becomes "bishop-watcher", and then a "serious episcopologist." It's a cute story, ending with him going fishing with two of the most famous, at the time, bishops in Ireland.:)

There are stories of when he is at sea, as a young man and there are stories of him when I is a young imperial bureaucrat in Africa, including stories of a black man who takes on one too many wives, and another of a bureaucrat not just a little obsessed with elephant hunting...There is a gem of a quote, though, at the end of "Melakia and Mwalim Joseph", though. Dobbs has to transfer Mwalim Joseph, a schoolteacher that is his friend, and also a polygamist, something there had been an effort to suppress in colonization, because of some trouble with the local tribal Chief's daughter.

"I had Mwalim Joseph transferred at once. The Chief's daughter chose to follow him, and within a few months he had replaced her. I have seldom felt such distress as I did when I said good-bye to Joseph at the railway station. With that wonderful fair-mindedness which all Africans seem to be born with, he took my hand and said, 'You are trying to do right, but you don't know enough about us.' It might have been a judgement of the whole colonial situation." (74)

The two stories that I perhaps loved the best, though, were in the Landed Immigrant section. One is called "Views of Venice" and here we're NOT talking about Italy. We're talking about ONTARIO, and small town neighbors who are convinced the others are out to get them, the two shopkeepers in town, each others only competition both think the other set fires in the town, a crime that according to the author "brought about the fall of Venice, and every man who spoke of it accused his particular enemy. The suspects had only one thing in common: they all sat in the front seat in church." (129) Then there were the female busybodies in the town who kept order as well, or "female vigilantes" as Dobbs calls them. The story that particularly stuck with me, though was the story called "Shocking Charge". It's because it's about homosexuality, something that is talked and written about very little in the prizes. Dobbs starts out by saying:

"A queer news item recently was the report that two Toronto men were found guilty of gross indecency after being accused of using electric shocking equipment for an unspecified act of homosexuality. What sort of charge they got out of it (other than criminal and electric) seems impossible to imagine.

Musing on this report, I find it hard to draw a moral. Perhaps it reflects the passion of North American men for gadgets. Or it may be a tribute to the Ontario Hydro-Electric Power Commission: Love Better Electrically. To the magistrate trying the case, however, it was the occasion for one of those scholarly asides that make law reports such interesting reading. He said that in Canada--and in this respect we differed from some other countries which he named--homosexuality was always regarded as a serious moral offence.

I wonder if the magistrate is right about this. (The courts, it must be said, are not the arbiters of morals and it is open to us to argue about them.) I have met Canadians who regard homosexuality as a joke, and others who think it a misfortune. I have also met many who believe firmly that Canadians are specially immune to it.

I can only go by my own experience." (134-135)

Dobbs goes on to explain what happens to him, in that he is cruised and picked up by a young gay man after only being in Canada for a few weeks. He is taken to a party where he quickly realizes that he is the only heterosexual there. He says:

"There is nothing that separates us so conclusively from our fellows as a difference in our pleasures. It is this, rather than any doctrinal debate, that exacerbates religious quarrels: between the celibate drunkard and the lecherous total abstainer there yawns an uncrossable gulf. We could forgive even Khrushchov his politics if only he did not prefer the backside of the moon to that of a can-can dancer.

Someone asked if I was gay. Since I was beginning by this time to feel decidedly gloomy, I answered truthfully that I was not.

Everyone in the room stopped talking and stared at me. It was not exactly a hostile look, but it has the effect of hostility. It was the sort of look a group of physicians give to a man the have consulted under the impression that he is a colleague, only to find that he is (a) a chiropractor, (b) an advocate of socialized medicine.

It came to me that the word 'gay' had special connotations of which I had not been aware.

Muttering thanks and apologies, I quickly left the party.

I tell this story not so much to show how widely and adventurously my life has ranged(that too, of course), as to make the point that homosexuality is as much at home in Canada as it is anywhere. The orgy I witnessed did not take place in Paris or London or Cairo but in the stuffiest quarter of what is supposed to be the stuffiest city in Canada. The people who took part in it were not the decadent Europeans or Asians but true-born Canadians. (I cannot remember their names and I shall regard with the gravest of suspicion any attempt by the Attorney-General of Ontario to approach me for them.) And if the Toronto magistrate was right when he said that homosexuality is always regarded in Canada as a serious moral offence, I am left wondering how effective all this viewing with alarm has been.

There is an alternative way of looking at it.

To an African tribe among whom I once lived, unnatural offences seemed not morally wrong but ridiculous. Perhaps it was just coincidence that such offences were almost unknown among them, those that did occur being practised for magical purposes. In the only case that came to my notice, the accused's plea brought howls of laughter from the tribesmen. He said, 'I was following the custom of the government officers.' Quickly entered as a plea of Not Guilty." (137-138)

In 1962 this book won the Governor General for fiction. It would be four years later that Margaret Laurence would win her first Governor General for A Jest of God, a book that definitely has lesbian undertones. I find it impressive that this story talks about homosexuality outright and doesn't necessarily condemn it. Hmmm...I'm too tired for much more interpretation at this point. I think that's enough for this book too, which came from Idaho...:)