Month: July 2014

Hawaii by James A. Michener

/ wrightjessie / Leave a comment

Hawaii
Suggested by: Reddit friend
Traveled: July 12-24

Hawaii is an afterthought most of the time. It comes in the same post-script breath as Alaska in U.S. history, always inhabiting its own corner cutout on the pull-down maps in classrooms. I had never really spent any time thinking about Hawaii, and am ashamed to say was surprised when I pulled up Google maps and realized just how far out in the middle of the Pacific it actually is.

But I just went to summer school, folks. Michener’s Hawaii was an epic crash course. It’s a generational saga, starting with the birth of its principal character — the island — bubbling up billions of years ago from a primordial vent below the ocean. The novel charts the human histories of the families who came to Hawaii and struggled to make the islands a part of their story. Polynesians from Bora Bora, New England missionaries, Chinese peasants, Japanese villagers and the modern day “native” Hawaiian, born from centuries of the melting pot’s influence.

I became seriously invested in these families. And the genius of Michener’s writing is that it never made me choose a side. With deft care and deep respect, Michener told their stories honestly. Even in the moments that forced fierce moral objections or historical tragedies, I sympathized with each new friend. Instead of righteous indignation against the tides of history, Michener’s Hawaii provoked a deeper, more human feeling. It told the story of a place, but more than that, recognized that a place’s story is fundamentally written by the lives that crack open its soils and worship its winds. It told the truth. We struggle for ourselves alone, but can never escape our undeniable ties to one another.

The book triumphs in its early beginnings and rich middle. It falters a bit as Hawaii enters more modern times, as though Michener himself was still too close to the events to make sense or beauty out of their futures. I was ready to leave Hawaii around page 700, but pushed on a couple hundred pages further out of respect for the stories of those with whom I had come so far. I now leave Hawaii with a much deeper appreciation of the islands and their history, with poignant truths that once again show the power and promise of fiction.

Point of Direction by Rachel Weaver

/ wrightjessie / Leave a comment

Alaska
Suggested by: NPR
Traveled: July 9-10

Here is the problem I had with Point of Direction. It acts as though the only problems worthy of writing about are earth-shattering, specifically terrible problems. It’s not enough to have a mother that ignores a main character except to pour her wine while she’s still in preschool — no, let’s make that terrible childhood lead her to be responsible for the death of a young hiker on a giant GLACIER and then give her brain-ripping nightmares until she hitch-hikes around and has numerous scrapes with death and then is maybe-stalked by a mystery man on a freezing, rain-whipped lighthouse in the middle of an Alaskan winter.

Ok, so I wasn’t totally impressed with Point of Direction. Clearly.

This is a point of frustration with me, and it’s not just in the books that I read. People don’t need to have the royal flush of shitty, unbelievable circumstances to make them interesting. They don’t even need that to make them tragic. Point of Direction’s protagonist, Anna, is a hyperbole. She is impenetrably covered in heavy, reaching problems that guarded against any chance for my attempted empathy. Frankly, she ended up seeming a bit selfish to me, a bit frustratingly smug in her possession of “unique” traumas.

Does it make for easy, even at times engaged, reading? Yes. I tore through this book, because it has that addictive, selfish quality that young-adult type fiction books do. I knew how it would end, and even the silly guesses I made about the mystery thread turned out to be tucked neatly together at its conclusion.

But it’s easy to redeem and heal a character who has obvious wounds and a textbook history. It’s a much more enjoyable experience to get caught up in a world where the characters have subtle scars that forge their identities, where misunderstandings and everyday betrayals create a rich portrait of life’s struggles and triumphs. I guess I wish Point of Direction would have been just a little less direct.

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

/ wrightjessie / Leave a comment

Idaho
Suggested by: Rachel
Traveled: June 28-July 2

Unlike the plot-heavy epics of previous stops, Housekeeping is a book of few pages, a story that swells with daily moments and detailed simplicity. I feel as though I’ve stumbled upon an allegory, ancient in its truths and easily familiar. It’s possible that Sylvie and Ruth inhabit pages next to Cain and Noah and Moses, I just wasn’t paying close enough attention in Sunday School. The train at the bottom of a lake somewhere in Idaho winks its ghostly reflection back at the genesis tales of Eden.

The thematic richness of Housekeeping is almost too much to unpack. I don’t plan to use this touchpoint of a post to capture the depths that the story stirs, so for now, I won’t try. But there are phrases and sentences in Housekeeping that I want to hold like a hard candy on my tongue, sucking and savoring them. So I’ll let Robinson speak for herself:

“Never since they were small children had they clustered about her so, and never since then had she been so aware of the smell of their hair, their softness, breathiness, abruptness. It filled her with a strange elation, the same pleasure she had felt when any one of them as a sucking child, had fastened her eyes on her face and reached for her other breast, her hair, her lips, hungry to touch, eager to be filled for a while and sleep.” — page 11

“She had no other family, except her husband, Charley, who sat on her porch with his hands on his knees and his belly in his lap, his flesh mottled like sausage, thick veins pulsing in his temples and in the backs of his hands. He conserved syllables as if to conserve breath.” — page 21

“…it was a surprise to me when I realized that Lucille had begun to regard other people with the calm, horizontal look of settled purpose with which, from a slowly sinking boat, she might have regarded a not-too-distant shore.” — page 92

“To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know anything so utterly as when we lack it?” — page 152

“The horns of the ferries made huge, delicate sounds, like cows lowing. They should have left a milky breath in the air.” — page 212

“If one is lost on the water, any hill is Ararat. And below is always the accumulated past, which vanishes but does not vanish, which perishes and remains. If we imagine that Noah’s wife, when she was old, found somewhere a remnant of the Deluge, she might have walked into it till her widow’s dress floated above her head and the water loosened her plaited hair. And she would have left it to her sons to tell the tedious tale of generations.” — page 172