Month: August 2014

The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver

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Arizona
Suggested by: Karl (and Andrea)
Traveled: August 21-23

The Bean Trees was exactly what I needed this week. It was simple and nuanced at the same time, a breath of fresh air in a forgiving desert. It gathered up the darkest of the dark, the dry and hopeless pattern of the oppressed, and created a rocky soil from which something beautiful was able to grow. It was a story of hope. After the dismal stretch of Utah I had just traveled, and even moreso the constant depression of turning on any sort of news or social platform recently, humanity needed a win.

About half-way through the book, the protagonist Taylor says, “I keep finding out that life can be hard in ways I never knew about.” How do we deal with a world where pain and suffering goes to depths we may never know? How do we acknowledge the wounds that every single person we encounter carries with them? The Bean Trees reminded me that we have immense power. And that power comes in simple forms, through personal connections. The roots of sadness go deep. But the roots that we grow together as people go deeper.

For those looking for a book recommendation, here it is: read this one. The beauty and strangeness of Arizona’s plants and wildlife are almost enough to refresh one’s view of a hopeless world. The 3-year-old little girl Turtle and the rag-tag family that grows around her will push you over the edge. In this book, to borrow a quote from its own pages, “there seemed to be no end to the things that could be hiding, waiting it out, right where you thought you could see it all.”

The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer

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Utah
Suggested by: Emily
Traveled: August 5-19

Whew. This one was a doozy, and not just because of its 1056 page count. It’s got murder, suicide, rape, deep familial dysfunction, mental disorders, a rats’ nest of a legal system, prison, demons, and public execution. Oh, and it’s a true story. I found myself eagerly wanting to return to Mailer’s epic tome each day, but needing to take “mental health” breaks every 50 pages to look at something with, at the very least, some saturated color.

Through a painstakingly rich and thorough interview process, Mailer has told the story of Gary Gilmore, an ex-con sentenced to death by the state of Utah in 1976. After committing robbery and killing two men, Gilmore became the first man to be executed in the U.S. in decades and set off a firestorm of public interest in a person’s right to his own death. The cast of characters in this desert drama is immense, and the level of detail and internal understanding is breathtaking. After only the first hundred or so pages, I had to verify through a rabbit hole of online researching whether or not this is a fiction or nonfiction work. It is essentially nonfiction, with the understandable fictional adjustment here and there. It is a novelization of a real life story, and it is beautifully done.

But, man, it was painful to read.

Surfacing from small town 1970’s Utah, I feel the need to wipe the dust from my skin and take great gulps of free, expansive air. This is a hard story to live in. It touches on some deeply disturbing philosophical questions — do all humans have the same right to life? What is love capable of making us do — and is that really love? Are there evil forces at work in the world? Is a person to blame for the scars a flawed system has inflicted? It would be easier to just wash our hands of this discomfort and walk away, but Gilmore did not let the world do so in 1976, and the book certainly does not let us today. I was stared down by turmoil during the whole reading experience, with a glare as clear and unsettling as Gilmore’s through the bars of his cell.

 

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

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Nevada (with some Arizona, West Virginia and NYC)
Suggested by: Jake
Traveled: July 26-28

So rewind for a second to my not-so-glowing review of Point of Direction in Alaska. I had this to say in my main critique of the debut novel: “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.” I argued a few weeks ago that tragedy is more compelling when it comes from traumas rooted in some relatable reality. I’d rather be moved by subtlety than overt misfortune.

Jeannette Walls turns this premise completely on its head. In her head-shakingly good memoir, The Glass Castle, she demonstrates the power of holding the royalest of flushes of terrible circumstance, and not even touching the idea of tragedy. She tells her story of a childhood rife with circumstances few of us could even visualize, with a refreshing frankness and lack of drama. She doesn’t put on a saintly cheery outlook. She doesn’t wallow, and she doesn’t whine. She asks for no credit in succeeding to love and appreciate her (most likely) bipolar mother and alcoholic father, whose wild hare ideas and eccentricities kept her and her three siblings eating out of garbage cans most of their early years. She tells it just the way it is, and the end result comes out as a genuinely optimistic tale of family that challenges our strict obsessions with normality.

As a stop in the road trip, the portions of the book in Nevada are limited to the first half, and we spend at least as much time in a decaying shack in the hills of West Virginia. But her recollections of sleeping in the dry coldness of the Nevada desert and the fondness she has for an old railroad depot with an upright piano in the front yard are memorable. It’s a masterful work coming from the humblest of beginnings — I only wish there was more of it to read.