The Member of the Wedding (1946) by Carson McCullers

1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Member of the Wedding (1946)

by Carson McCullers

Columbus, Georgia

Georgia 18/23

  Mildly surprised that this is Carson McCullers first appearance on this blog.  I would have thought The Heart is a Lonely Hunter would have been something I'd read at one point or another.  Alas, here we are.  I was unaware until after I read her Wikipedia page just now that McCullers was closeted lgbt during her life- she got married, unhappily, and suffered from many of the classic symptoms of mid-century American closeted queendom.   It's impossible to read McCullers without thinking of O'Connor- on the actual, literal 1,001 Novels map they are about 120 miles apart from one another.  If you wanted to map Southern Gothic, I think it would encompass the north-central parts of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. Move too far north, and it's Appalachian goth, too far south and it's either N'awlins or the swamps of Florida- both with gothic aspects in those right but not *real* Southern Gothic.

   If you look at her Amazon product page, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is the clearly canonical pick, making this an selection of editor Susan Straight making an "insider" pick for a well-known writer.  This will probably be enough impetus to get me to track down a library Audiobook of Hunter, since, in my heart I know I am a southern Gothic gentleman. 

1,001 Novels: A Library of America, North Carolina

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

North Carolina

Published 10/4/24

Nothing Gold Can Stay (2013)

by Ron Rash

Boiling Springs, North Carolina

North Carolina: 1/19

   North Carolina, here we go.  I drove through North Carolina once after college driving between Washington DC and San Francisco, but I didn't stop and I've never been back.  These days what I know about North Carolina is that it's a reddish-purple state with some strong universities, a big African-American population and a bunch of southern white people.   I'm looking forward to actually learning something about North Carolina via the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project and Nothing Gold Can Stay, a book of short-stories by Ron Rash, is a good start.

    Boiling Springs is mapped on the border of North and South Carolina, about half way between Charlotte and Asheville.  It's a whole lot of nothing according to the characters, who see a two-hour drive to an Indian Casino as a big trip.  One reoccurring motif is characters filling out financial aid forms for college- there are fourteen stories in this collection and financial aid forms are mentioned in four or five of them.   There's also meth addiction, illegal bear hunting and run-down shacks a plenty.  Despite the repetition of the financial aid motif and the author's steady disregard for providing endings to the stories, I enjoyed Nothing Gold Can Stay and Rash is the first author in weeks where I've considered looking further into his bibliography. 

Published 10/11/24

Winter Birds (1994)

by Jim Grimsley

Grifton, North Carolina

North Carolina: 2/19

   Winter Birds is another incredibly dark family drama written from the perspective of the son an extremely dysfunctional family living off a Freeway in rural North Carolina.  Winter Birds is so dark that it was originally published in German translation after no American publisher would take it.  After the German language translation, Grimsley did find a publisher but it was never a hit- Publisher's Weekly straight up panned it, for many of the same reasons I didn't enjoy reading the book.

 Grimsley is primarily a play-wright, and Winter Birds reads like a play- the entire book takes place inside the family home and is told in the second person.   Basically, the entire book is an extended scene of domestic violence, with multiple- multiple lengthy scenes that are basically this guy's one-armed father chasing his poor mom around the house with a knife.  Dad commits all types of atrocities including stabbing the family dog to death while screaming "this is you" to his wife, who is hiding in the woods.  In the culminating scene/waking nightmare, Dad forces the narrator to have sex with his own mother.  Horrific! 

Published 10/16/24

 The House Behind the Cedars (1900)

by Charles W. Chesnutt 

Fayetteville, North Carolina

North Carolina: 3/19

   I was under the impression that the only Fayetteville was the one in Arkansas, but here we are in Fayetteville North Carolina for this excellent minor classic, The House Behind the Cedars, written by bi-racial (that's not what they called it back then!) author, Charles. W. Chesnutt.  This is the kind of book I'd hope to see a lot more of in the 1,001 Novels project.  First, it's a book from the 19th century (I extend the 19th century through the beginning of World War I in 1914).  Second, it's a book with some wit to it, that also exists in a recognizable literary universe- allusions to Walter Scott and a 19th century version of a Renaissance Faire both appear in its pages.  Third, it's a point of view: That of the "passing" of people with African American ancestry for white, that is little encountered in contemporary literary culture. 

   Generally speaking, any actually readable American novel written before The Great Gatsby is a find, and I enjoyed reading The House Behind the Cedars, even if the frequent discussion of "the race question" is galling to contemporary ears.  Also, the frequent use of the n word, and not in a nice way, by bigoted Southern characters. You aren't going to get assigned The House Behind the Cedars in your introduction to American Lit class, let's put it that way.  I would love to find more books written before World War I on the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America list. Rediscovering 19th Century American Literature is a potential gold-mine, or silver-mine, anyway. 

Published 10/17/24

In West Mills (2019)

 by De'Shawn Charles Winslow
711 Main Street, South Mills, North Carolina

North Carolina: 4/19

  In West Mills was the debut novel by author De'Shawn Charles Winslow, about a fictional African-American community in the northeastern tip of North Carolina.  I really enjoyed this book, centered around Azalea "Knot" Centre, an unconventional woman who is a dedicated reader and equally dedicated alcoholic.   Set between the 1940's and the 1980's, In West Mills nearly takes place out of time- the characters are blessedly unaware of the societal upheaval that never reaches their little piece of heaven. 

  Most of the book concerns Knot and her decision to have two children and surrender them to her childless neighbors.  She is present as they grow up, and the plot expands to encompass her children and their lives as Winslow moves through the decades.  Knot also has her friends- Otis Lee, and Valley, the local representative of the LGBT community in West Mills.  She also has her enemies- one of her neighbors betrays her secret pregnancy and subsequent surrender of her children to her parents, and they refuse to talk to her for the rest of the book. In West Mills is unusual for the books from the south in that it is, basically, a book only about African Americans with little or no white presence.  Most of the books from the south contain both black and white characters, and the plots are often about their interrelationships.  Contrast this to the north, and New York City in particular, where single ethnicity books are the rule, rather than the exception. 

  Also this was a very good Audiobook.

Published 10/18/24

Here To Get My Baby Out Of Jail (1983)

by Louise Shivers

Tarborough, North Carolina

North Carolina: 5/19

   Here To Get My Baby Out Of Jail is another win for the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America: A regional work of fiction by a little-known author who I would have never read but for the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  There's not much online about her- a stub-like Wikipedia page that mentions this book was named best first novel of the year by USA Today in 1983(!) and was made into  a movie in 1987, Summer Heat.   Her New York Times obituary noted the surprise success of this book- which was published when she was 53.

  Reviewers at the time compared her writing style to Flannery O'Connor, and author Mary Gordon had a role to play as well- selecting the manuscript out of a prize competition where she was the judge and sending it to her publisher.   The plot can be described in one line: Rural wife of a farmer has an affair with a hired hand with violent and predictable results, but like many books set in the rural south, it is all about the atmosphere.  The hot days, the sultry nights and the desperate need to escape- if not to another place then to another person, both themes that are active in this book. 

Published 10/24/24

Roxanna Slade (1998)

by Reynolds Price

Macon, North Carolina

North Carolina: 6/19

    I'd never heard of Reynolds Price, a North Carolina-based author of some reputation. He was active for decades both as a writer and a professor- Roxanna Slade is one of his last books, and I imagine him writing a book from the perspective of a woman was a late career stretch for him.  Roxanna is a poor, uneducated white woman who narrates the book looking back at her ninety year long life, from her beginnings as a 18 year old bride, the birth of her two children, her struggles with depression during a time when there weren't many treatment options, a suicide attempt and then life as a single, older mother after her husband passes away in his 50's. 

  This is the rare book from this part of the country where race is a relatively minor issue.  Roxanna Slade's people aren't wealthy enough to have servants nor poor enough to be in economic competition with their African American neighbors.  Late in the book, Slade recalls her husband punching his long-time African American employee in the eye (and causing him to lose said eye) after the employee had been drinking and demanded back pay from her husband.  

   I recognized women from my Grandmother's generation in this book- women who were pushed into a domestic role in the home without a second thought or option and ended up living long enough to see what they missed. 

Pulished 10/28/24

Bewilderness (2021)

by Karen Tucker

523 N. Main St. Troy, North Carolina

North Carolina: 7/19

   Due to my job as a criminal defense lawyer working in Federal Court, I have ample time to contemplate the vagaries of life as a drug addict, since that epithet describes many of my clients.  Thus, this novel, about two young, female opiate addicts living in the middle-of-nowhere North Carolina was always going to be a challenge for me.  I started by checking out the Audiobook but had to give up about a third of the way in because I simply couldn't stand the narrator/protagonist.   I am totally ok with drug addicts and their issues, but you have to be a pretty interesting drug addict to keep my attention, and this one was not.  It's interesting in that this is one of the first depictions of rural opiate addiction, which is a huge issue- even at the highest levels of national politics, but that doesn't make this a fun book. 

Published 11/5/24

Jim the Boy (2000)

by Tony Earley

Rutherfordton, North Carolina

North Carolina: 8/19

   Jim the Boy  was an easy mark- under 200 pages, written from the perspective of a prepubescent boy growing up in the 1930's.  Earley was named one of Granta's Top 30 Writers Under 30 at one point but the only novels he ever published was this book and a sequel published in 2008.  As with all of the authors I hadn't heard of before the 1001 Novels project, I checked out his New York Times coverage and found a really detailed review for this book and a somewhat less detailed review for the sequel and then a review for his most recent collection of short stories, published in 2014.  I guess it's not exactly a disappearing act but you'd hardly call him a household name.

  The most distinct aspect of Jim the Boy is the author's rejection of complexity that is inherent in choosing a 9/10 year old boy as the narrator and protagonist.  Like many of the protagonists and a few of the narrators, Jim isn't a complicated fellow.  This isn't a trauma narrative, but the opposite, a non-trauma narrative where the emotional peak is a back-alley confrontation in a small North Carolina town where Jim and a buddy are threatened by local streets toughs, and rescued by a friendly African-American.   In fact, I'm hard pressed to think of another book within the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project that is so gosh darned wholesome. 

  The New York Times critic made a big deal out of the style back in 2000, which makes this book sound like a purposeful rebuttal to the frenzied Y2k era, but a quarter century later we have gotten no less frenzied.

Published 11/21/24

Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (1989)

by Alan Gurganus

Fells, North Carolina

North Carolina: 9/19

    This book is 700 pages long.  It isn't JUST 700 pages long- it is also a big ole physical 700 page book with smallish type and small margins.  Of course, I'd heard about this book before- Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All  was a monster hit when it was first published- especially for a 700 page work of more or less serious literary fiction.  It spawned a 1994 television mini-series which was also a hit, winning four Emmy's, and a musical version in 2003 (starring Ellen Burstyn) which flopped on Broadway and closed after one show(!).  Its length precludes a ready transition to the internet era, but I'd wager most active readers over the age of forty have at least heard of it.  

   For those unfamiliar, Oldest Living Confederate Widor Tells All is both the title of the book and an accurate description of the plot- a ninety nine year old Lucy Marsden, married to a 50-something confederate veteran at the age of fifteen, lives in a rest home and she is being interviewed by someone- there are frequent in-book references to the tape recording process of the interview.   Over the course of these 700 pages you not only get to hear Lucy's story- child bride, mother-of-eight and put-upon wife- but also the stories of her husband, her mother, her husbands mother, her husband's ex-slave and possibly the narrator's only friend and maybe more that I'm leaving out.  The multiplicity of narrative viewpoints and the use of a spoken idiom both conspire to lengthen Confederate Widow.  

  Lucy is a plucky, humorous narrator, and one aspect I couldn't get over is that her aw shucks, almost exaggerated southern dialect (which, mind you, constitutes almost the only distinct narrative voice for 700 pages) is something that young Lucy adopts to annoy her Mother, who raises her to be better.  Lucy has other plans, those other plans being married off to a fifty year old man before she turns 16.  

   The over-all vibe for me resembled that of John Irving- quirky, eccentric small-town types who experience both humor and great sadness- but in a humorous way.  In fact, if I had to make a one-line pitch for this book pre-publication it would be "John Irving but set in North Carolina"- Irving was at the height of his powers in 1989- that was the year A Prayer for Owen Meany came out. Also, in 1989, Alice Walker published The Temple of My Familiar and Billy Bathgate (E.L. Doctorow) came out so Guraganus was right there and you could argue that this book would be a better representative in the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die list than is A Prayer for Owen Meany- one of several Irving novels on that list,

  There is no doubt it's one of the top books from North Carolina and a top 5 title for the sub-chapter (Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina) and top 10 for the full chapter.  Still, it is hard to imagine many people taking the time to actually sit down and read this 700 page book in 2024.  The late 1980s were different in that regard- you could publish a 470 page novel like London Fields by Martin Amis and EVERYONE read it.

  Published 11/25/24

Even as We Breathe (2020)

by Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle

227 Drama Road, Cherokee, North Carolina

North Carolina: 10/19

   Even as We Breathe is a pretty low-stakes work of historical fiction set at a World War II detainee camp for enemy diplomats (a luxury hunting lodge/spa situation outside Asheville). The narrator is orphaned high school graduate Cowney Sequoyah (Pronounced "County"), an Eastern Cherokee descended from the Cherokee's who hid rather than take the "Trail of Tears" march to the Indian territory of Oklahoma.  I was thrilled to encounter a book written from this viewpoint, which, despite an active interest in Native American themes I'd hardly knew existed- like I know they have a Casino on Eastern Cherokee land but that's it.  Wikipedia says that between 800 to 1000 tribal members remained behind- vs, the 15k odd that got moved out, so it is a rare POV.   

    The location of this title on the map marks it as the Eastern most point of the entire chapter from Maryland to South Carolina.  Only a half dozen books in the entire chapter are set "in the mountains," which strikes me as being an undercount, but it's likely subsidized by the states like Kentucky and West Virginia where EVERY book is a mountain book. 

    Aside from the POV- which is very interesting- the rest of the work is rote historical fiction with some family drama thrown in.   It made for a great Audiobook since it is narrated by the protagonist and he has an American Indian voice/accent that I don't typically encounter.

   Published 12/3/24

Ellen Foster (1987)

by Kaye Gibbons

Rocky Mount, North Carolina

North Carolina: 11/19

   The caption that 1,001 Novels: A Library of America editor Susan Straight wrote for Ellen Foster says, "In a voice like no other, a young girl tells the story of the dissolution of her family..."  I have to take issue with that statement, since the voice of a young girl in difficult circumstances is the single most prevalent voice in the entire 1,001 Novels project.  Every state has at least one book that could be accurately described the same way, and many of the large states have multiple books that could be described this way.   It's only a mild spoiler to reveal that the name of the book comes from the fact that Ellen, the narrator and protagonist, proudly takes the name of the foster family who takes her in, because she thinks "Foster" is their name, and a generic description.   Ellen describes a childhood that is utterly familiar to me as a result of all the similar books in the 1,001 Novels project:   One dead parent, one absent parent, an immediate family that isn't inclined to help.   Just about the only thing that doesn't happen in this book that a reader might reasonably expect is that the protagonist isn't sexually abused by a relative or friend of the family.    To be fair, she does have a distinctive voice, and it's a good Audiobook because it's just her recounting her history to the reader for the entire book.

Published 1/8/25

Tending to Virginia (1987)

by Jill McCorkle

Lumberton, North Carolina

North Carolina: 12/19

  Tidewater Tales and Oldest Living Confederate War Widow Tells All really cramped my style in November/December 2024.  I spent almost a month and a half just reading those two physical books.  It created backlog on my physical reading list that I'm only clearing out now.  Tending to Virginia is one of those titles, a book that only exists as a hardback check out from the library.  I'd never heard of McCorkle before the 1,001 Novels project but it looks like she has a decent sized regional footprint with some national recognition- 74 returns in the New York Times search index and some minor prizes spread out over 20 years.   Her last book was in 2013, which makes me think she is semi-retired.  Tending to Virginia was her third book and it made the New York Times Notable Book list in 1987.  The original review pointed to her "skillful use of voice" and that was something I noticed. She also uses many types of modernist tricks to keep the reader off-balance, specifically, she doesn't sign-post her shifts in time as the three generations of women bedsit one of their number (Virginia) who is in the last stages of a difficult pregnancy.

   There are, as one might expect, deeply held family secrets which are exposed during Tending to Virginia.  Tending to Virginia is also an example of American literary fiction where the characters exists solely within the confines of a domestic setting and have no educational or professional experiences to speak of between the group of them.   The result of this situation is that "family" is the only subject of conversation that can sustain them in a literary fashion, so that is all they talk about. Ever.  In books like Tending to Virginia I yearn for scenes where the characters just go outside and describe the world around them, but that rarely happens in this book or any that shares its characteristics.  Family is everything to these women, and to abandon family is almost unthinkable.  Sounds boring to me.

Published 1/9/25

Now You Know It All (2021)

by Joanna Pearson

Shelby, North Carolina

North Carolina: 13/19

    Now You Know It All is a debut collection of short-stories by psychiatrist/author Joanna Pearson.  It was published by the University of Pittsburgh press- the first work I've read published by the University of Pittsburgh.   It also won the Drue Heinz literary prize, which I'd never heard of before but must be linked to the Heinz ketchup family.  The prize was decided by Edward P. Jones, Pulitzer Prize winner and he was attracted to the straight-forward story telling embraced by Pearson- no metafictional fuckery here.  Clocking in at 224 pages with wide margins and large type, I read Now You Know It All in a single sitting and as is the case with many collections of short stories I found myself driving to grasp the links between the stories.   

   At least most of the subjects in these short stories have college educations. Beyond that it's the familiar constellation of female characters grappling with the fissures between jobs and spouses, kids and parents. There are a couple stories that edge into speculative fiction- my favorite was the story about a woman hitch-hiking in a perpetual-pandemic future who encounters a car of masked revelers on their way to an infection ball. 

Published 1/10/25

In Memory of Junior (1992)

by Clyde Edgergton

Summerlin, North Carolina

North Carolina: 14/19

    Another day, another Southern writer I'd never heard of before I started the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  He certainly isn't obscure, with a decades long track record of having his books reviewed by the New York Times and a prominent position teaching creative writing at a regional university in North Carolina.  The Times called this book "a shaggy cemetery story narrated by the 21 most interested parties."  I kind of groaned to myself when I saw that this small, 215 page book came with its own family tree in front a la a 900 page Russian novel, but it wasn't especially difficult to follow because none of these 20 characters do anything in this book except plot and scheme over the burial location of some family members.

   There is also a minor, unresolved struggle based on an inheritance that will flow based on the death order of an elderly couple.  In Memory of Junior was very much one of those books on the 1,001 Novels list where I just didn't care what happened in the book, didn't care about any of the characters and didn't find the milieu/setting interesting in anyway.   I did appreciate the literary technique expressed by cramming 20 narrators into 215 pages- which is a technique that George Saunders wrote all the way to a major literary award in recent years (Lincoln in the Bardo) but that book was about Lincoln and a bunch of ghosts, and this is about a bunch of redneck southerners who have nothing going on (except for the one family member who is a lawyer in Charlotte.)

Published 1/14/25

Hello Down There (1993)

by Michael Parker

Elizabeth City, North Carolina

North Carolina 15/19

   All the titles left in this chapter of the 1,001 Novels project are physical or ebooks- no more Audiobooks available.  That means these are the most obscure titles left, since every book with any kind of track record gets an Audiobook editions these days.  Hello Down There is a work of historical fiction about a university student who becomes addicted to morphine in the 1950's after sustaining a back-injury.  He's the oldest son of a wealthy local family (they own the building that contains the local pharmacy) and his addiction is the kind where he bullies the local pharmacist into supplying him drugs in excess of what he is legally allowed to possess.   It's a gentrified addiction, in other words.  

  He draws others into his orbit, notably the daughter of the pharmacist, and he spirits her away to the prison in Kentucky which happened to possess the first drug detox facility in the United States.  It's not unfamiliar literary territory- William Burroughs writes about the same place in Junky.   Hello Down There is another first novel and it's hard not to think there is some biographical elements involved even taking into account the historical setting.  I would imagine that Parker is from the same area.  Parker's drug-addled, well educated protagonist is a welcome respite from the legions of troubled adolescent girls that editor Susan Straight favors, but there wasn't a huge amount of action here and the central relationship between Parker's drug addled college-educated protagonist and his uneducated teen-age boo was not revelatory. 

Published 1/22/25

Let the Dead Bury the Dead (1992)

by Randall Kenan

Tim's Creek, North Carolina

North Carolina: 16/19

   Let the Dead Bury the Dead is a book of (inter-connected?) short stories set in the fictional town of Tim's Creek, founded by an escaped slave on the model of the "Maroon" communities of Jamaica.  The final story in the collection gives some historical context, and this isn't the first book of short-stories in the 1,001 Novels project to be set in a similar environment.  Despite having stories with fantastical elements- the first story features an infant who can tell the future-  Let the Dead Bury the Dead has a realist vibe even when the subject matter is more like speculative fiction.  

  Probably the most unusual aspect of Let the Dead Bury the Dead is the LGBT themed story- rare for the rural south and even rarer for rural African-American communities, though editor Susan Straight has gone out of her way to include those viewpoints in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  Kenan was known as a member of the LGBT community before his death in 2020. 

Published 2/19/25

Heathen Valley (1962)

by Romulus Linney

Valle Crucis, North Carolina

North Carolina: 17/19

    Heathen Valley is a strange (certainly by the standards of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America) pick, a novel based on a true story about the Protestant mission in the North Carolina Appalachians,  founded by an Episcopalian bishop who went on to be the highest ranked protestant to convert to Roman Catholicism.  Heathen Valley is based on a true story.  The Bishop in question is Levi Silliman Ives.  Literary fiction about religion is so rare that the novelty value is often enough to keep me interested, such was the case here, as the eponymous Heathen Valley itself, which is presented as a part of America without organized religion of any kind.  So much of the United States was founded directly by religious participants that an America without religion almost seems impossible.  

  However, as Heathen Valley depicts, parts of the Appalachians were founded without sanction from secular or religious authorities, leaving its residents without an organized religious presence.

Published 4/17/25

Evensong (1999) 

by Gail Godwin

High Balsam, North Carolina

North Carolina: 18/19

  Another book about Church people in the mountains of Western North Carolina, only this time it's the classy sort.  Evensong is a good example of what you might call domestic/low stakes fiction with just enough professional engagement (the narrator is a female pastor of an Episcopalian congregation in the North Carolina mountains) to make it interesting.  I was never really worried about anything going on in this book, but every twenty pages or so the narrator/protagonist would make some kind of wry observations about the vagaries of married/professional life that I would chuckle.  Her Wikipedia says she has three National Book Award finalist nominations (1975, 1980 and 1983) but never got a win.  Seems about right?  Church people are boring people, by in large, that is something I've learned from books in the 1,001 Novels: A Libary of America.

NOT READ

Cold Mountain (1997)

by Charles Frazier

North Carolina 19/19

   I read Cold Mountain when it came out- I think I just picked it up randomly on vacation or during a break from law school- something like that.

Cane (1923) by Jane Toomer

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Cane (1923)

by Jane Toomer

Hancock County, Georgia

Georgia: 17/23

 Published 5/21/14

Cane (1923)
by Jean Toomer

It makes sense that the first significant African American novelist-writer wouldn't consider himself an African-American writer, and would be so upset by such a designation that he would move to France and turn to spiritualism, never writing another novel. Jean Toomer is present on the 1001 Books To Read Before You Die list as the first African-American author. Post Uncle Tom's Cabin, African American's were a central THEME in American literature, but typically as characters in the work of well meaning Whites. The rise of African American authors, alongside other non-traditional literary voices, is one of the key occurrences in literature in the 20th century, so even as a one hit wonder, being first in time within that category is a significant achievement.

The vehicle for the emergence of African American literature written by African Americans was the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance was a multiple discipline artistic frisson that reached across music, studio arts (painting, sculpture) and literature. In the area of literature, the Harlem Renaissance produced the first world famous African American novelists, short story writers, novelists and poets.

Jean Toomer was the mixed-race or "Creole" son of an established Creole family from Georgia. He moved to Washington DC as a child and was raised in a comfortable, middle-class neighborhood. He studied at several colleges but graduated from none of them, eventually moving to New York, where he landed in 1919. In 1920, he returned to Washington DC to care for his ailing parents. In 1921, he took a job as a school teacher in rural, African-American Georgia, where he was exposed to that culture for the first time.

Cane is not a conventional novel, but rather a mix of short stories and poems. The characters are largely African Americans: The only white character I remember is a deranged lover who is killed by an African American romantic rival via a slit throat. Toomer is free with his use of the 'N' word and discusses sex frankly and without prudery. The frequent dropping of the n bomb might be one reason this book is little read. Another might be the non-standard format combination of poetry and prose. Regardless of present popularity, it is the first significant work of literature by an African American in the period immediately prior to the Harlem Renaissance (which gave birth to MANY significant works of literature by African American authors.) so it is very much worth seeking out.

Also, Cane is only 160 pages, so you can read it in a sitting.

1,001 Novels: A Library of America, South Carolina

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

 South Carolina

Published 10/25/24

Sweetwater Creek (2005)

by Anne River Siddons

Hunting Island, South Carolina

South Carolina: 1/13

   Anne River Siddons was (d. 2019) a well-known writer of popular fiction of and about the South.  She never won any major literary prizes but she had some hits, and signed a 10 million dollar book deal at a time when that was still a lot of money.  Sweetwater Creek is the first book from South Carolina.  South Carolina has a pretty distinctive role in the history of the South by being a primary market for the slave trade.  At the same time, there is some of the social flexibility that is more typically associated with New Orleans- the idea of an urban class of free blacks and mixed-race people that is absent in other parts of the South. In Virginia, for example, freed slaves were forced to leave Virginia almost immediately upon pain of death, which meant that the population of free blacks was very limited. 

   Charleston also developed an intellectual culture that drew upon the outsiders who came and went for trading purposes- more outward looking than comparable locations in North Carolina and Virginia.  Which all goes to say that the area around Charleston is the most interesting place in this chapter.  Sweetwater Creek doesn't take place in Charleston but it operates in the orbit of Charleston, since the plot is a bildungsroman about a young girl who crosses paths with an alcoholic college age southern debutante who is in full flight from her life as a well-to-do young Charleston lady.   I listened to the Audiobook since it looks like I'm going to run out of available Audiobooks from titles in this chapter long before I finish reading the non-Audiobook titles.

  As Audiobooks go, it was one of the excruciating ones- with a third person narrator telling the story entirely from the perspective of this adolescent girl who has never left her Dad's spaniel raising operation in the South Carolina low country.  I lost track of the number of times the protagonist broke down in tears and ran crying to her room to be comforted by her dog.   I did think the depiction of the low country was really memorable and that was really the only thing that kept me slogging through the story to the end.

   

Published 11/4/25

Indigo Girl (2017)

by Natasha Boyd

West Ashley, Charleston, South Carolina

South Carolina: 2/13

   I'm running two or three states ahead of reading physical books, so I'm listening to Audiobooks set in South Carolina and reading books set in Virginia.  That figures to be the major dynamic going forward since I'm almost positive I will close out all the Audiobooks from this chapter months before I finish reading the rest.   I liked Indigo Girl because it is set in the Colonial/Pre-Revolutionary period- when I started the 1,001 Novels project it was clear in New England that the editor favored contemporary stories over historical stories, and I accept that, but all things being equal, say a plot that is a bildungsroman about a young woman in a rural area of America, I'd rather read about the past than the present. 

  The protagonist of Indigo Girl is the oldest daughter of a British Naval Officer who is sent to fight the Spanish in the Caribbean. Daughter endeavors to save the family plantation by growing indigo, which has never been tried before in the Carolinas.  This character is a historical person- she ended up marrying Charles Pickney who was the father of one of the signers of Declaration of Independence.  The author added an afterword where she noted how she used historical artifacts- letters by the real version of her character- to give voice to her story. 

Indigo Girl was also interesting to me because it was set in the period before the slave rebellion's in Haiti solidified white opinion against a more genteel form of slavery.  One of the plot points in this book revolves around the fact that in the timeline of the story, South Carolina has recently made it a crime to teach slaves to write, though they did not make it a crime to teach a slave how to read, a fine point picked up on by the heroine and her husband to be, lawyer Charles Pickney. 

  It's not literary fiction, but as historical fiction goes it is well suited for its depiction of early Colonial Charleston.

Published 11/6/24

Brown Girl Dreaming (2014)

by Jacqueline Woodson

Greenville, South Carolina

South Carolina: 3/13

   South Carolina is a geographically distinct state- the southern equivalent of Rhode Island on a bigger scale.  If you look at the map you can see that unlike Virginia, North Carolina and Maryland, South Carolina is cut off to the point where it basically looks like a city-state surrounding Charleston.  It's not hard to imagine some alternative history where South Carolina extends across what became Northern Georgia, but the Spanish and French presence in the South precluded expansionism early on, and then Georgia took that part of the US for itself. 

   Brown Girl Dreaming is one of only four South Carolina titles that takes place outside of the Charleston/low country area- Greenville is located in the northwest corner of the state and I had to look up its Wikipedia page to find out that it has a population of 1.5 million.   Brown Girl Dreaming was another easy target- a four hour long Audiobook which is "written in verse"- not poetry, exactly, but not prose- really a succession of very short chapters telling the story of the eponymous protagonist/narrator, the daughter of a single mom from Greenville, who is herself the child of Jehovah's Witnesses. Mom doesn't observe the faith, but the kids do, particularly after Mom decamps for New York City.  Her children eventually follow her up there, and this is another example of a 1,001 Novels title that could be placed on more than one location on the map.  Here, I thought the perspective of a Jehovah's Witness was interesting and I believe the first book which touched on that particular experience but this book didn't add much to my understanding of South Carolina or Greenville- basically all the narrator does in Greenville is hang out with her grandparents and go door to door with her fellow Jehovah's Witnesses. 

   Like many novels written from the perspective of pre-adolescent children, there is, simply put, a limit to how interesting a child under the age of ten can be in the pages of a book- and it's an even sharper limit if the author adheres to anything close to realism.

Published 11/19/24

South of Broad (2009)

by Pat Conroy

Charleston, South Carolina

South Carolina: 4/14

   I will say that Charleston, South Carolina seems like the only globally interesting culture in this part of the United States (Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina).  The whole idea of the southern aristocrat comes alive in Charleston, which is also a genuinely interesting city which I'd someday like to visit.  Pat Conroy, of course, is one of the most well-known authors in this chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  He achieved huge popular and limited critical acclaim for this novels, most (all?) of which were set in this part of the world.  Several of his books were adapted into big-budget Hollywood pictures that further cemented his place in the literary imagination of America.  

  South of Broad tracks the experiences of a group of friends from their time in high school in the late 60's to the present day- the book ends after Hurricane Hugo.  The narrator is Leo King, an obvious stand-in for the author.  The book traces back in forth in time from Leo's troubled childhood, marred by the suicide of hid older brother (this is the fourth or fifth older brother to commit suicide in this chapter of the 1,001 Novels project) and his own mistake of being caught holding the cocaine of a popular athlete at a high school party.  Leo's Mother is a lapsed nun turned high school principal.  She is also a scholar of James Joyce, a fact that King/Conroy bandies about without it ever impacting the writing style or plot of his book.

  

 South of Broad is a great pick within the parameters of the 1,001 Novels project because Conroy's narrator is a newspaper writer who is himself obssessed with the beauty of Charleston.  He also does a good job explaining the different cultural dynamics of this place, though he seems a bit treacly in his sentiments.  At 20 hours, the Audiobook was no walk in the park, particularly in the early going, but as the plot cranks into gear I found myself enjoying the dramatic third act.

Published 12/5/24

The Hunt Club (1998)

by Brett Lott

Mount Pleasant, South Carolina

South Carolina: 5/14

   The Hunt Club is what you call an interesting failure- half of a conventional thriller about greed and life in South Carolina as seen through the eyes of the 15 year old protagonist and half a work of literary fiction about said 15 year old and his family.   It doesn't really land either punch, but it is short enough and there are enough interesting moments to make it a worthwhile read- certainly within the context of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of American it is a good representative of South Carolina, with plenty of tromping about in the marshy landscape of the area north of Charleston.   One of the things I've learned from this chapter of the 1,001 Novels project is that there are geographical similarities between the low lands of South Carolina and the swampy wetlands of southern New England- at times I feel like the descriptions- here of lowland South Carolina could equally apply to summertime New Hampshire.

  The Hunt Club has several of the worst tropes in thriller/crime fiction including multiple scenes of various villains loudly explaining what they are doing to people they intend to murder in cold blood.  I've never understood it since seeing James Bond villains do it as a child.  So much talking but at least The Hunt Club was short.

Published 12/9/24

The Invention of Wings (2014)

by Sue Monk Kidd

Charleston, South Carolina

South Carolina: 6/14

  I've finished all the audiobooks from the Delaware to South Carolina chapter of the 1,001 Books project, so I'll be moving on to Pennsylvania in one direction and Georgia in the other- fewer than half of the books on this list have Audiobook editions so I suspect I'll be done with all the Audiobooks from this list months and years before I finished reading the rest.   The Invention of Wings is a based-on-a-true-story about the abolitionist daughter of a South Carolina slave-owning plantation family and her relationship with her slave-maid, Handful.  Both characters assume narrating duties, meaning The Invention of Wings takes 14 hours to tell a seven hour story.   The abolitionist daughter, Sarah Grimke is based on a real person with the same biography.

   It's a pretty boring story, to be honest- with no sex (Grimke lives and dies a virgin) and little violence for a book that theoretically chronicles the slave holding society of South Carolina.  The plot even includes a slave revolt, and the resultant violence is limited to one oblique hanging.  I'm pretty sure that is not how that went down. 

   

Published 12/11/24

 The Southern Book Club Guide to Slaying Vampires (2020)

 by Grady Hendrix 

Mount Pleasant, South Carolina

South Carolina: 7/14

  I hadn't heard of author Grady Hendrix before I read his book so I didn't know until after that Hendrix is a writer of what you might call horror-comedy.   Based on the title and the opening chapter I had assumed this was going to be some kind of cozy mystery/comic novel cross-over but as it turns out the horror is taken quite seriously and as I progressed to the business end of the vampire hunting there were several truly horrific scenes:  An old woman eaten alive by rats,  a book club member raped by the suspected vampire and a method of vampire feeding that involve suckling on to the inner thigh of the victim.   These Charlestonians aren't part of the planter aristocracy or the South of Broad professional set, rather they are a bunch of housewives in the traditional sense of that word- five women who do  not work outside of the home and have dedicated their lives to raiding children and taking care of their thankless husbands.

 The issue is, of course, that no one takes their warnings seriously forcing them into a DIY vampire hunt.   The South Carolina stuff is pretty muted- it's clear from the accents of the characters that this book takes place somewhere in the suburban south, but it could have been anywhere.  

Published 1/16/25

The Tubman Command (2019)

by Elizabeth Hobbs

Combahee River, South Carolina

South Carolina: 8/14

   The Tubman Command is a work of historical fiction imagining an episode from the career of Harriet Tubman.  Tubman is best known for her success as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, where she personally led hundreds of enslaved people to freedom.  This book is about her work for the Union Army during the Civil War as a scout, where she was sent ahead of Union forces to reconnoiter and gather information, at great personal risk to her person.  Specifically, it's about a raid up the Combahee River in South Carolina to free blacks from several of the great plantations in that part of the state.   It's a fairly interesting story but the fact that this is a white author writing from the perspective of a famous African American person made me a tad uncomfortable.  Certainly, if you know that fact you know that there is not going to be a single negative observation written about any of the African American characters.  The Tubman Command is more like a hagiographic work than a novel.

Published 1/20/25

Gap Creek (1999)

by Robert Morgan

Gap Creek, South Carolina

South Carolina: 9/14

   Gap Creek is an "Oprah book," i.e. a book selected by Oprah Winfrey for her "Oprah's Book Club."  I would never openly mock Oprah Winfrey, but I've never been a fan of Oprah's club or any of the other celebrity book clubs which followed hers.  A couple hundred books into the 1,001 Novels project I can now say that I look forward to "her" books on the 1,001 Novels list for a couple reasons.  First, chicken or egg questions aside, Oprah picks hits- people actually read the books she likes, which makes her a person of significance in the world of literary fiction because;  second, Oprah and her team have genuinely good taste- it's a taste that clearly favors stories of struggle and adversity often featuring characters from the lower levels of the socio-economic ladder, but those are exactly the type of narrative I'm trying to access through this project, so that makes it a match.  

   Gap Creek was picked more or less from obscurity- it was published by a regional press (Algonquin Press of North Carolina) and half of the New York Times review- published two months before Oprah picked it for her club- spent half the review trying to convince readers not to ignore Gap Creek for a variety of reasons related to the marketing.  Julie Harmon, the narrator and protagonist is the middle daughter of a struggling Appalachian hill family.  Dad is permanently disabled, forcing Julie into the role of provider on the family farm (she is something like 15 when the action starts).  As will surprise no reader with any familiarity with how things go in this category of novel, Julie leaps to marry literally the first man who talks to her as a means of escape.

   Though she frequently bemoans her quick choice throughout the book, I, for one, thought she did just fine, since the husband she picks doesn't beat her up or abandon her, which is pretty rare behavior in this part of the country as far as literary fiction goes.  Julie and her husband re-locate to a shared "house" in Gap Creek and start building a life together.  Although there is less interpersonal drama than a reader might expect from the place and time of the book, the physical environment picks up the slack, providing a series of natural and man-made catastrophe's,

   I agree with the New York Times reviewer and presumably Oprah's selection team that Robert Morgan is a rare American author who can write convincingly about manual labor.  Unlike many of the narrators/protagonist in this part of America, I actually liked Julie Harmon: give me a plucky American broad any day of the week.

  

Published 1/21/25

Edisto (1984)

by Padgett Powell

Edisto Island, South Carolina

South Carolina: 10/14

   Edisto was the debut novel from Padgett Powell. It was nominated as a finalist in 1984 for the National Book Award and that was just about the peak of Powell's literary prominence despite five more novels over the years- including a sequel to this book, Edisto Revisited, published in 1996.  Edisto is a conventional bildungsroman written from the perspective of Everson Manigault, living with his eccentric, semi-single Mother, "The Doctor" (she's a professor) in a ramshackle model home of a beach house on the South Carolina coast.  The plot is coming-of-age 101, but Everson is a class above your normal teen, American narrator, with a wit and verve that bring to mind an 80's era hipster more than the struggling son of a (well-educated) single mom with a drinking problem.  Of course, where would the bildungsroman even be without inattentive parenting.

    I was also challenged by the modernist flourishes introduced by Powell- removing narrative guardrails and leaving the reader guessing about what was actually going on throughout large portions of the plot. "Challenging" describes almost none of the books in the 1,001 Novels project, so having to go back and re-read certain chapters really stood out to me during my reading experience.  

Published 1/30/25

Mama Day (1988)

by Gloria Naylor

Willow Springs, South Carolina

South Carolina:  11/14

   Mama Day is an intergenerational family novel written from a variety of perspectives about an matriarchal African American clan that managed to obtain title to an island in between South Carolina and Georgia in the time before the United States was a country.  Every since, the clan has lived between and apart from the surrounding world creating a distinct African-American world that operates in the absence of white people. As is always the case, the use of multiple perspectives telling the same set of events once, twice and three times over slows down the pace of reading.   Particularly, the main plot line, about Ophelia AKA "Baby Girl" AKA "Coco" the scion of the imperial line of Days, and her relationship with George, a self-made orphan who has risen to be a co-owner of his own engineering firm in New York City, is told first by Ophelia then by George, or vice versa, for the entire length of the book.   As it turns out, despite interesting moments, neither character is particularly insightful about their situation, George having been raised without a family full stop and Ophelia having been raised in a matriarchy with literally no strong male role models.  

  Neither one of them has a clue, and that might have made for an interesting book, but after the couple head back to Ophelia's home island, the book bogs down in a magical-realist witchcraft plot that does no favors to any of the characters.  Mama Day was a swing and a miss for me, with some interesting moments- honestly, ANY African American characters who aren't totally poverty stricken are a welcome break from the usual tone of the titles selected by editor Susan Straight, and the scenes set in New York City, specifically the courtship between George and Coco, fit this bill.  However, the scenes that are set down in the South are tedious, and the idea that this whole book eventually boils down to (spoiler alert) Coco being voodoo hexed by a rival struck me as preposterous- and that's writing as a fan of magical realism, not to mention speculative fiction.

Published 2/11/25

In the Heat of the Night (1965)

by John Ball

Wells, South Carolina

South Carolina: 12/16

  I am inching towards closing out Virginia/North and South Carolina.  In the Heat of the Night was a welcome respite from the parade of sad girls that populate a majority of the 1,001 Novels project and it's a certified classic as well- I checked out the Penguin Classics 50th anniversary edition from the library.  My sense is that In the Heat of the Night has been soft-dropped out of any applicable canon because it's a book with a black protagonist written  by a white guy AND because the white characters use the n-word like it is going out of style throughout the book- they are an obviously unsympathetic bunch, but I swear, there is an n word on almost every of the 150 pages of In the Heat of the Night,  It's hard to imagine a contemporary reader stomaching the rough language without taking offense (or wanting to read a similar book written by a black author).  

  The black police detective from Pasadena- Virgil Tibbs- is a very pre-1960's type of fellow- always careful not to give offense to his racist white hosts, even as the n bombs explode around him. The idea that Tibbs would want to help these people solve a murder seemed laughable to me. 

Published 2/13/25

Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

by Dorothy Allison

Greenville, South Carolina

South Carolina:  13/16

    Bastard Out of Carolina had me searching for the "Trauma Porn" wikipedia page (which they have titled "Misery Lit" to see if this would have been one of the first books in that genre and sure enough, the Wikipedia page lists Wild Swans (1992) and Angela's Ashes (1996) as "seminal works establishing the genre."  I think there is a good case to add this book to that list. In more old fasthioned terminology it's a bildungsroman about the miserable childhood of the author who was raised by her mother and abusive (physical, mental and yes, sexual) step father in shit town South Carolina (AKA Greenville).  Bastard Out of Carolina still has a capacity to shock over thirty years later- particularly the scenes where the protagonist pleasures herself to the thought of her (physical) abuse at the hands of her stepfather.  

   When things escalate to full blown rape later in the book, she does not take delight in the experience.  Besides exploring that extremely, extremely forbidden link between childhood sexual abuse and precocious sexuality,  Bastard Out of Carolina is also notable/ahead of its time in the way it depicts a mother who ultimately choses her partner over her child.  That continues to be a fraught subject, as the recent turmoil surrounding Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro, demonstrates. 

Published 2/14/25

Scarlet Sister Mary (1928)

by Julia Peterkin

Fort Motte, South Carolina

South Carolina: 14/16

    I actually do want to visit South Carolina, Charleston, particularly, and I thought the books from that part of the state were interesting and the ones from outside the city less so.  Scarlet Sister Mary is a Pulitzer Prize winner and it is also a book about freed black slaves written in dialect by a white author so.... kind of cringe? I mean, it's cringe, but what are you going to do.  Mary, the eponymous protagonist, is a woman who marries young and is quickly abandoned by her husband, leading her to have multiple children with a succession of men to the mild approbation of her community.  Having now done enough non-fiction reading (largely via the NY Times hundred best books of the 21st century, which has a half dozen titles on the subject), I now understand that the idea of imposing conventional bourgeois morality on a formerly enslaved population is absurd since the women were forced to have sex by their owners whenever and wherever they pleased, and their children were then frequently sold as slaves.  Where does Christian morality have a place in that world?

  So, I guess beside the entire premise being ridiculous, it's an interesting milieu and one entirely absent of white faces.

Published 2/28/25

Porgy (1925)

by Dubose Heyward

Charleston, South Carolina

South Carolina: 15/16

    Here is another novel written about African-Americans by a white dude- using the "Gullah" dialect. (which to contemporary ears sounds like the way racists think black people talk in the South but which is actually a distinct dialect with deep African roots). Heyward turned this book into Porgy and Bess, an opera which had worldwide success but I'm assuming was racist as shit which is why no one talks about it anymore.  It was hard to get over the racist tropes in Porgy and I would def ask editor Susan Straight about this pick for sure.

NOT READ

Sassafras, Cypress and Indigo (1982)

by Ntozake Shange 

Charleston, South Carolina

South Carolina: 16/16

1,001 Novels: A Library of America Maryland & Delaware

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

 Maryland & Delaware

  What to say about the literary footprint of Maryland and Delaware? I was astonished that Edgar Allan Poe wasn't included considering his long residence in Baltimore.  I wasn't astonished that editor Susan Straight left out Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon, pardon me for saying, but she doesn't seem like a Pynchon type, based on her selections up to this point.  At every turn, Straight favors the stories of the underdogs, the go-nowheres and the poor and abused.  Good for her, I say- certainly I have learned about the life experiences of the underclass from New England through the South thus far.   That, after all, is the point of programmatic reading: Exposing yourself to worlds beyond your own.

  Looking through the reviews below, I couldn't even pick out a favorite.  I suppose maybe the Anne Tyler title, since she is a major American author, I'd consciously avoided before the 1,001 Novels Project.

Published 8/2/24

The Book of Unknown American (2014)

by Christina Enriquez

Newark,. Delaware

Delaware: 1/3

    Welcome to Delaware! I think I took the train through Delaware on the way to New York back in college.  Beyond that, no.  When I was in college I never- not once- got in a car driven by myself or someone else to explore the area.  It's not a regret, exactly, but I doubt I will ever in my life get another three or so years to explore a part of the United States like I could have in college.  Delaware registers only three books in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project, two in the north and one in the south. I'm going to lump these three books in with Maryland (9) and DC(11) to give me a Chapter 4: North subgroup of 23 books.  The other subchapter will be Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina.

   The Book of Unknown Americans is one of those good YA titles in the 1,001 Novels project where I wasn't entirely sure it was actually a YA novel until I finished it and looked up reviews and internet mentions.  It's basically a YA title, plot 2 (Plot one is the YA bildungsroman, plot two is the tragedy befalls an overprotected child as they transition to adolescence.) Here, the main plot is a mom/dad/brain damaged daughter who legally immigrate to Newark, Delaware so their daughter can take advantage of a school for special education in the area.  Dad, formerly the owner of his own construction firm, takes a job at a mushroom farm to secure working papers.  Mom, unable to work under the terms of their immigration status, sits around the house and tries to cope with life in America.  Daughter makes a friend with the neighbor boy, the child of Panamanian immigrants and other minor characters include a Puerto Rican, a Venezuelan and a Dominican- all legal immigrants living in the same apartment complex outside of Newark, Delaware.

   The tension in the plot comes from the relationship between the neighbor boy and the brain damaged high-school aged daughter of the main family.  Once that gets going it is crystal clear that a tragedy will befall the family as a result, and when it happens the mechanism is hardly surprising.  On the other hand, it's great to read a book written from the POV- legal immigrants from Latin America (various) living in Northern Delaware- exactly the type of book for the 1,001 Novels:  A Library of America project.

Published 8/5/24

The Saint of Lost Things (2005) 

by Christopher Castellani 

Wilmington, Delaware

Delaware: 2/3

   The Saint of Lost Things is volume 2 of a four or five volume saga about an Italian American family living in Wilmington, Delaware.  Author Christopher Castellani is the director of Grub Street, the arts organization that was embroiled in the 'bad art friend' scandal last year.   Like many of the authors on this list he has a decent reputation and a job teaching the arts but no real hits.  I mention it because while I was reading The Saint of Lost Things it occurred to me that the author was trying to give Italian Americans the kind of serious family/immigrant novel that they lack.  It was a supposition that was born out by the New York Times review of the next volume in this series, where the reviewer quotes Castellani as being motivated by the degree to which Italian-Americans have been ignored by the more intellectual parts of American literary culture.

 Welp. Not to make things worse, but my main thought while reading The Saint of Lost Things was precisely how uninteresting this particular group of characters turned out in the pages of this book.  The main character is the Italian immigrant/matriarch of the clan, here she is a young bride, recently arrived from Italy, who is struggling to fulfill her function as a bearer of healthy children (preferably a son) and make her way in the confusing world of America.  Her husband works at a Ford Factory and dreams of opening his own restaurant.   There's also the brother of the husband and his non-Italian wife and a single man (also Italian American) who lives by himself after the death of his parents.  Besides the ongoing obsession with this lady having a child, the rest of the plot largely revolves around attempts by the locals to scare the sole African American family into moving out of their Italian American neighborhood.   They all come across as a bunch of uneducated assholes.  Not sure if that was the point, but that was the message I received.

  Reading The Saint of Lost Things did give me cause to consider the "dim bulb" narrator problem and how it might apply to Italian-Americans, a group that largely eschew intellectual accomplishments in favor of "hard work," however that may be defined.   Probably a legacy of millennium of being under the boot of Catholicism and being told to keep their mouths shut and to not ask any questions of authority, I'd guess.

Published 9/4/24

The Furrows (2022)

by Namwali Serpell

Bethany Beach, Delaware *

Delaware 3/3

   Like many readers I was extremely impressed by Zambian-American novelist Namwali Serpell's first novel, The Old Drift (2019).   The Old Drift was hands down the best first novel I'd read for years- mixing historical fiction about a mostly ignored location (Southern Rhodesia/Zambia) with science-fiction, moving across space and time with a well detailed cast of characters- it wasn't a perfect novel, but it was an amazing FIRST novel- being neither a trauma porn take or a bildungsroman written from the perspective of a character who shares many of the author's characteristics. 

  Thus, when The Furrows was release in 2022 I was at first excited, then disappointed when I read the reviews, Serpell having moved in a different direction from book one.  If her first novel placed her in a category far beyond what is normally achieved by most authors with their first book, her second novel sounded like something most American authors would write for their first book: A dour tale about a biracial young woman who is present when her younger brother goes missing/dies in the Atlantic ocean during a summer visit.  Like many readers I was surprised that the premise here is that a seven year old and ten year old from a family with little history in the water were allowed to swim alone in the ocean without supervision. especially since the major plot dynamic is that the mother of the family never, ever gets over the disappearance/death of the younger brother.

  The Furrows is certainly an example of American literary fiction family plot type 3- child dies young and the entire family spends the rest of their life (and the book) absolutely not getting over it.  Here, the narrator and primary actor is Cassandra Williams- black dad, white mom.  She is a young adult with a good education and no career.  Her mom, a wealthy heiress (ish) living in San Francisco, has dedicated her entire life to the proposition that Cassandra's little brother is not dead, merely missing, and she's set up a non-profit to help others sharing her fate.

  Cassandra is, obviously, haunted by her missing/dead brother, and most of the book involves her running into guys named Wayne who might be her brother.  Serpell has injected a "magic realism" edge to the text, to the point where the reader is sometimes unsure if Cassandra is hallucinating or not.  At least one major event in the book- some kind of explosion at SFO is treated so obliquely that the reader doesn't know if it happened at all.

    Like many works of contemporary American literary fiction written about people from the upper echelons of the socio-economic ladder, I found the characters in The Furrows borderline insufferable. Were The Furrows Serpell's first novel, I would say it was a good first effort but not that interesting, as the book she wrote after The Old Drift, it can only be called a disappointment. 

Published 9/5/24

Sugar House (2000)

by Laura Lippman

Baltimore, Maryland

Maryland: 1/9

   After slogging through over 100 novels set in New York State I'm positively giddy at the prospect of dispensing with Delaware in 3 books and Maryland in 9.   Coincidentally I was reading On Such a Full Sea (2014) by Chang Rae Lee at the same time I was reading Sugar House a so-called "Tess Monaghan" mystery by Baltimore based author Laura Lippman.  On Such a Full Sea is a concrete example of a book that could have substituted for yet another lady detective novel- On Such a Full Sea is squarely set in a (post-apocalyptic) Baltimore, called B-more for the Chinese descended settlers.  Sea has ample description of the Maryland landscape and is firmly anchored in its location.  At the same time, I get what editor Susan Straight is trying to do here, platforming female voices in a genre that goes through periods of guy-heavy narratives. 

  Lippman is married to fellow writer David Simon (he did The Wire)- they both worked in newspapers, once upon a time. This book isn't particularly concerned with the "urban areas in decline" thesis, it's more like a work-a-day detective novel that has a well-observed locale.  The Domino Sugars sign, in particular, is referenced frequently.  The reader is also treated to a couple of trips to colorful Philadelphia- which for some reason has been lumped with the Appalachians and southwestern Midwest, for the purposes of the 1,001 Novels project.

An elegant, lovely novel-in-stories, set in 1950s America, when a young boy, after the loss of brother and father, finds solace in the complicated faith of his mother, while realizing his own gay identity.

Published 9/9/24

Mother of Sorrows (2005)

by Richard McCann

1600 St Camillus Dr, Silver Spring, Maryland

Maryland: 2/9

  When I was in undergraduate in Washington DC, a couple of our friend group moved into a 10th floor apartment in one of the big, nice apartment buildings that line some of the avenues out this way.  My memories of Silver Spring are limited to the drive to and from that apartment and being inside the actual apartment, since I didn't own a car and there was nothing a young college student would do in Silver Spring besides sitting in a friend's apartment and watching NFL football and/or the Simpsons.   Editor Susan Straight locates this book in one of the single-family home communities that is more typical for the area than the apartment building I frequented, but Mother of Sorrows could have just as easily been located in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington DC, where half of the connected short-stories occur.

  The description that Editor Straight provided for this book left me questioning if she actually read the same book I did:

An elegant, lovely novel-in-stories, set in 1950s America, when a young boy, after the loss of brother and father, finds solace in the complicated faith of his mother, while realizing his own gay identity.

   This sentence isn't wholly inaccurate, but the narrator is the adult version of the "young boy," and the father plays a very minor role.  Rather, Mother of Sorrows is largely about the relationship between the author-narrator and his real-life brother, Davis.  Both of them were gay, but Davis self-destructed and killed himself accidentally with a heroin overdose in his 30's.  Richard McCann, meanwhile, became a moderately succesful author and teacher and didn't die until 2021.  Mother of Sorrows is about the brother and his relationship with the author, more than anything else.

  McCann pairs a light, elliptical style with the dark themes of a gay identity denied by a parent.  While the book does begin in the 1950s/60's when the two brother are kids, by the end of the book is well into the modern era and Mom is still denying the gay identity of both her children.  Sure to be at the top of my Maryland list if only because it isn't a book about an adolescent girl.

Published 9/10/24

Bright River Trilogy (1984)

by Annie Green

Hooke's Crossing, Maryland

Maryland: 3/9

    Bright River Trilogy is as obscure as it gets- a one-off author, published in the 1980's to no acclaim, and author Annie Green vanished from the public sphere without a trace.   It's also not a trilogy in the sense that it is one novel, under three hundred pages long.  The "trilogy" refers to the trio of main characters who live in the middle-of-nowhere, Maryland.  I didn't even know there were rural parts of Maryland for most of my life.  I had some idea that somewhere, Maryland had generated a "southern" culture with plantations and such, but I feel like they hush it up.

  Bright River Trilogy is not set on one of these erstwhile plantations, rather it's a small town filled with characters who- yes- you guessed it- never go anywhere.  In this way this book reminds me of several novels from upstate New York and rural New England- sad characters, often from a once well-off, now decadent/failed wealthy family of the area, slouching towards their eventual extinction.  Here you've got the well-meaning grandma whose stern husband hung himself after being implicated in a real estate fraud, the prodigal son, who goes off to Vietnam and returns with a wife who he literally picked up at the Port Authority bus station (and is an alcoholic).  Other protagonists include the whorish daughter of a local yokel- she's got a book with the 50 dudes she's banged.  Her dad spends his days reading the "M" volume of an encyclopedia to her deaf, drug-addled younger brother. 

  Besides the M volume, nobody in this tale picks up a book or appears to have any interests what so ever besides self-destruction.  You'd be forgiven if you thought this book was published last year as part of the "deaths of despair" trend, but you'd be wrong- 1984!  

Published 9/12/24

Your Face in Mine (2014)

by Jess Row

Baltimore, Maryland

Maryland: 4/9

  Susan Straight, editor of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America calls Your Face in Mine, a 2014 novel about racial reassignment surgery a "sharp satire" but I would have to disagree.   I found Your Face in Mine neither particularly sharp nor satirical.  Your Face in Mine is also another 1,001 Novels example of an author who hits a dead-end-  this novel was published in 2014 after two well received collections of short stories, the New York Times gave it a highly favorable review and compared Row to Jonathan Lethem.  Since then?  Row has been working as a non-tenured creative writing professor at NYU and being a Dad in NYC.  

  It's crazy to see how many authors make it to the point where their first novel gets a good publisher (Riverhead for this book) and a favorable NYT notice and then that is it- nothing to follow.  What is the point of all that work if only to abandon it.  It suggests to me that many SUCCESFUL authors only have one or two ideas and if it isn't an idea they can write over and over again endlessly, they are through. Shouldn't writers of literary fiction be able to come up with plots and characters that don't draw directly from their own experience?  Isn't that the point of fiction?

   This links to a larger idea I've considered recently:  That 90% or so of SUCCESFUL artists are really just telling their personal story to the world, and once they've done that they have nothing left to say. 

  This book though is strange, at least, in contrast to the domestic banality that editor Susan Straight has favored thus far, 200 books and seven states into the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project. I listened to the Audiobook- a good pick since the narrator sounds like me and the book is written with a narrator-protagonist- that's the best format for an Audiobook.  Complicated plot dynamics sink Audiobooks since you can't flip through what you've previously read to make sense of what you are presently reading.

Published 9/13/24

Mary Jane (2021)

by Jessica Anya Blau

205 Hawthorne Road, Baltimore Maryland

Maryland:  5/9

 Mary Jane is the biggest hit I've read from the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America: 13 thousand plus Amazon reviews and a movie rights deal announced last year.  It's a coming-of-age novel from the POV of a teenaged girl living in suburban Maryland.  Her life changes forever when she takes a summer nanny gig for a "Jewish family"- still an exotic thing at that time in place (70's suburban Maryland).  The father of that family is a psychiatrist specializing in substance abuse disorder.  Mary Jane's life is turned upside down that summer when it is revealed that rock-star Jimmy and his tv-famous-musical-family wife Sheba (just "Sheba") are going to be living there for the summer while Jimmy tackles his heroin addiction. 

  The book is written relentlessly from the perspective of the eponymous protagonist- this was the Audiobook that broke me in terms of listening to adolescent female narrators in the Audiobook format- no more after this book!  Mary Jane, as you would expect, is a bright, curious girl with many questions left unanswered by her waspish housewife Mom and incommunicative country-club Dad.  Given the Baltimore location and the "Parents just don't get it" setting of the early 1970's, it was hard not to think of John Waters, specifically Hairspray, the first movie version.  Mary Jane was kind of a fun-house mirror (or not-fun house mirror, in the case of Mary Jane's parents home) of the same kettle of influences that spawned Waters' distinctive vision.

   Another book I was thinking about while listening to Mary Janes was another title from the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project, The Dakota Winters,, which is another coming-of-age story with the introduction of a celebrity element.  The other title that keeps popping up is Daisy Jones and the Six, which I refuse to read, but understand is very popular. Seems to me the idea of weaving a celebrity element into one's otherwise normal-people coming-of-age story is a solid technique for generating marketplace interest in a manuscript that might otherwise not exist.  Editors will ask, "What does the protagonist LEARN from the celebrity element in your book?"

Published 9/16/24

The World Doesn't Require You (2019)

by Rion Amilcar Scott

Cross River, Maryland  

Maryland: 6/9

  The World Doesn't Require You is the second collection of short-stories which all take place in a fictional Maryland town that was the site of the only successful American slave revolt.  The best of these stories have either a satirical edge, metafictional fuckery or some kind of speculative fiction vibe.  For me the clearest comparison would be Paul Beatty in terms of tone.  Unlike many of the white Marylanders in the pages of the 1,001 Novels project, the black characters of The World Doesn't Require You are interesting.

   You don't need any back story about the fictional backstory of Cross River, Maryland, or at least, the reader isn't provided any back story.  Cross River appears mostly through its institutions- the local University plays a starring role in the longest story/novella, about two dissolute university professors (Special Talks in Loneliness Studies).  That story and another striking story about a regional variation of the popular children's game of "Ding Dong Ditch" both wallow in the academic setting of a "campus novel."  The other important institutions depicted are local churches, the focus of a story about a local musician who breaks into and then out of the local church music scene in an endless quest for the regionally distinct "sound" of Cross River.

    The World Doesn't Require You was a good selection to hear as an Audiobook.  Each story has a separate narrator, so that gave the producers an opportunity to employ a constellation of voices to tell each story 

Published 9/17/24

The Language of Light (2003)

by Meg Waite Clayton

Worthington Valley, Maryland

Maryland: 7/9

   The Language of Light is plot type 2 of the 1,001 Novels project:  Woman (or rarely, Man) comes home to deal with unresolved personal and familial issues; surprises are revealed.  I also call this the "Hallmark Movie" plot, which typically involves a busy professional woman throwing over her urban life for life in a small town in the middle of nowhere where she grew up.  Here, the protagonist is a young widow with two small children who moves back to Maryland "Horsey Country," which is a thing.

 Once ensconced in her familial estate- in the fashion of the generationally wealthy, money, or the need for money, is mentioned not a single time in the pages of The Language of Light.  Nelly, the protagonist, is not one of those Moms who spends all day worrying about her children, here, the childrearing is so effortless it makes the Mothers in countless other 1,001 Novels titles look like complainers.   Rather, Nelly spends her time thinking about her relationships: with her now dead husband, who she was on the verge of divorcing before he drove his car off the road and snapped his neck and with her father, a famous photographer/journalist known for his pictures snapped in war zones.

  Nelly, it seems, also once had dreams of becoming a professional photographer, only life got in the way.  Nelly befriends Emma, the wealthy widower who lives next door and when Dad shows up for the holidays, Emma and Nelly's dad rekindle an old relationship.  I found many of the plot points ridiculous, like the trip Nelly takes with her "portfolio"(mostly pictures of her kids) to New York City to try to land a solo show.  True, she laughs at herself, but maybe not hard enough. 

   In terms of the concerns of the 1,001 Novels project, The Language of Light is worthwhile because of the depiction of Maryland Horsey country but otherwise, no.

Published 9/18/24

Mason's Retreat (1995)

by Christopher Tilghman

Chesapeake, Maryland

Maryland: 8/9

  Ready to wrap up Maryland!  Mason's Retreat is an example a rare but important genre in the 1,001 Novels project, a volume from a multi-volume multi-generational family history series.  This family is the Mason family, owners of a southern-style plantation in Maryland, of all places.  I was frankly unaware of this part of Maryland despite spending my college years in Washington DC, but it is out there.  It's a decidedly coastal location with much of the transit in this book taking place via boat, in a manner similar to the Maine coast, with folks popping by for visits on their sailboats and what not. 

  This volume is the first of four- each with a different time period and cast of characters.  Here, the Mason's are not the Mason's at all but a cadet branch who have inherited the plantation, called Mason's Retreat, after the death of a maiden aunt, the previous occupant.  The time is the great depression, and the inheritor, Edward Mason, is at the end of his financial rope after his airplane parts factory in Manchester UK is put to the rack during the Great Depression.  Mason and his wife, Edith (the protagonist) are both American but relocated to the UK as wealthy people did back then.  No one is particularly excited about relocating to a run-down plantation house, but hey, life could be worse, right?

  Once they make it to Maryland they meet the house staff- it never gets brought up in Mason's Retreat, but this is the same general area where Frederick Douglass was born a slave (and escaped).  Race kind of simmers beneath the surface but despite the inclusion of some black characters the author is mostly concerned with Edith.   They've hardly settled in to plantation life when Hitler emerges, followed by renewed interest on the part of the British Government in manufacturing more airplanes, and Edith is left to her own devices.  Her own devices being a lusty affair with a neighbor- class and race appropriate, thank heavens.

  Mason's Retreat was another title from the 1,001 Novels project that was great because it focuses on this specific place- but the humans in the book are less memorable than the plantation itself.

Published 9/19/24

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982)

by Anne Tyler

Baltimore, Maryland

Maryland: 9/9

  Maryland, complete.  So easy! New York with its 100 books for the state and 80 for the city is way beyond the average number of books per state.  That number is more like 10.  Maryland with its 9 titles is just under that average, but you could also give it credit for most of the books in the DC chapter, since many of those characters go back and forth between DC and the Maryland suburbs.   There are no Maryland books representing the panhandle, nor are any cities discussed outside of Baltimore.  I thought editor Susan Straight did do a good job representing weird rural Maryland.  In terms of the Baltimore titles, it seems like the TV show, The Wire would be the best pick but that would require changing the name of the project to something besides 1,001 Novels.  That's the second state in a row (New Jersey, The Sopranos) where I felt like the best novel to represent a place wasn't a novel at all.

   Anne Tyler is one of those authors that I've consciously avoided because of her subject matter (sad families, or so I gather.)  If you want me to read a novel about a sad family or a wealthy, well-educated white couple whose marriage falls apart it had better be either a) foreign or b)a major prize winner or preferably both, otherwise... I've heard it already.  Sure enough, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant has a moment in the publisher provided auxiliary materials (Book club questions,  interview with the author), where she is asked a question like, "Most of your books deal with marriage and family, but this book is just about family, why is that?" It reminds me of the scene in the Blues Brothers film where they show up to a gig and are told that the bar has both types of music, "Country AND western."   

   Tyler has flirted with the major awards- she's got three books, including this one, that were Pulitzer Finalists and she's got two books that were Booker nominated- a shortlist and a longlist.  This book is about a sad family:  Mom, abandoned by her husband to raise three kids on her own.  Ezra, the oldest, a sad-sack restaurant owner, single, Jenny, a doctor going on her third husband and Cody, an efficiency expert who steals Ezra's girlfriend and marries her.   There wasn't anything "Baltimore" about Dinner except it's actual physical location.  As I've mentioned before, a characteristic of family-centered fiction is that the characters don't talk to anyone else, don't go anywhere (unless it is off camera, so to speak) and don't do anything of note.   Certainly that is the case here- it's simply true of this whole category of fiction, prize winning or not, domestic or foreign.  

Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965) by Flannery O’Connor

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965) 

by Flannery O’Connor

Milledgeville, Georgia

Georgia: 16/23

   Flannery O'Connor would be one of a handful of authors from this chapter that I would group with "best American authors."  Faulkner, of course, he's the going-away number one. Elmore Leonard representing Florida.   Percy Walker from Louisiana and Flannery O'Connor in Georgia.  Really, it's only Alabama without a single top-flight writer.  I'm pretty sure I read Flannery O'Connor in an American Lit class in college.  In 2013 I watched the John Huston movie Wise Blood, based on her novel- that movie is so, so good. Really underrated/forgotten. Then in 2015 I read the novel and her other novel, and in 2016, this book.

  More so than Faulkner, O'Connor is the beating heart of "Southern Gothic."  Compared to Faulkner, she is easier to enjoy, the literary equivalent of the critic-directors of the French New Wave.  Faulkner, on the other hand, is like the last apostle of the high-modernist/modernism-for-modernism's sake of Joyce and Proust.

Published 6/12/16
Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965)
by Flannery O'Connor

    The genre of literature known as "Southern Gothic" is essentially William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor.   A major difference between Southern and other iterations of literature known as Gothic is the absence of the supernatural as a major motif.  Instead, "Gothic" in the context of southern literature refers to quirky characters and dark plots.   Everything That Rises Must Converge was the last book published by O'Connor before she died of Lupus at 46.

  Everything That Rises Must Converge is a group of short stories, nine in total, six of which were published in various publications prior to their collection.  The characters and themes are familiar: racist mother's, religious fanatics, disappointing sons, class and race conflict.  The pairing of a disaffected, failed, intellectual son and an elderly, widowed mother reoccurs in multiple stories.  This is also a frequent dynamic in the work of William Faulkner, and it is a combination that foreshadows the dynamic between conservative parents and their more liberal offspring for decades to come.

  Flannery O'Connor was herself no hipster, she was a practicing Catholic and remained so until her untimely death.  Her appeal to hipsters is a combination of a little bit of the dead-before-their-time rock-star, a little bit of the consanguinity between her concerns and the concerns of 1960's youth culture and a little bit of the darkness and weirdness of her vision, which spread so far, particularly in the worlds of film and tv to the point where her influence isn't cited.   Whether cited or not, her influence on the artistic concept of "weird small town America" can be traced back to her work.  For example, it's hard to imagine David Lynch or Tom Waits without Flannery O'Connor.