Heathen Valley (1962) by Romulus Linney

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Heathen Valley (1962)

by Romulus Linney

Valle Crucis, North Carolina

North Carolina: 17/20

    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.

Porgy (1925) by Dubose Heyward

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

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.

Blacktop Wasteland (2020) by S. A. Crosby

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Blacktop Wasteland (2020)

by S.A. Crosby

153 Main St, Mathews, Virginia

Virginia: 16/17

   I have been trying to finish Blacktop Wasteland, S.A. Crosby's excellent crime-caper book, since it was published in 2020, but it hits so close to my professional life that I couldn't bear it.  Even within the constraints of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project, Blacktop Wasteland was a struggle.  I checked it out twice as an Audiobook and once as an Ebook before I finally finished a hardback copy from the public library. It was only a struggle because the characters are so richly drawn, particularly the protagonist, that it was impossible for me not to empathize with them to the point where reading/listening to the book was painful.   

Scarlet Sister Mary (1928) by Julia Peterkin

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

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.

Bastard out of Carolina (1992) by Dorothy Allison

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

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. 

Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the 20th Century Novel (2024) by Edwin Frank

 Book Review

Stranger Than Fiction: 

Lives of the 20th Century Novel (2024)

by Edwin Frank

   There was probably no one on EARTH more excited about the prospect of reading Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the 20th Century Novel:  A book pitched at a general reader offering a meandering stroll through some subjective highlights from the 20th century literary canon? Yes please!   Because I was so excited, someone considering reading this book shouldn't be put off by the fact that I ultimately felt disappointed by Stranger Than Fiction.  I certainly appreciated the premise, and enjoyed certain chapters, but on the whole I finished without having added significantly to my thoughts about the 20th century novel. 

   Or maybe it's more the case that the blog format doesn't allow me to do this book justice.  I think to really appreciate Stranger Than Fiction I would have to buy a copy (I checked out the e-book from the library) and really mark it up, make marginal notations, etc.  Then I would need someone to talk about this book with, someone who has read as much as the author.  

   One of the things I did think about after reading was Frank's idea that the 20th century novel was in conversation with itself from the very beginning.  His best illustration of this was the dialogue that publisher/critic/author Virginia Woolf had with James Joyce and Ulysses, a book she did not like.  Here we are, right in the center of the genesis/apogee of the 20th century novel and one major author hates the work of another major author.  

    

In the Heat of the Night (1965) by John Ball

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

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. 

Dry Bones in the Valley (2014) by Tim Bouman

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Dry Bones in the Valley (2014)

by Tim Bouman

Susquehanna Municipality, Franklin Forks, Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania: 5/27

  Dry Bones in the Valley is another regional police procedural set in the Pennstucky, i.e. the Pennsylvania Appalachians.   Unlike the Amish-country set snoozer from yesterday,  Dry Bones in the Valley is more interesting, if only because of the frequent and animated presence of guns, gun fire and gun play on nearly every page.  It turns out the people in this part of the country really like their guns.  All kind of guns- pistols, rifles and even muzzle loaded muskets, which play an important part in unravelling one of the two murders that must be solved.

   Bouman does an excellent job of evoking this unfamiliar (to me, anyway) part of the country, with plenty of well described walks in different landscapes. There isn't a great deal of tension that the murder victim remains a john doe up until the case is actually solved, which guts many of the emotions a reader might invest in a book of this genre.  There is very little building of the case and then the solving at the end reads like something out of an Encyclopedia Brown book, but still, I did enjoy this relative to other examples of detective fiction in the 1,001 Novels project.

Just Plain Murder (2018) by Laura Bradford

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Just Plain Murder (2018)

by Laura Bradford

Paradise, Pennsylvania 

Pennsylvania: 4/27

   Editor Susan Straight loves herself a regional detective novel, so I wasn't surprised that "Amish Country" is represented in the 1,001 Novels project by, yes, you guessed it, a detective novel set in Amish country.  Straight calls this "an engrossing debut" in her map copy but this was honestly one of my least favorite books in the entire 1,001 Novels project.  The narrator is not the detective himself but rather his girlfriend, a thirty-something who has retreated to Amish country to run a small tchotchke store after her marriage in New York City broke up.   There is less action in Just Plain Murder than your average coming of age book about an underprivileged girl growing up in the urban Northeast- and fewer murders.  When the mystery is finally solved, the reader is likely to be struck by the over-all weakness of the entire book. And so much talk about this sad ladies feelings. 

Juice (2024) by Tim Winton

 Book Review

Juice (2024)

by Tim Winton

  Juice is a well-regarded new novel by Australian author Tim Winton- it hasn't been released inside the US yet, though you can buy an international version on Amazon in semi-bootleg fashion.  I picked up the hardback during my recent visit to Ireland.  Juice is the story of an un-named narrator from future Australia who has been captured by another nameless survivor as he seeks a resting spot with a similarly un-named little girl.  As he sits in his cage, trying to talk his way out of what feels like certain doom, he narrates his past in chapter sized portions, with his interlocutory frequently commenting on his chattiness.  The frame of the story isn't great, but the story itself:  About surviving in the post-global warming north of Australia as a homesteader and agent for an anarchist band of fighters seeking to extirpate the remainders of the old world order, is.

    Winton combines a well-researched understanding of homesteading in the wastes of Australia with a decent grasp of human emotion and a vision of far-future life that sounds extremely plausible.  Great horrors are hinted at but rarely described, rather Winton produces a survival narrative punctuated with episodes of astonishing violence- a savvy combination that had me wondering if Juice had been purchased by Apple/Netflix/HBOmax for a tv version before it even came out in the US.  It's not hard to imagine the events of Juice being transferred to the American southwest or a post-global warming great plains- one of the critical episodes even takes place in the well-described Utah wilderness.   American fans of clim-fic would be well advised to watch for the American release, sure to be forthcoming, or even pick up the semi-bootleg foreign editions for sale at Amazon right now.