The Book of Unknown Americans (2014) by Christina Enriquez

 1,001 Novels:  A Library of America

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.

1,001 Novels A Library of America: Capes and Tidewaters, Shifting Coasts and Capitals

 1,001 Novels A Library of America:

 Capes and Tidewaters, Shifting Coasts and Capitals

District of Columbia, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina

   True, I haven't finished up New York/New Jersey quite yet, but the press of needing new books to read waits for no person.   The third chapter in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America are the states which run north to south against the Atlantic Ocean, from Delaware in the north to South Carolina in the south.  This is the most diverse chapter yet, ranging from the majority black capital to the oldest of the old Confederacy states in the south, South Carolina.  In terms of personal experiences, I went to college in Washington DC so I'm familiar with that area and the parts of the surrounding states that interface with it.  I went to Baltimore a couple times in college.   I've drive through Virginia and North Carolina and I've never set foot inside South Carolina, but know plenty about its history.

  Delaware only merits three books, making it the least represented state in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project by a good margin.  Looks like  77 books for the whole chapter, so I should be able to knock it out in less time than either New England or New York/New Jersey.  I am very much looking forward from moving on from New York City and the travails of its citizens.

Eddie and the Cruisers (1980) by P.F. Kluge

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Eddie and The Cruisers (1980)

P.F. Kluge

Berkeley Heights, New Jersey

New Jersey: 7/14

    Editor Susan Straight called Eddie and The Cruisers an "iconic novel of 1950s rock-and-roll," and I was surprised to find out the book itself is hugely out of print (a copy costs 100 at Amazon) AND unavailable to check-out from the Los Angeles Public Library.  It is also unavailable from the library as a Kindle book, forcing me to read Eddie and The Cruisers on the native Libby app on my cell phone.  Reading a 300 page book on my phone is possible but unpleasant because the screen is so small: So much flipping of virtual pages that it becomes a distraction and at times simply unbearable.  There is also the distraction of other things to look at on ones phone, making it hard to focus on reading a book.

  Even so I feel like I'm not being overly negative when I observe that Eddie and The Cruisers, iconic though it might be, is not actually a good book, in the sense of how it is written, the plot or any other themes the author may be trying to express.   I did look up the movie and specifically the sound-track, this being a solid piece of IP even if it isn't a great book.  The band they found to perform the music of Eddie and The Cruisers was an east-coast bar band that essentially functioned as a Bruce Springsteen cover band in fact if not in name.

  That got me thinking about the New Jersey bar-rock scene, which this book somewhat describes.  While at some level I know that artists as disparate as Bruce Springsteen and Bon Jovi came "from" New Jersey, I didn't know what that meant, and Eddie and The Cruisers gave me some idea of the milieu.  In that regard it's a great pick for the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, New Jersey chapter, but otherwise not worth the effort to dig up.  I do want to see the movie after reading the book. 

Pink Slime (2024) by Fernanda Trias

 Book Review

Pink Slime (2024)

by Fernanda Trias

   I confused Uruguayan author Fernanda Trias with Fernanda Melchor (Mexican), but I read Pink Slime because it is another excellent example of the wave of speculative/realist fiction emerging out of Latin America.  I could name a half dozen books just from my blog- Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez (Argentina), is one of my favorite books of this decade.  Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird (2023) by Agustina Bazterrica, who also wrote Tender is the Flesh, one of my favorite books from 2019.  There is You Glow in the Dark (2024)by Liliana Colanzi, and I'm sure, others that I've missed.  These books exist alongside their non-speculative counterparts- authors like the aforementioned Melchor, and Brazilian Ana Paula Maia.

  I was so anxious to read Pink Slime that I read it on my phone, on the native reader for the Libby library app, which was a major sacrifice.  Pink Slime takes place in an unnamed Latin American or possibly Southern European nation- there is a coast line, towns further inland and geographic features of the city that evoke specific cities- la rambla (Barcelona) and barrio alta (Lisbon) but appear to be used generically here.  The narrator and protagonist is unnamed, working as a caretaker for Mauro who has the syndrome where he never feels full from eating and is essentially constantly hungry.  Mauro's wealthy parents are absent for a reason unexplained, and the narrator is housebound as the coastal city is beset by a killing red wind that flays humans alive after infection.  Respite comes in the form of a thick, bad smelling fog that allows transit around the increasingly deserted city.  Food, the pink slime of the title, comes from a chicken processing plant, newly constructed amid dwindling food supplies.

   Pink Slime is a novel of pre-apocalyptic survival and I found it compelling, worth picking up from the library for sure.

Jernigan (1991) by David Gates

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Jernigan (1991)

by David Gates

Trenton, New Jersey

New Jersey: 6/14

  Jernigan was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1992.  It was the first novel by author David Gates, who went on to publish one additional novel and two collections of short stories, most recently in 2015.  It's pretty crazy to read a novel by an author who made it to the last three of the Pulitzer Prize with his first book and then basically quit. Like the protagonist of The Sports Writer, he did parlay it into a journalism career, where he was a writer and editor at Newsweek until 2008.   Jernigan is an example of a sad dad, suburban New Jersey type, vice: alcoholic, issue: PTSD from wife's dramatic death(running drunk out of their suburban pool party, getting behind the wheel of her car and backing out of the driveway into the path of an oncoming truck, which hits her car and kills her). 

  Like all substance abuse narratives, I found the character rather self-dramatizing. Substance abusers are all similar in that they act like they are the only people to grapple with a particular problem and uncaring of the fact that their particular failure also impacts other members of their community who often are suffering from the exact same issue.  Picking up in the aftermath of his wives death, Jernigan suffers another trauma when his famous-painter dies in a house fire, which also destroys all his unsold paintings. This double trauma sends him into a real spiral, where he falls in bed with the singlish mom of his son's girlfriend, and finds himself living in her "suburban survivalist" home, where she brews moonshine and raises rabbits in the basement to eat. 

  Single mom and her daughter have their own issues, and the whole situation can only be described as a god awful suburban mess. At least, though, Jernigan is an interesting, articulate guy, and there was enough incident in the plot to keep me from crying tears of boredom. 

Final Payments (1978) by Mary Gordon

1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Final Payments (1978)

by Mary Gordon

Queens, New York

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 15/26

New York: 91/105

  In 2017, a New York Times reviewer of Gordon's most recent novel called her, "the bard of the American Catholic experience" but then goes right on to say that perhaps she hasn't gotten due credit because most serious readers in this country think Catholicism is stupid and its avid followers are idiots.  I don't agree with the former sentiment- there is plenty interesting about Catholicism, as indeed, there is about every succesful world religion, but I do agree with the second sentiment: that practicing Catholics tend not to be very interesting people because of the requirements of the faith to not ask certain questions and to definitely follow certain arbitrary rules because "God says."   I'm also always thinking about the hundreds of years the Catholic church spent trying to prevent normal people from reading the Bible because it was "dangerous" and of course the Inquisition is a personal sore spot as someone who was raised Jewish.  Catholicism has been systematically eliminating people who think differently and take issue with authority for over a millennium. 

 For this reason I would Final Payments in the "boring protagonist" category of books on the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America list.   The thirty year old protagonist, Isabel Moore, is a woman who has spent her entire adult life caring for her bed-ridden father, a once prodigious Catholic intellectual who has served as the guiding light of her part of Irish-Catholic Queens.  As a care-taking gig, the requirements of her dad seem particularly onerous- at one point she recalls how she only got one hour to herself outside the house and had to do that by skipping Church, which is the only reason she was allowed to leave the house.

  At the beginning of the book, her father dies leaving Isabel Moore adrift.  She has two friends in the world- one a divorced lady living in Manhattan and the other a married mother living unhappily with her local pal husband outside of Albany (I think?)  After the funeral, Isabel lands a gig surveying in home caretakers of indigent elderly people and almost immediately bangs her friends husband and commences an extra marital affair with the second man she meets, a friend of her married friends (whose husband she bangs almost immediately). 

  Of course, this renders her apoplectic with guilt, particularly after she is confronted by the wife of her married lover in public, and she ends up retreating to the home of her Father's caretaker, who she had maliciously fired after her father's stroke so that she wouldn't be around anymore. 

Her Dad sounds like an absolutely atrocious human being, his career highlight being a stint as a speech writer for pre-disgrace Joseph McCarthy.   It's not so much that Isabel is unlikable as much as she is simply not an interesting human being.  It is, however, a good book for the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America for the solid depiction of a working-class Irish-American neighborhood in Queens- a valuable piece of the New York City jigsaw puzzle.

   

Dear Edward (2020) by Ann Napolitano

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Dear Edward (2020)

by Ann Napolitano

West Milford, New Jersey

New Jersey: 5/14

   Here is an observation about the psycho-geography of New Jersey:  It is the area "west" of the New York City monolith where people go to break semi-free of the high pressure environment and replace their fifth story walk-up apartments with spacious ranch-style homes on cul-de-sacs.  This psychic landscape was made possible by the automobile, and it is worth noting that any Jersey-ite and light out from any point in New Jersey and simply drive west and end up in California.  There is also a southern section for the Philadelphia/Trenton era that serves as a mirror to the northern New York focused area, and then there is the rest, which includes some tourist areas and farm country.

  Dear Edward is the northern most of the northern New Jersey cohort, taking place on the border between New Jersey and the beginning of the southern reaches of upstate New York. It is clearly suburban environment, and the ties to New York are dim.  Dear Edward is a cross between domestic lit and a thriller.  Edward is a young boy who is the sole survivor of a domestic flight that goes down over the United States flying between New York and Los Angeles.  He has to go live with his (childless) Aunt (mother's sister) and her husband in the suburbs of New Jersey.  None of these characters are interesting, from the baby-hungry Aunt who has suffered a miscarriage, to her husband, a nerdy stock character out of touch with his feelings, to Edward himself.  A real significant moment comes when Edward sneaks into his Uncle's private study and finds racks full of...western novels by Louis L'amour. Sheesh!

  I listened to the 13 hour audiobook- huge mistake since the whole book is portions told from a variety of perspectives of the passengers on the airplane before they die alternated with chapters about Edward's life after the crash.  As interesting as life as a sole-survivor of an airplane crash might sound, Edward manages to bring no interest to his part in the book. One minute into the Audiobook, you know we are going to be listening to sad Edward mope around for the rest of the book.

  There is some relief in the portions narrated by the passengers on the doomed flight, but I thought it was pretty risible that all of the profiled characters who were people FROM the New York area who were ALL travelling to Los Angeles for various reasons having to do with work or family.  Anyone who has ever been on New York to LA flight knows that many, if not a majority of the people on that flight are people from LA going back there, and that another huge group is foreign tourists, none of whom, apparently, were on this flight.

  Like many of the low-stakes works of domestic fiction on the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America list, Dear Edward has an almost claustrophobic level of myopia about the world it portrays.   I would also add "children suffering from extreme PTSD" as another category on the list of the dim-bulb narrators of American fiction: Nothing wrong with being poor or even illiterate but it does make an interesting book harder to write.