1,001 Novels: A Library of America Virginia

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America 

Virginia

  It took me just about seven months to make it through the 17 novels from Virginia in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  September of 2024 through the middle of April, 2025.  It was the first of the "southern tier" of this particular chapter: Delaware, Maryland and Washington DC for the north, Virginia and North and South Carolina for the south.  I guess my favorite book was the one I'd already ready- House of Leaves (2000) by Mark Danielewski, which is also on the 1,001 Novels to Read Before You Die list.  Beyond House of Leaves there is Blacktop Wasteland, a great regional noir, and The Book of Numbers (1969) by Robert Deane Pharr, another book with an African-American author and an eye for the seedy underbelly of the tidewater region. 

Published 9/25/24

The Yellow Birds (2012)

by Kevin Powers

Richmond, Virginia

Virginia: 1/17

    Virginia is the most significant state hit I've tackled since I finished off New York and it's 100 books of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  This chapter has Delaware (3), Maryland (9), Washington DC (12) and North (20) and South Carolina (13).   Delaware and Maryland are both "minor" states and the rest are mid-range.  I have little personal experience in Virginia outside of the garden suburbs of Washington DC- which are just as likely to come up in the DC books as they are here.  As for the rest of Virginia... I drove through the state on my post-college drive back to the west coast, but didn't stop.  I've never been to Richmond, the location of The Yellow Birds, an Iraq war and its aftermath novel by Kevin Powers, and I've certainly never been to the rest of Virginia, so in that sense, I'm looking forward to learning some more about the state beyond what I know of its super racist history and purple state present. 

   

   The New York Times gave it a rave review in 2012.  It was a finalist for the National Book Award.  A movie version was released in 2017 with a cast that included Jenifer Aniston, Toni Collette and Jason Patric.  The movie version cost twelve million and made fifty thousand in theaters, which I think means that it essentially went unreleased.  It has a 44/37 split on Rotten Tomatoes.   The Amazon product page has 2000 reviews which is good but not great. 

 

 Michiko Kakutani, writing in the Times, called it "brilliantly observed and deeply affecting" and compared it to Tim O'Brien, specifically to his 1990 collection of short stories about the Vietnam War, The Things They Carried.  Thankfully, The Yellow Birds is not a collection of short stories.  It does track backwards and forwards in time in an attempt to find out what happened to Murph, a naive young soldier who Bartle, the protagonist and frequent narrator, swears to protect before they go off to fight in the first Iraq War.

   Powers intersperses the present- which is Bartle back in Richmond, living under a bridge by the river and bemoaning his PTSD with florid glimpses of the gritty, bloody scenes of the first Iraq War.  I'm a huge fan of reading about the horrors of war- the inevitable scene of field medics or the soldier himself trying to stuff his intestines back into his body after falling victim to an explosive is one of my personal favorites and of course it happens in this book.

     The secret at the center of The Yellow Birds left me a bit overwhelmed. In fact, I'm hard pressed to explain what Kakutani found so enchanting about the prose- maybe it was good timing on the part of Powers, publishing at the exact time when readers were looking for this particular perspective. In 2024 it's like, throw it on the horrors of the forever war pile.

Published 9/26/24

Manywhere (2022)

by Morgan Thomas

Jamestown, Virginia

Virginia: 2/17

   Manywhere is a collection of short stories, many featuring "genderqueer" protagonists, set all over the rural and semi-rural south.  Many, many diversity points scored between the different stories and their locations and their characters: Rural, socio-economic, LGBTQ etc.   One story is historical fiction about an immigrant who lived as a man for decades before revealing themselves as a biological woman.  Another is about a transman who buys a pregnancy bump from Amazon and wears it to work, where her co-workers aren't aware of her background.  Not all the stories are about "genderqueer" characters- one story involves a young woman living in rural Oklahoma who becomes a surrogate for another couple after having a child of her own.

  The language is haunting and poetic, it was a good Audiobook to pick because of the lyricism of the language.

Published 10/4/24

My Monticello (2021)

by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson

Charlottesville, Virginia

Virginia: 3/17

   My Monticello is a collection of a few short stories and the title novella about a near-future break down of authority/government as experienced by a young, Virginia-based African American woman and her white boyfriend and a cluster of neighbors who relocate to Monticello (Thomas Jeffersons' estate) where Da'Naisha muses over the impending end of the world, her pregnancy and the possibility that the father could either be her white boyfriend or black ex-boyfriend, both of whom are with her at Monticello.  She also is concerned about her Grandmother, who is also at Monticello and close to death.   Even taking into account that a novella is short by definition, not much happens here.  There is one trip outside (it goes badly) and a looming showdown with white supremacists that happens off page, after the end of the novella.

  While I'm no stranger to the drama of women being pregnant under difficult circumstances- seemingly about 15% of the entire literary output of English language literature in any given time period, it seemed strange to center a novella on that subject and end it before she gives birth.  

Published 10/14/24

The House Girl (2013)

by Tara Conklin

Lyndhurst, Virginia

Virginia: 4/17

    One observation I would make about Virginia and North Carolina is this theme of enslaved people being sold from the relatively benign environments of the upper South to the harsher, crueler world of the cotton belt:  Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.  The plantation economy of places like Lyndhurst, Virginia is one of perpetual, inevitable decline as the soil failed from primitive 17th and 18th century farming techniques.  Instead, you had these small plantations owned by families who owned multiple properties or leased land to others, or made their money from a profession or trade.  The slaves in these environments were an asset of the estate that could be sold off in times of economic distress to places that needed man and woman power.

   The House Girl is two inter-related stories, one about Lina, a contemporary attorney working at a white-shoe law firm, she lives in Brooklyn with her artist Father and a mother who "died" under mysterious circumstances.  She is recruited by a partner at her firm to work on an unusual case undertaken at the behest of an African-American defense contractor, a lawsuit for reparations for slavery.  She is tasked with finding the so-called, "Lead Plaintiff," a lineal descendent of an enslaved individual who can serve as the face of the lawsuit.

  This story intersects with that of Josephine, the "house girl" of the title and an 18th century slave who works as the lady-in-waiting for her dying mistress on a swampy, run-down Virginia plantation.  The House Girl is a good pick for the 1,001 Novels project on a couple of levels.  First, with over 7000 Amazon reviews it is a certified hit by the standards of literary fiction (though this isn't quite that).  Second, Lyndhurst is the farthest east location for a Virginia title save two books set near the Cumberland Gap (that's a thing, right?), and the gloomy, gothic plantation where Josephine lives is very evocative of the time and place. 

  Published 10/24/24

A Stolen Life (1999)

by Jane Louise Curry

Shirley Plantation, Virginia

Virginia: 5/17

    The Shirley Plantation where A Stolen Life- which is a Newberry Prize winning Children's book, is set at the southern edge of an arc of territory that encompasses all of the books from Delaware, Maryland and Washington DC, and all but six of the titles from Virginia.  There's a clear dividing line between this territory, which is basically the watershed of the Chesapeake Bay, and the rest of the area of Chapter 4:  western Virginia and all of North and South Carolina.  The defining characteristics of these books is their proximity to water and status as "old" parts of the United States, with a history that reaches back to the colonial era.  

    That brings us to A Stolen Life, about a young girl who is kidnapped (or "spirited" in the quasi-whimsical language of the time) away from her home in coastal Scotland and sold as an indentured servant in still-wild colonial Virginia.   If I have my history correct, the father of the protagonist is a rebellious Jacobite, and the reason for her kidnapping is tied up in her families decision to have her dress as a boy to avoid the wrath of the English king (for complicated reasons).  Thus, the spiriters take her for a boy when they grab her off the Scottish coast.

    A Stolen Life is a children's book, so her adventures in the new world, which include being kidnapped by Cherokees are decidedly PG but I enjoyed the rare depiction of life in colonial era Virginia.  

Published 10/23/24

Mattaponi Queen (2010)

by Belle Boggs

Mattaponi Reservation, Virginia

Virginia:  6/16

I love the Native American books in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America list. I thought I had a pretty good grasp on the different types of tribes out there but this was the first representation of the first peoples of Virginia, AKA the "Pocahontas" tribe that interacted with Captain John Smith.  They were and are a tribe of Algonquin speaking people who were members of the Powahatan chiefdom.  They have a rich and complex history but Mattaponi Queen doesn't really get into it, except to the occasional reference to a character who is absent because she left to act in Hollywood because she looked "just like" Pocahontas or another character musing about what a disappointment the real Pocahontas would have been to her family when she left for England in colonial times.

 The stories aren't all about Native American characters- both African American and White residents are represented, and this had the first story I can remember where I wasn't sure what race a character was until I really thought about it.  It's a rural milieu, so the stories in this volume resemble the stories from other run down, economically morose parts of the United States:  Health issues, poverty, a desire to escape coupled with an inability to do so- they all get ample space.  The dwarf river boat of the title doesn't appear till the end as part of a story about the owner and his desire to sell the boat and restore it at the same time.   

Published 11/1/24

The Book of Numbers (1969)

by Robert Deane Pharr

Richmond, Virginia

Virginia: 7/17

   I've got 10 titles to go for Virginia and I'm out of Audiobooks.  I actually had to buy a copy of The Book of Numbers, a lost classic by African-American author Robert Deane Pharr.  Like many of the lesser-known classics of post World War II African American literature, The Book of Numbers has some shocking language and behavior as judged by the standards of bourgeois white America.  Pharr writes about a fictional city based on Richmond Virginia and about the denizens of "the block," the only African American urban area in Virginia.  Once again, it's worth observing that in 1806 Virginia passed a law that required freed slaves to leave Virginia within 48 hours, and that undoubtably had an impact in reducing the native population of free African Americans until after the Civil War.  

  The main focus of The Book of Numbers is an African American racketeer named Dave and his mentor-sidekick Blueboy.  They blow into town with a bankroll funded by the insurance money Dave received from the deaths of his parents and proceed to start Richmond's first numbers racket.   I didn't know much about numbers before I started 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, but The Book of Numbers isn't the first or second book to use the numbers racket in its plot.  Pharr is very detailed about the ins and outs of the racket- one memorable chapter involves Blueboy and Dave trying to locate a printer who will print the triplicate pads required to run a numbers game.  This was also the first mention of how the numbers were generated- Dave would use the first three winners of horse races at various tracks around the country. 

  The language is very earth- tons of N-words and frank discussions of sexuality that still seem pretty racy.   There's also a cool blaxploitation era movie that you can watch on youtube.  The Book of Numbers was a real stand-out for me in this chapter  of the 1,001 Novels project.

   

Published 11/11/24

The Kitchen House (2010)

by Katherine Grissom

Tidewater, Virginia

Virginia: 8/17

   The Kitchen House by Katherine Grissom resides squarely in the "white lady book club" category.  It has a cover quote from Alice Walker(!) comparing it to The Help and my paperback copy had one of those complicated, multi-flap covers that only come with "Recommended by Jenna" stickers added or the like. Grissom blends the stories of a white child who is brought to a Virginia plantation with the story of her African-American counter-part, Belle, slightly older and way wiser in the troubling ways of pre-emancipation Virginia.  To whit, the ability of any white man to force himself on any black woman with legal impunity, and indeed, the ability to sell his own child should the mood or need arise.

  This dynamic is at the heart of Grissom's tale, and perhaps it is why an author like Alice Walker would agree to blurb the book jacket of a white author telling a story involving narrators of both races.  Here, the dramatic tension is maintained by the white Irish servant girl's very naivete about such matters.   Compared to other characters in the same circumstances, her ignorance often seemed comical but I suppose that is book-club land for you. 

Published 11/13/24

Big Stone Gap (2001)

by Adriana Trigiani

Big Stone Gap, Virginia

Virginia: 9/17

  Finally, a book from this part of the country that wasn't narrated by a sad, abused white girl or her African-American counterpart.  My overwhelming impression of the entire 1,001 Novels: A Library of America is that of the perspective of an adolescent or pre-adolescent woman living on the margins of American society.  Which is fine, but it's hard to distinguish the perspectives from each other since every protagonist has almost the exact same background: limited/poor education, extremely limited geographical horizons and challenging family.

   Big Stone Gap, on the other hand, has an interesting and relatively sophisticated narrator- Ave Maria, the 30 something "town spinster" of Big Stone Gap, which guards the entrance to the Appalachians.  She runs the town pharmacy, which she inherited from her Dad and she has recently buried her Mother, who died after a long illness.  Her mother, an Italian immigrant, throws Ave's well ordered world into chaos when she reveals, after her death, that the man Ave thought was her biological father is not, and that instead her mom emigrated to the US from Italy after getting knocked up by a married man in her Italian village.

   This startling revelation sets off a chain of activity and provides most of the plot.  Generally speaking, Big Stone Gap is Hallmark movie/rom-com territory but I actually enjoyed listening to Audiobook Ave Maria and hearing about her life.  Some of Ave's tropes made me roll my eyes- like her insistence that she was the town spinster in her mid 30's, and her refusal to see the love that has eluded her has, in fact, been in front of her the whole time, but those are the rules of the rom-com/Hallmark movie.  I also enjoyed listening to her country accent- the Audiobook was narrated by the Author, so that was a treat. I wouldn't recommend this book but I didn't mind listening to it as part of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.

Published 11/14/24

Black Mountain Breakdown (1980)

by Lee Smith

Black Mountain, Virginia

Virginia: 10/17

  Geographically speaking, Black Mountain Breakdown is just down the road from the last book, Big Stone Gap, and the two books combined are the only representatives from far western Virginia.   Unlike the last book, Black Mountain Breakdown is another book which epitomizes the preferred POV of editor Susan Straight:  Adolescent girl protagonist character, can't get her act together for reasons which are hard to understand, spends her life between periods of normalcy where a man takes care of her and longer periods where she is neither barely functional or actually institutionalized.  Crystal Spengler is the lady in question and maybe the best thing I have to say about this book is that the writing style was sophisticated/modernist enough to give me trouble in actually comprehending the book.   Only the last portion, where Crystal becomes the wife of a rising Virginia politician, really stuck in my memory.  Published in 1980, Black Mountain Breakdown still belongs to the gauzy/hazy era of mental health where people were afflicted with nameless maladies and institutionalized for reasons that had more to do with the judgments of the people around them than any desire to help the sufferer get better. 

Published 12/12/24

House of Leaves (2000)
by Mark Danielewski

Rappahannock, Virginia

Virginia 11/17

  Hard pass on the idea of re-reading this 800 pager.  It's the first cross-over book in this chapter between the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project and the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die list. 

Published 5/1/18

House of Leaves (2000)
by Mark Danielewski

   Like Donnie Darko or Infinite Jest, House of Leaves is a love it or hate it proposition, an 800+ page book containing a half dozen different narrative voices, typefaces, page layouts and the most footnotes in a novel I've ever seen outside of the aforementioned Infinite Jest, which, now that I think about it, used end-notes, not footnotes.   The two major narratives in House of Leaves are about a purported documentary film about a house that contains infinite space inside of it AND a story, told in the footnotes, of a late 20th century LA hipster type who discovers the manuscript about the documentary film in the bedsit of a Bukoswski like deceased hobo.

  I was astonished- astonished- to learn for the first time of this book via the 1001 Books project. Not because I particularly liked it or anything like that, but just that it very much seems like something someone I know would have read or told me about.  It may be simply that it was published at a time- I was in law school in 2001- when I wasn't really tracking on new books.   The copy I read- a 2nd edition, is the cleaned up, big budget version that includes not only the novel but a companion piece, called The Whalestoe Letters, which are letters written by the institutionalized mother of the LA hipster type who authors one of the two major narratives in the book.

  At times, the "infinite house" at the center of House of Leaves, and the explorations within, seem to comment on the eccentricities of post-modern criticism: People wandering around in an infinite darkness, unable to derive any specific meaning from their experience.   Such postmodern fuckery was hardly novel in 2000, when House of Leaves was published, but Danielewski brings a certain counter-cultural swagger that obviously appealed to the readers who made it such a cult hit. 

Published 1/6/25

The Tidewater Tales (1987)

by John Barth

Cheaspeake Bay, Virginia

Virginia: 12/17

  AND I'M BACK!!!!

   This 600 page plus BEHEMOTH of a novel took me over a month to complete.  It really had me thinking about the novel as an artform and the various ways audiences and publishers collaborate to fix the form of a novel.  It also reminded me of the discourse surrounding Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace and whether it might be the worst book ever.  Frankly it is hard to imagine the literary world where this book was launched.  It's about a waspish couple who take their sail boat around the Chesapeake Bay for a couple weeks.  It is loosely structured around the idea of Scheherazade  and 1,001 Nights but it was so tedious trying to really figure what was happening I felt content to just drift along.  There was a lot about the female partner's prior marriage to a would-be Maryland politician.  There were several chapters detailing the travel of various named sperm on a race to fertilize the egg of the female half of the couple on the boat.  There is a sub-plot about the death of a probably CIA operative in the Chesapeake Bay and plenty about the family history of the couple.

    It's a very waspy affair and in that sense it's a welcome break from the middle and working class perspectives of most of the books in this chapter.  Something I took for granted before I started this project was the idea that literary fiction is written from the perspective of literary PEOPLE, now I understand this whole world both of proletarian and middle class fiction where the characters don't give a hoot about books let alone literary culture.  

  

Published 1/15/25

Black Thunder (1936)

by Arna Bontemps

Richmond, Virginia

Virginia: 13/17

  Black Thunder scores high marks in several categories. First, it was written before 1980.  Second, the author is an interesting dude (African American, lived in Los Angeles).  Third, it has an interesting subject, a historical slave revolt in Virginia in the very early 19th century (1800).  Understanding what actually happened in the South before the Civil War requires reading about slave revolts because of the fierce impact they had on the wild imaginations of white elites in the South, and the way that fear was then translated into a very heavy handed legal regime.  It might sound absurd to talk about more or less cruel forms of slavery, but the American South was, in fact, quite cruel relative to other slave systems, with slavery being hereditary and with strict limits being placed on uplifting slaves (It was illegal to teach slaves to read in South Carolina) as well as limits being placed on the ability of non-slave blacks to remain in slave states (Freed slaves had to leave Virginia within 48 hours of freedom.)

   I wish there were more picks like this in the 1,001 Novels project.  If I was involved in any revision I would add more older titles and remove more of the recent titles. 

Published 1/17/25

The Ice at the Bottom of the World (1990)

by Mark Richard

Franklin, Virginia

Virginia: 14/17

   This collection of short-stories won the Faulkner/Pen AWARD in 1990.  He published one other collection of short-stories, one novel and one work of non-fiction.  As the Penguin product page makes clear, you can file Richard under "southern gothic," comparing him to Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor.  I didn't have to read the product page to get that vibe- it comes through on every page.  When I read an author with a career trajectory like Mark Richard:  early short story collection wins a prize, a debut novel that doesn't sell and then...nothing...I'm always interested in the question of "what happened?"  Here, the combination of reading his short story collection and a description of his first and only novel, Fishboy, gives me a good idea of what happened.  His first novel didn't sell, and there was nothing about the way it didn't sell to inspire a big publisher to give him another shot, and Richard, for whatever reasons either couldn't or wouldn't take a step backwards.  His Wikipedia page fills in the rest- he moved to Los Angeles and started writing and producing both network and prestige series television.  There you have it. 

Published 1/24/25

A Country of Strangers (1989)

by Susan Richards Shreve

Elm Grove, Virginia

Virginia: 15/17

     Set in then-rural Virginia outside of Washington DC, A Country of Strangers is a work of historical fiction (World War II) about the intertwined fates of two families, one African-American and the other white.  Like many of the less succesful titles on the 1,001 Novels list (I had to buy a copy because the Los Angeles Public Library doesn't have one), A Country of Strangers has some interesting moments and take the notion of "place" seriously, but wasn't compelling as an overall work.   Author Shreve hints at some interesting subjects- the idea of an interracial, extra-martial affair between the Danish immigrant wife of the white couple and the husband of the African American family, but doesn't take it far enough to create real interest in the reader.   The plot line involving a pregnant 13 year old from a cadet branch of the African American family sparks interest but the character herself, named Prudential after the insurance company, does not. 

Published 2/17/25

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.   

Published 4/14/25

Horse People (2013)

by Cary Holladay 

Rapidan, Virginia

Virginia: 17/17

   Finally closing out the Virginia sub-chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project with Horse People, the impressively obscure novel-in-the-form-of-a-short-story-collection that I had to buy off Amazon because the Los Angeles Public Library system does not own a copy, and there is no Ebook, and there is no Audiobook.   Despite the title, the book isn't about "Horse People" in the sense that I understand that term which is "rich people who don't have to work and spend all their time and energy riding horses and talking about them."  Rather, the central figures seem to be a succession of what you might call the Viriginia version of poor white people, followed over generations, with the addition of a wealthier white woman who is more in line with what I expected from the use of that term. 

  I'd never heard of the author before- she's published nine books, all but one on a small or university press (this book was published by the University of Louisiana press, and her most lasting relationship is with the University of Ohio press) but it looks like she mostly works in the area of short stories. I didn't love the Viriginia chapter- Virginia didn't have the Kook factor of North Carolina and South Carolina, and I didn't relate to the locations like I did in Washington DC and Maryland.  Bye Virginia- doubt I will be back!