Glass House (1994) by Christine Wiltz

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Glass House (1994)

by Christine Wiltz

New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana: 14/28

  HALF WAY THROUGH LOUISIANA. Chug-chug that train be moving. I am deep into New Orleans.  New Orleans and environs makes up more than half of the Louisiana chapter, which sounds right to me.  Interesting literary subjects of Louisiana being 1) New Orleans: It's places and peoples and 2) Cajun/Bayou country.  The rest is just plantation country with more mixed-race people in positions of power.   Wiltz is another one of these roughly contemporary women writers that editor Susan Straight favors in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  Wiltz has one best-seller, about the "last madam" of New Orleans.  She's also got a handful of genre titles (The Neal Rafferty New Orleans Mystery Series, 1-III).  Finally, there is Glass House, a conventional 1990's era "city novel" centered around the experience of urban living during the fraught decades between the 1970's and 2000's. Inevitably, these books are written from a white perspective, with African American's showing up in sympathetic supporting roles that are often fraught with ambiguity. 

  Here, the protagonist is a newly single woman moving back to New Orleans to inherit her spinster Aunt's rickety old mansion.  She is still coping with the experience of having her parents murdered by an African American teen inside their Mom n Pop grocery store- classic 80's/90's issue book murder right there.  She reconnects with an old flame struggling with his own set of issues, and the darkly charismatic contractor/local drug kingpin who is also the son of her deceased Aunt's housekeeper-for-life. Wiltz casts a sympathetic eye on her literary version of an inner-city drug kingpin, mostly we hear about his attempts to clean up the projects he calls home and he and his henchman do not engage in any criminal activity in the pages of this book.

   

Set in Motion by Valerie Martin

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Set in Motion (1978)

by Valerie Martin

New Orleans, Louisiana 

Louisiana: 13/28

  Set in Motion is a debut novel by Valerie Martin, an author who has published steadily if intermittently over the decades (two novels in the 70s, one in the 80s, three in the 90s, three in the oughts, one in the '10s and two this decade.  Her career highlights in terms of sales are Mary Reilly, her rework of Frankenstein, which landed a movie version and Property- which won the Orange Prize (Women's Prize for Fiction) in 2004.  I think I actually saw the Mary Reilly movie when it was released.   

 Set in Motion felt like a predecessor of sad girl lit, or rather an originator of the genre.  Sad Girl lit (of which I am a fan) features protagonists who are young-ish, though always grappling with issues surrounding mortality, they are not married, they do not have children, they may or may not have a job, they are prone to fits of emotion triggered by unusual and/or disturbing events.  The protagonist of Set in Motion fits all these descriptors.   She works for the County Welfare office vetting applicants for food-stampes.  She has a bartender boyfriend who casually shoots drugs into his veins (Pre Aids!!!!).  She has sex with the fiancé of her friend in a manner that borders on a contemporary description of sexual assault.

What is not to love?  I also enjoyed the descriptions of New Orleans in the mid 1970's, which were a nadir for urban areas all over the United States.  The sense of urban despair was palpable in this era. Love it.

Yellow Jack (1999) by Josh Russell

1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Yellow Jack (1999)

by Josh Russell

New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana: 12/28

    Josh Russell is the first 1,001 Novels: A Library of American writer I can remember who does not have  a Wikipedia page.  He is gainfully employed, as the director of the Creative Writing Program at Georgia State University.   I did take a creative writing class in college- it struck me as a borderline insane way to spend one's time and energy.  I don't have a ton of respect for the teachers or students of creative writing, beyond recognizing that teaching creative writing is by the far the best way for authors of literary fiction to support themselves and their families- you gotta do what you gotta do.

   Yellow Jack is set in dirty old New Orleans, about a protagonist who learns the tricks and methods of the earliest kind of photography in the studio of originator Louis Daugerre, and then flees to New Orleans, where he sets up the very first photography studio.  Russell does an excellent job of conjuring early to middle 19th century New Orleans- a place where summer inevitably bought death in the form of Yellow Fever.   Claude Marchand lives a life of passion and intrigue, juggling a mixed-race girlfriend and the sexually precocious (and way underage) daughter of a local bigwig.  Meanwhile, the mercury that was key to developing early photographs is causing his teeth to fall out and driving him not-so-slowly insane.  I wouldn't say Yellow Jack was a fun read, but it was interesting.