The Ice at the Bottom of the World (1990) by Mark Richard

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

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. 

The Tubman Command (2019) by Elizabeth Cobb

1,001 Novels: A Library of America

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.

Black Thunder (1936) by Arna Bontemps

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

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. 

Hello Down There (1993) by Michael Parker

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Hello Down There (1993)

by Michael Parker

Elizabeth City, North Carolina

North Carolina 15/20

   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. 

A Crooked Tree (2021) by Una Mannion

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

 A Crooked Tree (2021)

by Una Mannion

Valley Forge Mountain, Pennsylvania 

Pennsylvania: 1/27

   New Year, New States!  I've run out of easily available Audiobooks from the last chapter (Maryland through South Carolina) so I'm moving forward on two fronts- back north to Pennsylvania and continuing south through Georgia and Florida while I try to polish off the Ebook/physical book portion of the prior chapter.   The first book from Pennsylvania is A Crooked Tree by Una Mannion.  This novel is from the most common category of the 1,001 Novels project:  A bildungsroman written from the POV of a adolescent girl in difficult socio-economic circumstances, sub-category white, sub-category debut novel.  Like almost all of the books in this category we've got a narrator who is trapped in her family home, in the middle of nowhere (played here by someplace called "Valley Forge Mountain.")

  Here, our narrator is Libby, an awkward 15 year old girl living with her single mom and three siblings (one older sister, one older brother, two younger sisters.)  Driving home from school at the beginning of the book, her younger sister angers her Mom to the point where mom abandons younger sister on the side of the road, forcing her to walk home.  Sister is picked up and mildly assaulted by the sinister "barbie man" an albino type dude with long blonde hair.  Sister jumps out of barbie man's moving vehicle to escape and reaches Libby's weekly babysitting gig, promising her to secrecy so that their mom doesn't get in trouble.  Events move forward from that point in somewhat predictable fashion- I was surprised at the number of reviewers who expressed enthusiasm at the plotting in A Crooked Tree but it might be a function of my day-to-day experience in the criminal justice system.

     The world of "the mountain" is well-depicted, but I wasn't particularly enthralled by Libby or her troubled family.

In Memory of Junior (1992) by Clyde Edgergton

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

In Memory of Junior (1992)

by Clyde Edgergton

Summerlin, North Carolina

North Carolina: 14/20

    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.)

Now You Know It All (2021) by Joanna Pearson

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Now You Know It All (2021)

by Joanna Pearson

Shelby, North Carolina

North Carolina: 13/20

    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. 

Tending to Virginia (1987) by Jill McCorkle

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Tending to Virginia (1987)

by Jill McCorkle

Lumberton, North Carolina

North Carolina: 12/20

  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.

The New Jim Crow (2010) by Michelle Alexander

 100 Best Books of the 21st Century (New York Times)

The New Jim Crow (2010)

by Michelle Alexander

#69

    The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander is the 55th of the 100 books I've read from the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century list.  As a criminal defense attorney who has spent over 20 years practicing in state and federal criminal court,  I am intimately familiar with every argument that Alexander made AND which of those arguments have succeeded AND I also have opinions about her arguments have harmed the Democratic party in recent national elections.   Alexander presents a blue-print for the racial justice portion of the post-George Floyd era and personally, I'm pretty convinced that some of the arguments in here helped Trump to victory.

   Alexander's main thesis is that the mass incarceration that followed the declaration of the "war on drugs" is the New Jim Crow: A race based system of government sponsored control aimed mostly at young, African-American males.  It's an argument that should sound familiar, because it has won the day here in California and made inroads at the Federal level.  Both the California state government and the Federal government have adopted many of the easy fixes that Alexander proposes.   However the deeper cuts of Alexander's arguments expose how (and I say this as someone who supports and agrees with much of what she says) very Un-American the structural underpinnings of her arguments can be.

  I'll share two examples.  The first is the argument that she makes late in the book that the success of Barack Obama and his election as President is harmful to the cause of racial justice because it promotes racial exceptionalism and allows racists to claim that there isn't a race problem in the United States.  Even if Alexander is right, that is a terrible argument to make in support of her many common-sense policy positions.  Can you imagine trying to argue to a swing state voter in suburban Philadelphia or semi-rural Wisconsin that the success of individuals like Barack Obama is a problem that needs to be addressed?  You'd sound like a lunatic.

   The second example is Alexander's lengthy explanation of how the racism of the criminal justice system operates despite the explicit bar to overtly racist laws in the United States.  I'm not saying she's wrong, only that this is a terrible argument that has helped Donald Trump win over potential democratic voters.   It's a bad argument because like many arguments inspired by Marxism, it attempts to convince the listener/reader that the truth is the exact opposite of what the reader believes to be the truth.  It's a heavy tactic in Marxist inspired persuasion that goes right back to the beginning, or close to it, specifically the idea of "false consciousness" i.e. the idea that the duty of Marxist intellectuals to convince the working-class/proletariat that everything they believe about their lives under capitalism is wrong.    Think of how that dovetails with the failed Democratic attempts in the most recent Presidential election to brow-beat swing state voters into fearing Donald Trump as an existential threat to democracy.   Liberal, wealthy democrats telling middle and working class white Americans what to think is never going to win.

  Alexander also obscures a broader, more succesful theme that Trump himself has impressed- which is that law enforcement is petty and vindictive and over-reaches all the time.   This argument is present in Alexander's facts, but she is more interested in the racists implications of over-policing instead of focusing on how over-policing sucks for everyone, poor black guys in the South and Donald Trump as well.  Get the cops off our backs is a winner.

The Tidewater Tales (1987) by John Barth

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

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.