Brown Girl Dreaming (2014) by Jacqueline Woodson

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Brown Girl Dreaming (2014)

by Jacqueline Woodson

Greenville, South Carolina

South Carolina: 3/13

   South Carolina is a geographically distinct state- the southern equivalent of Rhode Island on a bigger scale.  If you look at the map you can see that unlike Virginia, North Carolina and Maryland, South Carolina is cut off to the point where it basically looks like a city-state surrounding Charleston.  It's not hard to imagine some alternative history where South Carolina extends across what became Northern Georgia, but the Spanish and French presence in the South precluded expansionism early on, and then Georgia took that part of the US for itself. 

   Brown Girl Dreaming is one of only four South Carolina titles that takes place outside of the Charleston/low country area- Greenville is located in the northwest corner of the state and I had to look up its Wikipedia page to find out that it has a population of 1.5 million.   Brown Girl Dreaming was another easy target- a four hour long Audiobook which is "written in verse"- not poetry, exactly, but not prose- really a succession of very short chapters telling the story of the eponymous protagonist/narrator, the daughter of a single mom from Greenville, who is herself the child of Jehovah's Witnesses. Mom doesn't observe the faith, but the kids do, particularly after Mom decamps for New York City.  Her children eventually follow her up there, and this is another example of a 1,001 Novels title that could be placed on more than one location on the map.  Here, I thought the perspective of a Jehovah's Witness was interesting and I believe the first book which touched on that particular experience but this book didn't add much to my understanding of South Carolina or Greenville- basically all the narrator does in Greenville is hang out with her grandparents and go door to door with her fellow Jehovah's Witnesses. 

   Like many novels written from the perspective of pre-adolescent children, there is, simply put, a limit to how interesting a child under the age of ten can be in the pages of a book- and it's an even sharper limit if the author adheres to anything close to realism.

Jim the Boy (2000) by Tony Earley

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Jim the Boy (2000)

by Tony Earley

Rutherfordton, North Carolina

North Carolina: 8/20

   Jim the Boy  was an easy mark- under 200 pages, written from the perspective of a prepubescent boy growing up in the 1930's.  Earley was named one of Granta's Top 30 Writers Under 30 at one point but the only novels he ever published was this book and a sequel published in 2008.  As with all of the authors I hadn't heard of before the 1001 Novels project, I checked out his New York Times coverage and found a really detailed review for this book and a somewhat less detailed review for the sequel and then a review for his most recent collection of short stories, published in 2014.  I guess it's not exactly a disappearing act but you'd hardly call him a household name.

  The most distinct aspect of Jim the Boy is the author's rejection of complexity that is inherent in choosing a 9/10 year old boy as the narrator and protagonist.  Like many of the protagonists and a few of the narrators, Jim isn't a complicated fellow.  This isn't a trauma narrative, but the opposite, a non-trauma narrative where the emotional peak is a back-alley confrontation in a small North Carolina town where Jim and a buddy are threatened by local streets toughs, and rescued by a friendly African-American.   In fact, I'm hard pressed to think of another book within the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project that is so gosh darned wholesome. 

  The New York Times critic made a big deal out of the style back in 2000, which makes this book sound like a purposeful rebuttal to the frenzied Y2k era, but a quarter century later we have gotten no less frenzied.

Indigo Girl(2017) by Natasha Boyd

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Indigo Girl (2017)

by Natasha Boyd

West Ashley, Charleston, South Carolina

South Carolina: 2/13

   I'm running two or three states ahead of reading physical books, so I'm listening to Audiobooks set in South Carolina and reading books set in Virginia.  That figures to be the major dynamic going forward since I'm almost positive I will close out all the Audiobooks from this chapter months before I finish reading the rest.   I liked Indigo Girl because it is set in the Colonial/Pre-Revolutionary period- when I started the 1,001 Novels project it was clear in New England that the editor favored contemporary stories over historical stories, and I accept that, but all things being equal, say a plot that is a bildungsroman about a young woman in a rural area of America, I'd rather read about the past than the present. 

  The protagonist of Indigo Girl is the oldest daughter of a British Naval Officer who is sent to fight the Spanish in the Caribbean. Daughter endeavors to save the family plantation by growing indigo, which has never been tried before in the Carolinas.  This character is a historical person- she ended up marrying Charles Pickney who was the father of one of the signers of Declaration of Independence.  The author added an afterword where she noted how she used historical artifacts- letters by the real version of her character- to give voice to her story. 

Indigo Girl was also interesting to me because it was set in the period before the slave rebellion's in Haiti solidified white opinion against a more genteel form of slavery.  One of the plot points in this book revolves around the fact that in the timeline of the story, South Carolina has recently made it a crime to teach slaves to write, though they did not make it a crime to teach a slave how to read, a fine point picked up on by the heroine and her husband to be, lawyer Charles Pickney. 

  It's not literary fiction, but as historical fiction goes it is well suited for its depiction of early Colonial Charleston.

The Book of Numbers (1969) by Robert Deane Pharr

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

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.

   

A Sunny Place for Shady People (2024) by Mariana Enriquez

 Audiobook Review

A Sunny Place for Shady People (2024)

by Mariana  Enriquez

Translated by Megan McDowell

  I straight up loved Our Share of Night, the multi-generational novel about a group of Satanists operating in the UK and Argentina.  I'm by no means a fan of the horror genre, but Enriquez really nailed the cruelty of a fictional satanic cult and I still think about some of the scenes on a regular basis as an example of what good writing means to me- and just to think that this is a writer who has her words translated into English from Spanish.  I've more or less decided that for books within the close Indo-European sphere: English, Spanish, French, German the idea of losing meaning/beauty in the translation from one closely related language to another is overblown except on a poetic level. 

  Going in I knew that this volume of short stories wouldn't match her novel, but I still enjoyed this collection.  The title story, in particular, combines the elements of her style:  A spooky, LA-based story about an Argentinian journalist who convinces her editor to let her travel to  Los Angeles to do a story on the cultish group that has sprung up around the memory of Elisa Lam, a 21 year old Canadian student who died under extremely mysterious circumstances inside the Water Tower of the Cecil Hotel.  While in Los Angeles, she is forced to confront the memory of her dead lover who lost himself to schizophrenia and heroin and reconnecting with a lesbian couple who live in the Hollywood hill.   Most of the other stories are set either in Argentina or in an Argentina-like place and have similar but different combinations of spooks and personal issues.   Mostly, though, this collection was just a reminder for me about how much I loved Our Share of Night. 

   

William (2024) by Mason Coile

 Audiobook Review

William (2024)

by Mason Coile

    William is an AI centered horror novel and I checked out the Audiobook after the New York Times gave it a great review last month.  The mere fact that the Times gave that many column inches to a work of genre fiction that was published under a pseudonym, no less (Mason Coile is the "open pseudonym" of award-winning Canadian author Andrew Pyper.)  The set up is that a pregnant tech billionaire and her agoraphobic husband are living in their state of the art "smart home" in the Seattle area.  Henry, the protagonist, is an engineer who spends his days working on "William" a spooky ai powered android that has no legs and a fearsome hatred of Henry and all of humanity.  The reader knows things are not going to go well and indeed they do not, with events starting to pile up after Lily, his wife, invites to work friends over for a rare dinner. 

  Although William clocked in at under four hours, Coile manages to intersperse the gory horror scenes with philosophical musings and a very big twist at the end.  It's worth a listen for the Halloween season!

Father of Lies (1998) by Brian Evenson

 Book Review

Father of Lies (1998)

by Brian Evenson

   The first Brian Evenson book I read was Immobility, his 2013 novel about a human-less post-apocalyptic scenario.   That was back in 2021.  Since then I've kept track of him- he's one of the few horror/sci-fi genre writers who commonly attracts attention from the literary fiction mainstream, which is enough for me.  Recently(2016 anyway), many books from his backlist were put back into print by Coffee House press, and Father of Lies (along with everything else he ever published) popped up on the Libby library app.  

  Father of Lies is an early work, a relatively straight-forward work of religio-horror about a psychopathic leader of a Mormon-like church (Evenson is from Utah and was raised Mormon).  In 2024, it sounds like a particularly sadistic retelling of the Catholic Priests vs. Young Boys saga of the past decades.  Unlike the Catholic Church, Mormons are still in full on refuse to acknowledge/cover-up mode, which perhaps accounts for the fact that the church which is depicted is only Mormon-like. 

  The horror is nothing you wouldn't read about in a newspaper story about Catholic priests abusing young boys- although he does murder one young parishioner after she confesses to being pregnant by her older brother.   This murder triggers a cascade of events which include a physical manifestation of Satan and lots of back and forth between him and his ever-supportive Church elders.  Events spiral when the mothers of three young church-members all come forward claiming that their young male children are victims of the protagonists vile abuse, and much of the horror comes from the support he continues to claim from the Church hierarchy who really stand by him all the way through the book.

Bewilderness (2021) by Karen Tucker

1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Bewilderness (2021)

by Karen Tucker

523 N. Main St. Troy, North Carolina

North Carolina: 7/20

   Due to my job as a criminal defense lawyer working in Federal Court, I have ample time to contemplate the vagaries of life as a drug addict, since that epithet describes many of my clients.  Thus, this novel, about two young, female opiate addicts living in the middle-of-nowhere North Carolina was always going to be a challenge for me.  I started by checking out the Audiobook but had to give up about a third of the way in because I simply couldn't stand the narrator/protagonist.   I am totally ok with drug addicts and their issues, but you have to be a pretty interesting drug addict to keep my attention, and this one was not.  It's interesting in that this is one of the first depictions of rural opiate addiction, which is a huge issue- even at the highest levels of national politics, but that doesn't make this a fun book. 

Sweetwater Creek (2005) by Anne River Siddons

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Sweetwater Creek (2005)

by Anne River Siddons

Hunting Island, South Carolina

South Carolina: 1/13

   Anne River Siddons was (d. 2019) a well-known writer of popular fiction of and about the South.  She never won any major literary prizes but she had some hits, and signed a 10 million dollar book deal at a time when that was still a lot of money.  Sweetwater Creek is the first book from South Carolina.  South Carolina has a pretty distinctive role in the history of the South by being a primary market for the slave trade.  At the same time, there is some of the social flexibility that is more typically associated with New Orleans- the idea of an urban class of free blacks and mixed-race people that is absent in other parts of the South. In Virginia, for example, freed slaves were forced to leave Virginia almost immediately upon pain of death, which meant that the population of free blacks was very limited. 

   Charleston also developed an intellectual culture that drew upon the outsiders who came and went for trading purposes- more outward looking than comparable locations in North Carolina and Virginia.  Which all goes to say that the area around Charleston is the most interesting place in this chapter.  Sweetwater Creek doesn't take place in Charleston but it operates in the orbit of Charleston, since the plot is a bildungsroman about a young girl who crosses paths with an alcoholic college age southern debutante who is in full flight from her life as a well-to-do young Charleston lady.   I listened to the Audiobook since it looks like I'm going to run out of available Audiobooks from titles in this chapter long before I finish reading the non-Audiobook titles.

  As Audiobooks go, it was one of the excruciating ones- with a third person narrator telling the story entirely from the perspective of this adolescent girl who has never left her Dad's spaniel raising operation in the South Carolina low country.  I lost track of the number of times the protagonist broke down in tears and ran crying to her room to be comforted by her dog.   I did think the depiction of the low country was really memorable and that was really the only thing that kept me slogging through the story to the end.

   

Roxanna Slade (1998) by Reynolds Price

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Roxanna Slade (1998)

by Reynolds Price

Macon, North Carolina

North Carolina: 6/20

    I'd never heard of Reynolds Price, a North Carolina-based author of some reputation. He was active for decades both as a writer and a professor- Roxanna Slade is one of his last books, and I imagine him writing a book from the perspective of a woman was a late career stretch for him.  Roxanna is a poor, uneducated white woman who narrates the book looking back at her ninety year long life, from her beginnings as a 18 year old bride, the birth of her two children, her struggles with depression during a time when there weren't many treatment options, a suicide attempt and then life as a single, older mother after her husband passes away in his 50's. 

  This is the rare book from this part of the country where race is a relatively minor issue.  Roxanna Slade's people aren't wealthy enough to have servants nor poor enough to be in economic competition with their African American neighbors.  Late in the book, Slade recalls her husband punching his long-time African American employee in the eye (and causing him to lose said eye) after the employee had been drinking and demanded back pay from her husband.  

   I recognized women from my Grandmother's generation in this book- women who were pushed into a domestic role in the home without a second thought or option and ended up living long enough to see what they missed.