Mostly Dead Things (2019) by Kristen Arnett

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Mostly Dead Things (2019)

by Kristen Arnett

2925 Corrine Drive, Orlando, Florida

Florida: 4/21

   I'll say that Florida has a lotta swamp action.  There are swamps and wetlands all up and down the coast of the United States- South Carolina, Maryland- plenty along the New England seacoast.  Psychically though, swamps are a small part of those other places whereas in Florida they take center stage from a literary imagination standpoint.  Mostly Dead Things, for example, is mapped onto Orlando, which is a major urban center of Florida, but I thought these people were out in the middle of nowhere, not stuck into a suburban neighborhood in a majorish American city.  

  Mostly Dead Things is interesting in that it is written by a coolish writer- Arnett has or had a column on LitHub, which is about as cool as it gets these days for literary fiction.  This novel has a queer protagonist and an interesting milieu- a family built around the now-deceased fathers' taxidermy business.  Arnett doesn't shy away from the gruesome stuff- not just the taxidermy material but also Arnett's frequent writing about the smell of sweaty armpits- at least a half dozen times in the 300 pages of this book.

Indonesian Banda (1978) by Willard Hanna

 Book Review

Indonesian Banda: 

Colonialism and Its Aftermath in the Nutmeg Islands (1978)

by Willard Hanna

   Recent books I've read on the history of Capitalism and the relationship of Capitalism to slavery have pointed out that the genocidal elimination of an entire population of a specific territory was not, as they computer nerds of today say, "a bug, but a feature" of early capitalism.  Specifically, the idea that if one encountered a geographically distinct territory, an island, for example, that was otherwise amenable to factory/plantation agriculture BUT such exploitation was presently prevented by the presence of an existing population that did not want to become slaves to foreigners, one could simply remove the population, one way or another.  

  I was familiar with this dynamic in the New World milieu, but it wasn't until recently that I'd heard about the adventures of the Dutch in this same area, not in the new world, but in the Indonesian archipelago, namely, the island of Banda, where an enterprising Dutch merchant-warlord utterly extirpated an indigenous population so he could bring in slaves to grow the nutmeg he wanted.   This went on from about 1609 to 1621, when Jan Pieterszoon Coen led a mixed army of Dutch soldiers, local recruits and Japanese mercenaries to take the island once and for all.  Coen remained a culture hero in the Netherlands until relatively recently, when the scholarship caught up with him.  Note at how early this sequence of events took place, around the same time the North American British colony at Jamestown was founded. 

Meely LaBauve (2000)by Ken Wells

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Meely LaBauve (2000)

by Ken Wells

Cathoula Bayou, Louisiana

Louisiana: 28/30

  My ability to handle the 1,001 Novels project is solely due to the fact that I live in Los Angeles and have a Los Angeles Public Library card.  As any diehard library user knows, the strength of a library is not a single branch but the ability to request books from all the different branches, or, in the case of the interlibrary loan used by the American University system, any book in any university library.  The Los Angeles Public Library request feature, which you can use in the app or online, is amazing, and typically the book arrives at my local branch within a week.  I mention that here because I actually had to buy a copy of Meely LaBauve off of Amazon, making it one of the few novels the Los Angeles Public Library doesn't have available.  

   This book is a coming-of-age novel about a child of mixed-race heritage- probably Native American and African American, though given the location and the variability of the racial implications of identifying as a Native American over the years, the question is a fraught one.  Meely is a feral child, living by the Bayou with a father who is equally devoted to fishing and trapping and being a knockdown, drag-out alcoholic It's a boy's life, and the comparison of Meely to a swamp-bound Huck Finn is fair.  

The Hate U Give (2017) by Angie Thomas

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Hate U Give (2017)

by Angie Thomas

Carnation Street, Garden Heights, Jackson, Mississippi

Mississippi: 18/19

   This YA novel was adapted into a pretty popular YA movie (with Sabrina Carpenter as the racist white friend from prep school).  It's about a young, African American girl (high school student) who is riding shot gun when her friend from the neighborhood is shot by a white cop.  Readers of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America will not be surprised by the events which follow, though Thomas deserves some credit for evoking the specific time and place (the following/unfollowing of a race-themed Tumblr blog is a minor plot point).  At 400 plus pages, I didn't really linger on the prose, but I think I got the drift of it. As a criminal justice practitioner I didn't find the details of this particular fictional shooting of a young minority man by a white cop in the deep south particularly troubling, as far as those circumstances go.   Here, the cop mistakes a heavy comb being stored in the front driver door for a glock, which is ridiculous, but also something that no African American south would ever do (one, what teenage male owns a heavy duty hair brush let alone keep it in their driver side door while driving around the deep south.

The Witch (1996) by Marie NDiaye

 Audiobook Review

The Witch (1996)

by Marie NDiaye

Translated by Jordan Stump

   French author Marie NDiaye's 1996 novel about a very domestic witch living in suburban France finally got an English translation (and a nomination for the International Booker Prize) this year.   Like Vengeance is Mine, The Witch blends some genre touches (a female family of witches with varying levels of power) with what is essentially a domestic tale about a suburban housewife abandoned by her teenage daughters and husband in the same week, and how she deals with the situation.  

White River Crossing (2026) by Ian McGuire

 Audiobook Review
White River Crossing (2026)

by Ian McGuire

   I saw White River Crossing, the latest book by English novelist Ian McGuire, had been released and immediately went back and listened to the Audiobook for The North Water, his second book.  I read his last book, The Abstainer, when it was released and recognized McGuire of a writer who had both popular ambition and literary merit, working in the field of historical fiction.   I really enjoyed listening to the Audiobook of The North Water because McGuire is really a novelist of the 19th century British empire, and the backgrounds (and accents) of his characters reflect a diversity that wouldn't necessarily come across to someone READING the book.   The Abstainer was historical fiction but it was set in an urban environment, and in that sense White River Crossing is more of a successor to The North Water than The Abstainer.  Listening to them back-to-back the thematic similarities were apparent. 

  White River Crossing is a land-based version of The North Water, set on a remote trapping outpost of the Hudson's Bay Company (I'm assuming, the name is never used.)  The greedy leader of the company fort hears tell of a source of gold far to the north and sends a secret mission with his brutish second in command, a few other workers from his fort, and a party of Indian guides.   As was the case in The North Water, once the adventurers are away from the last outpost of civilization, all kinds of gruesome hell breaks loose.  McGuire is not interested in softening the edges of 19th century colonialist enterprise, and his characters often act like they've been written as examples of the negative press this period has received from the past half century of historiography. 

Delicious Foods (2015) by James Hannaham

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Delicious Foods (2015)

by James Hannaham

Ovis, Louisiana

Louisiana: 27/30

  I read this whole novel thinking it was set in Mississippi, not Louisiana.  It very much reminded me of Paul Beatty, and I was more than a little surprised it took the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America to bring Delicious Foods to my attention.  Significantly, Delicious Foods contains an element of transgression in its plot, about a modern-day farm where drug-addicted African Americans are held in sort of debt peonage to a white owned corporation.  Crack itself is a character here, who goes by Scotty, if I'm not mistaken, and the protagonist is Delores, a mother-of-one whose life takes a crack induced downward spiral after her do-gooder husband is murdered in vile fashion by contemporary analogues of the KKK for his organizing work in rural Louisiana. 

 After a trick goes bad and Delores gets a couple of her teeth knocked out, she is easily recruited to the farm, where she is provided with necessities (including crack) and a dormitory type living environment, and compelled to work on harvesting and maintaining a variety of crops, notably watermelon.  Despite the marketing materials using the term "slavery" to describe the environment Delores finds herself in, the truth is more complicated, and Hannaham seems to also being working on a critique of the underlying capitalist system as much as he is making any race specific statement.  On the other hand, the environment and characters are very specific to the plantation south and "second slavery" system, so there is a complexity of theme that is often absent in the works in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  

  There is also nothing specifically Louisiana about Delicious Foods, rather it is a work from a third area, the delta, which crosses state lines in the north of Louisiana and the center of Mississippi. 

Yesteryear (2026)by Caro Claire Burk

Book Review

Yesteryear (2026)

by Caro Claire Burk

   I do love me a hit, and Yesteryear, by Caro Claire Burk, is one.  It's a Number one New York Times bestseller, Anne Hathaway snapped up the adaptation rights, and of course every book club in American is seemingly getting on board.  I read the first half in an eBook edition then switched to the Audiobook version.   The log-line is "trad wife influencer wakes up on a real 19th century farm...and hates it."  However, like many works of successful contemporary literary fiction, Yesteryear is really a story about a smart young woman from a difficult background trying to come to terms with her role in society.  As someone who is already mildly interested in the "trad-wife" movement (mostly monitored by following the Peter Thiel-backed lifestyle brand for women, Evie, I was interested in what Burk had to say about the movement, as well as its critics.  I was not disappointed.  Burk proves an adept observer of internet culture while not pursuing any stylistic tics that would put off a would-be reader.  Beyond the lit fic high concept, Yesterday is a traditional novel about the difficulties of being a young woman in contemporary society, as related to Emma Bovary as it is the tik tok account of Nara Smith.

   I had issues with the pacing at times, and the fact that the protagonist was so very unlikeable, but that is the point with an unreliable (?) narrator.  

City of Refuge (2008) by Tom Pizzota

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

City of Refuge (2008)

by Tom Pizzota

New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana: 26/30

  Cit of Refuge is a Hurricane Katrina novel, specifically focusing on the aftermath and how it impacts two families, one white with one of those "only in the past" situations where an entire family of four is supported by a male breadwinner who works for an alt-weekly, and the Mom's only job is to take care of the children and complain about everything.  The African American family is more interesting- a brother/sister pair with the sister's adult child.   The actual description of Katrina and its aftermath as experienced by the African American protagonist (the white couple have decamped to Oxford before relocating to Chicago), is the real-life equivalent of the opening of a work of dystopian fiction, but the aftermath is not- the worst of it being a few rough days at the Superdome or Convention Center in New Orleans followed by bus relocations to anywhere- in the case of the sister of the brother/sister duo, a Christian camp in Arkansas surrounded by cotton fields. 

  The worst of it for the white family is listening to unsympathetic voices on early oughts' talk radio.  I thought it was clear that the agenda of the writer was not to create some kind of gothic freakshow of Fema trailers and the survival of the most destitute, but rather to show a more "average" experience of having your whole life ruined overnight.  All in all, it hardly seems dystopian- after the storm itself and the aftermath, pretty much everything works like it should in this book, and by the end all the characters are resuming "normal" lives, either inside New Orleans or in their new homes.

A Good Scent from A Strange Mountain (1992) by Robert Olen Butler

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

A Good Scent from A Strange Mountain (1992)

by Robert Olen Butler

Lake Charles, Louisiana

Louisiana: 25/30

    I'm not sure when exactly it became a problem for an author of one race to write an entire book in the voice of a second race of which he or she is a member, but clearly it was a not problem in 1992, when A Good Scent from A Strange Mountain, which is a collection of short stories about the Vietnamese immigrant experience in Louisiana as told by a white guy whose qualification is (checks notes) being an American soldier in Vietnam during the war.  Aside from that small issue this is an enjoyable collection of short stories about the Vietnamese immigrant experience in and around New Orleans.   I did frequently wince when it came to Butler writing about these characters IN Vietnam or when it came to the characters talking about non-Christian Vietnamese spiritual identity.