Girls (1997) by Frederick Busch

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Girls (1997)

by Frederick Busch

Hamilton, New York

New York: 13/105

Upstate New York: 12/23

    Man, I am going to be reading New York books all year.  Here we are in month two of 2024 and I'm still deep into Upstate/Hudson River Valley with New York City on the horizon.   This is the last of the eight books representing the swath of New York that covers Buffalo, Syracuse and the part of the northern state that isn't the Hudson River Valley.   This is detective fiction of a sort- the protagonist being an Ex Military Policeman now working as a campus cop for an upstate private university in a small New York town.

   Girls was the first book from upstate New York where I really felt the location: specifically the New York winter with its surfeit of snow- am I right in thinking that the confluence of the great lakes/distance from the ocean/lack of mountains creates literally the most snow of anywhere in the United States?  Syracuse is the snowiest city in the United States so I think I'm right about that.  I've noticed making my way through 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, that the emphasis is specifically on the PEOPLE of the United States, with the places themselves being secondary.  So far, the books that have been about place are either books about a single location- beach house, sanitarium, vacation house OR books that portray the life of a small town.  Girls was the first book where I really felt the snow of upstate New York, so credit to author Busch.

   Otherwise, Girls confronts a common issue in the attempt by editor Straight to portray the people of the United States: It involves many, many novels written about people from immigrant groups and the working/underprivileged classes of America, which means plenty of protagonists and narrators who lack a high school education.   How does the author address that situation?  The most common approach is to use the technique of a third party narrator who speaks for the (educated, sophisticated) writer of said characters.  The second most common approach- and this is what Busch does- is place that character in proximity to the educated, so that they can influence the narrative of the working-class/disadvantaged narrator.

  Here, the detective is a private security guard at an elite university, and he takes one class a semester.  Thus, the author is allowed some leeway when the detective character muses on a thing above his level of education/worldliness, "Must have been something rubbed off on me in my literature class."  OR the musings can be supplied by an educated character who exists for that purpose- also at work here.  I wondered if Busch started off to write a more conventional "campus novel" when he was struck by the idea of writing about a campus cop. 

  While Girls is certainly not the type of book I would have sought out beyond the precincts of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America,  I found it one of the more interesting books to emerge out of Upstate New York, since it wasn't about the difficulties of a young girl trying to make her way in a hostile USA.

The Air We Breath (2007) by Andrea Barrett

 1,001 Novels:  A Library of America

The Air We Breath (2007)

by Andrea Barrett

Saranac Lake, New York

New York: 12/105

Upstate New York: 11/23

  It is February and I'm halfway through greater Upstate New York, which I have extended down to New Rochelle- sorry purists!  The Air We Breath is one of the more tolerable titles I've read from this part of the country.  It's a low-stakes work of historical literary fiction set at a Tuberculosis sanitarium in far North New York, set during World War I.   Barrett uses an unnamed third person narrator who generally sounds like another resident of the asylum who also knows everything, everywhere- that's what they call technique, kids.   

 I'd never heard of Barrett before this book but I quickly learned that she won a National Book Award for a collection of short stories and novellas that mostly revolve around scientific themes, as is the case there.  As I've said before and I'll say again, anything that takes me aware from middle aged white Dads and Moms having troubled marriages in NYC is gold for me, so this is one of those books that I'm just happy to read.   It wasn't great- there is some action towards the end but generally speaking tuberculosis patients are a sedate bunch (they have to sit still so the pockets of germs in side their lungs scab over and can't be released). Certainly there are some interesting/memorable moments, particularly those that relate to the lady who operates the early X Ray machine in the basement (before they knew what prolonged exposure to radiation did to you, early technicians just suffered and died) but I'd be hard pressed to recommend it to anyone. 

Fetishists of sanitarium culture, perhaps.

A Place in the Wind (2017) by Suzanne Chapin

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

A Place in the Wind (2017)

by Suzanne Chapin

Lake Holly, New York

New York: 11/105

Upstate New York: 10/23

   A Place in the Wind (alarmingly subtitled "A Jimmy Vega mystery") is the last of the three books from the Buffalo, New York area. A book about African American factory workers, a Joyce Carol Oates book and this book:  that is what Buffalo and its hinterlands has to offer the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.  I don't mind reading detective fiction but I'm not sure why editor Straight has included so much detective fiction and YA fiction but spurned Romance novels and children's books.  I mean, if you are going to be inclusive, be inclusive all the way.  Personally, I've never read a genre romance book but plenty of people do and they are certainly a part of the American literary identity. 

  This was an Audiobook I checked out from the library and I immediately regretted it.  The prose, I felt, was so clumsy that it really got in the way of the plot.  Also, the characters were not complicated- everyone was either good or bad and they all stayed that way throughout.  The actual mystery involved- the death of a young girl from a wealthy white family with suspicion falling on members of the (illegal) immigrant community- relies on the author concealing a very, very, important fact from the reader while otherwise pretending that we have access to the thought process of that character.  

  The ending literally made me laugh because I thought, any character in any book would have revealed the concealed fact on page one.  It's cheap, in other words.  I can see within the precincts of the 1,001 Novels project, how this book got included because it's about a Puerto Rican detective working in Buffalo New York, with a plot that deals with tensions between local whites and the immigrant community, arguably a plot that could have been as interesting without the mystery. 

   The bottom line is that I simply didn't think this was a very good book, I found the whole thing tedious.   This book pretty much ends the Buffalo/Syracuse portion of New York- only one more title remaining from this part of the country.  The rest of upstate is the Hudson River Valley down to the New York City suburbs.   Then...on to Manhattan. Or maybe I'll do New Jersey first and come back to Manhattan because New Jersey is only a dozen or so books.

   

Primitive People (1993) byFrancine Prose

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Primitive People (1993)

by Francine Prose

Hudson's Landing, New York 

New York: 11/105

Upstate: 10/23

  I'm pretty sure that Primitive People, a novel written by a white American woman from the point of view of Simone, an illegal Haitian immigrant would have issues getting published in 2023.  It's not like Simone is one character among multiple narrators, Primitive People is written exclusively from the perspective of Simone, starting with her life in Haiti, where she has a career as an assistant to an American diplomat working in Port-Au-Prince.  Her life is turned upside down when her kind boss is replaced by an unkind boss, and her painter fiance starts cheating on her with a different woman.  Time to go!  She swipes some money from her fiancee- who is never heard from again- hooks up with an agency that arranges a fake husband for her and finds a job as a Nanny (child care, not cleaning) for a ditzy upstate New Yorker who is going through a divorce from her wealthy husband.  

    This was my first encounter with Prose- who got a National Book Award nomination  in 2000 for Blue Angel, a campus novel (sigh).  Prose has written a ton of books but no hits that I can see on her Amazon author page. Her inclusion on the 1,0001 Novels list is very on-brand for editor Susan Straight, who has already introduced me to over twenty American women authors of fiction that I hadn't heard of or read before I started this project. 

 

   Primitive People also had me wondering how many books I'm going to have to read about women working as domestic servants- somehow New England didn't have any that I can recall but New York has already had two.  The first, a legal Puerto Rican immigrant and his book, about an illegal Haitian immigrant.   At a little over 200 pages, it's hard to be offended by Prose's depiction of Simone- although her education isn't discussed, she speaks English fluently (Haitians speak French or a creole French) and sounds like an American college students.  Her recollections of life in Haiti often sound like they come out of a New York times article. 

   I went back and read the New York Times book review from 1993- they obviously didn't see any issues with Simone back then- there was even an excerpt from the book included with the review.   But again, I'm not someone who sees cross-racial characters as particularly problematic, but I am surprised that Susan Straight doesn't see it as problematic given her general concern with gender equality and economic diversity within the 1,001 Novels project thus far (100 books in). 

Tell the Wolves I'm Home (2012) Carol Rifka Brunt

1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Tell the Wolves I'm Home (2012)

by Carol Rifka Brunt

Westchester, New York

New York: 10/105

Upstate New York: 9/23

   Carol Rifka Brunt is a huge one hit wonder- Tell the Wolves I'm Home was a YA smash back in 2012 and then that was it- she hasn't published a thing since.  No short story collection, no memoir,  no second book, period. I read on her Wikipedia that she is married to an astronomer and has three kids- that would be enough to keep anyone busy. 

     Tell the Wolves I'm Home is about a precocious (is there any other kind?) 14 year old girl living in Westchester county with her slightly older sister and her Mom and Dad, both accountants- though their careers are as depicted through the understanding of a fairly unworldly 14 year old.  Specifically, that they are very busy around "tax time" and don't have much time for their kids. 

   The plot, essentially, is that precocious June Elbus has a beloved uncle Finn, her Mom's brother, who is a famous artist (painter, in typically YA fashion- hard to imagine he would be a performance artist!) and who, in the opening pages of the book, dies of AIDS.  In as much as this book is about anything besides the thoughts and experiences of a fourteen year old girl, it's about AIDS and the early days of AIDS, when people with AIDS were hated and feared- before the United States Government officially acknowledged it's existence.  

    Finn has left behind Toby, his bad-boy ex-con, illegal English immigrant boyfriend, and if you have the kind of specific knowledge about how the criminal justice system and immigration interact, you will have to leave aside that information and just go with the flow of the book.   June travels back and forth to Manhattan and forms a friendship with Toby while seeking a better understanding of her feelings about her dead uncle and AIDS, generally speaking.  Meanwhile, her slightly older sister Greta is having her own issues and that relationship functions as a subplot. 

   There's no denying the power of this book, specifically as it relates to the early days of AIDS.  It's clear that June and her family live in the New York suburbs, but you could have just as easily assigned this book to Manhattan, where Toby/Finn live/lived in an apartment owned by Finn.