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. 

The Empusium (2024) by Olga Tokarczuk

 Audiobook Review

The Empusium (2024)

by Olga Tokarczuk

   Like many English readers, I hadn't heard of Polish author and Nobel Prize Winner Olga Tokarczuk until the release of Flights in 2018- a translation from the original Polish which was published in 2007.  Since then I've kept up with her new English language releases- like many I found the similarities between Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, published in 2019(in English and 2008 in Polish), and Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh (published in 2020). No one ever got to the bottom of it! I also read The Books of Jacob- which I thought was really great but had zero and I mean zero, commercial appeal.

  The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story arrived late last month and I quickly got the Audiobook(!) version out of the library of the Libby app.  At 11 hours it was much shorter than The Books of Jacob and more in line with the standard length of a newly published novel.   Like every book I've read of hers except for Flights, The Empusium is going to appeal to a limited audience, fans of cheeky, feminist historical fiction with genre elements, provided here by the promise of a "horror story" in the title.   Perhaps unsurprisingly, the horror is ever lurking and rarely front in center.  Instead, the reader/listener is treated to lengthy dialogues between the residents of a turn of the 20th century sanitarium which I believe is located in the Czech alps- or what would be a mountainous region of the Czech Republic today or maybe Austria.   

    I've actually learned a fair amount about sanitariums over the years from history and literary fiction- they played a prominent role in the settling of southern California vis a vis the dry client being ideal for sufferers of tuberculosis.  There's also the more contemporary understanding of the sanitarium as a predecessor/forerunner of the modern mental hospital/place to stash well-off people who are incapable of maintaining themselves in society- LGBT people, for example.   This sanitarium in this book makes use both of the tuberculosis model and the developing "science" of psychiatry- which- you don't have to be a Scientologist to point out issues with psychiatry. 

    So personally, I quite enjoyed it but it's another work of literary fiction which will have little, if any appeal to people who aren't already interested in fiction about turn of the century European sanitarium culture. Those showing up for the horror story will be left wanting.

Mattaponi Queen (2010) by Belle Boggs

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Mattaponi Queen (2010)

by Belle Boggs

Mattaponi Reservation, Virginia

Virginia:  6/16

I love the Native American books in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America list. I thought I had a pretty good grasp on the different types of tribes out there but this was the first representation of the first peoples of Virginia, AKA the "Pocahontas" tribe that interacted with Captain John Smith.  They were and are a tribe of Algonquin speaking people who were members of the Powahatan chiefdom.  They have a rich and complex history but Mattaponi Queen doesn't really get into it, except to the occasional reference to a character who is absent because she left to act in Hollywood because she looked "just like" Pocahontas or another character musing about what a disappointment the real Pocahontas would have been to her family when she left for England in colonial times.

 The stories aren't all about Native American characters- both African American and White residents are represented, and this had the first story I can remember where I wasn't sure what race a character was until I really thought about it.  It's a rural milieu, so the stories in this volume resemble the stories from other run down, economically morose parts of the United States:  Health issues, poverty, a desire to escape coupled with an inability to do so- they all get ample space.  The dwarf river boat of the title doesn't appear till the end as part of a story about the owner and his desire to sell the boat and restore it at the same time.   

Annihilation (2024) by Michel Houellebecq

 Book Review

Annihilation (2024)

by Michel Houellebecq

  It's hard to be a fan of Michel Houellebecq in the United States- he's despised by the literary establishment, and the type of Americans who would be his fans typically aren't big fans of translated French literary fiction.  Thus, to read about Houellebecq in English language periodicals is to be subject to an endless stream of disdain with occasional concessions to his wit or powers of anticipation.  I wasn't surprised that the New York Times review for Annihilation, which is reportedly Houellebecq's last novel book?) struck this exact tone- using the cover of an opening about how an average American reader of literary fiction might become increasingly sympathetic to Houellebecq as additional drinks are consumed over the course of the evening. 

    Regrettably I agree with Dwight Garner's assessment, that this is far from Houellebecq's best work and it, in fact, frequently grim and nearly impossible to read.  The major theme here is end of life care and the issues surrounding euthanasia, interspersed with a strange and half abandoned techno-thriller angle and Houellbecq's typically fraught musings about relations between the sexes.   The inclusion of the techno thriller stuff gave me hope for at least some kind of mass market ambition, and it is impossible to know what to make of the fact that the plot line is abandoned two thirds of the way through the book.  Houellebecq's characters are, as always, hugely unlikable, that is nothing new, but there is a real lack of both wit and fun, which if you are going to put up with the rest of it, are what makes Houellebecq such a good read.

Jacob I Have Loved (1980) by Katherine Paterson

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Jacob I Have Loved (1980)
by Katherine Paterson

Ross Island, Chesapeake Bay, Maryland

 Maryland: 10/10

  I thought this 1980 YA novel about living on an island was part of the Virginia chapter, but apparently it is not.  I didn't even know people lived on islands in Chesapeake Bay!   The book is about a young girl growing up on this island during World War II, more or less.  A mysterious stranger moves into town, there is a big storm, people go off to war, come back.  Narrator does nothing, goes nowhere.  The reader does get a very real sense of what living on one of these islands was like back in the day, so it makes sense that Straight included it in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project but other than that it's standard bildungsroman stuff here.

Playground (2024) by Richard Powers

 Book Review

Playground (2024)

by Richard Powers

   I like Richard Powers but I don't love him.  In many ways he's one of the last old white men if American fiction- he's managed to avoid irrelevance by winning major literary prizes and writing fiction that is broadly appealing to the biggest possible audience for literary fiction while changing things up enough to avoid charges that he is repeating himself or running out of new ideas.  One hallmark of Powers' fiction is his repeated ability to introduce non-fiction subjects into his prose:  Ecology, AI or, in Playground, the wonders of the oceans.  The weaving together of science and literary fiction is the essence of Powers and his appeal.  For me, his books are hit and miss.  Yes, I enjoyed The Overstory, but only read it after it won the Pulitzer Prize because "Richard Powers writes about trees" didn't sound interesting.  Afterward, I didn't regret reading it but I never think about it, talk about it or recommend it to anyone.

  Similarly,  I wasn't annoyed or uncomfortable reading Playground but nor was I ever compelled or emotionally triggered by the characters or the story.  Playground isn't a book I'll revisit and I really do doubt it's going to win a major literary award.  It got weeded out at the shortlist stage by the Booker Prize this year, which makes sense to me.  

A Stolen Life (1999) by Jane Louise Curry

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

A Stolen Life (1999)

by Jane Louise Curry

Shirley Plantation, Virginia

Virginia: 5/17

    The Shirley Plantation where A Stolen Life- which is a Newberry Prize winning Children's book, is set at the southern edge of an arc of territory that encompasses all of the books from Delaware, Maryland and Washington DC, and all but six of the titles from Virginia.  There's a clear dividing line between this territory, which is basically the watershed of the Chesapeake Bay, and the rest of the area of Chapter 4:  western Virginia and all of North and South Carolina.  The defining characteristics of these books is their proximity to water and status as "old" parts of the United States, with a history that reaches back to the colonial era.  

    That brings us to A Stolen Life, about a young girl who is kidnapped (or "spirited" in the quasi-whimsical language of the time) away from her home in coastal Scotland and sold as an indentured servant in still-wild colonial Virginia.   If I have my history correct, the father of the protagonist is a rebellious Jacobite, and the reason for her kidnapping is tied up in her families decision to have her dress as a boy to avoid the wrath of the English king (for complicated reasons).  Thus, the spiriters take her for a boy when they grab her off the Scottish coast.

    A Stolen Life is a children's book, so her adventures in the new world, which include being kidnapped by Cherokees are decidedly PG but I enjoyed the rare depiction of life in colonial era Virginia.