1,001 Novels: A Library of America
Maryland & Delaware
What to say about the literary footprint of Maryland and Delaware? I was astonished that Edgar Allan Poe wasn't included considering his long residence in Baltimore. I wasn't astonished that editor Susan Straight left out Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon, pardon me for saying, but she doesn't seem like a Pynchon type, based on her selections up to this point. At every turn, Straight favors the stories of the underdogs, the go-nowheres and the poor and abused. Good for her, I say- certainly I have learned about the life experiences of the underclass from New England through the South thus far. That, after all, is the point of programmatic reading: Exposing yourself to worlds beyond your own.
Looking through the reviews below, I couldn't even pick out a favorite. I suppose maybe the Anne Tyler title, since she is a major American author, I'd consciously avoided before the 1,001 Novels Project.
Published 8/2/24
The Book of Unknown American (2014)
by Christina Enriquez
Newark,. Delaware
Delaware: 1/3
Welcome to Delaware! I think I took the train through Delaware on the way to New York back in college. Beyond that, no. When I was in college I never- not once- got in a car driven by myself or someone else to explore the area. It's not a regret, exactly, but I doubt I will ever in my life get another three or so years to explore a part of the United States like I could have in college. Delaware registers only three books in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project, two in the north and one in the south. I'm going to lump these three books in with Maryland (9) and DC(11) to give me a Chapter 4: North subgroup of 23 books. The other subchapter will be Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina.
The Book of Unknown Americans is one of those good YA titles in the 1,001 Novels project where I wasn't entirely sure it was actually a YA novel until I finished it and looked up reviews and internet mentions. It's basically a YA title, plot 2 (Plot one is the YA bildungsroman, plot two is the tragedy befalls an overprotected child as they transition to adolescence.) Here, the main plot is a mom/dad/brain damaged daughter who legally immigrate to Newark, Delaware so their daughter can take advantage of a school for special education in the area. Dad, formerly the owner of his own construction firm, takes a job at a mushroom farm to secure working papers. Mom, unable to work under the terms of their immigration status, sits around the house and tries to cope with life in America. Daughter makes a friend with the neighbor boy, the child of Panamanian immigrants and other minor characters include a Puerto Rican, a Venezuelan and a Dominican- all legal immigrants living in the same apartment complex outside of Newark, Delaware.
The tension in the plot comes from the relationship between the neighbor boy and the brain damaged high-school aged daughter of the main family. Once that gets going it is crystal clear that a tragedy will befall the family as a result, and when it happens the mechanism is hardly surprising. On the other hand, it's great to read a book written from the POV- legal immigrants from Latin America (various) living in Northern Delaware- exactly the type of book for the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.
Published 8/5/24
The Saint of Lost Things (2005)
by Christopher Castellani
Wilmington, Delaware
Delaware: 2/3
The Saint of Lost Things is volume 2 of a four or five volume saga about an Italian American family living in Wilmington, Delaware. Author Christopher Castellani is the director of Grub Street, the arts organization that was embroiled in the 'bad art friend' scandal last year. Like many of the authors on this list he has a decent reputation and a job teaching the arts but no real hits. I mention it because while I was reading The Saint of Lost Things it occurred to me that the author was trying to give Italian Americans the kind of serious family/immigrant novel that they lack. It was a supposition that was born out by the New York Times review of the next volume in this series, where the reviewer quotes Castellani as being motivated by the degree to which Italian-Americans have been ignored by the more intellectual parts of American literary culture.
Welp. Not to make things worse, but my main thought while reading The Saint of Lost Things was precisely how uninteresting this particular group of characters turned out in the pages of this book. The main character is the Italian immigrant/matriarch of the clan, here she is a young bride, recently arrived from Italy, who is struggling to fulfill her function as a bearer of healthy children (preferably a son) and make her way in the confusing world of America. Her husband works at a Ford Factory and dreams of opening his own restaurant. There's also the brother of the husband and his non-Italian wife and a single man (also Italian American) who lives by himself after the death of his parents. Besides the ongoing obsession with this lady having a child, the rest of the plot largely revolves around attempts by the locals to scare the sole African American family into moving out of their Italian American neighborhood. They all come across as a bunch of uneducated assholes. Not sure if that was the point, but that was the message I received.
Reading The Saint of Lost Things did give me cause to consider the "dim bulb" narrator problem and how it might apply to Italian-Americans, a group that largely eschew intellectual accomplishments in favor of "hard work," however that may be defined. Probably a legacy of millennium of being under the boot of Catholicism and being told to keep their mouths shut and to not ask any questions of authority, I'd guess.
Published 9/4/24
The Furrows (2022)
by Namwali Serpell
Bethany Beach, Delaware *
Delaware 3/3
Like many readers I was extremely impressed by Zambian-American novelist Namwali Serpell's first novel, The Old Drift (2019). The Old Drift was hands down the best first novel I'd read for years- mixing historical fiction about a mostly ignored location (Southern Rhodesia/Zambia) with science-fiction, moving across space and time with a well detailed cast of characters- it wasn't a perfect novel, but it was an amazing FIRST novel- being neither a trauma porn take or a bildungsroman written from the perspective of a character who shares many of the author's characteristics.
Thus, when The Furrows was release in 2022 I was at first excited, then disappointed when I read the reviews, Serpell having moved in a different direction from book one. If her first novel placed her in a category far beyond what is normally achieved by most authors with their first book, her second novel sounded like something most American authors would write for their first book: A dour tale about a biracial young woman who is present when her younger brother goes missing/dies in the Atlantic ocean during a summer visit. Like many readers I was surprised that the premise here is that a seven year old and ten year old from a family with little history in the water were allowed to swim alone in the ocean without supervision. especially since the major plot dynamic is that the mother of the family never, ever gets over the disappearance/death of the younger brother.
The Furrows is certainly an example of American literary fiction family plot type 3- child dies young and the entire family spends the rest of their life (and the book) absolutely not getting over it. Here, the narrator and primary actor is Cassandra Williams- black dad, white mom. She is a young adult with a good education and no career. Her mom, a wealthy heiress (ish) living in San Francisco, has dedicated her entire life to the proposition that Cassandra's little brother is not dead, merely missing, and she's set up a non-profit to help others sharing her fate.
Cassandra is, obviously, haunted by her missing/dead brother, and most of the book involves her running into guys named Wayne who might be her brother. Serpell has injected a "magic realism" edge to the text, to the point where the reader is sometimes unsure if Cassandra is hallucinating or not. At least one major event in the book- some kind of explosion at SFO is treated so obliquely that the reader doesn't know if it happened at all.
Like many works of contemporary American literary fiction written about people from the upper echelons of the socio-economic ladder, I found the characters in The Furrows borderline insufferable. Were The Furrows Serpell's first novel, I would say it was a good first effort but not that interesting, as the book she wrote after The Old Drift, it can only be called a disappointment.
Published 9/5/24
Sugar House (2000)
by Laura Lippman
Baltimore, Maryland
Maryland: 1/9
After slogging through over 100 novels set in New York State I'm positively giddy at the prospect of dispensing with Delaware in 3 books and Maryland in 9. Coincidentally I was reading On Such a Full Sea (2014) by Chang Rae Lee at the same time I was reading Sugar House a so-called "Tess Monaghan" mystery by Baltimore based author Laura Lippman. On Such a Full Sea is a concrete example of a book that could have substituted for yet another lady detective novel- On Such a Full Sea is squarely set in a (post-apocalyptic) Baltimore, called B-more for the Chinese descended settlers. Sea has ample description of the Maryland landscape and is firmly anchored in its location. At the same time, I get what editor Susan Straight is trying to do here, platforming female voices in a genre that goes through periods of guy-heavy narratives.
Lippman is married to fellow writer David Simon (he did The Wire)- they both worked in newspapers, once upon a time. This book isn't particularly concerned with the "urban areas in decline" thesis, it's more like a work-a-day detective novel that has a well-observed locale. The Domino Sugars sign, in particular, is referenced frequently. The reader is also treated to a couple of trips to colorful Philadelphia- which for some reason has been lumped with the Appalachians and southwestern Midwest, for the purposes of the 1,001 Novels project.
An elegant, lovely novel-in-stories, set in 1950s America, when a young boy, after the loss of brother and father, finds solace in the complicated faith of his mother, while realizing his own gay identity.
Published 9/9/24
Mother of Sorrows (2005)
by Richard McCann
1600 St Camillus Dr, Silver Spring, MarylandMaryland: 2/9
When I was in undergraduate in Washington DC, a couple of our friend group moved into a 10th floor apartment in one of the big, nice apartment buildings that line some of the avenues out this way. My memories of Silver Spring are limited to the drive to and from that apartment and being inside the actual apartment, since I didn't own a car and there was nothing a young college student would do in Silver Spring besides sitting in a friend's apartment and watching NFL football and/or the Simpsons. Editor Susan Straight locates this book in one of the single-family home communities that is more typical for the area than the apartment building I frequented, but Mother of Sorrows could have just as easily been located in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington DC, where half of the connected short-stories occur.
The description that Editor Straight provided for this book left me questioning if she actually read the same book I did:
An elegant, lovely novel-in-stories, set in 1950s America, when a young boy, after the loss of brother and father, finds solace in the complicated faith of his mother, while realizing his own gay identity.
This sentence isn't wholly inaccurate, but the narrator is the adult version of the "young boy," and the father plays a very minor role. Rather, Mother of Sorrows is largely about the relationship between the author-narrator and his real-life brother, Davis. Both of them were gay, but Davis self-destructed and killed himself accidentally with a heroin overdose in his 30's. Richard McCann, meanwhile, became a moderately succesful author and teacher and didn't die until 2021. Mother of Sorrows is about the brother and his relationship with the author, more than anything else.
McCann pairs a light, elliptical style with the dark themes of a gay identity denied by a parent. While the book does begin in the 1950s/60's when the two brother are kids, by the end of the book is well into the modern era and Mom is still denying the gay identity of both her children. Sure to be at the top of my Maryland list if only because it isn't a book about an adolescent girl.
Published 9/10/24
Bright River Trilogy (1984)
by Annie Green
Hooke's Crossing, Maryland
Maryland: 3/9
Bright River Trilogy is as obscure as it gets- a one-off author, published in the 1980's to no acclaim, and author Annie Green vanished from the public sphere without a trace. It's also not a trilogy in the sense that it is one novel, under three hundred pages long. The "trilogy" refers to the trio of main characters who live in the middle-of-nowhere, Maryland. I didn't even know there were rural parts of Maryland for most of my life. I had some idea that somewhere, Maryland had generated a "southern" culture with plantations and such, but I feel like they hush it up.
Bright River Trilogy is not set on one of these erstwhile plantations, rather it's a small town filled with characters who- yes- you guessed it- never go anywhere. In this way this book reminds me of several novels from upstate New York and rural New England- sad characters, often from a once well-off, now decadent/failed wealthy family of the area, slouching towards their eventual extinction. Here you've got the well-meaning grandma whose stern husband hung himself after being implicated in a real estate fraud, the prodigal son, who goes off to Vietnam and returns with a wife who he literally picked up at the Port Authority bus station (and is an alcoholic). Other protagonists include the whorish daughter of a local yokel- she's got a book with the 50 dudes she's banged. Her dad spends his days reading the "M" volume of an encyclopedia to her deaf, drug-addled younger brother.
Besides the M volume, nobody in this tale picks up a book or appears to have any interests what so ever besides self-destruction. You'd be forgiven if you thought this book was published last year as part of the "deaths of despair" trend, but you'd be wrong- 1984!
Published 9/12/24
Your Face in Mine (2014)
by Jess Row
Baltimore, Maryland
Maryland: 4/9
Susan Straight, editor of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America calls Your Face in Mine, a 2014 novel about racial reassignment surgery a "sharp satire" but I would have to disagree. I found Your Face in Mine neither particularly sharp nor satirical. Your Face in Mine is also another 1,001 Novels example of an author who hits a dead-end- this novel was published in 2014 after two well received collections of short stories, the New York Times gave it a highly favorable review and compared Row to Jonathan Lethem. Since then? Row has been working as a non-tenured creative writing professor at NYU and being a Dad in NYC.
It's crazy to see how many authors make it to the point where their first novel gets a good publisher (Riverhead for this book) and a favorable NYT notice and then that is it- nothing to follow. What is the point of all that work if only to abandon it. It suggests to me that many SUCCESFUL authors only have one or two ideas and if it isn't an idea they can write over and over again endlessly, they are through. Shouldn't writers of literary fiction be able to come up with plots and characters that don't draw directly from their own experience? Isn't that the point of fiction?
This links to a larger idea I've considered recently: That 90% or so of SUCCESFUL artists are really just telling their personal story to the world, and once they've done that they have nothing left to say.
This book though is strange, at least, in contrast to the domestic banality that editor Susan Straight has favored thus far, 200 books and seven states into the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project. I listened to the Audiobook- a good pick since the narrator sounds like me and the book is written with a narrator-protagonist- that's the best format for an Audiobook. Complicated plot dynamics sink Audiobooks since you can't flip through what you've previously read to make sense of what you are presently reading.
Published 9/13/24
Mary Jane (2021)
by Jessica Anya Blau
205 Hawthorne Road, Baltimore Maryland
Maryland: 5/9
Mary Jane is the biggest hit I've read from the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America: 13 thousand plus Amazon reviews and a movie rights deal announced last year. It's a coming-of-age novel from the POV of a teenaged girl living in suburban Maryland. Her life changes forever when she takes a summer nanny gig for a "Jewish family"- still an exotic thing at that time in place (70's suburban Maryland). The father of that family is a psychiatrist specializing in substance abuse disorder. Mary Jane's life is turned upside down that summer when it is revealed that rock-star Jimmy and his tv-famous-musical-family wife Sheba (just "Sheba") are going to be living there for the summer while Jimmy tackles his heroin addiction.
The book is written relentlessly from the perspective of the eponymous protagonist- this was the Audiobook that broke me in terms of listening to adolescent female narrators in the Audiobook format- no more after this book! Mary Jane, as you would expect, is a bright, curious girl with many questions left unanswered by her waspish housewife Mom and incommunicative country-club Dad. Given the Baltimore location and the "Parents just don't get it" setting of the early 1970's, it was hard not to think of John Waters, specifically Hairspray, the first movie version. Mary Jane was kind of a fun-house mirror (or not-fun house mirror, in the case of Mary Jane's parents home) of the same kettle of influences that spawned Waters' distinctive vision.
Another book I was thinking about while listening to Mary Janes was another title from the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project, The Dakota Winters,, which is another coming-of-age story with the introduction of a celebrity element. The other title that keeps popping up is Daisy Jones and the Six, which I refuse to read, but understand is very popular. Seems to me the idea of weaving a celebrity element into one's otherwise normal-people coming-of-age story is a solid technique for generating marketplace interest in a manuscript that might otherwise not exist. Editors will ask, "What does the protagonist LEARN from the celebrity element in your book?"
Published 9/16/24
The World Doesn't Require You (2019)
by Rion Amilcar Scott
Cross River, Maryland
Maryland: 6/9
The World Doesn't Require You is the second collection of short-stories which all take place in a fictional Maryland town that was the site of the only successful American slave revolt. The best of these stories have either a satirical edge, metafictional fuckery or some kind of speculative fiction vibe. For me the clearest comparison would be Paul Beatty in terms of tone. Unlike many of the white Marylanders in the pages of the 1,001 Novels project, the black characters of The World Doesn't Require You are interesting.
You don't need any back story about the fictional backstory of Cross River, Maryland, or at least, the reader isn't provided any back story. Cross River appears mostly through its institutions- the local University plays a starring role in the longest story/novella, about two dissolute university professors (Special Talks in Loneliness Studies). That story and another striking story about a regional variation of the popular children's game of "Ding Dong Ditch" both wallow in the academic setting of a "campus novel." The other important institutions depicted are local churches, the focus of a story about a local musician who breaks into and then out of the local church music scene in an endless quest for the regionally distinct "sound" of Cross River.
The World Doesn't Require You was a good selection to hear as an Audiobook. Each story has a separate narrator, so that gave the producers an opportunity to employ a constellation of voices to tell each story
Published 9/17/24
The Language of Light (2003)
by Meg Waite Clayton
Worthington Valley, Maryland
Maryland: 7/9
The Language of Light is plot type 2 of the 1,001 Novels project: Woman (or rarely, Man) comes home to deal with unresolved personal and familial issues; surprises are revealed. I also call this the "Hallmark Movie" plot, which typically involves a busy professional woman throwing over her urban life for life in a small town in the middle of nowhere where she grew up. Here, the protagonist is a young widow with two small children who moves back to Maryland "Horsey Country," which is a thing.
Once ensconced in her familial estate- in the fashion of the generationally wealthy, money, or the need for money, is mentioned not a single time in the pages of The Language of Light. Nelly, the protagonist, is not one of those Moms who spends all day worrying about her children, here, the childrearing is so effortless it makes the Mothers in countless other 1,001 Novels titles look like complainers. Rather, Nelly spends her time thinking about her relationships: with her now dead husband, who she was on the verge of divorcing before he drove his car off the road and snapped his neck and with her father, a famous photographer/journalist known for his pictures snapped in war zones.
Nelly, it seems, also once had dreams of becoming a professional photographer, only life got in the way. Nelly befriends Emma, the wealthy widower who lives next door and when Dad shows up for the holidays, Emma and Nelly's dad rekindle an old relationship. I found many of the plot points ridiculous, like the trip Nelly takes with her "portfolio"(mostly pictures of her kids) to New York City to try to land a solo show. True, she laughs at herself, but maybe not hard enough.
In terms of the concerns of the 1,001 Novels project, The Language of Light is worthwhile because of the depiction of Maryland Horsey country but otherwise, no.
Published 9/18/24
Mason's Retreat (1995)
by Christopher Tilghman
Chesapeake, Maryland
Maryland: 8/9
Ready to wrap up Maryland! Mason's Retreat is an example a rare but important genre in the 1,001 Novels project, a volume from a multi-volume multi-generational family history series. This family is the Mason family, owners of a southern-style plantation in Maryland, of all places. I was frankly unaware of this part of Maryland despite spending my college years in Washington DC, but it is out there. It's a decidedly coastal location with much of the transit in this book taking place via boat, in a manner similar to the Maine coast, with folks popping by for visits on their sailboats and what not.
This volume is the first of four- each with a different time period and cast of characters. Here, the Mason's are not the Mason's at all but a cadet branch who have inherited the plantation, called Mason's Retreat, after the death of a maiden aunt, the previous occupant. The time is the great depression, and the inheritor, Edward Mason, is at the end of his financial rope after his airplane parts factory in Manchester UK is put to the rack during the Great Depression. Mason and his wife, Edith (the protagonist) are both American but relocated to the UK as wealthy people did back then. No one is particularly excited about relocating to a run-down plantation house, but hey, life could be worse, right?
Once they make it to Maryland they meet the house staff- it never gets brought up in Mason's Retreat, but this is the same general area where Frederick Douglass was born a slave (and escaped). Race kind of simmers beneath the surface but despite the inclusion of some black characters the author is mostly concerned with Edith. They've hardly settled in to plantation life when Hitler emerges, followed by renewed interest on the part of the British Government in manufacturing more airplanes, and Edith is left to her own devices. Her own devices being a lusty affair with a neighbor- class and race appropriate, thank heavens.
Mason's Retreat was another title from the 1,001 Novels project that was great because it focuses on this specific place- but the humans in the book are less memorable than the plantation itself.
Published 9/19/24
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982)
by Anne Tyler
Baltimore, Maryland
Maryland: 9/9
Maryland, complete. So easy! New York with its 100 books for the state and 80 for the city is way beyond the average number of books per state. That number is more like 10. Maryland with its 9 titles is just under that average, but you could also give it credit for most of the books in the DC chapter, since many of those characters go back and forth between DC and the Maryland suburbs. There are no Maryland books representing the panhandle, nor are any cities discussed outside of Baltimore. I thought editor Susan Straight did do a good job representing weird rural Maryland. In terms of the Baltimore titles, it seems like the TV show, The Wire would be the best pick but that would require changing the name of the project to something besides 1,001 Novels. That's the second state in a row (New Jersey, The Sopranos) where I felt like the best novel to represent a place wasn't a novel at all.
Anne Tyler is one of those authors that I've consciously avoided because of her subject matter (sad families, or so I gather.) If you want me to read a novel about a sad family or a wealthy, well-educated white couple whose marriage falls apart it had better be either a) foreign or b)a major prize winner or preferably both, otherwise... I've heard it already. Sure enough, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant has a moment in the publisher provided auxiliary materials (Book club questions, interview with the author), where she is asked a question like, "Most of your books deal with marriage and family, but this book is just about family, why is that?" It reminds me of the scene in the Blues Brothers film where they show up to a gig and are told that the bar has both types of music, "Country AND western."
Tyler has flirted with the major awards- she's got three books, including this one, that were Pulitzer Finalists and she's got two books that were Booker nominated- a shortlist and a longlist. This book is about a sad family: Mom, abandoned by her husband to raise three kids on her own. Ezra, the oldest, a sad-sack restaurant owner, single, Jenny, a doctor going on her third husband and Cody, an efficiency expert who steals Ezra's girlfriend and marries her. There wasn't anything "Baltimore" about Dinner except it's actual physical location. As I've mentioned before, a characteristic of family-centered fiction is that the characters don't talk to anyone else, don't go anywhere (unless it is off camera, so to speak) and don't do anything of note. Certainly that is the case here- it's simply true of this whole category of fiction, prize winning or not, domestic or foreign.
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