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: 17/19

   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.