The Killing Ground (1982) by Mary Lee Settle

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Killing Ground (1982)

by Mary Lee Settle

Canona, West Virginia

West Virginia: 3/10

 Author Mary Lee Settle is an interesting lady- she won the National Book Award in 1978 for Blood Tie and she helped to found the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1980.  The Killing Ground is the last novel in her blend of historical and family based auto-fiction, The Beulah Quintet.  The five volumes traverse thousands of miles and hundreds of years, from the state sanctioned murder of religious dissenters in 17th century England, through the settling of this corner of West Virginia by white people, to the present of the mid 1970's, when the author stand-in returns home to her coal-mining family to unravel the mystery of what is called in the description of the book the "murder" of her brother, though FWIW what happens to her brother, who dies hitting his head on the metal toilet of the local lock up after getting sucker punched by a drunken hillbilly (and distant relative) is, at best, manslaughter, murder requiring intent. 

  I can't find any discussion of The Killing Ground as auto-fiction but it read that way to me.  An early chapter features the author character describing her previous Beulah Quintet works in front of an audience of locals, and the description she gives of rich kid boho life in the late 50's, early 60's sounds pretty familiar. 

The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake (1983) by Breece D’J Pancake

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake (1983) 

by Breece D’J Pancake 

Milton, West Virginia

West Virginia: 2/10

   This is the only book by West Virginia author Breece D'J Pancake (he acquired the apostrophe when a copy editor at The Atlantic made a typographical error and he decided it looked cool that way), who killed himself (or maybe accidentally shot himself while he was drunk.)  He was 27 when he died, putting him in the literary annex to rock and roll's 27 club.  That kind of gives you an idea of the Breece Pancake vibe- bad boys and bad girls skulking around burned out derelict West Virginia river towns.  In one particularly vivid story, a river-rat-tugboat worker staying in a decrepit SRO for New Year's picks up an underage prostitute. beds her and then has to call the cops when he finds her with her wrists slit in an alley behind the only bar in town.  That is the scene, man.   Generally speaking I'm relieved to encounter any book in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America written by a male author who isn't a coastal elite or a professor of lit at a university in some random part of the United States and Pancake here fits the bill.   Dying before he could write a novel, that's the real tragedy here. 

Ply (2026) by Hernan Diaz

 Audiobook Review

Ply (2026)

by Hernan Diaz

   Hernan Diaz returns after winning the Pulitzer Prize for his last novel, Trust (2022). I read Trust in the because it made the Booker prize Longlist.  At the time I said, "I quite enjoyed Trust, though I'm not sure it's a (booker prize) short lister- it might be a National Book Award and/or Pulitzer Nominee- vibe-wise Trust reminds me of Richard Powers- a recent winner and author of a book- Gain, that really reminds me of Trust, in that it attempts to convey an economic narrative in a novel."

  Thus, when I read the negative review in the New York Times calling Ply a dud and specifically calling out his Ballardian cyberpunk future as Dead on Arrival, I wasn't particularly dissuaded.  I got a bump to the top of the Libby borrowing list and blazed through my seven-day rental window at 2.25 speed- faster than I prefer but fine for Ply, which, at 15 hours isn't shockingly long but IS at times tedious.  I largely agree with the New York Times review of Dwight Garner.  Ply, like Trust, again stuck me as resembling the technique of Richard Powers- introducing subject matter from science (here it is physics) and melding that with elements of both genre and literary fiction.  Garner critiques the lack of specificity in Diaz's description of this dystopian future but I think that was a very specific choice by Diaz to keep from alienating his potential audience, he wanted something familiar enough to a literary fiction audience to not be off-putting. 

  I thought the most interesting facet of Ply, and something Garner didn't mention in his review, is the depiction of social life within the dystopian future.  Diaz goes further in describing this part of his world than any other dystopian/literary fiction cross-over that I can remember.   The human relationship at the center of Ply, between a girl electricity thief called "the pincher" and a kooky mad scientist who needs her help, was interesting, to me.  Overall, though, yeah, hard to see an Audience responding to Ply. 

  An independent critical observation I want to lay out in brief is that Diaz depicts a world where living beyond 40 or 50 is unusual.  This appears to be based on a fundamental misapprehension about human demography before modern medicine lowered infant mortality from almost half to essentially zero.   This often takes the form of depicting these times as being almost devoid of old people and having characters muse on how few people live beyond their mid 30's or 40's.  That is not how shit worked.  The fact is that if someone lived beyond year 5, they had a reasonable chance of living to a "normal" old age- 60 or 70, and that there were plenty of old people around back in the day. 

  Not an issue that would bother me normally, but Diaz does include pages and pages of his mad scientist character discussing particle physics, and his mad scientist character is the only human over 50 in the book, and Diaz' Pincher constantly talks about how, as a 20 something, she only has a few more years left before she can expect to die.