If I Survive You (2022) by Jonathan Escoffery

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

If I Survive You (2022)

by Jonathan Escoffery

Cutler Bay, Florida

Florida: 10/21

   I am CRUSHING the Florida chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.  This chapter is filled with 200 page volumes of inter-connected short stories from the POV of different ethnicities etc. Trelawny, the main protagonist of If I Survive You, is the child of two Jamaican immigrants- though, as depicted in this book, it is quite frequent for Jamaicans to go back and forth BETWEEN the US and Jamaica- something like the situation for other Caribbean groups, Puerto Rican's of course, but also Dominicans.  Most Jamaican immigrants come over on work visa's to do a specific job- illegal immigration isn't uncommon, but mostly immigrant Jamaicans are legal.   Trelawny is unusual in the context of African American culture in Florida because his father is mostly white.  The opening of If I Survive You is about life in high school as someone who doesn't fit in with white, black or latino ethnic groups.   The alienation is compounded when Trelawny goes off to the Midwest for college, while his brother stays behind to do post-Hurricane Andrew reconstruction with his Dad.  

  Mom returns to Jamaica after divorcing Dad, and Trelawny sinks into a non-ethnically specific post-college malaise recognizable to anyone, and lives out of his car as he tries to make a life for himself.  We also hear about other characters- the brother, a cousin and his father. 

River of Hidden Dreams (1994) by Connie May Fowler

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

River of Hidden Dreams (1994)

by Connie May Fowler

St. Augustine, Florida

Florida: 9/21

   I will say that I like Florida swamp country, which is a fair bit of Florida- I mean, pretty much all of it. The books set in swampland Florida make me want to seek out non-fiction about the area- I have The Orchid Thief, by Susan Orlean in mind. Fowler's protagonist, Sadie Hunter, is a woman of mixed Native/White/Black ancestry, with a link to the midwestern tribes that were imprisoned and re-educated, with her grandmother being a young woman who is "left behind" with white people- she was also the only child brought to the Florida prison.  The emotions are raw, and the choices are fraught.   River of Hidden Dreams also highlights the ethnic fluidity- up to a point- of northern Florida, which is like a racial paradise compared to the 19th century plantation economy of the delta. 

A Free Man of Color by Barbra Hambly

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

A Free Man of Color (1997)

by Barbra Hambly

New Orleans, Louisiana 

Louisiana: 30/30

  I found the missing Louisiana title from the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America,  A Free Man of Color by Barbra Hambly.  What happened here is I read the wrong Barbra Hambly novel- Good Man Friday, both volumes from her series detailing the exploits of free man of color and surgeon, musician and private investigator Ben January.  Good Man Friday was cool because January went to Washington DC and ran into Edgar Allan Poe- the actual inventor of the detective story. The juxtaposition of the past of relative racial harmony and toleration and the (at the time of the story) new American regime, where white are free and black are not, provides much of the plot and narrative tension. 

Visiting Hours (2012) by Jennifer Anne Moses

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Visting Hours (2012)

by Jennifer Anne Moses

Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Louisiana 29/30

  I am missing one book from Louisiana, and I can't figure it out for the life of me.  As far as I'm aware, Visiting Hours is the last book from this chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of American project. Visiting Hours was last because I had to buy a copy- I was surprised didn't have this interesting novel about the grim lives of patients waiting to die in an AIDS hostel in... the 1990s? The early 2000s?  It actually really reminded me of Blackouts by Justin Torres, the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction winner, which concerns a man dying of AIDS (I think) in a New Orleans SRO.  

  I could have used more Bayou.  I'm really loving the swamp-lit of Florida, and Louisiana seems like a missed opportunity in that regard, maybe because the geographical location overlaps so completely with the Cajun population that one supersedes the other.   One other conclusion I drew from this chapter is that Hurricane Katrina did real damage to the city both physically AND psychically. 

Killing Mr. Watson (1990) by Peter Matthiessen

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Killing Mr. Watson (1990)

by Peter Matthiessen

Chokoloskee Bay, Florida

Florida: 8/21

    Killing Mr. Watson was the first of a three-volume series retelling the life of real-life villain Edward "Bloody" Watson, who looms over the history of this remote outpost of swampland Florida like a giant. The three volumes were eventually republished in a single volume called Shadow Country in 2008, and that book won the National Book Award for Fiction.  I checked out the Audiobook edition from the library- Killing Mr. Watson takes the form of an oral history, with 12 voices telling different versions of the same events, starting out with the more-or-less cold-blooded murder of Watson at the hands of a loosely organized "posse" of his neighbors.  Matthiessen, award-winning author that he is, knows how to handle both the human and natural elements- the swampy everglades being almost an equal attraction of the tale.

The Yearling (1938) by Marjorie Rawlings

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Yearling (1938)

by Marjorie Rawlings

Volusia, Florida

Florida: 7/21

   This 1938 children's book is set between Jacksonville to the north and Orlando to the south, broadly swampy but with high points called "islands" where people settled in the mid to late 19th century (The Yearling is set in the 1870's.)   The edition I checked out of the library was an illustrated version- the illustrator being N.C. Wyeth, father of painter Andrew Wyeth and phenomenally successful illustrator in his own right.   Like many so-called "children's books" from before the 1960's and 70's, The Yearling is really an adult book with a child protagonist, written "for" children, but in a way that hardly acknowledges that fact other than the plot of the book itself.   

  Rawlings rounds some of the corners off the harsher aspects of frontier life- she does describe the father-son duo gutting a deer, but omits the part, which I've learned from other novels, that involves being careful not to pierce the guts or entrails in order to avoid befouling the meat.   Describing it as "frontier boy raises baby deer to adulthood" doesn't really do justice to the detail of perspective presented.   The Yearling might be the best depiction of "back woods" life I've come across so far (but with Kentucky, Tennessee and Arkansas to come in the next chapter). 

Milk, Blood, Heat (2020) by Dantiel W. Moniz

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Milk, Blood, Heat (2020)

by Dantiel W. Moniz

2771 Monument Road, Jacksonville, Florida

Florida: 6/21

    Besides this novel and the other novel from Jacksonville on this list (The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw), the only thing I know about Jacksonville is that it has a professional football team. Before the 1,001 Novels project I doubt I would have been able to pick it out on a blank map of Florida.  Looking at a map of Florida now, I would have thought is was closer to Tallahassee or Tampa Bay.   It doesn't come across well in Milk, Blood, Heat, a debut collection of short stories by an African American woman with links to McSweeney's, and the prose is that of a crisp stylist.  Moniz's characters are at the margins, though like other contemporary writers of literary fiction from all over the United States, the margins seem to be the place to be.  It was very refreshing to read an entire book from this chapter where race is explored in terms over than overt day-to-day oppression and stultifying racism.  I get the sense that Florida is more of a promised land than anything else for African Americans in the southeast, a refuge for those who wanted something than the Atlanta metropole. 

Ghost Summer (2015) by Tananarive Due

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Ghost Summer (2015)

by Tananarive Due

Gracetown, Florida

Florida: 5/21

   I'm elated to be out of the deep, deep south, which is BY ALL ACCOUNTS, an absolutely miserable place.   I'm not talking about Georgia, with it's beacon of African American culture, and Louisiana with the French and Spanish and Cajun mélange.  I'm talking about Alabama and Mississippi, which are dark spots on the American psyche. I think nearly every volume from either place manifestly grapples with issues of racial injustice.  I'm happy to read about the subject- non-fiction as well as fiction, but the emphasis on covering the American map produces a kind of repetitiveness inside and between different states.

Thus, this volume of independently published (Akakish Press) horror short stories by an African American woman are a welcome departure from the heavy material out of the deep south. Only some of the stories are set in Gracetown (central) Florida- but she sure knows how to evoke the swamp.  This Florida swamp ecosystem is the most interesting geography I've crossed since I tackled the wilds of New England early on. Reading novels set in the Florida swamps makes me want to visit. 

Wolf Whistle (1993) by Lewis Nordam

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Wolf Whistle (1993)

by Lewis Nordam

Arrow Catcher, Mississippi

Mississippi: 18/19

     The end of each state is a cause for reflection on my part- what I've learned, any avenues I am interested in pursuing further, etc.  Mississippi is a dead end- I think I'll always be interested in Faulkner because of his interesting canonical history, but the more books I read set in Mississippi, the less interesting Faulkner becomes.  Here at the tail end of the chapter, Wolf Whistle has been kicking around my Kindle for six months.  This is an example of the "post-Faulkner" genre of southern lit, where authors with literary ambition are compared to one or all of the handful of authors from here with any literary cache.  Wolf Whistle is a surprisingly "even handed" recounting of the Emmett Till murder, mostly from the point of view of the murderer.     Considering how many of the books in this chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America deal with the murder of an African American male at the hands of local white people, I'm not sure Wolf Whistle was a necessary pick, but no doubt my viewpoint of this book was largely informed by it's second-to-last place in the random reading order.

   

The Great Transformation (1944) by Karl Polyani

Audiobook Review

The Great Transformation (1944)

 by Karl Polyani

   I keep coming across references to Hungarian economist/social theorist Karl Polyani.  He was front and present in Capitalism by Sven Beckert, and I'd argue that Polyani is a huge influence on Beckert- I'm sure Beckert would agree so maybe not an opinion I'd have to argue.  Polyani also got his own chapter in Capitalism and Its Critics by John Cassidy.  I think it was while I was listening to Capitalism and Its Critics that I discovered that someone made an Audiobook edition of Polyani's opus, The Great Transformation.  Clocking in at 14 hours, it was the attention commitment equivalent of a novel, and Polyani is light on the hard economics.  The Great Transformation read almost like a magazine article at times, presumably this was his attempt to communicate his ideas to a larger audience.  The timing though- yeesh- 1944- probably couldn't pick a worse time to publish a work of popular economics, what with the war on and all.

   I'm sure it also didn't help his popularity that he had foreign origins and a critique that took direct aim at the concept of "lassez faire" economics popularized by the Austrian school (Von Mises, Friedman and his disciples). Polyani was unique in that he was a contemporary of Von Mises going back to his student days, and so was well prepared when American intellectuals began promulgating his ideas.  Thirty years into a broad consensus about the basic mechanics of managing economic growth (spend your way out of a recession or demand crises, generally try not to let administrators throttle economic growth) it can be easy to forget how controversial some of these positions were a half century back.

  The main thesis in this book is that capitalism created a "market society" that, far from requiring a "hands-off" approach from the state, is unfathomable WITHOUT the state intervening in a myriad of ways.  His major illustration of this process was what happened with the Speenhamland system .  This was an amplification of the Elizabethan poor laws from the 18th century.  Basically, locals where required to offer everyone in their area a place to stay, food and a job.  The growing middle class and budding capitalist class destroyed this system so that poor people would be forced to work for wages.

  In an era where AI technologists have suggested that a "universal basic income" might be the solution to compensating people for AI created job loss, the comparison is as relevant now as it was in the mid 20th century (maybe more so?)   Polyani's point with the Speenhamland system is both that it was government created and government destroyed.  A free market in labor was not something which "existed in nature" and needed to be "protected from the leviathan," rather it was something that needed to be created by affirmative action at the behest of motivated, enfranchised interest groups.   Hard to argue the point in 2026.