1,001 Novels A Library of America: Capes and Tidewaters, Shifting Coasts and Capitals

 1,001 Novels A Library of America:

 Capes and Tidewaters, Shifting Coasts and Capitals

District of Columbia, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina

   True, I haven't finished up New York/New Jersey quite yet, but the press of needing new books to read waits for no person.   The third chapter in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America are the states which run north to south against the Atlantic Ocean, from Delaware in the north to South Carolina in the south.  This is the most diverse chapter yet, ranging from the majority black capital to the oldest of the old Confederacy states in the south, South Carolina.  In terms of personal experiences, I went to college in Washington DC so I'm familiar with that area and the parts of the surrounding states that interface with it.  I went to Baltimore a couple times in college.   I've drive through Virginia and North Carolina and I've never set foot inside South Carolina, but know plenty about its history.

  Delaware only merits three books, making it the least represented state in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project by a good margin.  Looks like  77 books for the whole chapter, so I should be able to knock it out in less time than either New England or New York/New Jersey.  I am very much looking forward from moving on from New York City and the travails of its citizens.

The New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century List

 The New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century List

\

  This list dropped last week- I can't track down a printable list but you can find non paywalled versions on Goodreads.  The list was generated via a survey of 500+ authors and other literary types which means that there was no editorial portion of the process. There was no definition of "best" give to the voters though in the parlance of this blog it is clear that voters cared more for "classics" than "hits,"  many hits were absent- no Sally Rooney, no Karl Ove Knausgaard, no Harry Potter.  Very little genre work of any kind.  The interactive presentation on the Times website allows you to tick off each title to see how many you've read- I came out with a count of 50/100- which probably would have been higher but for the inclusion of non-fiction works- not 50/50 fiction/non-fiction, but I'd only read one of the non-fiction titles.   There were a surprising number of authors who landed two or more titles on the list- Jesmyn Ward had three I thin, Ferrante has two, and Denis Johnson had 2 or 3.

  Leaving aside the actual rank order from 1 to 100, there was plenty of similarity between the books picked by these folks and the books I've written about here.  I was shocked by how many books in translation made the list- including the number one book (Ferrante) and three of the top ten books.  I saw the similarity in this blog and that list in the number of works of translated fiction and in the presence of so many titles that eschew the ordinary lives of ordinary folks.  I've made a dogged attempt over the past five years to come to terms with the merits of domestic fiction but after seeing only a handful of such titles on this NYT list, I'm starting to think I'm correct in my opinion that domestic fiction isn't particularly interesting to anyone. 

1,001 Novels Collected: Harlem

 1,001 Novels Collected: Harlem

1.  The Street (1946) - Ann Petry

2.   Invisible Man (1955) - Ralph Ellison

3.  Passing (1929) - Nella Larsen

4.  Home to Harlem (1928) - Claude McKay

5.  If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) - James Baldwin

6.  Big Girl (2022) by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan

7.  Ruby (1976) by Rosa Guy

8.  Stories From the Tenants Downstairs (2022) - Sidik Fofana

9.  Bodega Dreams (2000) - Ernesto Quinonez

10.  The Ballad of Black Tom (2016) by Victor LaValle

11.  Daddy Was A Number Runner (1970) - Louise Merriweather

12.  Hoops (1981) - Walter Dean Myers

13.  Cool World (1959) - Warren Miller

14.  A Hero Ain't Nothin But A Sandwich (1973) - Alice Childress

  Harlem is a great example of a place where the whole 1,001 Novels: A Library of America concept genuinely lands.  Unlike all the sub-areas besides Massachussets, Harlem is a specific geographic part of the USA with a distinct corpus of literature and an associated literary movement/culture(the Harlem Renaissance and its successors) that goes back over a century.

 Like any attempt at a canon it's an arbitrary, personal attempt, but at least an attempt of an area that deserves to be singled out, unlike, say, New Hampshire or Rhode Island.  I also liked the temporal balance among the 14 books she picked- two titles from the 20's, a book from the 40's, two from the 50's and 3 from the 70's- over half of the books picked.  Harlem also had the single best POV type book in the whole project up till now, Big Girls by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, which genuinely enlightened me.

Published 2/23/24

Big Girl (2022)

by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan

New York:  22/105

Harlem: 1/14

  The Audiobook listens run geographically ahead of the books, since fewer titles are Audiobooks.  Here we are in Harlem, the second New York borough to hit and the third sub-area of New York/New Jersey.  Like the other areas, Harlem could itself be a whole state, a small one.   I'm expecting that all of these books except maybe for one (Spanish Harlem) are going to be written by African-American authors, since Harlem is the unquestioned literary capital of Black America and part of the New York City, which is, by virtue of population size and location of the publishing industry, the unquestioned literary capital of the United States.

   

   Big Girl is the exception to all my complaints about YA type titles where the protagonist/narrator is a young woman who basically spends the whole book in her room, or like, at school, and if anything "real" happens to her its horrific.  You can write that novel any way you want, but I've read enough them at this point, 10 percent through the 1,001 Novels project, that 90% of these books are all the same, with only the ethnic background, socioeconomic status and geography changed.

  Big Girl is that other 10 percent- and these are books that genuinely open my eyes to a new perspective I hadn't given serious thought.  Here, it's the inner life of a morbidly obese high school student, the child of two African-American Yuppie/Professional parents who inhabit a refurbished brownstone in 1990's Manhattan.  Big Girl also has a strong theme of love for the pre-gentrification, now-vanished Harlem of that era, and I found both themes engaging.  Sullivan handles her subject with grace and dignity and does a fantastic job of getting inside the world of a morbidly obese teenager. 

 Published 2/26/24

The Ballad of Black Tom (2016)

by Victor LaValle

New York: 23/105

Harlem: 2/14

   I believe this is the first genre horror-fantasy book that editor Susan Straight has selected for the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America. I don't believe there has been a single science fiction title.  Perhaps that is because most horror/fantasy/science fiction books don't take place in a recognizable location on a current map of the United States, but there is still the connection of authors to place to consider.  Nathaniel Hawthorne for Salem, Mass.  I was mildly surprised that H.P. Lovecraft didn't make the cut in Rhode Island- he's an iconic literary figure for that state, whether you like his books or approve of his racism etc. I wasn't hugely surprised because my sense is that Editor Straight is concerned with representing the present populations of each state and is very much unconcerned with upholding the dead white guy canon of literary notoriety.  

   But here we are and the first book that could be called a fantasy-horror genre pick is a work plainly inspired by Lovecraft and which takes place in Harlem with an African-American protagonist. Like Lovecraft himself, the difficulty in writing a book/story about cosmic horror is complicated by the frequency with which characters find themselves seeing the unseeable or knowing the unknowable. LaValle makes clever use of Lovecraft's real life prejudices- if you've read Houellebecq's take on Lovecraft you know that his primary fear was of immigrants- and that is reflected in this plot line. 

   LaValle's magical New York is simply New York with magic in the background- no police trolls or magical citizens need apply.  Again, that reflects the works of Lovecraft himself- one has to either confront the nameless horrors in private or go someplace obscure to find them.  It was nice to finally read a fantasy/sci fi genre book after the parade of YA lit, but this story was just ok from my perspective. 

Published 3/5/24

Invisible Man (1955)

by Ralph Ellison

New York: 26/105

Harlem: 3/14

  I haven't been doing any re-reads for the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  I Invisible Man for the first time for the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die project back in 2015.  Back then, I was a little embarrassed I hadn't read it in school.  Reading it back then I thought, why wasn't this book assigned reading. As supposed to a book like On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, which I did read in school. Within the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project, Invisible Man is representing Harlem.  Pretty obvious pick and a top three no doubt.  Here is the 2015 post:

Author Rosa Guy

Published 3/18/24

Ruby (1976)

by Rosa Guy

515 Malcolm X Boulevard, Harlem

New York: 34/105

Harlem: 4/14

    Ruby is another YA title from 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.  This is the standard YA plot of a young woman who is trying to "get out of her bedroom" and into the wider world but faces difficulties.  Here, the narrator is the daughter of widowed West Indian immigrant of African descent, living in 70's Harlem, who falls in love with her female classmate.  Pretty daring stuff for the 1970's, and I didn't make it as a YA title while I was reading the book.   Rosa Guy is an iconic figure, the only female founder of the Harlem Writers Guild in 1950, a group that was instrumental in promoting the efforts of a generation of African American writers, including Maya Angelou. 

   This being a YA book, you don't hear much about Harlem or NYC, since Ruby, again, spends most of the book either inside her house, at school or racing around trying to dodge her controlling father.   Other than the precocious lesbian relationship, the most eye raising moment was the open use of the "N" word by a white teacher at Ruby's high school.  Hard to imagine that today!

Jamaican-American author Claude McKay

Published 3/20/24

Home to Harlem (1928)

by Claude McKay

Harlem, New York City

New York: 37/105

Harlem: 5/14

 I was actually interested in reading this novel from the Harlem Renaissance- it faced a fraught path to publication and a rocky reception once published- right before the Great Depression- fell out of print and was later revived after his death.  Today he's recognized as an apostle of the Harlem Renaissance and a precursor to Black/Queer literature- McKay was either gay or bisexual and simply lived at a place and time when it wasn't acceptable to be public.    McKay's focus in Home to Harlem is on a pair of young black men, one born in the United States, the other a Haitian immigrant (McKay emigrated from the interior of Jamaica to the United States before relocating to Europe for several years).    The over-all vibe is similar to the beat genre of literature that would come decades later- McKay's plot reminded me of Kerouac or Bukowski, i.e. the lives of men who live on the fringes by some kind of conscious choice in a quest to escape 20th century conformity.

  Today it would be tough to ask someone to read Home to Harlem because of the frequent and prolific use of the n-word by the characters- all black characters- to describe themselves, others or even as a adjective- the use of the phrase "n word brown" is constant to describe the color suits and shoes.  Obviously, McKay knows what he is doing and the usage here is much like the usage in hip hop decades later, an attempt by the victimized to reclaim the word, but it is also hard not to think that these characters are consciously accepting their denigration by white society by embracing the n word in their everyday speech. It's certainly a challenge for the modern ear.  Hard to imagine an audiobook version.

Published 3/21/24

Hoops (1981)

by Walter Dean Myers

New York: 38/105

Harlem: 6/14

   I've started reading the YA titles from the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America list on my Kindle app on my cell phone (Samsung Galaxy)- the YA titles don't take a huge amount of effort to understand, and I can read them during times when I otherwise wouldn't be reading at all- watching television or what have you.  This lessens the annoyance I feel at having to read yet another YA title.  It is pretty clear to me at this point that editor Susan Straight is interested in including a wide swath of YA titles at the expense of more adult books that cover the same territory.  Hoops is about New York City basketball life circa the late 1960's, early 1970's, I think- it was hard to pin down the exact time.  It's hard for me to believe that Straight picked this book instead of The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll, which basically covers the same time and place trading Harlem for Hell's Kitchen.  To be fair, The Basketball Diaries has a fair amount of heroin usage, and maybe that is not what Straight is all about, though she hasn't shied away from books ABOUT the drug trade in NYC (See Spidertown.)

     It was good by the standards of YA lit, but I found it wanting compared to The Basketball Diaries. 

Published 3/25/24

If Beale Street Could Talk (1974)

by James Baldwin

New York: 40/105

Harlem: 7/14

     I checked this out as an Audiobook and almost immediately regretted it because this book is what you call a "Busman's Holiday" for me about a young African-American man falsely charged with raping a Puerto Rican woman, told from the perspective of his fiancé, who is, of course, pregnant with their first child.  It's also a portrait of the social fabric as it existed in Harlem in the early 1970's, Baldwin spends plenty of time with the families of both the imprisoned father to be and his betrothed.  Tish and Fonny are young, black and in love, and of course that presents a problem for the NYPD- the villain of the piece being a "red haired blue eyed" Manhattan police officer who apparently frames Fonny for a violent rape sheerly out of spit after a white shopkeeper intervenes on the couples behalf after Tish is accosted by a white junkie.

   Of course, this is all extremely old hat to me- I could tell you  about the lives of young men from African American communities ruined by a racist criminal justice system- that kind of thing was still happening in places like San Diego and Orange County when I was practicing 20 years ago, though thankfully it seems to be a thing of the past these days.   This is the third book I've read by James Baldwin- I read Notes From A Native Son just for fun and Go Tell it on the Mountain for the 1,001 Novels To Read Before You Die list.  I'm surprised I haven't read Giovanni's Room yet.    Beale Street is a good pick for the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America since it shows Baldwin depicting a slice of Harlem community but I certainly prefer Go Tell it on the Mountain if anyone is asking about my favorite James Baldwin title. 

 

Published 4/3/24
Bodega Dreams (2000)
by Ernesto Quinonez
Spanish Harlem, New York
New York: 41/105

Harlem: 8/14

Bodega Dreams was another Busman's Holiday:   A novel largely about organized crime in New York City in the early 1990's, with a Robin Hood/Spanish Harlem vibe.  The central figure, though not the protagonist or narrator, is the neighborhood kingpin, Bodega.  Bodega dreams of a larger New York empire and of reinvigorating Spanish Harlem. To that end he allies himself with crooked lawyer Nazario and together they buy and renovate decrepit Spanish Harlem apartment buildings while plying crack in the same neighborhood.  It's a common feature of narrative around the crack epidemic that local dealers destroyed their own neighborhood and that fights over territory to sell crack caused most of the violence in that period.

  It's a critical conflict that the author completely omits other than a few glancing questions asked by the protagonist/narrator, a local college student with a pregnant, evangelical wife at home.   That omission, combined with the Audiobook narration, in "tough guy" New York accent, made Bodega Dreams a chore.  It did make me want to visit Spanish Harlem- a place inside New York City I've never been.  I actually did stay in Harlem once on a visit over twenty years ago.

  Halfway done with Harlem, which is my favorite chapter/subchapter so far. Also, I'd already read a third of these titles before I started, which moves things along.  A stand out from this early period is Enormous Radio- which has a surreal element that I didn't associate with Cheever before reading it.   From there Cheever starts his series of stories in Shady Hill, New York

Published 4/9/24

The Cool World (1959)

by Warren Miller

Harlem, New York City

New York: 43/105

Harlem: 9/14

  A finalist for the National Book Award in 1960, The Cool World is a literary-world rarity: A book about African American teens written by a middle aged white guy.  Hard to say what editor Susan Straight was thinking when she included The Cool World in her Harlem section- it's a book that has been largely forgotten- an author who has been largely forgotten.   I feel like Straight must have read The Cool World when she was growing up.   Straight has done a solid job covering 50's New York and the youth culture that partially emerged from that time and place.   Like many of the books set in Harlem, The Cool World is filled with characters who spend the entire book complaining about their circumstances.  

  There isn't much escape in these pages, just characters struggling, struggling, struggling to make it through.  Miller's picture of gang life in the 1950's is (relatively) benign, sure, the gang keeps an underage prostitute cooped up in their clubhouse to bang for a buck fifty, but the hardest drugs are reefer cigarettes, and the protagonist, Duke's(leader of the Crocadiles(sp)) most sacred wish is getting his hands on a working gun.  How quaint!

Published 4/10/24

The Street (1946)

by Ann Petry

Harlem, New York City

New York: 44/105

Harlem: 10/14

    The Street was a very rough but very powerful Audiobook- 13 hours, I think?  I really need a break from Audiobooks dealing with the day-to-day life in Harlem during the mid 20th century because man, this book was rough.  The Street is, I guess, a minor classic- it made this list, and it also made the recent Atlantic Monthly Great American Novel list (136 titles).  Considering it was published in 1946- not a great decade for fiction because of, well, you know, there is also an argument that this could be on the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die list.   As a 1/14 in the Harlem chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America it is a solid top 5 pick- maybe a top 3.   Petry combines work-a-day realism with episodes that evoke both surrealism and expressionism.

   Lutie Johnson is the character at the center of The Street- in the present of the novel she is a single mother, separated but not divorced from her cheating husband and living in a gritty Harlem apartment on 116th street. The Street is very much the kind of book I thought I would be getting all the time on the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America list:  A minor/forgotten canon level classic that exposes me to a place a time with which I was previously unfamiliar.   Petry doesn't shy away from the grittier side of life- the rapey super in Johnson's apartment building is stopped just short of rape on more than one occasion, and Petry gives us a look inside his head- a harrowing look- I might add.  

   The Street was very good- a top 3 for Harlem, I think.  Probably a top ten for all of New York?  Certainly a top 15.

Published 4/11/24

Stories From the Tenants Downstairs(2022)

by Sidik Fofana

Harlem, New York

New York: 45/105

Harlem: 11/14

    This book is a linked collection of short-stories- somewhere between a short story collection and a novel.  It's a format that has gained popularity in recent years, and the idea behind this book- chronicling the lives of the mostly young inhabitants of a rent controlled, Harlem area apartment building, is well adapted to the linked-short-story format.  I imagine that Fofana was seeking realism in his depiction of young lives in contemporary Harlem, so it should be viewed as a compliment that I found myself impatient with the decision making process for many of these characters- proof that I was identifying with them and putting myself in their position for the duration of this book.

   This 1,001 Novels sponsored sweep through northern New York City- the Bronx and Harlem- has brought into focus certain things that I already believed- first, that any kind of measurable progress involves satisfying Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.  The lowest/most necessary level of the pyramid is physiological: air, water, food, shelter, sleep, clothing and reproduction, and it's not surprising that many of the characters in novels set in this part of the country struggle daily with exactly those issues.   The dynamic of New York city apartment life- a world where landlords/owners are either looking to evict current tenants so they can upgrade their units OR where they are not looking to evict current tenants because they don't want to put any money into the building and just cash the rent checks- is a continuing, unresolved, ongoing crisis for thousands (tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands?) existing at the lower levels of the socio-economic ladder.

   At the same time there is little benefit derived from the joys of NYC life- these characters are literally not going anywhere the subway can't take them.  It suggests to me that the Government should intervene to upgrade the lives of those who can't fulfill the lowest level of Maslow's hierarchy- at the very least, no one should be going hungry, which happens frequently in the pages of books set in this part of America.  

   

Published 4/16/24

Daddy Was a Number Runner (1970)

by Louis Merriweather

Harlem, New York City

New York: 47/105

Harlem: 12/14

   Daddy Was a Number Runner is another classic from the Harlem canon- the Audiobook wasn't published until 2022, so make that a bit of an underground classic.  It came complete with a scholarly afternote that placed the book in context and mentioned most of the other titles and authors that Susan Straight picked for this portion of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America list.   I've been really satisfied with her Harlem picks- it's been a who's who of Harlem lit and I've been surprised at how few of these books I've read.  This book is another bleak slice of life novel written from the perspective of Francine Coffin, a twelve year old girl living with her Mom, Dad and two older brothers in Harlem during the depression.   

   The Depression-era timeline is given as the reason for the father being unable to find work, forcing him into a job as a "numbers-runner" an early 20th century predecessor of the state lottery that was run by the mob... Dutch Schulz, to be exact.  A numbers runner was the person who collected the bets and money and ferried both to the mobsters who ran the game.  In this book, gambling is portrayed as pernicious a vice as drugs would be later- Francine's father not only works as a numbers runner, he spends all of this money and more on the game, hoping for "the big hit."

  Francine meanwhile has to dodge the day-to-day reality of being constantly molested by white men who come to Harlem for that purpose, and the wives of Jewish shopkeepers who want to exploit her for her labor by making her clean the outside of a window on the 10th floor of an apartment building.  White people, as represented by Jewish people, do not come off well in this book.

   It has been many Harlem Audiobooks.  Taxing! I've implemented a new guidelines which is no more 12/13 hour Audiobooks- 10 hours is the limit going forward.  I'd rather just read the book if the Audiobook is over 10 hours, unless it is super long, in which case I'd rather listen to the Audiobook (say over 30 hours). 

Published 4/19/24

A Hero Ain't Nothing But a Sandwich (1973)

by Alice Childress

Harlem, New York

New York: 49/105

Harlem: 13/14

   A Hero Ain't Nothing But a Sandwich is a 1973 YA classic about a 13 year old Harlem boy addicted to Heroin.  Certainly it represents some kind of nadir for the depiction of addiction in YA fiction.  Speaking as someone who has been exposed to drugs in various capacities over most of my forty plus years, I found this character hard to imagine.  A thirteen year old who is shooting heroin.  It's insane.  And the whole tone of the book is so blase about it!  I mean, sure college students, heroin, of course, and maybe even high school age student, I mean, ok, it must have happened.  But a thirteen year old?  Why would a thirteen year old even want to do heroin in the first place- speaking as someone who was using drugs at that age- the whole idea of injecting oneself with a needle was abhorrent- still is!

  The tale is told from a kaleidoscope of perspectives but the main players are the junkie teen and his step dad.  There are also some interesting school teachers- one black, one white, who both provide a more complicated portrait of inner city school teachers in a few pages than the other books do in dozens.   The early 1970's were a real nadir for the social fabric in New York City.

Published 4/22/24

Passing (1929)

by Nella Larsen

Harlem,  New York City

New York: 50/105

Harlem:  14/14

     OK! Done with the Harlem chapter of 1,001 Novels: A Library of America and done with the Bronx/Harlem subgrouping from New York, i.e. the black and brown part of New York City.  Loved the Harlem books, but the Bronx titles were a bummer.  Passing is last up because I thought I had already read this book but couldn't find any record of it.  I ended up checking out the Netflix movie associated Audiobook from the library because it's only four hours long and listened to it during a run.  Passing really seems like more of a novella but it's gone firmly canon- it was on the Atlantic Great American Novel list from last month.

     After listening to the Audiobook I'm still not sure whether I've read it before or not- parts seemed familiar, but I did not remember the ending, and I feel like I would have remembered the ending if I actually had read the book.  The craziest part of this book is that it's about these two friends, both light skinned African American women from Chicago.  One "Passes" and marries a white man, who is also a virulent anti-black racist, the other marries a black Doctor.  They both end up in New York, but the book begins with the black friend recounting a meeting with the passing friend's husband, who calls his wife the n-word as a term of affection because "she gets darker every year."   It's wild. I'm going to go watch the 2021 Netflix movie just to see how they handle it in the movie.

1,001 Novels Collected: The Bronx

 The Bronx - 1,001 Novels:

A Library of America

1. Charming Billy (1998) by Alice McDermott

2. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent (1991) - Julia Alvarez

3.  Don't Erase Me (1997) by Carolyn Ferrell

4. The Bait (1968) - Dorothy Uhnak

5.  Spidertown (1996) - Abraham Rodriguez Jr.

6.  Object Lessons (1991) - Anna Quindlen

7. The Catfish Man: A Conjured Life (1980) by Jerome Charyn

8.  The Blackboard Jungle (1954) by Evan Hunter

  The most interesting fact about the titles from the Bronx in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project is that two of the books are mis-mapped- Object Lessons and Charming Billy, which seems significant for a sub-chapter with only eight titles.  25% are mis-located!   The Bronx sub-chapter also illustrates another point that runs throughout the 1,001 Novels Project:  Poor people don't lead very interesting lives.  It doesn't really have much to do with race or gender, a person who grows up poor, never travels outside a ten block radius of their neighborhood, never goes to school beyond high school (if that), never meets anyone outside of their own milieu- it's a limited life experience.

  An author can still construct an interesting novel from those pieces, but it helps if the narrator has actually escaped that universe- which is the case for the two top books- Charming Billy  and Garcia Girls- both narrated by educated women who have escaped their back-story and are writing from the perspective of an escapee.  I'm not trying to say books written about poor people and their circumstances are boring, but I am saying that they tend to feature similar elements.   Also, I've said the same thing about the literature of the well-educated, upper middle/upper class, wealthy city dwellers for years, so this isn't an attack on the poor.

Published 1/16/24

The Bait (1968)

by Dorothy Unhak

The Bronx, New York City

New York: 5/105

The Bronx, New York City: 1/8

  As you'd expect from a state with 108 titles, there are states within states for New York.  Upstate, with its 22 titles qualifies as the third biggest state thus far (Massachussets, Maine) and The Bronx equals a smaller state like Vermont or Rhode Island. Pioneering female writer of police/detective fiction Dorothy Unhak is not a stranger to this blog- I read Policewoman memoir on the recommendation of a genre afficionado.  The Bait was her hit debut writing fiction- it won the Edgar Award the year it was released.  

  It certainly qualifies as a good novel about The Bronx- I believe all the action takes place there.  The story hasn't aged well- I'm not sure how many mentally defective serial murderers the 1001 Novels project is going to encompass but I think we are already at a half dozen 10 percent of the way through.  Are serially killers ever not mentally ill?  There are parts of The Bait that don't age particularly well- an incipient romance between the plucky girl detective and her District Attorney boss is cringe inducing, but the inter-cop banter is less racist than what you would expect from a more period accurate book.  Unhak, of course, was a cop, so she is clearly writing from that perspective.  A book like this, you half expect the N word to pop out at many minute, but thankfully there was no racial angle to the plot.

Published 3/13/24

How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent (1991)

by Julia Alvarez

The Bronx, NYC

New York: 31/105

The Bronx: 2/8

   How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent is an example of a book from 1,001 Novels: A Library of America that was both something I didn't like AND easily recognizable as a good book despite my personal preference.  Alvarez is widely recognized as a path-breaking Latina/Dominicana author, with novels(adult and YA) and poetry to he credit, and How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent inspired a generation of Latina authors- see, for example, In Praise of Julia Alvarez- published in the New York Times in 2018. 

    Unlike much of the Latno representation on the 1,001 Novels list, the characters of Garcia Girls are not members of the underclass, the patriarch is a Dominican doctor who is forced to flee political unrest in the Caribbean for New York City, the Bronx, specifically.  Alvarez takes a non-linear approach, telling the story in four parts in reverse chronological order. I actually the parts that took place back in the Dominican Republic more compelling and the material set in the US less so.   Like many immigrant narratives, I found myself more sympathetic to the parents, sacrificing for their children than the children themselves, who, as is the case in many immigrant centered bildungsroman's come off as selfish dicks.   It is amazing to me how many characters in immigrant centered fiction decide they want to study to be writers, rather than going to school for some practical reason and then writing on the side. 

  Immigrant children in bildungsroman fiction seem to never grasp that one does not have to study art to become an artist, and that studying art is no guarantee of a career in said art. 

Published 3/14/24

Spidertown (1996)

by Abraham Rodriguez Jr.

New York: 32/105

The Bronx: 3/8

   Spidertown is an extremely tedious bildungsroman about a teenage crack runner (don't call him a dealer!) living in the South Bronx in the 1990's.  As a criminal defense attorney working in federal court, I've spent many working days reviewing the text messages and phone calls of drug dealers so a three hundred page book on the subject wasn't going to add much to my understanding.  Nor, for that matter, is the love life of a 16 year old drug runner of particular interest.  Also, I didn't enjoy the fact that the whole book is written in South Bronx patois- there isn't an H pronounced properly in the whole book.  I didn't find any of characters convincing, nor did I find the author's depiction of the drug trade particularly accurate or compelling. 

   And, amazingly, Rodriguez makes the South Bronx of the crack era seem pretty boring culturally speaking- no references to the amazing NYC rap that dominated that era- rap that was often about dealing crack.  I've often had the thought- not generated by this book but from my work experience, that being a drug dealer is highly stressful and not particularly lucrative when one factors in the risks involved- whether at the hand of your own organization, a rival organization, the cops or the feds.  Also the lifespan of a professional drug dealer is often quite short and leaves the dealer unable to pursue a different line of work.  Other than manual labor I can't think of a worse way to make a living- personally I'd rather work at a fast food restaurant.

Published 3/15/24

The Catfish Man: A Conjured Life (1980)

by Jerome Charyn

New York: 33/105

The Bronx: 4/8

      I can't remember this ever happening before, but I could not find a single review of this novel on the internet.  I used Google Books and found a reference to a review that appeared in Kirkus Reviews but that review is not online.  The New York Times reviewed plenty of his books, and he wrote reviews for The New York Times, but they did not review this book, which is today what we would call a work of "auto-fiction." 

   Jerome Charyn is one of those authors who will be revisited when he passes away but appears to be done with publishing books.  While he published, he was incredibly prolific, with over 50 titles to his name, including a run of 12 detective novels about a Jewish detective in New York City, several graphic novels, works of non-fiction about Quentin Tarantino and Ping-Pong and a grip of fictionalized biographies of historical figures- his book about Emily Dickinson caused a minor uproar when he put it out in 2010.  

   The Catfish Man is an example of his auto-fiction.  Apparently he wrote more than one auto fictional book but I can't figure out which they are among his oeuvre.   The first fifty pages, describing his childhood in the Bronx and attending an arts magnet high school in Manhattan are interesting- particularly his participation in a nascent weight-lifting culture in the Bronx in the 1950's.  He attends Columbia University and finds work ghosting adventure stories for the uncle of a classmate under a pseudonym.  Up to this point, The Catfish Man is a pretty typical NYC bildungsroman.  After graduation however, the author-protagonist relocates to New Orleans in pursuit of a story about a New Orleans based 19th century chess master who met an early death.

   Here, The Catfish Man goes badly off the rails, as the protagonist loses his mind-quite literally- and is institutionalized outside of New Orleans.  He escapes, goes back to NY, then back to the South, landing outside of Texas, where he takes over a gang of latino child bandits.   Here, The Catfish Man lurches into incoherence.  I can't remember reading a book where mental illness is treated so casually and unsatisfactorily.  I couldn't tell you the nature of the mental illness at play or why it manifests itself. It makes the last two hundred pages of the book remarkably tedious to read. 

Published 3/18/24

The Blackboard Jungle (1954)

by Evan Hunter

New York: 35/105

The Bronx: 6/8

    Quite frequently I check out one of these 1,001 Novels: A Library of American books as an Audiobook for a library and find the experience simply excruciating.  I really learn about my own prejudices based on my positive/negative reactions- as clear an example of the "unconscious bias" phenomenon in my own life.  One of my most disturbing discoveries is that I have issues appreciating narrator voices that mimic the tones of the American underclass- of whatever ethnicity- I just find those voices grating and unpleasant, whether they be male or female, white, black, hispanic etc- a disturbing discovery and something that I am trying to address.  

   This book wasn't in that category, but it was in this category of American fiction from the earlier half of the 20th century that also gives me issues for different reasons.  

Published 3/19/24

Charming Billy (1998) 

by Alice McDermott

The Bronx, New York City

New York: 36/105

The Bronx: 5/8

* mis-mapped- should be in Queens....

   Charming Billy won the National Book Award in 1998.   Unclear why the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America has placed it in the Bronx instead of Queens.  To quote the first line of the New York Times review, "The Irish Catholic world Alice McDermott writes about in her magical new novel, ''Charming Billy,'' is located in Queens, not Dublin."   McDermott is one of those writers "celebrated for her granular, nuanced portraits of mid-century American life" who I have studiously avoided for my entire life.  Indeed, the 1,001 Novels project I've undertaken is specifically an attempt to rectify this purposeful omission. That means I'm trying to keep a positive and optimistic attitude about reading hundreds of books about alcoholic ethnic-white Americans and sad teenage girls trying to get out of their bedrooms.

  At least Charming Billy is an award winner, another category I'm keeping in the back of my mind as I go through this list.  Additionally, Charming Billy is neither a work of detective fiction nor a YA title, so that also made the reading experience tolerable.  Finally, there is no denying that Charming Billy is chock filled with literary technique- using a kaleidoscopic approach that takes the reader backwards and forwards in time and space (from Queens to Long Island and back, at least.)    The Billy of the title is a recently deceased alcoholic, and the book explores his lifelong "great disappointment"-  being abandoned by an Irish girl-woman who promises to return from a visit home to marry him and subsequently throws him over for a local lad- and the impact it may or may not have had on his lifetime of alcoholism. 

   McDermott and her characters are not naive dummies- the narrator- who I think is a younger sister of the extended clan- early on questions the premise that a lifetime of alcoholism  could possibly be triggered by a single romantic disappointment.   But here we are, three hundred pages about the impact of said romantic disappointment.   Also, this is another book on the 1,001 Novels list where the dysfunction of a single family member ends up defining the life of all the other family members.   There are a lot of those books on this list.

Published 3/22/24

Don't Erase Me (1997) 

by Carolyn Ferrell

South Bronx, New York

New York: 39/105

The Bronx: 7/8

   Don't Erase Me, a harrowing collection of short-stories about materially disadvantaged young women growing up in the South Bronx in the early 1990's, closes out the Bronx sub-chapter of editor Susan Straight's 1,001 Novels: A Library of America list. Ferrell published this collection back in 1997- one of the stories ended up making it into more than one anthology and Ferrell landed a job teaching at Sarah Larwrence.  She didn't publish another book until July of 2021 when Dear Ms. Metropolitan came out- a grim tale about three young women who are kidnapped, tortured and raped for a decade by a neighbor.   Don't Erase Me isn't quite that grim- although several of the included short stories- all about young minority women living in the South Bronx (except for one that takes place in Orange County for some reason), recall multiple tropes that I remember from 90's newspapers.  In one story, eighth graders compete to be "school wives"- i.e. get pregnant and married in the eighth grade.  In another, a single mother of three struggles with her HIV diagnosis, which she apparently contracted from her step-father.  In a third, a gay African American student is murdered by classmates. 

  Also worth mentioning that Don't Erase Me is not a novel, it's a collection of short stories.  I think this is the first short story collection on the list and it's hard to see why this would be the one book to pick in a project putatively dedicated to the novel.

  It is all pretty dark stuff, and frankly, every novel in this sub-chapter was pretty dark.  Not to tip my forthcoming summary post, but How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent by Julia Alvarez, which was recently named to Atlantic Magazine's Top 150 American Novels list, looks like the class of the bunch.  Charming Billy is also up there because it's a prize winner, but the rest, yikes.  Not fun. None of these books were fun and a couple were positively excruciating. 

Published 5/16/24

Object Lessons (1991)

by Anna Quindlen

Kenwood, The Bronx, New York

The Bronx: 8/8 *

New York: 66/105

* This book is mis-mapped on the home page of the 1,001 Novels project.

   Object Lessons is mis-mapped on the home page of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.  They mapmakers have placed it on the edge of Washington Square Park, but the book takes place in the Bronx.  No one goes to Manhattan in this book- the furthest they travel from the Bronx is Queens.  Quindlen is an authorial jack-of-all-trades with a career in journalism, both fact based and opinion, for which she won a Pulitzer Prize.  She wrote a memoir that was made into a movie and she's written 10 novels, the most recent of which was published this year. 

   Object Lessons was her first work of fiction- which Wikipedia calls a coming-of-age book about a 13 year old girl growing up in a toxic extended family headed by a stereotypical Irish American patriarch, John Scanlan.  I actually thought the central plot was that of the 13 year old's mother, an Italian-American who marries into this family and spends literally the rest of her life complaining about it (with merit, to be sure).   I found this entire book almost indescribably sad- another American  novel filled with characters who don't go anywhere, do anything, achieve anything or change anything about their circumstances, except for the villain/patriarch, who is hated by everyone for actually accomplishing something in his life and then trying to hold the rest of his clan to his standards.

      

1,001 Novels Collected: Upstate New York

 1,001 Novels Collected: Upstate New York

  I was pretty fired up to get out of New England and into a different Chapter of the 1,001 Novel's list.  That enthusiasm persisted until I hit the rock of Manhattan and the outer Boroughs, which boast 61 titles between the two of them, many of them struggle/POV narratives about how rough it is to grow up in Manhattan and Brooklyn.   I finished this portion of the project in a two months, basically.  Meanwhile, the rest of New York City minus the Bronx/Harlem is going to take me four or five months. 

  If we treat Upstate New York as a separate state it would be tied for number two behind Massachusetts (30), tied with Maine  and ahead of New Hampshire (13), Connecticut(9), Rhode Island(9)and Vermont (7).  While most of Upstate New York is super rural- including an northern third of the state that only got two books, the selections here mostly focused on the urban areas: Buffalo, Syracuse and Albany- nothing for Rochester.   Upstate New York has a reasonably strong top 5- although I'm unsure how many of these books will be in the all New York and New Jersey list at the end.  Ironweed, for sure will be there.  Maybe Marya and At Home at the End of the World,

  Towards the bottom there is the already familiar blend of genre detective novels and YA and YA leaning fiction centering around teen girls and their particular set of issues (16-22).  Everything outside of the top five are just OK literary fiction, some less fun classics  and some historical fiction- nothing I would recommend picking up.  Really, the only book on this list I would call "a must" is Ironweed. I think Marya has a lot of potential as a show-off book, but it wasn't a fun read and ultimately falls into the same category of teen girl trying to get our of a bad place as the books at the bottom, just executed by an author who went on to literary immortality. 

   This was the first part of the country that I haven't personally visited.  Can't say that any of these books made me want to visit Buffalo or Syracuse, though I'd like to drive up the Hudson River Valley and see Albany and maybe stay at a fun Airbnb.  Unlikely to every happen, but I'd do it!

1. Ironweed (1983) by William Kennedy 

2. Marya (1986) by Joyce Carol Oates

3. Ragtime (1975) by E.L. Doctorow

4. At Home at the End of the World (1990)by Michael Cunningham

5. All-Bright Court (1987) by Connie Porter

6. The Last of the Mohicans (1826) by James Fenimore Cooper

7. America's Dream (1975) by Esmeralda Santiago

8.  We the Animals (2011) by Justin Torres

9.  A Northern Light (2013) by Jennifer Donnelly 

10.  The Collected Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever

11.  The Monsters of Templeton (2008)by Lauren Groff

12. The Air We Breath (2007) by Andrea Barrett 

13.  We Are Gathered Here (1996) by Micah Perks

14.  Lost Lake (1998) by Mark Slouka

15.  Living on the Borderline (2019) by Melissa Michal

16.  The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon (1820) by Washington Irving 

17.  The Church of Dead Girls: A Thriller (1997) by Stephen Dobyns 

18. Girls (1997) by Frederick Busch

19. Tell the Wolves I'm Home (2012)  Carol Rifka Brunt 

20. A Place in the Wind (2017) by Suzanne Chapin

21. And Give You Peace (2014) by Jessica Treadway

22. Mona in the Promised Land (1996) by Gish Jen

23. Against Gravity (1996) by Lucy Feriss

Published 1/2/24

The Church of Dead Girls: A Thriller(1997)

by Stephen Dobyns

New York:  1/105

Aurelius, New York

Upstate: 1/23

   Welcome to Chapter 2 of 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, editor Susan Straight's 2023 mapping project of the American Literary landscape- literally! There is an actual map.  This chapter is called Empire States and Atlantic Shores.  108 of the titles are from New York.   Based on my understanding of New York geography, 18 of the New York titles are from upstate and the rest are from New York City and its suburbs.  So that means 90 books for NYC, 18 for the rest of New York and 13 for New Jersey- putting it at the same level as New Hampshire.  I'm assuming this will be the biggest chapter in terms of number of titles- with 12 chapters the average is 83.5 books per chapter, and New England was already over at 91, meaning that after two chapters the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America will be already be 44 titles over.

  When I look at the first 91 titles from New England I see really solid top 20, including several books I'd already read and didn't read again for the project.   Another twenty after that were worth while and then the bottom 50 were like, couldn't wait to be done.   I'd call that about a 50% hit rate.  The first chapter- with its 91 books took me six months so the I would guess this chapter will go to September.

    Starting off weak with upstate New York- which- this is going to be like another New Hampshire/Connecticut type situation I'm guessing- plenty of genre stuff and domestic fiction about people who never left small towns and people who come back.   The Church of Dead Girls: A Thriller is written by mystery-genre author Stephen Dobyns, though this is not from his series of moderately succesful books of detective that are also set in upstate New York. 

     I get that this is supposed to be a portrait of a particular upstate town in New York, but it didn't feel very specific.  Worse was the plot which has a plot that does no favors to the mentally ill or the LGBT community despite featuring an LGBT narrator.  I suffered through the Audiobook- it felt like forever.  When the killer was finally revealed I was left non-plussed.  Not a great start for New York in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.

   

Published 1/8/24

Living on the Borderlines (2019)

by Melissa Michal

New York 2/105

Upstate: 2/23

Nedrow, New York

  Living on the Borderlines is an impressively deep cut in the 1001 Novels: A Library of America New York chapter.   Living on the Borderlines is representing the Onodaga Nation- one of the five original nations of the Iroquois Confederacy.  This collection of interwoven short stories is interesting but very conventional Native American lit- talking about the intergenerational trauma and troubled family relationships in a way that will be familiar to even a casual dabbler in Native American literary fiction.  Which is not to say that I didn't enjoy the read- I'd rather read a million books like this one than another single YA book, but I know from history that the Iroquois Confederacy were both victim's and collaborators with the British and American authorities.  For example, the Iroquois seized the lands of another Native tribes and then sold it to the British in the 17th and 18th centuries. 

There was nothing within these pages that struck me as particularly Iroquois, but maybe that's because most of these protagonists are women with little or no formal education and limited life experience, giving their stories a similar tone. It's something I've noticed about fiction written from the POV of the non-literary classes- an author telling the story of a human being with a fifth grade education, is, to a certain extent, writing about a fifth grader.  That's not a criticism, simply an observation.   When, on the other hand, your character has a graduate degree in English literature or some other professional qualification, they are free to sound like the likely highly educated author.

   Michal's stories aren't exclusive to Onodaga country- one story is about a Haida (Pacific Northwest) carver of totem pools and his struggles to carry on the tradition to the next generation.  Another story centers on a character who was given away for adoption by an Iroquois woman to a non-Native family.  Some of the stories have elements of magical realism.   The stand out story was The Long Goodbye- about the matriarch of a family descending into Alzheimer's, haunted by her experience at the dehumanizing Indian Schools of the early 20th century.

Published 1/12/24

All-Bright Court (1987)

by Connie Porter

New York: 3/105

Buffalo, New York

Upstate New York: 3/23

  

  Buffalo's sole representative in the 1001 Novels project is All-Bright Court is Connie Porter's 1987 debut novel about a community of African American steelworkers living in the eponymous housing block.  It's another collection of interlinked short stories spread over decades.  All-Bright Court accomplishes exactly what books in the 1001 Novels project are supposed to accomplish- giving the reader an idea about a community of American with whom they may be unfamiliar.  It's not fair to say I've never thought about Buffalo- I have two friends who are from there and I've talked about their experiences growing up in Buffalo dozens of times.  However, they are both Jewish-American professionals who left after high school, i.e. nothing like this community of African American steelworkers. 

Published 1/15/24

A Northern Light (2003)

by Jennifer Donnelly 

Big Moose Lake, New York

New York: 4/105

Upstate: 4/23

    I'm breaking off the up-state portion of New York as a separate "state"- everything north of Scarsdale, New York.  I might also divide up the borough's- really, though most of NYC is Manhattan.  I know that Manhattan is going to turn out to be the single biggest location in the 1001 Novels: A Library of America project, but I can't but feel an incipient dread.  After all, do we not already know the great (and not so great) novels of Manhattan?  No single place is depicted more in American literature and if you account for the fascination of writers themselves with New York, particularly with downtown New York, and the fact that the publishing industry for fiction is largely based in New York, well, it's the kind of overwhelming advantage the 1001 Novels: A Library of America project should be working to counter.

   So far upstate New York feels a lot like upstate New Hampshire and Vermont.   More industry, perhaps, but lots of lakes and over-intelligent daughters yearning to be free.  With A Northern Light the 1001 Novels project is back within the well-worn precincts of YA fiction.  Credit to the book, while it was obviously narrated by a teen girl, it wasn't entirely clear to me that this was marketed as YA fiction until I got prepared to write it up.  The plot is classic YA Lit:  A smart girl wants to get out of the middle of nowhere via college but she faces impediments to her plans.  She is influenced by a  sophisticated outsider of some sort.  Meanwhile, there is some kind of b-plot that invokes a mystery or current-event. 

  Here, the location is Big Moose Lake, New York.  The b-plot is the murder of a mistress at the hands of her big city paramour- the same story that forms the basis of An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser.   As this genre of book goes within the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, it is less insufferable, perhaps because of the historical setting and the able handling of the issues of woman's rights that were nascent in that era.

Published 1/18/24

America's Dream (1975)

by Esmeralda Santiago

Westchester County, New York

New York: 6/105

Upstate: 5/23 *

* this book is mismapped. 

   This title is mis-mapped on the actual map- they have it as the most far-northern book in New York state period when it is actually set in the close in suburb of Westchester County.  It's labelled properly but simply mapped onto the long Westchester I suspect. Obviously no one checked this chapter or this is a mistake that would have been caught.

    America's Dream is very much exactly the sort of book I had in mind when I started reading the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.  It's a novel about the experience of a Puerto Rican woman who escapes a violent abuser on Vieques island (where the US Army tests bombs) for a job as a house keeper/nanny in Westchester County circa 1970.   I get the sense that it's a minor classic on the grounds that Santiago is a pioneer in the field of Puerto Rican representation- it's still in print, though the last editions looks like it was published in 2009.  

  The frank depiction of domestic violence circa 1970's Puerto Rico is what the kids call "triggering," as a hardened criminal defense attorney who has tried twenty domestic violence case and represented defendants in dozens more, I was shocked, even allowing for the culture of "Machismo."   If I understood the plot correctly, the protagonist was the third generation of single mothers who gave birth at 14.  That is shocking to me but I've been exposed to enough of the world to know that it happens.   Here, her babydaddy would have gone to prison for twenty years, there, he doesn't even get arrested.  

  I'm not sure whether Puerto Rico is even covered by the 1,001 Novels project, but certainly it's right to expect more than one title from New York from the Puerto Rican community of that state- actually I know it's at least three because I'm listening to an Audiobook of a Puerto Rican Police investigator and a book by National Book Award winner Justin Torres, who also identifies as Puerto Rican.

   Like many books depicting characters with limited formal education the range of observations are limited- we are talking about the life experience of a woman who got pregnant at 14 and has literally never left her home island before the events of the book- but that's the same reason everyone needs to read books like America's Dream, it's an empathy generator for someone you might not have thought in detail about before reading. 

Published 1/19/24

Lost Lake (1998)

by Mark Slouka

Lost Lake, New York

New York: 7/105

Upstate: 6/23

    There are five books from the Syracuse area, three from Buffalo/Rochester, three that are in between Syracuse and the Hudson River Valley (one of those is mismapped) and then the remaining half span the north to south length of the Hudson River- from the suburbs north of the city to Albany, with only two of those books coming from north of Albany.  That's upstate!  This means I'm halfway through the non-Hudson's River Valley portion of upstate.  What would that portion of America be without at least one book about fishing immigrants?   

  Honestly, I'm expecting more than one book on fishing, since it is an avowedly "literary" pursuit according to many (not me).  Also, there are large swaths of the country where fishing is the most exciting subject in the area that doesn't involve detective fiction.   This is a collection that blends equal parts fishing and the experience of Czech immigrants- including one story that partially takes place inside post-war Czechoslovakia.   The New York Times reviewer gave it a great review but it doesn't seem to hand landed with any kind of audience.   His Wikipedia page lists eight books, all on major publishers, the last from 2018.   No hits.   I wonder what he is up to these days. 

Published 1/23/24

We the Animals (2011)

by Justin Torres

Baldswinville, New York

New York: 8/105

Upstate: 7/23

  Justin Torres just won the National Book Award for his novel, Blackouts.  We the Animals is his first book- also marketed as a novel though the circumstances- an LGBT childhood in upstate New York with two older brothers, a white mother and a Puerto Rican father, largely mirror his biographical details.  This book also ends with the narrator being shipped off to a mental institution by his family, which is also a theme in Blackouts. 

   We the Animals reminded me of On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong- which is another poetically inclined bildungsroman about being an LGBT child of immigrants in a decaying, New England-rust belt milieu.  I know, New York isn't New England but honestly if you cut off the northern third of the state it could just as well into Vermont or New Hampshire.   We the Animals is a slim volume- 144 pages or a three hour audiobook.  I was excited to see the Audiobook was instantly available- sometime with recent prize winners their earlier works see heavy demand and limited supply.    I wasn't shocked, exactly, but it was surprising that both books written by Puerto Rican authors in the 1,0001 Novels: A Library of America feature women who start giving birth at 14 years old.  In this book, the parents elope to Texas when the Mother is 14 and the father 16. 

  Again, the father figure is violent towards all members of his family and it is simply acceptable to all involved.  There is one chapter in this book where the mother briefly contemplates leaving the abusive father but generally speaking the state of affairs seems acceptable to the family.  It is a frequent characteristic of relationships involving domestic violence that there is sympathy for the abuser on the part of the abused- nothing specifically Puerto Rican about that. 

  We the Animals is the fourth of fifth books set in and around Syracuse- so far none of them have done so much as mention the existence of Syracuse itself- they all take place in small towns set around Syracuse.  I couldn't tell you a single fact about Syracuse based on the books from that region selected in the 1,001 Novels project.

A photo of a young Joyce Carol Oates

Published 1/25/24

Marya (1986)

by Joyce Carol Oates

Innisfail, New York

New York: 9/105

Upstate New York:   8/23

    This is the first 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die/1,001 Novels a Library of America I've encountered in the New York/New Jersey chapter.   Marya was included on the original 1,001 Novels list but was dropped in the 2008 version and replaced by Francophone author from Africa (Marima Ba). 

   I didn't re-read Marya for the 1,001 Novels Project.  Below is my review from 2017:

Published 4/18/17
Marya (1986)
 by Joyce Carol Oates

   You might consider Marya a Joyce Carol Oates origin story.  Marya, the title character, physically resembles Oates, shares a similar background and has the same experiences as Oates the writer.  Within the 1001 Books project, Oates is a huge loser.  She starts with four titles in the original edition, and that number is cut to a single title in the first revision.  This reduces Oates from a repeat player of some note to a one hit wonder, for the purposes of the list.  It also points to the way that many, if not all, authors with multiple titles- certainly all those from the 20th century and beyond- were subject to having their contribution halved.

  I'd be inclined to think that Oates was ill served- she is almost certainly an author who deserves more than a single title.  It's likely that she is a victim of both being prolific, still writing and not a major literary prize winner.  Oates is not going to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, she hasn't won the Pulitzer Prize.  She's also written non fiction and short stories throughout her career, and flirted with the career of a public intellectual in the television era.

  Like Anagrams by Lorrie Moore, Marya hasn't aged well, except as it relates to a general up-swell of appreciation for Oates as she ages out of productivity.  Most of Mayra exists within the confines of the academic literature of the 1980's.  Her plight as a white woman, making her way in academia, has only muted relevance to the polyphonic explosion of viewpoints related to class and gender.   At least Oates, unlike Moore, avoids writing from a place of vested privilege.  

Published 1/29/24

Tell the Wolves I'm Home (2012)

by Carol Rifka Brunt

Westchester, New York

New York: 10/105

Upstate New York: 9/23

   Carol Rifka Brunt is a huge one hit wonder- Tell the Wolves I'm Home was a YA smash back in 2012 and then that was it- she hasn't published a thing since.  No short story collection, no memoir,  no second book, period. I read on her Wikipedia that she is married to an astronomer and has three kids- that would be enough to keep anyone busy. 

     Tell the Wolves I'm Home is about a precocious (is there any other kind?) 14 year old girl living in Westchester county with her slightly older sister and her Mom and Dad, both accountants- though their careers are as depicted through the understanding of a fairly unworldly 14 year old.  Specifically, that they are very busy around "tax time" and don't have much time for their kids. 

   The plot, essentially, is that precocious June Elbus has a beloved uncle Finn, her Mom's brother, who is a famous artist (painter, in typically YA fashion- hard to imagine he would be a performance artist!) and who, in the opening pages of the book, dies of AIDS.  In as much as this book is about anything besides the thoughts and experiences of a fourteen year old girl, it's about AIDS and the early days of AIDS, when people with AIDS were hated and feared- before the United States Government officially acknowledged it's existence.  

    Finn has left behind Toby, his bad-boy ex-con, illegal English immigrant boyfriend, and if you have the kind of specific knowledge about how the criminal justice system and immigration interact, you will have to leave aside that information and just go with the flow of the book.   June travels back and forth to Manhattan and forms a friendship with Toby while seeking a better understanding of her feelings about her dead uncle and AIDS, generally speaking.  Meanwhile, her slightly older sister Greta is having her own issues and that relationship functions as a subplot. 

   There's no denying the power of this book, specifically as it relates to the early days of AIDS.  It's clear that June and her family live in the New York suburbs, but you could have just as easily assigned this book to Manhattan, where Toby/Finn live/lived in an apartment owned by Finn. 

Published 1/30/24

Primitive People (1993)

by Francine Prose

Hudson's Landing, New York 

New York: 11/105

Upstate: 10/23

  I'm pretty sure that Primitive People, a novel written by a white American woman from the point of view of Simone, an illegal Haitian immigrant would have issues getting published in 2023.  It's not like Simone is one character among multiple narrators, Primitive People is written exclusively from the perspective of Simone, starting with her life in Haiti, where she has a career as an assistant to an American diplomat working in Port-Au-Prince.  Her life is turned upside down when her kind boss is replaced by an unkind boss, and her painter fiance starts cheating on her with a different woman.  Time to go!  She swipes some money from her fiancee- who is never heard from again- hooks up with an agency that arranges a fake husband for her and finds a job as a Nanny (child care, not cleaning) for a ditzy upstate New Yorker who is going through a divorce from her wealthy husband.  

    This was my first encounter with Prose- who got a National Book Award nomination  in 2000 for Blue Angel, a campus novel (sigh).  Prose has written a ton of books but no hits that I can see on her Amazon author page. Her inclusion on the 1,0001 Novels list is very on-brand for editor Susan Straight, who has already introduced me to over twenty American women authors of fiction that I hadn't heard of or read before I started this project. 

 

   Primitive People also had me wondering how many books I'm going to have to read about women working as domestic servants- somehow New England didn't have any that I can recall but New York has already had two.  The first, a legal Puerto Rican immigrant and his book, about an illegal Haitian immigrant.   At a little over 200 pages, it's hard to be offended by Prose's depiction of Simone- although her education isn't discussed, she speaks English fluently (Haitians speak French or a creole French) and sounds like an American college students.  Her recollections of life in Haiti often sound like they come out of a New York times article. 

   I went back and read the New York Times book review from 1993- they obviously didn't see any issues with Simone back then- there was even an excerpt from the book included with the review.   But again, I'm not someone who sees cross-racial characters as particularly problematic, but I am surprised that Susan Straight doesn't see it as problematic given her general concern with gender equality and economic diversity within the 1,001 Novels project thus far (100 books in). 

Published 1/31/24

A Place in the Wind (2017)

by Suzanne Chapin

Lake Holly, New York

New York: 11/105

Upstate New York: 10/23

   A Place in the Wind (alarmingly subtitled "A Jimmy Vega mystery") is the last of the three books from the Buffalo, New York area. A book about African American factory workers, a Joyce Carol Oates book and this book:  that is what Buffalo and its hinterlands has to offer the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.  I don't mind reading detective fiction but I'm not sure why editor Straight has included so much detective fiction and YA fiction but spurned Romance novels and children's books.  I mean, if you are going to be inclusive, be inclusive all the way.  Personally, I've never read a genre romance book but plenty of people do and they are certainly a part of the American literary identity. 

  This was an Audiobook I checked out from the library and I immediately regretted it.  The prose, I felt, was so clumsy that it really got in the way of the plot.  Also, the characters were not complicated- everyone was either good or bad and they all stayed that way throughout.  The actual mystery involved- the death of a young girl from a wealthy white family with suspicion falling on members of the (illegal) immigrant community- relies on the author concealing a very, very, important fact from the reader while otherwise pretending that we have access to the thought process of that character.  

  The ending literally made me laugh because I thought, any character in any book would have revealed the concealed fact on page one.  It's cheap, in other words.  I can see within the precincts of the 1,001 Novels project, how this book got included because it's about a Puerto Rican detective working in Buffalo New York, with a plot that deals with tensions between local whites and the immigrant community, arguably a plot that could have been as interesting without the mystery. 

   The bottom line is that I simply didn't think this was a very good book, I found the whole thing tedious.   This book pretty much ends the Buffalo/Syracuse portion of New York- only one more title remaining from this part of the country.  The rest of upstate is the Hudson River Valley down to the New York City suburbs.   Then...on to Manhattan. Or maybe I'll do New Jersey first and come back to Manhattan because New Jersey is only a dozen or so books.

   

Published 2/1/24

The Air We Breath (2007)

by Andrea Barrett

Saranac Lake, New York

New York: 12/105

Upstate New York: 11/23

  It is February and I'm halfway through greater Upstate New York, which I have extended down to New Rochelle- sorry purists!  The Air We Breath is one of the more tolerable titles I've read from this part of the country.  It's a low-stakes work of historical literary fiction set at a Tuberculosis sanitarium in far North New York, set during World War I.   Barrett uses an unnamed third person narrator who generally sounds like another resident of the asylum who also knows everything, everywhere- that's what they call technique, kids.   

 I'd never heard of Barrett before this book but I quickly learned that she won a National Book Award for a collection of short stories and novellas that mostly revolve around scientific themes, as is the case there.  As I've said before and I'll say again, anything that takes me aware from middle aged white Dads and Moms having troubled marriages in NYC is gold for me, so this is one of those books that I'm just happy to read.   It wasn't great- there is some action towards the end but generally speaking tuberculosis patients are a sedate bunch (they have to sit still so the pockets of germs in side their lungs scab over and can't be released). Certainly there are some interesting/memorable moments, particularly those that relate to the lady who operates the early X Ray machine in the basement (before they knew what prolonged exposure to radiation did to you, early technicians just suffered and died) but I'd be hard pressed to recommend it to anyone. 

Fetishists of sanitarium culture, perhaps.

Published 2/2/24

Girls (1997)

by Frederick Busch

Hamilton, New York

New York: 13/105

Upstate New York: 12/23

    Man, I am going to be reading New York books all year.  Here we are in month two of 2024 and I'm still deep into Upstate/Hudson River Valley with New York City on the horizon.   This is the last of the eight books representing the swath of New York that covers Buffalo, Syracuse and the part of the northern state that isn't the Hudson River Valley.   This is detective fiction of a sort- the protagonist being an Ex Military Policeman now working as a campus cop for an upstate private university in a small New York town.

   Girls was the first book from upstate New York where I really felt the location: specifically the New York winter with its surfeit of snow- am I right in thinking that the confluence of the great lakes/distance from the ocean/lack of mountains creates literally the most snow of anywhere in the United States?  Syracuse is the snowiest city in the United States so I think I'm right about that.  I've noticed making my way through 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, that the emphasis is specifically on the PEOPLE of the United States, with the places themselves being secondary.  So far, the books that have been about place are either books about a single location- beach house, sanitarium, vacation house OR books that portray the life of a small town.  Girls was the first book where I really felt the snow of upstate New York, so credit to author Busch.

   Otherwise, Girls confronts a common issue in the attempt by editor Straight to portray the people of the United States: It involves many, many novels written about people from immigrant groups and the working/underprivileged classes of America, which means plenty of protagonists and narrators who lack a high school education.   How does the author address that situation?  The most common approach is to use the technique of a third party narrator who speaks for the (educated, sophisticated) writer of said characters.  The second most common approach- and this is what Busch does- is place that character in proximity to the educated, so that they can influence the narrative of the working-class/disadvantaged narrator.

  Here, the detective is a private security guard at an elite university, and he takes one class a semester.  Thus, the author is allowed some leeway when the detective character muses on a thing above his level of education/worldliness, "Must have been something rubbed off on me in my literature class."  OR the musings can be supplied by an educated character who exists for that purpose- also at work here.  I wondered if Busch started off to write a more conventional "campus novel" when he was struck by the idea of writing about a campus cop. 

  While Girls is certainly not the type of book I would have sought out beyond the precincts of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America,  I found it one of the more interesting books to emerge out of Upstate New York, since it wasn't about the difficulties of a young girl trying to make her way in a hostile USA.

Published 2/8/24

At Home in the End of the World (1990)

by Michael Cunningham

Woodstock, New York.

New York: 14/105

Upstate: 13/23

    The rest of the upstate portion of New York is from the Hudson River Valley, which runs north and south along the Eastern border area of New York state.  This was my second read of At Home in the End of the World- frankly, I forgot I had already read this book until I was writing this post- Cunningham is a two book member of the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die list- this is the second book from that list.   Seems like this author has a decisive hold as a representative of the LGBT literary community based on his Pulitzer win for The Hours.

   In terms of the 1,001 Novels project,  At Home in the End of the World is another geographically suspect pick. There are strong arguments that this book represents Cleveland, the Village or the suburbs of Phoenix, all locations that have more scenes than the eponymous home at the end of the world, which is, in fact, a fixer farmhouse in Woodstock, NY- where editor Straight placed this book on the map. 

  Other than literally not remembering a single moment from my first time through, I don't have much to add to the 2017 review:

Published 7/11/17
At Home at the End of the World (1990)
 by Michael Cunningham

   At Home at the End of the World is a combination of a gay coming-of-age book and a contemporary relationship novel.  Each chapter is voiced in the first person by a different narrator.  The narrator rotates between the three main characters: Bobby, Jonathan and Clare with occasional appearances from Jonathan's mom.  The main childhood friendship is between Jonathan- essentially the main character and author stand in, Bobby- his straight friend, and Clare, who is the type of woman one might call a "fag hag" - in a non pejorative sense, of course.  

   Although these characters are 20 or so years older than I am, I recognized all of them, from the parents on down, as being accurate portrayals of urbanites in the late 1980's.   Unlike other gay-friendly lit titles from this time period, At Home at the End of the World explicitly deals with the AIDS crisis through the travails of a minor character who none the less features prominently in the unexpected resolution of the book.

Published 2/9/24

The Last of the Mohicans (1826)

by James Fenimore Cooper

Cooper's Cave,  Glen Falls, New York

New York: 15/105

Upstate: 14/23

 I've been disappointed with the lack of 19th century picks in the 1,001 Novels project.  I understand that the idea is to provide a contemporary portrait of American life, and that if you go back to the 19th century diversity wasn't a huge concern among published and authors, but still, what's the point of an 1,001 Novels project without some obscure 19th century titles in the mix.  Instead we get The Last of the Mohicans, which, I read for the 1,001 Books project back in 2012.  That was a pretty good post, so I'm just going to re-post it.  No way I am re-reading The Last of the Mohicans for this project:

Book Review

The Last of The Mohicans (1826) 
by James Fenimore Cooper (6/8/12)

                                  James Fenimore Cooper

  You simply can't discuss James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans without discussing Sir Walter Scott's The Waverley Novels.

  The Last of the Mohicans is the second of a five-volume series called The Leatherstocking Tales.  The Leatherstocking Tales stand in relation to The Waverley Novels as the Rolling Stones and the Beatles stand in relation to Elvis:  One inspired and survived to maintain a presence during the ascendancy of the other.  Here, Sir Walter Scott's The Waverley Novels were Elvis, and The Leatherstocking Tales are the Beatles.

  The Waverley Novels are known as such because Sir Walter Scott wrote under a psuedonym- but Waverley was the first Novel in his series, and for the second book in the series it said that the Author was "The Author of Waverley;" referring to the TITLE of the first book.  Unlike The Waverley novels, which were just a series of Novels by the same Author set in the past (i.e. "historical, epic fiction."), James Fenimore Cooper's The Leatherstocking Tales refer to a specific character, birth name, Natty Brumppo, although in the books he goes by a variety of names:  the Pathfinder, the Trapper, Deer Slayer, Le Longue Carabine and, most hilariously,  Hawkeye.

 Similar to The Waverley Novels, The Last of the Mohicans is set in the past.  Written in 1826, the events of The Last of the Mohicans re-enact well known "current events" from a half century ago.   Like The Waverley Novels, The Last of the Mohicans and the other Leatherstocking Tales were not written in a political vacuum.  To talk about Sir Walter Scott and his line of descent, as some kind of autonomous "Art for Art's Sake" type work is to entirely miss the main point of these books, which is to entertain, and convince the reader of a set of viewpoints that corresponds to the strongly held beliefs of the Author.

 It may be a fascinating area of inquiry- parsing that out- but not really the concern of someone who is going to read The Last of the Mohicans because they saw the movie starring Daniel Day-Lewis or because, say, it's on the 1001 Books to Read Before You Die list.  For those readers, The Last of the Mohicans is an inevitable disaster because of the clunk methods Cooper uses to go "back in time."  All the dialogue is stilted, and the lavish depictions of scenery are hardly a revelation to anyone who has seen a photograph.

   It's easy to understand WHY James Fenimore Cooper has been canonized, because he's the first internationally famous American Author, and because America INVENTED canonization in the mid 20th century, a time that was more concerned with American roots then we are today.  However, the action doesn't hold the attention, and the politics are, to be kind, "politically incorrect."  Another way to put it might be "well-meaning racism."

Author Lauren Groff

Published 2/12/24

The Monsters of Templeton (2008)

Cooperstown, New York

New York: 16/105

Upstate: 15/23

  I consider myself a fan of author Lauren Groff.  My thought is that she does have a major prize winning novel in her- she's already been a finalist for the National Book Award.  She's also prolific for a contemporary writer of literary fiction, averaging a new work every three to four years.  Finally, she's shown an ability to write about something other than herself- with forays into regional short story collections (Florida) and historical-literary fiction (The Matrix, The Vaster Wilds) from different time periods in history.  Fates and Furies was heavily laced with Greek mythology and this book, her first, has a strong element of the supernatural/magical realism with an appearance by a lake monster and a non-verbal ghost as a character. 

    She reminds me of Colson Whitehead in her efforts to blend genre appeal with the less audience friendly concerns of literary fiction- this book- her first- has several classic elements of the first novel- a university educated protagonist returns to her backwater hometown after some kind of trauma in her new life or old one.  This is a plot that is a frequent guest on the 1,0001 Novels list, I call it the Hallmark Movie plot. These books are, at the very least, said in said backwater small town, making them an excellent pick for the less-written about parts of the US.

  Groff awkwardly renames Cooperstown to Templeton and keeps the Baseball Hall of Fame generic- a real effort in the context of the gossipy tone of the references to said Hall of Fame and its impact on the community.  Half the book is pretty standard issue first novel stuff, the other half consists of a quest by the returning protagonist to uncover the identity of her father.   This involves a lot of historical research, which basically means half of The Monsters of Templeton is an epistolary novel, and tbh I could not be bothered to keep track of the quest of the narrator to find her poppa.  I mean, who cares?

 I saw this in the context of music more often but, the idea of a character in a work- a book- a song- who is an adolescent girl or post adolescent girl who is having trouble with some big decisions and spends a lot of time crying in her room- that is the most relatable trope and therefore it is super popular and there are a ton of artists who do it, and do it well, but it is, ultimately, all the same.  It's all the same in the same way that romantic poetry from the 18th and 19th century is all the same until you get to someone like Ezra Pound.   I'm not saying it's all BAD just that it covers that same thematic/artistic territory over and over again.

Published 2/13/24

We Are Gathered Here (1996)

by Micah Perks

Adirondacks Park, New York

New York: 18/105

Upstate: 17/23

   I could have made a four book subcategory of the Adirondack Mountains, which takes up the whole northern third of New York state.  But, only four books from this area so, no subcategory.  I've never been to the Adirondacks, but the books from here resemble other books from the Green Mountains of Vermont and the White Mountains of New Hampshire.  We Are Gathered Here is a work of historical fiction, about the friendship of two young women, one the epileptic child of wealth, confined to her grandfather's house in a last ditch attempt to cure her before she is committed to the state insane asylum (Utica, New York- represent!) and a local girl, the young bride of a Swedish immigrant coal miner and daughter of a local midwife.

  Perks deploy a ton of pieces on her thematic chess board- besides the obvious themes of  class, gender and sexuality there are also gypsies, a sect of renegade all female Shakers, union organizers and the afore mentioned state insane asylum in Utica.   Quite a stew!

Published 2/19/24

The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon (1820)

by Washington Irving

Tarrytown, New York

New York: 19/105

Upstate: 18/23

       Washington Irving has fallen out of favor in recent decades.  The Legend of Sleepy Hollow has some value as early American royalty free IP, but other than that you'd be pressed to find a reader outside the literature departments of American universities.  Irving was, I think, the first professional man of letters- the Penguin Classics edition of this book- a compilation of what we would call magazine articles in the 20th century, bears an introduction by Irving himself that describes, of call things, the history of the publication rights for the book itself, complete with numerous references to his mentor, Sir Walter Scott.

   Besides The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, the rest of the articles are mostly his travelogues from England.  When I went to Spain 15 years ago I actually read his book about Spain- which was actually pretty readable.  These articles I found less so.  It's also pretty clear that was familiar with the literary culture of his era- particularly the gothic style circa 18th century, which strongly influenced Sleepy Hollow.   

Published 2/20/24

Ragtime (1975)

by E.L. Doctorow

New York: 18/105

Upstate New York: 17/23

    Ragtime is another 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die/1,001 Novels: A Library of America cross-over title.  I read it for the 1,001 Books project back in 2016 and it is no surprise to find it listed on the 1,001 Novels list as well.   Perhaps worth noting that this is the southern most of the books from the "Upstate" section- below this it's the Bronx and then Manhattan and Long Island...  See my 2016 review below....

Published 8/20/16
Ragtime (1975)
by E.L Doctorow  

I quite enjoyed Ragtime, Doctorow's 1975 work of historical fiction.  Set largely in New York in the years prior to World War I, Doctorow blends a large cast of fictional and non-fictional characters in refreshing and novel fashion.   You've got J.P. Morgan, Harry Houdini, Evelyn Nesbit (America's first "It Girl."  Each of these historical figures have a sub-plot where they are treated in an irreverent fashion, blending factual history with a work of fiction.

   The major plot concerns a wealthy family living outside of New York.  They are referred to only by their family names, Father, Mother, Younger Brother.  The narrator at times appears to be a young son of the family, other times Doctorow adopts the third person.  The plot takes some time to develop, what with all the existential musings by Houdini and J.P. Morgan's obsession with the Egyptian pyramids and immortality.  

  Mother finds an abandoned African American infant in their spacious yard.  She saves the child and agrees to shelter the child's mother, an African American servant with no family.  Coalhouse Walker, the child's father, eventually finds his way to the family, where he slowly courts the mother of his child.  All appears to be headed towards a happy resolution for the young couple, when Walker's Model T Ford is vandalized by some local firefighters, resentful at the figure of an African American motorist using their roads.

   Coalhouse becomes obsessed with obtaining justice for his vehicle, and when his fiancé suffers an untimely death, he goes off the rails and launches a terrorist campaign against the men who have wronged him.  Doctorow covers an amazing amount of territory in roughly 300 pages.  It's a lesson in succinctness that might have been better observed by his successors.

Published 2/21/24

And Give You Peace (2014)

by Jessica Treadway

Ashmont, New York

New York: 20/105

Upstate New York: 19/23

    Ashmont is very close to Albany New York- the last major non NYC metropole in New York state.  And Give You Peace is the first book from this metro, the other is Ironweed by William Kennedy.  This book is about an OCD father who murders himself and his 16 year old daughter, leaving his two older daughters and separated-but-not-divorced wife to pick up the pieces.  While I admire editor Susan Straight's impulse to include the mentally ill in her literary picture of America, once again I found myself reading a novel where the mentally ill character commits a horrific crime (murder/suicide) that seems ridiculously out of character.

   Now, in addition to having mental illness run in my family, and having been in a past relationship with a person who was diagnosed with OCD as an adult, I've been working as  a criminal defense attorney in state and federal court for over 20 years.  I have never ever heard of a murder attributed to OCD, let alone a horrific murder-suicide.  I'm not saying such a thing never happens, but I've never heard of it.   I found the entire idea that his character could woo the wife character and have three kids, and raise three kids to the point where the youngest was 16 only to finally "snap"- preposterous.  And not in a suspension of disbelief kind of way.

   In my experience OCD manifests in a very specific way: The obsession triggers a certain kind of behavior.  Both the obsession and the behavior it induces are repetitive.  OCD does not, in my experience, trigger a sufferer to shoot his teenage daughter in the head because he saw her necking with a neighbor boy in the treehouse.   Someone suffering from OCD might very well harm themselves in a number of ways- most often by the nature of the repetitive behavior as a form of self harm- scratching, cutting, etc.

   This novel was published by Greywolf Press in 2014.  Was there really an editor there who read this manuscript and said, "Yes!"  There was, of course, but man, I just did not buy it one bit. 

Published 2/22/24

Ironweed (1983)

by William Kennedy

Albany, New York

New York: 21/105

Upstate New York: 20/23

    Ironweed, Pulitzer Prize winner and third book in William Kennedy's Albany Cycle, represents a kind of high-water mark of WHITE GUY literature- a moment in time when the entire literary establishment could fall under the spell of a drunken washed-up Albany area baseball player and his drunken regrets. And, don't get me wrong- I loved this book- def the highlight of the 22 books from Upstate New York in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.   In fact, I think there is a strong argument to include Ironweed on the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die list as well.

    Francis Phelan- played by Jack Nicholson in the movie(!) is a down but not entirely out bum (his word) eking out something approximating existence in Albany, where he abandoned his family 20 years ago after he dropped his infant son and the infant son died.  He's haunted by this and other mistakes- quite literally haunted by the shades of the dude he brained with a rock at a Union protest, or the labor protestors who were shot by the cops after he brained the guy with the rock.

   In between he does some casual labor, hangs out with this stomach cancer ridden friends (occupational hazard of hard core alcoholics, I gather) and makes up with his abandoned family.  Sad but a good read. And you know, he like, is doing stuff besides sitting in his bedroom and complaining about life, which I feel like is 30 percent of the protagonists of the titles in the 1,001 Novels project

Published 2/27/24
Mona in the Promised Land (1996)

by Gish Jen

Scarsdale, New York

New York: 24/105

Upstate New York: 21/23

    Not a huge Gish Jen fan.  I listened to the Audiobook of her 2020 Dystopia-lite book, The Resisters.  I reread the review I wrote back then- reads very much like I was trying to be polite.  It's currently over on Amazon with just under 500 reviews, which is not great.  None of her other books have more than 150 reviews, which is bad.  That shows you that people aren't reading her books.  Mona in the Promised Land is certain to be on my cut list for the revision.   It's another example of the "teenage girl trapped in her bedroom" genre- like The Resisters, Mona in the Promised Land has strong elements of YA fiction trapped inside what appears to be an attempt at a work of adult literary fiction.  I found that same approach grating in The Resisters, equally so here. I ended up having to grit my teeth to make it through the Kindle version I checked out from the library.

   The narrator/protagonist is the daughter of a pair of hardworking Chinese immigrants who decides to convert to Judaism.   The way this whole arc of the plot is written was cringe inducing for me, as was the other main plot line, where the narrator's white friend invites a fired black cook at the narrator's family restaurant to live with them after his wife kicks him out of his apartment.   So cringe.   I guess... I admire the attempt to write about these subjects but I didn't find any of the characters particularly interesting or convincing. 

   But challenging myself to read books I would never ordinarily tackle is the precise idea of undertaking the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.  The whole project has been a real carnival of teenage girls in small towns in the Northeast, thus far. . 

Published 2/28/24

Against Gravity (1996)

by Lucy Ferriss

Hudson River Valley, New York

New York: 25/105

Upstate New York: 22/23

     I will be so glad to see the back of the literary portrait of Upstate New York.  What a grim place!  A grim place, filled with stories about teenage girls either being murdered, getting pregnant or just being bored and unhappy.   I've already caught on to a central dynamic at the heart of the 1,001 Novels Project:  There are many, many, many places where they only people who stick around are 1) out of area do-gooders, back to make a difference (usually the mother of the nuclear family or a love interest) 2) local adult men who are either dumb but good hearted or smart and wicked or 3) sad teenage girls who can't get out because they can't drive or still in high school.  I would estimate that is about 75% of the characters from the books out of upstate New York.

   Against Gravity is a novel that dares to ask the question, "If you write a novel with a bunch of characters who are utterly uninteresting and accomplish nothing, will anyone read that novel?"  Based on the dour New York Times review, the fact that it's out of print and has two Amazon rating, I'm going to say the answer is no.  Certainly, I was grateful that I'd checked the hardback out of the library- which is the easiest, fastest way for me to read a book, and didn't have to subject myself to either an Audiobook or Ebook version.  

  Squarely inside the sad teenage girl stuck inside her room int he middle of nowhere genre that dominates the 1,001 Novels project, Against Gravity is about a teenage girl nicknamed Stick (because she is skinny) who lives in a sub-hamlet in the Hudson River Valley.  Mom manages a homeless shelter, Dad works at a local electronics plant.  Her best friend is a pregnant teen who gets knocked up the night of the Challenge explosion, which they had travelled en masse to watch.

   The first portion of the book revolves around dealing with her pregnant teen friend.  Snoozeville.  The second portion involves her going to NYC to be a tap dancer and then coming back to her nowhere hometown to take care of her dad after he falls off a roof.   There's also an utterly depressing subplot about a neighbor who is accused of molesting his foster children.   Maybe if I wasn't fifty novels deep into these types of books thanks to the 1,001 Novels project, I would have found Against Gravity, but as it stands this book is going to be at the bottom of my list for this part of the country.

  Last book up for upstate New York is the collected short stories of John Cheever, which clocks in at 700 pages.   I tried to read the Ebook but that didn't take so I'm waiting on a hard copy.  It's going to be a while.  Meanwhile, on the Bronx and Harlem.

Published 4/4/24

The Stories of John Cheever (1978)

by John Cheever

Tarrytown, New York

New York: 42/105

Upstate New York: 23/23

  Finally, finally finished the last book from the Upstate New York subchapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  Meanwhile I already polished off the Bronx (7 books) and I'm halfway through Harlem (14).  Why did it take so long?  The Stories of John Cheever is a mother- weighing in at 693 pages, with no single story going over 15 pages.  The first thing I tried was checking out the Ebook to read on my Kindle.  That was not happening.  Next I checked the paperback out of the library.  It was a shabby, shabby edition, which is fine- it being the library but kind of seems like a hardback version would be better.  It then took me a couple months to read it, first spending six weeks in my briefcase, then a final weekend where I sat on my couch while my partner was out of town and read the last half of the book over the course of an afternoon.  Meanwhile I finished 17 more books from New York in the interim.   I started reading this book last year.   Congratulations to me.

  Cheever is the quintessential New Yorker short story writer.  I want to say that every story in this collection was first published in the New Yorker.  The chronological organization and adherence to the "New Yorker short story" template is key- the reader watches Cheever go from writing about the inner lives of Elevator operators and pre and post War Lower East Side drunkards- his early period.    A stand out from this early period is Enormous Radio- which has a surreal element that I didn't associate with Cheever before reading it.  

    

    From there Cheever starts his series of stories in Shady Hill, New York.   He essentially became synonymous with his stories critiquing the conformity of the post-war New York commuter suburb.  The fact that Cheever was posthumously revealed as a closeted member of the queer community (famously the subject of a Seinfeld episode), seems more than a little ironic considering his characterization of unhappy hetero couples.  Yeah, no shit. 

   He never really left the suburbs, though his characters go back and forth to New York City and there is also a lengthy "Italian period" which are his least interesting material- mostly sad New Yorkers set adrift by various misfortunes who find themselves struggling in Italy.   Cheever does feature a number of women characters- though they are often unflattering portrayals of domestic harridans.  As for the diversity of New York City, I don't think there is a single non-white character in any of his stories. I don't believe there is a single Jewish character.  Despite a dozen stories set in Italy, I can't recall any of the stories grappling with the issues confronting Catholic Americans, or European Catholics. 

   Mostly what Cheever is about are white, Protestant characters who drink too much and complain about their circumstances.