Summer Reading
I’d been meaning to read Jim Harrison for a few decades now, but it wasn’t until this summer that I finally got around to it. His most recent novel, The English Major, follows its title character, a Michigan farmer (and ex-teacher and, yes, ex-English major) in his sixties who’s just been dumped by his wife as he heads west on a journey to remake, literally, himself and his country. The remaking America project involves coining new names for all fifty states; the remaking himself project starts with booze, sex, and driving, but these provide only temporary comfort. Mourning his beloved dog, Lola, brings the hero a bit closer to his goal, which actually seems to come within reach as the novel ends. Very nice.
Next I moved down south, taking up Mary Robison’s brutal One D.O.A. One on the Way. It’s a fractured narrative sunk deep in the chaos that is the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. An open wound of a novel, it is presented in cut-up form, 225 numbered passages arranged seemingly in chronological order across 166 pages. Eve, the heroine, is married into a wealthy, ailing New Orleans family, and amid stunning lists of statistics that measure from multiple angles the moral failure of America’s response to the man-made disaster that befell the Delta, her sometimes funny, sometimes morbid story unfolds. To be honest, I had a hard time connecting emotionally with the characters or their stories–and yet again that was in many ways the whole point. This is what alienation feels like, circa 2009.
Now, I’m about a hundred pages into Donald Hays’ 1984 baseball novel, The Dixie Association. Once again, I’m swimming in the larger-than-life loquacity of Southern gab, this time from the players, managers and hangers-on of an Arkansas minor-league team made up of leftists, dropouts, and other assorted outcasts. The narrator is an ex-con slugger who makes me laugh every few pages, but I’m beginning to wonder how far his smart-aleck lip will be able to carry the book. At least, it keeps my minds off the 2009 Minnesota Twins and the even more painful 2009 season of my fantasy baseball team, the woeful Twinkies.
