Don Robertson's Liminal Nightmare ~

Holy cow, what a book! It starts off a slow burn, but turns downright harrowing toward the end (I couldn't put it down). This is not the same old tired Civil War story recycled from a lot of other books; the characters are painfully real, and their circumstances are unlike any I've seen in any other piece of fiction about this era. You'll find no tired retread of battles, no hardtack, no endless exposition about the politics of the time, no romantic Southern apologetic, no kindly woman who takes in stray soldiers and falls in love ~ all those crummy tropes have no foothold here ~ at all: this is an end to the war that's intensely human, brutal, and appalling in its brutal humanness.

I came across this book by pure happenstance. It was mentioned somewhere that Stephen King was a fan, so I took a gamble and ordered it not knowing anything about it. Now I'll definitely be looking for some of Robertson's other books ~ it's just a pity they are all out of print and he passed away shortly after this one was published (argh!).

Not for the faint of heart, Robertson doesn't shy from the baser instincts of people trapped between wanting to die and a desperate instinct to survive. I think one of the most terrifying things about reading this is that eventually you realize that there is no mercy here: at any moment in the chaos of circumstance, anything can happen. Robertson's style takes a little adjusting to (some of his dialect choices throw you out of the story until you can get a hold on them ~ and the choice to write in a dialect when it's told from an omniscient voice that roams from one character to another is, frankly, a little bizarre. But the specificity of the characters and their compelling stories more than make up for it. This book is gritty, honest, and takes chances where I've seen so many others cop out or go ridiculously over the top.

There are only a handful of books I say I wish I had written. This one joins them.

In memory of Angelo ~

I spent most of Sunday gnashing my teeth. the reasons why are pointless to explain (same o'crud). then I did the stupid thing of reading myself a bedtime story so depressing that it carried my mood overnight and now I am officially in the glums.

The book, Dennis Brandt's Pathway to Hell isn't spectacularly written ~ it's rather short (barely over 200 pages), and isn't exhaustive about much ~ but that made it perfect for me: no long explanations of campaigns I already know too well, no endless nattering about hardtack. instead it's a true chronicle largely in Angelo Crapsey's own words from his letters and diary, documenting in the most painful way imaginable, his slow decline into self-destructive dementia.

Crapsey's story is unique as far as books of the war go, though there's unfortunately nothing unique about what happened to him. It tells the story that Paulson's Soldier's Heart tries to tell, but doesn't.

When I think back on the origins of Reconstruction, I think i wrote it in part because this book hadn't been written. Crapsey's story is more heartbreaking than any novel anyone could ever write: a disaster that could have been avoided a hundred different ways. The circumstances of his bizarre upbringing at the hand of a religious whack-job father, his fervor for the Union, his abolitionist sentiments that sour after emancipation drags the war into a seemingly endless slaughter, the shame of his surrender and imprisonment ~ all of it horrible, horrible ~ and then to come home to the father-figure and friend he looked up to the most only to find himself rebuffed, feared, and ostracized. And finally the everyday event that led to Crapsey's end is so banal, almost ~ so utterly human in its simple cruelty. It isn't any wonder he blew his brains out. Twenty two years old.

Of course I imagined a different end once upon a time for Reconstruction which is in many ways this same story: an endless cycle of addictions, an abusive marriage, desolation, death. Even I was never so brave to actually make any of that stick, though. I had to find some hope in there somewhere. So I did.

But there was none for a lot of young boys like Crapsey. Even Howard Bahr didn't shrink from drawing us a picture in The Judas Field (which is maybe why I didn't like that book as much as I wanted to ~ it hit a nerve with me).

So yeah. I don't know why i am writing this except to wonder at the meaning of it all.

200 years ~

Tomorrow being the 200th anniversary of the man in the funny hat's birthday, I sat myself down and read something that wasn't about him getting shot (yes, it's possible to find such a book in my house, believe it or not!). This is a little book written by Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews after the turn of the century called The Perfect Tribute. I believe it was originally published in 1906, but my own personal edition, a well-tanned ugly duckling, is from 1908 (and has an owner's stamp of "J. Lewis Riggles" which amuses me).

The story is not badly written, but is bad in general. It's a fictional account of Lincoln's day at Gettysburg and how insecure he feels about his pithy little speech and how no one applauds and therefore it was a complete failure. Scholars have interesting things to say about why no one applauded, but I love to read the reactions from people who actually heard the speech (which is why I really love Gettysburg Remembers President Lincoln). But this isn't a review of that book, it's a review of Andrews' fictional account, so I will leave it at her interpretation for now.

The story goes from there back to Washington where Lincoln runs headlong into a young boy in a dither over his dying brother: a Confederate prisoner who needs a will so that he can leave his property to his sweetheart and she will therefore be forced to accept it (otherwise she's too prideful). Lincoln, being a lawyer, volunteers his services and they go to the prison where he draws up the business for the bravely suffering young man. In the course of their conversation, the soldier brings up the Gettysburg speech, which is in all the papers, and he talks about how astonishing it is, blah blah blah. And of course he says that not clapping was the perfect tribute because the words were so perfect and so solemn. He talks about how he'd like to shake the President's hand, he's so dern grateful. Then the fella kicks the bucket holding Lincoln's hand, never knowing it's him.

The story works, even if it is melodrama. Its apotheosic (is that a word? I doubt it) bent is only mildly disturbing and the depiction of the two southern boys as righteous, indignant, but well-meaning is a rather dull stereotype. But in 1906 I can certainly see the appeal and I enjoyed the story despite my own prejudices.

So happy birthday, Mr. Lincoln. Enjoy your celebration year!

Homebound with Howard Bahr ~

Can't get my car to start this morning. Yesterday it was -17 and it cranked over okay, but today at -21, it just ain't going to happen. I'm waiting to see if, when the temp gets up to at least 0 (we're supposed to have a high of 8 today!), I can get the poor thing on the road. If not, I get to work on Saturday. Which completely screws up my anticipated 3-day weekend, but oh well, what can you do?

So while I'm trapped here and AAA is so clogged with calls that I can't even get through and I'm stuck in my house (which is about 54 degrees right now ~ 4 below what's comfortable for me, so I'm going to have to turn the heat on, God forbid), I thought maybe I would do some blogging since I've neglected it for a while (being too busy and overwhelmed with other nonsense as of late).

The last book I read in 2008 was Howard Bahr's The Black Flower. I am a huge fan of Bahr, though have read his books sparingly and over long periods (I want to make them last and I'm now down to only one, so he better write another). The Black Flower was his first novel and I remember distinctly passing it over when it first came out because I was turned off by the paperback artwork (which I did not reproduce here, though it's the edition I own). I made the lousy assumption (judged it, I confess) that the tacky exterior was indicative of a tacky interior (and my apologies to Mr. Bahr because I know the photo used on the paperback cover was his own).

Anyway, after reading The Judas Field (the cover of which appealed to me), I was so impressed with the writing, I collected all of Bahr's other books ~ and it was a treat to end the year on such a positive note. The Black Flower reads like a great first novel. There are parts of it that seem a bit disconnected from the whole as though they were written independently before the whole thing was put together ~ so it is a bit disjointed in places, but Bahr is still amazing with a turn of phrase and his occasionally long-winded metaphors are never overwrought, always worth labor of reading. His descriptions of battle and its aftermath as not so evocative of Crane, though people naturally make the comparison. But where Crane's impressions come from inside Fleming's naive observations, Bahr's impressions seem to come from inside the exhausted veteran perspective of men who've seen it all and worse and just want a cup of coffee: good, bad or indifferent. To me, it's a whole different world. Fleming doesn't want to die. Bahr's Bushrod Carter just wants to get it over with if it's got to happen. Bahr's female characters feel a little flatter to me, but I like them and can appreciate the challenge. Writing women in this era is always a battle between prissy wallflower and full-blown virago, it seems.

Bahr's story here is pretty simple: following the messy Battle of Franklin, the army lands on the doorstep of an estate that gets commandeered as a hospital (if you follow that link you can see a picture of the actual plantation house where the story takes place. Actually, there's a really cool one here). What happens next is predictable, but so well-drawn you forgive it for being cliché: yes, the whole wounded soldier/nurse thing. But here the nurse doesn't want to fall in love in spite of her emotions, and honestly, I wasn't sure how it was going to end, which made restraining myself from reading forward too quickly a real trial.

I had a lot of problems with how The Judas Field ended. It was conclusive and completely realistic, but it made me angry (sort of in that good way that a book ought to provoke ~ and then again sort of in a way that annoyed me because I couldn't see why it had to end as it did). The Black Flower is similarly conflicting, but I felt like it was clearly "right". It felt right. Hard to talk about without giving anything away here, but I don't want to spoil it.

So that's my long spiel for the morning. If you love amazingly sensory, great writing, read Bahr's work.

sometimes a book surprises you!

this year i am focusing on reading the gamut of Civil War fiction (not that i didn't read a lot of it last year, but i guess i'm making a real effort to tackle some of the books i just seem to perennially put off).


like those written by Howard Bahr. i couldn't get past page one of his first two books, but am having a very different experience so far with The Judas Field. maybe it's because the stumbling block of a name like Gawain isn't tripping me up in this one (though i confess "Cass" isn't much of an improvement). if i have bothersome names for main characters in my books, i pray to God people will tell me.

anyway, Howard Bahr's The Judas Field is so far surprisingly fresh. the story is pretty simple: dying woman enlists the help of ruined ex-confederate to dig up her father and brother where they were buried during the war and bring them home so she won't be lonely in the graveyard. then they set off on a trek to try and recover the bodies, slipping into the obligatory flashback to tell the story of their demise (with some apparent promises that their death might not have been all that it was made out to be twenty years before). anyway, i've been reading slow, but really digging Bahr's writing. it's very detailed and nuanced, his characters are not cloying, and the battlefield stuff is gruesome without being utterly gratuitous. much to admire there. i'm hoping it holds together to the end, but so far i feel pretty good about it.

i guess the point of me writing this is that i generally complain a lot about Civil War fiction and lately i am looking to suss out the good in it.

edit: (January 29, 2008) to read my final analysis, click for more!

keep reading ~

jack dann's The Silent should have stayed so ~

this is a book i bought years ago, started, then put down and hadn't gone back to. when i moved, i almost gave it away, but i kept it at the last minute thinking i'd get around to reading it.

last night i got around to reading it. i stuck with it, though i remembered why i had stopped reading it in the first place. it's got a first person narrator who's allegedly writing the book as instructed by a doctor for "therapuetic" reasons (yeah, it's already stretching my believability ~ and then it reads like no 14 year-old boy would ever write, with both profanities and eloquence that just make you shake your head in wonder).

you get over that and into the story and it gets even more tedious. like a catalog of checked-off war horrors. decapitated head (check), bloated body (check), amputated leg (check). worse yet, it felt as though jack dann sat around thinking: what disgusting, horrible thing can i do to this character next? between the rape and murder of his mother, the protagonist's own rape by a yankee malingerer (huh? this moment is so random!), gratuitous masturbation, his run-in with a pedophile colonel (geh! stop!), and then the buckets of blood and entrails and maggots (oh the maggots!), i was pretty bored and tired of it rather quick. i never knew horror could be so dull.

and ask anyone: i'm the last person to defend stonewall jackson, but dann's insinuation that jackson was a closet drunk is just ludicrous.

sadly, some of the writing is very good (some phrases, some descriptions are wonderful!), but the effect overall is repetitious and ham-fisted (and how many times do we have to repeat about the guy shot in the head with the maggots oozing out of the wound?)--(not to mention those are the fastest maggots in the world the way they spontaneously generate after a battle. maggots take 24 hours to hatch and up to three days to mature).

other weirdness in the book include how the temperature was hot and then cold and then snowing, but not really. and there were characters who were there, but not, and had died but were alive. i think part of this is supposed to be the state of trauma of the character, but it was very confusing and the symbol of the "spirit dog" that follows the boy was utterly pointless and wasted.

i found the following review on amazon and pretty much agree with it:

Jack Dann's "The Silent" features a mix of overheated spiritualism, glaringly anarchronistic dialogue, and an embarrassingly voyeuristic approach to sex that left me chuckling inwardly at the same time I reproached myself for wasting my time on this bit of historical deconstructionism. Interestingly, one scene in a field hospital and another describing preparations for battle were so vivid and truthful that I was even more astounded by Dann's novelistic chicanery. Lump this in with "Cold Mountain" as one of the more wayward and self-indulgent misuses of American history in a novel.

(bold emphasis mine). a big disappointment, to say the least. and after i'd held on to it for so many years!

: o p

i guess the good thing to come out of this is that i'm reminded to ease up on the clutch when it comes to the sex and gore in my own writing. i could very easily fall into the same trap given some of the plot elements of my own work. i might reread Stewart O'Nan's Prayer for the Dying to be reminded that real horror isn't what the writer shows you, it's what you piece together from what's not being said.

truly victorian prose from Andersonville Violets ~

the opening of Herbert W. Collingwood's Andersonville Violets is so deliciously bad it's worth saving. first, there's the excusatory preface ("unblinded by partisan feeling or sectional hatred")


~ and what has to be the most ponderous anthropomorphizing of a celestial body in the history of literature:


i could write a dissertation on how "bad" this book is. because it was written in 1889, i gave it far more consideration than i would have had it been "new". this book was an exercise in sentimentality, negative stereotypes about the south and black people (who are consistently called "niggers" by everybody, north and south), and some of the most horrific purple prose in a victorian novel (and that's saying something).

my favorite moment in the whole book, however is this:

She laid her head on John's breast and sobbed like a little child. Her brave task ended, she was only a woman now.

i tell you: there's something to offend everyone in this book. it has been way too amusing.

the basic premise is interesting: john rockwell (union man imprisoned at andersonville) risks his life to procure for a dying friend a clutch of violets growing on the wrong side of the deadline. jack foster (confederate soldier), in a moment of pity, permits him to get away with it. jack is subsequently dishonorably discharged (something i doubt would have actually happened in 1864, but that's beside the point).

keep reading ~

MacKinley Kantor's Andersonville ~

finishing up MacKinley Kantor's Andersonville, i figured i ought to share some thoughts on it (the big fat 750 page ordeal that it is). there are spoilers in this, be forewarned.

i am only half-kidding about it being an ordeal. i thought i might give up after the third chapter (which is always the "danger" chapter for me in any book) ~ but i was compelled by the keen writing to persevere and i am glad i did.

keep reading ~