by Nancy Pearl
Mississippi
’Sippi by John Oliver Killens (1916-1987) takes place during the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and ’60s. Killens, who is unfortunately not much read today, founded the Harlem Writers’ Group and taught many of the next generation of African American writers, including Piri Thomas, Ntozake Shange, Nicholasa Mohr, and Thulani Davis. (You might also try Killens’s Youngblood, which takes place in Georgia.)
Billy by Albert French, set in 1937, is a stunning and painful novel about the execution of a ten-year-old boy who killed a white girl during a racial confrontation.
A lighthearted look at Mississippi (and there aren’t many) is James Kaplan’s Pearl’s Progress, about a New Yorker who takes a job at Picket State University and finds himself a fish out of water.
In Rosellen Brown’s Civil Wars, Jessie and Teddy Carll, who came South to participate in the civil rights movement, find their marriage challenged when they take on the responsibility of raising their orphaned niece and nephew, whose views on race sharply differ with their own.
Bev Marshall’s Right as Rain also explores the contradictions and paradoxes of race through a story about two black women and the white family they work for.
Other Mississippi novels include Frederick Barthelme’s Bob the Gambler; Greg Iles’s 24 Hours (and others); Willie Morris’s Taps, set during the Korean War; all the novels of Steve Yarbrough (including Visible Spirits, The Oxygen Man, and Veneer); and Elizabeth Spencer’s The Salt Line.
Virginia
Probably the best-known historical novel set in Virginia is William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner. This story of a slave uprising two decades before the Civil War won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1968.
Thulani Davis’s 1959 and Dennis McFarland’s Prince Edward deal with the effects of the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954 on the lives of young people, both black and white.
The eccentric residents of Big Stone Gap are sympathetically portrayed in a series of novels by Adriana Trigiani, beginning with Big Stone Gap, in which the town’s pharmacist (and thirty-five-year-old self-declared spinster), Ave Maria Mulligan, sets out on a quest to discover who her father really was—which results in two marriage proposals. Big Cherry Holler and Milk Glass Moon complete the trilogy.
Many of Lee Smith’s novels are set in Virginia, including Family Linen, about a woman whose recovered memories result in the unearthing oflong-hidden family secrets; The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed, told from the viewpoint of a young girl; and my particular favorite, Black Mountain Breakdown, the story of Crystal Spangler, who was the most popular girl at Black Rock High, but whose adult life never lives up to the promise of her adolescence.
Jonathan Dee’s Palladio is set in an artists’ colony run by an eccentric millionaire who made his money in the advertising business.The ending of this powerful novel ought to be predictable, but isn’t.
I have many guilty pleasures when it comes to books, but none more so than Elswyth Thane’s series of historical romances known collectively as “The Williamsburg Novels,” which I seem to reread with appalling regularity. As you can infer from the collective title of the series, the family’s home is in Virginia, but the action, especially in the later novels, moves away from the sleepy town of Williamsburg into New York and, especially, London. Each one takes place during a particular war, from the Revolutionary War to World War II. Here they are, in order: Dawn’s Early Light; Yankee Stranger; Ever After; The Light Heart; Kissing Kin; This Was Tomorrow; and Homing.
SPACE OPERAS
I’m sure that many science fiction fans will join me in believing that of all the science fiction subgenres, the one called space operas includes some of the most entertaining books.The term itself probably began as a criticism—describing books that were low in literary qualities and excessively high on drama—similar to the negatives heaped on soap or horse operas. But I use the term as it’s now come to be regarded, as a descriptor of exciting adventure novels, often set in an exotic planetary world (or many worlds) far from Earth, with a likable hero who has a worthwhile goal (like saving mankind). Here are some I’ve thoroughly enjoyed:
The Eleven Million Mile High Dancer by Carol De Chellis Hill, written at the height of the Cold War, is a novel about a feminist astronaut, particle physics, the conundrum of Schrödinger’s cat, and a mysterious threat to Earth’s security.
Lois McMaster Bujold’s thoughtful and swashbuckling series takes place a millennium in the future; the main character is Miles Vorkosigan, who overcomes a difficult childhood to become a spy for his home world, using the cover of a mercenary fighter.The best books are Shards of Honor,The Vor Game, and Barrayar. (Incidentally, the Vorkosigan novels are great for teenage boys.)
Hyperion by Dan Simmons is set in the twenty-eighth century, in the midst of a galaxy-wide war. Seven pilgrims travel to the planet Hyperion to meet the Shrike, from whom they hope to learn how to save all of humanity from self-destructing. It’s followed by the equally strong The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, and The Rise of Endymion.
The ultra-imaginative Simmons is also the author of the most enjoyable Ilium, a complicated cliffhanger set hundreds of years in the future, in which a group of highly evolved beings—humans, but more than human—use Mars as their staging area to re-create Homer’s Iliad, casting themselves as the gods and goddesses of the epic poem. (They even import their own Homers, a group of humans from the past who report on the events on and off the battlefield.)
I can’t praise Peter F. Hamilton’s science fiction opus Pandora’s Star too much. Hamilton’s twenty-fourth-century world is one of thousands of planets connected by wormholes that enable highspeed transportation to occur throughout the galaxy. His characters—from the bad guys to the aliens to the heroes—are entirely three-dimensional. As the plot unfolds—is there some alien being out there who is eager to destroy anything that is not himself?—the tension mounts. This first of a two-part techno-space opera (followed by Judas Unleashed) is not to be missed, especially by those who loved Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon.
Other good space operas include Samuel R. Delany’s Nova; Downbelow Station by C. J. Cherryh; The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks; and Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross.
SRI LANKA: EXOTIC AND TROUBLED
Before Sri Lanka was Sri Lanka, it was Ceylon—a tropical island much coveted for its exotic spices and thus conquered by various European nations from about the fifteenth century on: first the Portuguese, then the Dutch, then the British, who took control of the whole island, something the previous colonial powers had been unable to accomplish. Independence from Britain came in 1948, a year after Britain left India, and within a decade fighting broke out between competing ethnicities—the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority, not to mention the European Christians who had lived there for generations.The heaviest fighting took place in the late 1980s and 1990s. Only at the beginning of the twenty-first century did it seem that a lasting peace might be possible. Many novels set here directly address the ongoing, seemingly endless conflict; when it’s not the main focus of the plot, it is frequently a subtext, running uneasily throughout the book.
You get a good sense of pre-Sri Lankan Ceylon in the 1930s from Edie Meidav’s first novel, The Far Field, whose theme is that of the Westerner (in this case, American) come to the mysterious East in order to find spiritual fulfillment.
If you can imagine a novel that seems to be part Agatha Christie and part Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day) or Chang-rae Lee (Aloft; A Gesture Life), then The Hamilton Case by Michelle de Kretser is just the book for you. De Kretser, who was born in Sri Lanka and grew up in Australia, sets her novel in Ceylon just prior to its independence from Britain in 1948.The English regard her protagonist, lawyer Sam Obeysekere, as being “other,” despite his British schooling and desire to be thought of as English. The Hamilton case, in which he prosecuted the murderer of a British coffee grower, has defined his
career. Only much later in life does Sam begin to think that the conclusions he reached—not only about the case, but also about his own life—might have been terribly wrong. This was a novel I read slowly, in order to savor both the intricacies of the plot and the evocative writing.
In the beautifully written (but painful to read) Anil’s Ghost by Sri Lankan-born Michael Ondaatje, forensic anthropologist Anil Tissera returns home to Sri Lanka as part of a human rights organization investigating the many religious, ethnic, and political murders that have occurred.
Reef by Romesh Gunesekera is a coming-of-age novel about a young Sinhalese boy who comes to work for Mr. Salgado, an aristocratic marine biologist who teaches young Triton not only how to cook but also how to live. Gunesekera also wrote The Sandglass and a collection of stories, Monkfish Moon, both of which are also set in Sri Lanka.
Other good novels include Shyam Selvadurai’s Cinnamon Gardens (set in Ceylon in the late 1920s) and Funny Boy, about a young Tamil boy’s struggles with his emerging homosexuality during the ethnic violence of the 1970s and 1980s.
Two of my favorite memoirs of this country are Leonard Woolf’s Growing: An Autobiography of the Years 1904 to 1911 and Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family. The five volumes of Woolf’s autobiography are consistently interesting, but none more so than Growing, in which he recounts his experiences as a British civil servant in Ceylon, from when he was twenty-four until just before he came home to England and married Virginia in 1912.While this book gives a picture of the maturation of a young man in an exotic land, it also depicts (sometimes unconsciously) Woolf’s growing misgivings about Britain’s role as a colonial power. Running in the Family, Ondaatje’s impressionistic memoir of his upper-class family in Ceylon, mixes fact and fiction with great success.
NEAL STEPHENSON: TOO GOOD TO MISS
Brilliant” is the best way to describe Neal Stephenson’s writing. Best known as a leader of the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction, Stephenson is often categorized simply as a genre writer. But in recent years especially, he has shown himself to be conversant with history, science, the history of science, code breaking, computers, human relationships, and languages. His novels just shine with intelligence.
Here are his must-read books. I look forward to many, many more in the years to come.
Snow Crash is the story of Hiro Protagonist, a pizza deliverer in the real world (for Uncle Enzo’s CosaNostra Pizza Inc.) and a warrior in the Metaverse world of computer gaming.When a computer virus threatens to bring down both worlds, Hiro is just the person to stop it.
Cryptonomicon is way up on my list of top ten favorite novels. It’s a hugely complex and inventive novel about history, computer hacking, men at war, and cryptography, with much of the novel set during World War II at Bletchley Park, home of the British code-breaking men and machinery.
Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle series is composed of Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World. He may well write something that outdoes this trilogy in the next few years, but for now it’s his magnum opus. Each of the novels that make up the trilogy averages more than eight hundred pages; their subject is no less than the history of the seventeenth century in all its confusing glory, and all three novels are filled with high adventure and lots of sly humor. We encounter historical figures such as Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke, and Samuel Pepys, along with the unforgettable invented characters, including Daniel Waterhouse, the son of a murdered Puritan leader (as well as the ancestor of a main character in Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon); “Half-Cocked” Jack Shaftoe, vagabond and swashbuckler (and ancestor of another major character in Cryptonomicon); and Eliza (whom Shaftoe rescues from an Eastern harem), who makes her way carefully to prominence in the newly developing financial centers of a war-torn Europe. These books took me ages to read because I kept putting them down to look up various characters and events in the encyclopedia, but they were worth every moment.
TEENAGE TIMES
In some of my favorite novels, I remember best the teenage characters, even when they’re not front and center in the plot. These books are written not for teens themselves, but rather to allow the rest of us a chance to look back on those years with nostalgia, regret, or even anger. Here are some I’ve most enjoyed:
Teenage Roxanne Fish, the heroine of the humorous novel The Hallelujah Side by Rhoda Huffey, tells the story of her eccentric family and their fundamentalist Assemblies of God beliefs, as well as her own spiritual search for truth and her struggle for independence.
The Sleeping Father by Matthew Sharpe tells what happens when the divorced and depressed father of teenagers Chris and Cathy has a stroke (as a result of taking—by accident—two incompatible antidepressants) and falls into a coma, forcing his children to muddle through their lives more or less without him, with mixed results. This quirky novel is sometimes very funny (there’s a particularly hilarious scene set at a Thanksgiving dinner) and often very sad. (Not unlike life, really.)
I will be forever grateful to Adam Langer for inventing Michelle Wasserstrom, one of the main teenage characters in Crossing California. Langer’s novel takes place in 1979-1981 in the primarily Jewish West Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago, which is bisected by California, a street dividing the upper-middle-class Jewish families on the western side from the primarily middle-class families on the east. Incidentally, for those with short memories or who were too young to remember that time or place, Langer includes a helpful index, with entries ranging from “Kwame Nkrumah” to “Myron and Phil’s” to “French Postcards” to “faygeleh” and many more.
Chicago, the senior year of high school, and the 1950s are the setting for Ward Just’s An Unfinished Season, when nineteen-year-old Wils Ravan learns about life and love. (See “Ward Just: Too Good to Miss” in Book Lust for more about this author.)
One of my favorite teenage girls is the brave and foolhardy Mattie Jones, true heroine of True Grit by Charles Portis. (Even the movie made from this novel is worth seeing, just to appreciate John Wayne as Rooster Cogburn.)
It might be stretching “teenage” a bit to include an eleven-year-old here, but bear with me: Addie Pray, the title character of Joe David Brown’s picaresque novel, is a delight to read about, as she and the expert con man Long Boy, who may or may not be her father, peddle their special brand of larceny throughout the South in the dark days of the Depression. (The book was made into the film Paper Moon, directed by Peter Bogdanovich.)
In In Country by Bobbie Ann Mason, seventeen-year-old Sam Hughes mourns for her father, killed in the war in Vietnam, and worries about her uncle, a Vietnam veteran who may be dying from his exposure to Agent Orange.
Other teenagers I’ve loved include Marian Gilbert and Valerie Boyd in Nora Johnson’s The World of Henry Orient (the voice of Marian, who tells the story of the two girls’ obsession with Henry Orient, is spot-on); Jersey Alitz in Elizabeth Evans’s Carter Clay; Harley Altmyer in Tawni O’Dell’s Back Roads; Roberta Rohberson in Lynda Barry’s Cruddy; Corvus, Alice, and Annabel in Joy Williams’s The Quick & the Dead; Will Bradford in John E. Keegan’s Clearwater Summer; Karen Moss in Lowry Pei’s Family Resemblances; Lucy Diamond in Pete Fromm’s As Cool As I Am; Nomi Nickel in Miriam Toews’s A Complicated Kindness; and Josh, the protagonist of Richard Bradford’s zany Red Sky at Morning.
The sections in Book Lust called “Girls Growing Up” and “Boys Coming of Age” cover this same territory.
TICKLE YOUR FUNNY BONE
Start reading some of these books and you’ll find yourself falling off your chair, you’ll be laughing so hard. Beware! Right from the dedication of Betty MacDonald’s The Egg and I (“To my sister Mary who has always believed that I can do anything she puts her mind to”), you know you’re in for a lot of fun.This classic memoir, originally published in 1945, tells the story of how the author and her husband (city slickers both) tried (and failed) to make a go of a run-down chicken ranch on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula.The book was made into a 1947 movie starrin
g Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray (imagine being played by Claudette Colbert!), and was the basis for the ever-popular television series Ma and Pa Kettle. (Let me warn you, though, that you may be put off by MacDonald’s unenlightened view of American Indians.) MacDonald followed The Egg and I with The Plague and I (an account of the year she spent in a tuberculosis sanatorium) and Onions in the Stew. She is also the author of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle and other humorous books for children about the eponymous character whose child-rearing techniques are somewhat unusual, to say the least, but always seem to work.
Even prior to 1946, when Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House by Eric Hodgins was first published, living in New York was crazy-making. The Blandings are two Manhattanites who discover just how far their lifelong dream of living in an old farmhouse in the country is from the reality of it. This story was filmed twice, first with Cary Grant and Myrna Loy, and again (as The Money Pit) with Shelley Long and Tom Hanks.
Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog!) was first published in 1889, so it will give you a lovely dose of nostalgia as well as plenty of laughs. The dog is Montmorency, a fox terrier who accompanies George, Harris, and the author on their trip up the Thames. (If you enjoy this—and I’ve never met anyone who didn’t—don’t miss Three Men on the Bummel. Jerome describes a bummel, in case you’re wondering, as “a journey, long or short, without an end”; in this case, it’s a cycling trip through the Black Forest, with the same companions as in the earlier book.) Incidentally, the subtitle of Jerome’s book—To Say Nothing of the Dog!—is, sans exclamation point, also the title of a wonderfully comic science fiction novel by Connie Willis.