American literary fiction

Review: Remembering Laughter

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Cover image of "Remembering Laughter" by Wallace Stegner

Remembering Laughter. Wallace Stegner, afterword by Mary Stegner. Penguin Books (ISBN: 9780140252408) 1996, (first published 1937).

Summary: An early Wallace Stegner novella. What happens when Margaret Stuart’s sister comes to live with her and her husband.

In 1936, Wallace Stegner was an English instructor at the University of Utah. An announcement of a novelette prize offered by Little, Brown, and Company caught his eye. But what to write? In the afterword, Mary Stegner shares her role in relating the story of two gaunt aunts living on a farm with a young man who was the son of one of them, though which was unclear. From that family vignette, Stegner wrote Remembering Laughter. To their surprise, they learned he was the prizewinner. He won $2500, very handy when one had an eight month pregnant wife at home.

Turning to the story, Margaret and Alec Stuart owned a prospering farm in west Iowa. Margaret was religious and ran her household with a quiet rectitude. Meanwhile, her husband worked hard but also enjoyed a good laugh, made up stories, and a shared drink with his fellows. Margaret disapproved of the latter and endured the rest.

When Elspeth MacLeod, Margaret’s younger sister by seven years emigrates from Scotland to live on the farm (and hopefully marry a promising young man from the area), everything changes. At first, all is well with welcomes from everyone, including the insipid bachelor minister who Margaret wants to match with Elspeth. And Elspeth embraces her new life joyfully, throwing herself into household chores while describing her surroundings in language reminiscent of Willa Cather. It’s also clear she has too much spirit to for the minister.

Then everything changes with the surprise party Margaret meticulously plans for Elspeth. To get her out of the house, she asks Alec to take her for a long walk by the stream. Bad idea, as the interest each had in the other turns into something more. The rest of the novel plays this out. Key to it all are the choices made (or not made) by each character under the control of Margaret who keeps up the appearances (even with a child who doesn’t know who his parents are) at the cost of laughter in the home. The years pass until we come to the scene of two gaunt women preparing for a funeral that opens the novella.

This book was out of print for many years until re-published in 1996. None of my friends who like Stegner knew of it and I only found it by chance. I thought it so adept at exploring fraught relationships, actions, silences, and their consequences. It previews all the great writing to come from the pen of Wallace Stegner.

Review: This Tender Land

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This Tender Land, William Kent Krueger. New York: Atria, 2019.

Summary: Four orphans fleeing the Lincoln Indian Training School due to a crime of self-defense embark on a journey to and on the Mississippi to find a relative they hope will provide a home and shelter.

Albert O’Banion and his younger brother Odie were orphans sent by family to live, by special arrangement, at the Lincoln Indian Training School. For the most part it was a brutal existence under the cruel headmistress, Thelma Brickman, known as “the Black Witch” and her grifter husband, and under the brutal strappings (and worse abuse) from Vincent DiMarco, who took care of the grounds. There were glimpses of kindness from Herman Volz, who secretly ran a still with mechanically clever Albert, and from a teacher, Cora Frost. They were also close to Mose, one of the Indian students, with whom they communicated by sign because his tongue had been cut out as a child

Cora Frost had the boys do some work for her. Her daughter, Emma, who suffered “fits,” took to them and Mrs. Frost was on the point of adopting them when a tornado hit, killing her beneath the wreckage, sparing Emma, who instead joined the boys under “the Black Witch.” At this point Odie is convinced that God is the shepherd who eats his sheep one by one, the Tornado God who takes away those you love. Things come to head and lead to the narrative that fills the rest of the book. Odie discovers the truth about the disappearence of an Indian boy. It has to do with DiMarco, who in turn sets out to kill Odie, pushing him over a cliff. A projection saves him and he grabs the strap hanging at DiMarco’s waist, which had inflicted so much hurt, pulling DiMarco over the edge, to his death.

Now a murderer, he must flee. His brother Albert, Mose, and Emma join him and they become “the Four Vagabonds” on their own journey down the Mississippi, reprising Huck Finn. A canoe left at the Frost place conveys them down the Gilead, then the Minnesota River to the Mississippi. Their goal, as improbable as it is, would be to make it to St. Louis, where Albert and Odie have an Aunt Julia with a big home and heart, hoping she will take them all in.

Traveling the river, they elude the manhunt on land to find the “kidnappers” of Emma, who is traveling willingly with them. For some strange reason, the Brickmans are focused on her. The remainder of the story traces their journeys on the river and their encounters both with the worst and the best of human beings during the summer of 1932, deep in the Depression. They pass through Hoovervilles and shanty towns. They take up with a traveling revival, whose Sister Eve discerns the special gift latent in Emma’s fits. The others discover more of themselves as well, from the site of a terrible slaughter of Sioux that sends Mose on a vision quest, to Albert, who realizes his mechanical gifts, and to Odie, who discovers what he really wants, which connects to his full name, Odysseus.

In the backdrop of all of this is the vast landscape of Middle America, heartbreakingly beautiful at times. It is the place of the forced subjugation of Native Peoples, represented by Indian schools who sought “to kill the Indian to save the man within.” It’s the place of contrasts between conspicuous wealth and bereft families traveling across the land hoping for a new start, often finding hopes dashed.

Amid all this are the four, bound together to protect one another and especially Emma. Despite the tensions between Albert and Odie, the mechanic and the storyteller, Albert is committed to look out for his younger brother. There are touching scenes of nights when it was safe when Odie played harmonica and told stories under the vast starscape, encouraging them all.

William Kent Krueger has given us not only a Huck Finn story but also an odyssey, leaving us reading breathlessly to discover whether they will find the home they are looking for or will be captured by the wicked Brickmans. For Odie, it is a spiritual odyssey as well as we wonder whether he will bitterly believe to the last only in the Tornado God or find some measure of grace. This finely written work was the first of Kreuger’s I’ve read. It won’t be the last.

Review: My Ántonia

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My Ántonia, Willa Cather (Foreword Kathleen Norris). Boston: Mariner, 1995 (Originally published in 1918, no publisher web link available).

Summary: Jim Burden’s narrative of his relationship growing up on the prairie with Ántonia Shimerda, one he would live with throughout his life.

[Review includes spoilers.]

Jim Burden was an orphaned boy who came to live with his grandparents in Nebraska. Ántonia Shimerda was a young girl, four years older, of Bohemian immigrants living nearby. This story, described in the opening narrative as a manuscript describing his friendship with Ántonia, given to a friend from the same town in Nebraska months after a train ride in which they had spoken of her.

Jim is quickly enlisted to teach Ántonia English so she can help with the family’s transactions in the community. And thus begins a deep friendship between the two lasting a lifetime. Tragedy quickly shadows Ántonia’s life when her sickly and unhappy father, several weeks after a beautiful Christmas Day visit, takes his life. Ántonia and her brother Ambrosch are left to eke out a living, and they do, by Ambrosch brute force and Ántonia’s hard work, through which she becomes somehow even more vibrant. Their friendship continues in the moments she is free, including an incident in which Jim, who happens to be carrying a shovel, kills a deadly and huge rattler, becoming a hero to her and all.

Later, Jim’s grandparents move to town and Ántonia also takes up a job, working as a housekeeper with Mrs. Harling, teaching her domestic arts she has not learned on the farm. The two keep up, Jim shunning younger girls for Ántonia and her friend Lena, to whom he is attracted. Lena has different ideas, and becomes an independent dressmaker, beholden to no man and eventually living in San Francisco. Jim went off to college and eventually law school. Meanwhile, Ántonia goes off with a young man to get married. He abandons her, pregnant. She returns home and joyfully, as she does so much, raises her daughter, leaving shame to others. She and her brother work together on the farm. Jim returns once to visit, holding her hands as he prepares to return to school, saying he will return.

It is twenty years until he does. They do continue to write. In the meanwhile, Ántonia marries Anton Cuzak, with whom she has ten children and builds a prosperous farm. Jim becomes a railroad lawyer. The book concludes with his visit to the farm, where he meets the children and Anton.

As in O Pioneers, the story unfolds amid Cather’s descriptions of the glories of the Nebraska prairie. And like that story, Cather portrays a woman of strength and joy in her life. One senses she could have spent her life with Jim, who never pursues her beyond their shared friendship. And yet she not merely accepts, but joyfully embraces a life with Anton, who honors her initiative and industry. We sense that Jim comes to realize this as well. What strikes me is that each honors the commitments of the other. A modern novel would probably have written in an affair that would destroy them both, and Ántonia’s family in the bargain. They choose a different road, generous friendship that honors boundaries, and finds joy in what they have, “the precious, incommunicable past.”

Review: Lila

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lila

Lila, Marilynne Robinson. New York: Picador, 2014.

Summary: The story of the unlikely marriage between Lila, a homeless drifter, and Rev. John Ames, a widowed older pastor.

“And as for thy nativity, in the day thou wast born thy navel was not cut, neither wast thou washed in water to cleanse thee; thou wast not salted at all, nor swaddled at all. No eye pitied thee, to do any of these things unto thee, to have compassion upon thee; but thou wast cast out in the open field, for that thy person was abhorred, in the day that thou wast born. And when I passed by thee, and saw thee weltering in thy blood, I said unto thee, Though thou art in thy blood, live; yea, I said unto thee, Though thou art in thy blood, live.” (Ezekiel 16:4-6, American Standard Version)

These verses and the remainder of Ezekiel 16 are ones to which Lila is strangely drawn when she begins reading the Bible she took from the pews of John Ames church. The verses, really a parable of Israel, seem to parallel her life, and perhaps more than she knows.

Lila was a neglected toddler, stolen away from her family by Doll, which probably saved her life. They fell in with other drifters on the road during the Depression and became fiercely loyal to one another. Eventually Doll is in a knife fight where she kills a man, possibly Lila’s father, nearly dies, but eventually escapes custody and disappears. Lila drifts to St. Louis, works for a time in a house of ill repute, and then flees the city with a woman returning to Iowa and ends up in a shack near Gilead, Iowa. One Sunday, she wanders into the church of Rev. John Ames, an older, widowed pastor. And so begins a relationship, a searching dialogue between the two with questions like “why do things happen the way they do?” He and the church help her out and give her work. She asks him to baptize her. She tends the grave of his wife, cultivating roses. At one point Ames thanks her for caring for the grave and wishes there were something he could do for her. She says, “You ought to marry me.” and he answers, “Yes, you’re right. I will.”

And so begins a most unusual marriage, where Lila, who has never trusted anyone but Doll, must somehow believe this man really loves her. The beauty of the story is that he does, and yet gives her the room to believe it for herself. And in the midst of it all, she finds herself pregnant with his child. Much of the story is her reflections on being the motherless child, and her life on the road as the months of her pregnancy progress, interwoven with the careful, tender love of Ames, never forced, but ever present; fearing she might leave, yet never compelling her to stay, but simply offering his love, his home, and himself.

Robinson uses the device of telling the story of her former life as memories Lila reflects upon as she embarks on this new life with Ames. She muses on the strange, dangerous, and sometimes unseemly life she has lived even as she wrestles with the possibility of having really found a home, a love with this man, and that she can be the mother she never had apart from Doll. The answer to her question of why things happen they way they do must remain somehow with the sovereign God, but the working out of the way things happen is a story of grace, the discovering of an incomprehensible but unwavering love.

The third of the “Gilead” stories, Lila explores the deepest questions of existence and the searching question of how far may grace reach. Can it reach Lila? Doll? And what about us the readers? It’s worth reading to find out.