→ September 29, 2009
→ By

The Edge of Sadness.

Edwin O’Connor’s The Edge of Sadness, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961, is a pensive, thoughtful character study, centered on a Catholic priest named Hugh Kennedy who, while recovered from a battle with alcoholism, still has a shade of emptiness in his professional and spiritual life, brought into focus by his reconnection with a family he has known since childhood, the Carmodys.

Charlie Carmody, the family patriarch, invites Father Kennedy to his 81st birthday party, making the priest a witness to his continued psychological tormenting of his children while also bringing him back into contact with Charlie’s son John, a priest in Kennedy’s old parish; and daughter Helen. O’Connor manages to flesh out those two characters – Charlie is basically a one-note curmudgeon, but responsible for a fair bit of black comedy – while using all of his secondary characters to help unfold Kennedy’s story and lead him to realize why he isn’t fulfilled in his current life.

It’s not an overtly theological or religious novel, although of necessity we get some internal monologues from Father Kennedy, including one on the difference between rote and thoughtful prayer:

The mechanical act of falling upon one’s knees and saying The Lord’s Prayer every day is one thing and a simple thing, but to say even the first half-dozen words of that prayer with the attention they deserve is quite another and not at all so simple. I think every prayer well said is a shot through a barricade…

Father Kennedy also breaks with the conventional fictional portrayals of priests as angry drunks, molesters, or insipid ciphers. He’s well-developed and reflective, with a sharp, almost sarcastic sense of humor:

“I mean, if you cut your hand off, it hurts; it doesn’t hurt any less simply because a thousand other people may have cut their hands off before you.”
“No, but if you remember all those other hands you may be prevented from hiring a hall and giving a short talk on ‘How I Cut My Hand Off.'”

Where the novel might fail to appeal is its almost complete lack of plot. There’s a long flashback to Father Kennedy’s battle with the bottle, including his time at a rehab facility in the Southwest (where he runs into one of those aforementioned stereotyped priests, perhaps O’Connor’s way of parodying other portrayals), and one major event at the end of the book (and if you don’t see it coming, you’re not paying attention), but the novel is introspective and dwells on its main character and narrator. I found him interesting because he was written realistically and because I found his soliloquies worth reading, but it can be slow and O’Connor’s writing did occasionally drift into wordiness.

Next up: A little light nonfiction – Kingsley Amis’s Everyday Drinking.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , ,
→ September 23, 2009
→ By

The Risk Pool.

My column on the 18U Team USA trials went up the other day. You can hear my hit from Mike & Mike in the Morning today and from AllNight last night. Both were recorded on the same phone but I sound quite different in each hit. Go figure.

Richard Russo was already one of my favorite novelists after I’d read just two of his books, Empire Falls and Nobody’s Fool*, but The Risk Pool cemented my affinity for his writing. I’m not sure if there’s a contemporary American novelist out there who can match Russo for both creating flawed characters and showing a clear affection for them despite their flaws, written in clear, modern prose with plenty of humor.

*Apropos of nothing, I read Nobody’s Fool right before reading William Kennedy’s Legs, then read this book right after reading Kennedy’s Ironweed, with all four novels set in upstate New York. This wasn’t a plan to read novels in geographical order – it just sort of happened.

The Risk Pool is the story of the relationship between Ned Hall and his parents, the shiftless, irresponsible Sam Hall and the wife, Jenny, he abandoned – mostly – when Ned was born and Jenny’s father died. Ned spends his childhood shuffled from Jenny to Sam and back to Jenny again, through Jenny’s mental collapse (caused in no small way by Sam) and Sam’s movement in and out of jail, sobriety, and the town (Mohawk) where Ned grows up.

Although the story is told by Ned and populated by Russo’s regular crew of local wackos, the star of the show is Sam. The elder Hall comes back from World War II a changed man, living entirely in the present, abandoning his responsibilities toward his strait-laced wife and newborn son without actually skipping town or exiting their lives entirely. Russo could easily have made Sam a villain, or just written about him with derision or obvious distaste, but Russo always embraces his flawed characters, and you can see that he enjoyed crafting Sam and putting him into odd situations to see what he’d do.

Ned finds himself torn physically and emotionally between his two parents, feeling more affection toward his father than he does toward his fragile, smothering mother, while trying not to become too much like either parent. His success or failure in this endeavor isn’t revealed until the final few pages of the book, but that question – how will Ned turn out – has a strong narrative pull in a book that doesn’t offer many unresolved questions to drag you forward. The story is driven by the characters, and because the characters are interesting, that’s just about enough.

The two Russo novels I read both had plenty of humorous moments, but The Risk Pool was definitely the funniest, both in situational comedy but also in Russo’s prose. There’s an extended riff when Ned ends up with the prim wife and timid daughter of one of Mohawk’s wealthiest families where Russo’s prose style emulates Wodehouse’s for a half-dozen pages, mostly as Ned mentally mocks the older woman’s bizarre mannerisms:

She discovered the lights at the same instant the strangling Lincoln gave a violent lurch forward, coughed once, and died.
“Oh dear,” said Mrs. Ward, as if she could imagine no way out of this unforeseen circumstance and suspected that they would now have to purchase a new car.

If The Risk Pool has a flaw, it’s Russo’s excessive use of disposable characters. In his later books, Russo uses slightly fewer side characters and integrates them more fully into the main plot, whereas The Risk Pool has more characters that Russo shunts aside when he’s done with them. I also found the relationship between Sam Hall and his on/off girlfriend Eileen – and Eileen’s son, Drew – a little unclear in the end, particularly where Sam and Eileen had stood before Sam married Jenny and went off to war. Whether this was a deliberate omission on Russo’s part or a minor plot hole he didn’t close isn’t clear (and I can’t say more without spoiling one of the book’s few mysteries).

Next up: Edwin O’Connor’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Edge of Sadness. Also, for those of you who were interested in a “book club” of sorts, how about Don Robertson’s The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread? (Granted, I might have made that subtitle up.) It’s coming up in my queue, and it’s on the short side so it should be accessible to everyone. If I have a handful of takers, I’ll fix a discussion date about two weeks ahead of us.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ September 18, 2009
→ By

Ironweed.

Klaw links: Yesterday’s chat transcript. Yesterday’s hit on Mike & Mike in the Morning. A quick take on Pittsburgh’s 2010 rotation and on the Angels’ complaints about Wednesday’s umpiring.

William Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Ironweed, which also appeared at #92 on the Modern Library 100, is the third novel in his Albany Cycle, which started with Legs and continued with Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game. Ironweed tells the story of Billy Phelan’s father, who appears briefly in the second novel as a pivotal character in Billy’s background but isn’t fleshed out at all until this third novel, which is by turns poignant and farcical, with strong prose and a smart, well-used literary device to make Francis Phelan’s difficulty dealing with his past more real to the reader.

The novel, set in 1936, shows Francis as an itinerant bum with an alcohol problem, surrounded by other bums in various stages of inebriation, several of whom are racing headlong for the grave. Francis himself played for the Washington Senators, but his career was bookended by two tragedies in which he had a hand – the death of a strikebreaker before he started playing, and the accidental death of his two-week-old son after – which drove him to alcohol and to abandon his family and hometown. Now, twenty years after his son’s death, Francis has returned to Albany to try to make peace with his past:

The latter name suddenly acted as a magical key to history for Francis. He sensed for the first time in his life the workings of something other than conscious will within himself: insight into a pattern, an overview of all the violence in his histroy, of how many had died or been maimed by his hand, or had died, like that nameless pair of astonished shades, as an indirect result of his violent ways.

Those shades, two of many Francis sees, are people in whose deaths he played some small part, as well as some people he otherwise wronged. They only appear to Francis, but whether they are ghosts or visions or hallucinations is never explained, nor does Kennedy need to do so. Francis has to deal with them regardless of their state before he can make any attempt to reconnect with the family he left behind. The themes that develop from there are somewhat obvious, such as Francis needing to forgive himself before he can seek forgiveness from anyone else, but the way that Kennedy unfolds them was both novel and gripping in a way that most emotion-driven books are not for me.

Next up: Richard Russo’s The Risk Pool.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ September 13, 2009
→ By

The City of Dreaming Books.

I had two articles posted on Friday, one on the Brewers’ immediate future another on Mat Gamel, Alcides Escobar, and Colby Rasmus. I have also filed a blog entry on Wade Davis that isn’t up yet.

Walter Moers’ The 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear was one of my favorite books of 2008 (books I read last year, that is, not books published last year), and his follow-up, The City of Dreaming Books, looked like it was more of the same, with a setting of particular interest to me, literature.

It is, like Bluebear, wildly imaginative, full of wordplay (including fictional author names like Asdrel Chickens) and incredibly sharp characters and settings. Moers has a gift for making the insane seem normal and for precise descriptions of places that evoke clear images in the reader’s mind, and, as in Bluebear, Moers has his main character, Optimus Yarnspinner, go through a series of vaguely ridiculous character-building adventures, although Yarnspinner does less to help his own cause than Bluebear did.

The problem with City is that the action plot isn’t well connected to the character-development plot. Yarnspinner spends 2/3 of the book in the catacombs under Bookholm and, while there’s plenty of action down there, the emphasis is on his development as a storyteller – both the effects his experiences have on his thinking and his ability to actually craft a story. There’s an obvious revenge plot at work, with Yarnspinner and one other prisoner looking for escape and vengeance on their captors, that portion of the plot is set aside for hundreds of pages. Moers brings it back when Yarnspinner and his comrade make their final escape attempt at the end of the book, and the resolution was quick, obvious, and cursory. I’m not arguing with the general plot, but with the lack of integration between that thread and Yarnspinner’s time in the catacombs. City is still a great read, but more for its cleverness and humor than for the action-oriented portion of the plot, and Bluebear was more imaginative and funnier.

Next up: The reissue of Leo Durocher’s classic memoir, Nice Guys Finish Last, due out on Tuesday.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ September 8, 2009
→ By

Under the Net.

I was originally going to call Iris Murdoch’s* Under the Net the poor man’s Lucky Jim, but by the time I finished, I changed my view. It’s more of the homeless man’s Lucky Jim – a similar modern picaresque around a hapless central character who can’t get out of his own way, but maybe 25% as funny as Amis’ novel with an ending that made no sense to me at all. It appears on both the TIME 100 and the Modern Library 100 (at #95).

*If Murdoch’s name rings a bell for you but the book doesn’t, the 2001 film Iris was about her, with Jim Broadbent winning the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Murdoch’s husband.

I admit, however, that the novel’s foundation in philosophy was probably lost on me, since I’ve never taken a philosophy course or had any interest in the subject. Murdoch herself was a philosopher, writing five nonfiction books on the subject, and philosophy is a running theme through Under the Net, with references to specific philosophers and discussions of the subject both through dialogue and through the plot. I didn’t appreciate any of the references and the dialogue tended toward the boring, while the narration … well, you tell me:

The roadway was glowing with light. One one side the Arc du Carrousel stood like an imagined archway, removed from space by its faultless proportions; and behind it the enormous sweep of the Louvre enclosed the scene, fiercely illuminated and ablaze with detail. On the other side began the unnatural garden, with its metallic green grass under the yellow lamps, and its flowers self-conscious with colour and quiet as dream flowers which can unfold and be still at the same moment. A little distance beyond the railings the garden ran into trees, and beyond the trees an explosion of light announced the Place de la Concorde, above and beyond which was raised upon its hill the floodlit Arc de Triomphe standing against a backdrop of darkness, with an enormous tricolore which reached the whole height of the archway fluttering inside the central arch.

That paragraph includes 143 words of descriptive text … in the middle of a pursuit scene. Just when I thought we were getting somewhere with the plot, Murdoch decides to stop and smell the roses.

Next up: Something a little more fun – Walter Moers’ City of Dreaming Books.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ September 8, 2009
→ By

Tales of the Jazz Age.

I’m a big fan of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels, with both Tender is the Night (#2) and The Great Gatsby (#17) appearing high on the Klaw 100, but before last week had only read eight of his short stories, those contained in his first collection, Flappers and Philosophers. Tales of The Jazz Age contains another eleven stories, although the edition I read indicates that Fitzgerald published over 160 short stories during his short writing career, using them largely to pay the bills as his novels didn’t come into such wide esteem as they hold today until after his death.

Of the eleven stories, only four really stood out, although there isn’t a bad read in the bunch because FSF was (and remains, I suppose) such a master of prose. The most famous story, at least today, is The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which is just as you’ve heard – the story of a man who is born at seventy years old and ages in reverse. It’s a clever gambit, and there are some little flourishes around how your apparent age affects the way people treat you (let’s just say that resonated with me), but the story itself isn’t much of a story – just a linear run through his life from 70 to 0. I did find it amusing to see that FSF received mail from loonies much as I do today, as you can see in the Wikipedia entry on Tales, although the edition I read has the word “piece” spelled as “peice” throughout the crackpot’s missive.

My favorite story in the bunch – and easily the most macabre – was “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” the story of a rather strange and insanely wealthy family camped out in a never-surveyed corner of Montana. The family will go to tremendous lengths to protect the secret of their wealth and their very existence. The story works on its own as a Hitchcockian suspense tale, but the family’s anachronistic ways set them up as a strong symbol of traditional views and practices that refuse or even fight attempts to introduce modernity to their world.

The collection also includes one straight-up romance, “The Camel’s Back,” that is almost inconsequential in plot but extremely well-written and witty, and a subtle meditation on risk and safety in life choices called “Oh Russet Witch!” Nothing in the collection is unreadable, although the phrasing in “The Tarquin of Cheapside,” which Fitzgerald wrote while he was at Princeton, is a little over-the-top, and “The Lees of Happiness” is quite sad without any point beyond, hey, sometimes life sucks.

Next up: Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ September 4, 2009
→ By

Falconer.

John Cheever’s Falconer, another book from the TIME 100*, made little sense to me as anything more than a superficial story of a man in prison until I read a little of Cheever’s biography. If you know two basic things about the author, the novel takes on significantly greater meaning: Cheever was bisexual and struggled to come to terms with this, and he was a lifelong alcoholic, which was probably tied to the first fact. After learning those details of Cheever’s life, I found more meaning Falconer as a story of self-acceptance and recovery.

*This is the 80th book I’ve read on the TIME list, and 90 seems well within reach, but I can already tell you those last five will be a bear, if I even choose to tackle them: Infinite Jest, An American Tragedy, White Noise, Gravity’s Rainbow, and The Recognitions. That’s about 4700 pages across five novels, and three of them have reputations as difficult reads. Ninety-five sounds like a lovely number, don’t you think?

The main character, Farragut, is a husband and father and has more or less had a successful career despite a heroin addiction dating back to his service in World War II, where he became hooked on morphine. For reasons not explained until near the end of the book, Farragut kills his brother, after which he’s sentenced to prison. His marriage, not strong before the murder, falls apart; his dependence on methadone becomes central to his daily life; and, even though he’s “not queer,” he has an affair with a fellow inmate. Although Cheever surrounds Farragut with a cast of wackos in his cell block, the story is entirely about Farragut and his struggle to maintain – or discover – his humanity in jail.

The prison of the book and Farragut’s gradual recovery from addiction and acceptance of his own character seem to be a metaphor for Cheever’s own life, where he struggled to accept his own bisexuality and promiscuity and drowned himself in alcohol, an addiction he apparently kicked around the time he wrote Falconer. Early in his confinement, Farragut is briefly denied his daily methadone dose and ends up suffering withdrawal symptoms, after which he pens three letters, one to the governor, one to his bishop, and one to his wife; armed with the knowledge of Cheever’s troubles, I read those letters as Cheever’s own rebellion against the authority figures in his life and prevented him or pressured him to keep his sexual orientation a secret and to feel shame for it, or just his awakening to the possibilities of a life outside of the oppression of those authority figures. Farragut’s eventual acceptance of himself is neither easy nor predictable, and in some ways it’s incomplete, but that made the book seem more real by giving Farragut antiheroic qualities.

The book is short and moves along quickly between Cheever’s prose and, outside of those three letters, little introspective text. It also moved quickly for me because, once Farragut is settled in prison, Cheever devotes a lot of ink to his main character’s sex life in prison, and I found those sections a lot easier to read if I just didn’t read them at all. The man was clearly obsessed with his own peter; perhaps there’s some Freudian analysis to be made there, but having never read Freud I saw no value in those details.

Next up: I’m still a bit behind, having just finished F. Scott Fitzgerald’s second short story collection, Tales From The Jazz Age, this morning.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , ,
→ September 3, 2009
→ By

Brighton Rock.

Today’s chat transcript is up and, I think, rather snarky. I wrote a bit about Happ and Penny last night on the Four-Letter. I’m tentatively scheduled to be on ESPN Radio tonight at 10:25 pm EDT.

Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock is his lone entry on the Bloomsbury 100, yet more evidence that as much as critics agree that Greene was a great novelist, they can’t seem to agree on what his best work was. Modern Library had The Heart of the Matter on their top 100; Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo put both that work and The Power and the Glory on theirs; the Guardian put The Quiet American; and I believe I’ve seen similar praise (that I can’t locate) for The End of the Affair. And for all of that, I loved the half-serious/half-satirical Our Man in Havana*.

*Apropos of nothing, this is now the 11th Greene novel I’ve read, including all of his “serious” novels. That puts him sixth on the list of authors when ranked by the number of titles I’ve read – your challenge is to guess who the top five are in the comments. One hint: I’ve never written up a book by #2 or #4 on this site.

Brighton Rock is lumped in with Greene’s “Catholic novels,” but while there’s certainly a lot of discussion among the characters of religion and its relation to right/wrong, I think that’s at most a secondary theme in the book. The novel focuses on a teenage delinquent nicknamed “Pinkie” who has taken over one local gang of street toughs who run, among other things, small-time bookmaking outfit. Pinkie’s gang commit a murder before the book has started, which leads to a string of murders and attempts all aimed at covering up the initial crime. Pinkie himself starts out as just an amoral, power-hungry killer, but as the book progresses and Greene peels back the layers of Pinkie’s character, we see more that he is driven by a raging feeling of inadequacy, set off when others show a lack of respect for his abilities, and driven by a desire to be seen as a capable adult.

Pinkie is pursued by an amateur detective named Ida Arnold, whose passing acquaintance with one of Pinkie’s victims turns into a quest to identify the killer(s) and see them brought to justice, a quest that itself changes shape as the story progresses. While Pinkie has clear, dogmatic views on life informed by inexperience and a superficial form of Catholicism, Arnold is a spiritualist with an independent moral compass of less certain origin. Pinkie hooks up with a girl who could provide testimony against his gang for one of the killings, and saving her becomes part of Ida’s quest, but the girl herself (Rose) is a cipher of a character who is childlike in her thoughts and actions.

Greene’s novels are short and tend to move along quickly, but despite the detective-novel portion of the plot, Brighton Rock was slow and plodding, especially when the camera focused on Pinkie, who is more interesting as a character to study and dissect than as one whose actions we might want to follow.

Next up: I’m a bit behind on reviews, as I finished John Cheever’s Falconer last night.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ September 1, 2009
→ By

The Secret Life of Bees and Losers Live Longer.

Last night’s hit on the Brian Kenny Show is up. Will be on AllNight tonight (taped), First Take on ESPN2 tomorrow at 11 am EDT, and ESPN 710 in Los Angeles tomorrow at 1:12 pm PDT.

UPDATE: Analysis of last night’s trades is up now.

I had avoided Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees because it looked like chick-lit – not crappy chick-lit like Luann Rice or Nicholas Sparks, just chick-lit with higher ambitions. When I saw the pull quote from the Baltimore Sun‘s review that referred to Kidd as “a direct literary descendant of Carson McCullers,” I decided to give the book a shot, since I loved McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. The Sun reviewer was way, way off base; where McCullers’ work is suffused with sorrow yet written in beautiful, thoughtful prose, Bees is sentimental and predictable with unremarkable writing.

The story is narrated by Lily, a preteen girl who vaguely remembers a childhood accident when she was four years old where she picked up a gun and shot her mother while her parents were fighting. She’s haunted by guilt and her lack of memories of her mother, and lives with an unloving and occasionally abusive father who appears to want no part of her, handing off the task of rearing her to one of the black peach-pickers on his farm, Rosaleen. When the Civil Rights Act is passed and Rosaleen goes into town to vote, she ends up in an argument with three local redneck racists, which leaves her beaten up and arrested; Lily decides to spring her and they both run away to a small town in South Carolina where Lily thinks her mother once visited or lived. Once there, they run into three sisters* straight out of The Well of Stock Characters, including the most cliched of all, the wise older black woman who dispenses sound advice on matters life and spirit. As you might imagine, someone dies, Lily’s father shows up, there’s a lot of crying, and the end is heart-warming but just a touch ridiculous.

* The wise woman is played by Queen Latifah in the film version, where all three sisters are much younger than their counterparts in the book. What I find interesting is that another sister is played by Sophie Okenodo, who probably seldom finds herself as only the second-most beautiful woman in a movie, which had to be the case here with the third sister played by Alicia Keys. That’s some good casting work.

I couldn’t really get past the vaguely patronizing portrayals of black women in the book, and of course, just about every male character is one-dimensional and the dimension is unflattering. The lone exception is the lone African-American male to get any significant page time, a teenaged boy named Zach who is one-dimensional in how good he is. The dialogue is clumsy and heavy, laden with Big Meaning, Kidd hit only a few notes right for me – I enjoyed her portrayal of the feminist twist on Catholicism that the sisters and their friends practice, and some of the beekeeping information was interesting although the metaphors were a bit obvious – but on the whole it wasn’t worth my time.

—

Also disappointing was Russ Atwood’s Losers Live Longer, the most recent release from Hard Case Crime, a boutique publisher of hard-boiled detective fiction, both new works and out-of-print novels that deserve reissue. Atwood put together a strong, tight story with just the right number of characters and twists, but his writing and dialogue were sloppy and occasionally cringeworthy (such as the 40-something white detective who says, “Homey don’t play that” about fifteen years after the phrase was last popular or relevant). He also falls into the trap that Raymond Chandler warned against in his essay “The Simple Art of Murder” – don’t make characters do unrealistic things just to push your plot forward. The detective character makes a couple of extremely dumb and obvious mistakes (such as not noticing that a potential client is named “Jane Dough”) that require us to forget that before, he was aware of what was going on around him.

Next up: Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , ,
→ August 29, 2009
→ By

The Confessions of Nat Turner.

My Kazmir trade analysis was posted this morning.

William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1967 and is on the TIME 100, but its main claim to fame is the controversy that surrounded its publication, as African-American writers and scholars largely banded together to criticize the book’s fictionalized portrait of its title character. Turner led the only major slave rebellion in the U.S., killing 55 white men, women, and children before the rebellion fizzled out and he was captured, but very little is known of his life other than what we have in the 20-page document known as “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” the accuracy of which is in question because it represents Turner’s words as written by one of the white attorneys working on his case. The novel did little for me – the prose was bombastic and the story is so full of digressions, tangents, and internal monologues that Turner’s reasons for rebelling are beaten into the ground – but the controversy is worth a deeper look.

The edition I read was the 25th-anniversary reprint that includes a new afterword from Styron, who quotes his (African-American) friend and fellow author James Baldwin to argue that, had he himself been black, he would not have caught the same criticism. That is, his biggest crime was being a white author writing about an African-American icon, intruding into territory in which he did not belong. I’m sure there was some element of that in the backlash against Styron’s book (which included an influential book of essays called Ten Black Writers Respond), but Styron glosses over some of the least flattering elements of his portrayal.

Styron ties Turner’s desire for rebellion to three causes. One is religious fanaticism, which we know was a factor from the actual confessions; Turner was a preacher who believed his violent rebellion was a divine mission. Another was certain aspects of his life as a slave for both cruel and kind masters, which was fictionalized but is almost certainly a valid explanation. But the third is a deep sexual repression that manifests itself in disturbing ways from a sexual encounter with a teenaged boy to a fantasy of raping the woman who is perhaps the only white person in the book who treats Turner as something approximating a full human being. The portrayal, which as far as I can tell has no basis in reality, demeans Turner and diminishes his myth by removing any righteousness from his cause. Demonizing Turner would have been easy enough through more attention to the violence of his makeshift army’s rebellion, where revenge was taken on all whites, including young children. Adding this bizarre sexual-repression twist seems to tie into the view of white slaveowners, that blacks were more akin to animals than to whites.

The book is fiction, not a biography, and Styron emphasizes that point in his afterword in response to critics of the book’s inaccuracy. I have no particular issue with an author creating a backstory for an actual historical figure about whom so little is known. What bothered me was the creation of a backstory that delegitimizes the simple idea (or myth) that Turner rebelled against the system that enslaved him and over a million other blacks at the time of the rebellion. We can condemn the violence of the insurrection while still understanding and sympathizing with its causes.

Next up: I’m a little behind, having just finished Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees this morning. Let’s just say for now that I don’t agree with the Baltimore Sun critic who referred to Kidd as “a direct literary descendant of Carson McCullers.”

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , ,