A Literary Discovery

In 1864, in the northernmost action of the Civil War, two dozen Confederate soldiers rode hell-for-leather down over the Canadian border into Vermont and robbed the principal bank of the booming Vermont railroad town of St. Albans. After shooting up the main street, killing an elderly local citizen, and trying to set fire to the bank and several other buildings, the raiders galloped back off across the border with nearly $100,000. Legend has it that the loot was buried at the foot of the mountain across the road from my house, not far south of the border. Of course, the buried treasure is just a local myth. Yet more than once I have glanced up at the steep, wild mountainside holding our hamlet in its shadow and thought, what if . . . .

It’s the same with literature. What masterpieces may have burned to cinders when the library at Alexandria went up in flames? Another Iliad or Odyssey? What new gospels may yet be unearthed in an urn in Egypt? There are precedents. Boswell’s letters turned up in a stack of wrapping paper in a notions shop in the French town of Boulogne-sur-Mer. In 1930, the original manuscript of The Life of Johnson was discovered in, of all things, a croquet box. Then there is the American novelist Walker Percy’s astonishing account of the barrage of phone calls that he received from a New Orleans resident whose son, now dead, had written a “great novel.” After putting her off as long as he politely could, Percy finally, with enormous reluctance, agreed to look at the manuscript of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces.

This said, I fear that the legends of undiscovered literary treasures accumulating dust in garrets and locked away in forgotten trunks are, for the most part, just that: legends, as fabulous as that of the purloined gold on our Vermont mountain. So it’s still something of a mystery to me that I actually asked to read Beverly Jensen’s manuscript. In April of 2006, Katrina Kenison, the long-time editor of Houghton Mifflin’s annual Best American Short Stories anthology, mentioned to me that she had recently read a wonderful manuscript by a writer who had died in 2003. Having just participated in a lengthy judging process as a member of a jury panel with Katrina, I had a very high regard for her critical acumen and taste. So while there are few surprises that I dread more than the discovery, in my mailbox, of a thick padded envelope almost certain to contain an unsolicited manuscript to read and comment on, I heard myself say, to my own great astonishment, “I’d be interested in taking a look at those stories.”

In due time, the manuscript arrived. With it was a kind note from Jay Silverman, Beverly Jensen’s husband, explaining that she had written the enclosed book while raising their two children. It had been edited, after Beverly’s death, by Jay and by her writing teacher, Jenifer Levin, author of the acclaimed Water Dancer and other novels. Jay said that he would appreciate any advice I might be able to offer toward the end of publishing the book.

I sat down with the manuscript and began to read. What struck me first is that I felt that I knew these characters. I knew them the way I knew my neighbors of decades, and even my own family. Beverly Jensen’s hard-bitten country folk seemed real to me in a way that I had only very rarely experienced before. Reading her manuscript was reminiscent of the day I discovered Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find and read it in a sitting. I finished Beverly’s book about ten o’clock that evening. The Red Sox were playing the Yankees on television, and I am a card-carrying member of Red Sox Nation. But I had entirely forgotten about the baseball game. Instead, I had read a literary masterwork.

The Sisters of Hardscrabble Bay chronicles nearly seventy years in the lives of two families related by marriage, the Hillocks and the Jensens. It opens with the starkly-titled “Gone,” narrating a crisis in childbirth, in 1916, of the author’s maternal grandmother, Mary Emeline Hillock, in a remote corner of New Brunswick. Its climax comes in 1966 with the catastrophic funeral of Mary Emeline’s husband, “Wild Bill” Hillock. Many of the stories are set in rural Maine, where the main recurring character, Idella, Wild Bill’s eldest daughter and the author’s mother, lived most of her adult life. Among my favorite characters are Idella’s philandering husband, Edward, with his capacity to incite all kinds of uproarious family debacles; Edward’s Dickensian mother, Jessie, who temporarily disowns her own daughter; and Idella’s wild and irrepressible younger sister, Avis.

What I find most notable about Jensen’s tales is their astonishing variety. Some, like “Gone” and “Pomme de Terre,” are as harsh and bleak as the rugged Maritime countryside where they take place. Both hinge on secrets as grim as any you’d find in Annie Proulx’s darkest fiction. “Cherry Cider” uses humor to reveal the profound contradictions of what it means to be a human being. Most depict the cultural and social realities of life in rural New Brunswick and northern New England. For this reason Beverly Jensen’s work will be compared to that of Willa Cather and Sarah Orne Jewett, with which it shares an appreciation for nature, highly independent-minded individualists, and the potential goodness of a world, however imperfect, that is still worth celebrating. Yet her fiction never veers too close to purely “regional” writing. There’s no hokey phonetic spelling to represent local dialect, not a drop of condescension or satire at the expense of colorful bucolic “characters.” Rather, like Faulkner and Frost, Beverly Jensen makes expert use of original images and sharply-drawn scenes to fix her people and their stories in our minds.

The book opens, for example, with an unforgettable image of Avis’s and Idella’s shoes hanging in a tree while the children scour the nearby woods for mayflowers to present to their pregnant mother. Bill’s worn-out workboots are “cracked like a broken chimney.” A cow “drawls” from the barn, and later in the book a treacherous frozen rain taps on a church like “thousands of little chickens picking on the floor and walls and windows.”

Stylistically, Jensen’s work is distinguished by the easy rhythms of good storytelling, reminiscent of, say, Joseph Mitchell and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Most of the chapters in The Sisters of Hardscrabble Bay, Jay Silverman told me, went through multiple drafts and revisions. The result is easy to read, ever-so-hard to achieve. Consider the stately, simple prose of the following paragraph from “Wake”: “Idella closed the hymn book she’d held absently throughout the funeral and put it on the pew beside her. She’d done more watching than singing, absorbing the look of all the faces around her. They were simple faces with hard edges and lines like cracked cement across their foreheads and around their mouths and eyes. The lantern light made these crevices seem even deeper. These faces, tilted forward in song or bent down in prayer, had met storms and winds of one kind or another, head-on, all their lives. They worked fields that were best suited to brambles and wild grasses, struggling, Dad and Uncle Sam included, to unearth potatoes and carrots and turnips along with the rocks that seemed to multiply with every turn of a spade. These were the people she’d known as a little girl living up here so long ago. They hunted and fished and lived off the land and by their wits, which were more considerable and deep-rooted than their plantings, and hardier than an outsider might suspect.”

Beverly Jensen grew up hearing from her mother and aunt many of the stories that would make their way into The Sisters of Hardscrabble Bay. Born in Westbrook, Maine, in 1953, Jensen graduated from the University of Maine and received an M.F.A. in drama from Southern Methodist. After a successful career as an actor, she left the stage to have her own family. In their home in New York, she would read her day’s writing to Jay, a professor at Nassau Community College, and a textbook author. Inspired by the contemporary fiction of Alice Munro, among others, she revised tirelessly. Yet Jay told me that Beverly wasn’t comfortable with self-promotion and networking. She was a writer, not a salesman, more like Idella than Edward in her ability to “recreate someone else’s thoughts and feelings.” As an actor, Jay recalls, Beverly studied her characters endlessly, determined to know every last detail about them. Her fiction illustrates the same capability to subsume her own personality to that of characters as diverse as Bill and Idella, Avis and Jessie.

For me, The Sisters of Hardscrabble Bay defines character-driven fiction, and the characters at the heart of this splendid collection are Bill, Idella, and Avis Hillock. If Jessie Jensen, Idella’s damaged mother-in-law, is the weirdest member of the extended family, Wild Bill is the most complicated. A man of violent outbursts and “black moods,” often drunk, sometimes abusive, he is, of course, his own worst enemy. “God help me, I’ll try,” Bill says of the formidable task of raising his small daughters. He does try, but it’s too much for him. He urges Avis to drink whiskey with his poker-playing buddies. There are hints that he encourages her, as a little girl and teenager, to sleep with him. Avis, for her part, is irrepressible, anarchistic, earthy and defiant. After moving to New England, she winds up linked with Boston crime figures and spends a couple of years in jail.

It is Idella, caregiver and fixer extraordinaire, who stands at the moral center and the heart of Jensen’s collection. She has a marvelous, ironical appreciation of all the feckless Hillocks and Jensens, though at times she is also their unwitting enabler. At her father’s funeral, she reflects about the arc of her life.
“Idella had left this Canada far behind and gone to find a better life. It was just being a maid, after all, and a household cook, but it had led to meeting Edward and marrying and having the store and house in Westbrook. She felt rich by comparison, wrapped in her squirrel coat, knowing she had a nice house to go home to down in Maine and a grocery to run. She’d set out, launched herself forward as best she could, and felt both relieved and saddened to have done so.”

While Bill, Avis, and Edward don’t ever really redeem themselves, they are redeemed for me, at least, by Idella’s great empathy for them. Her love is matched only by Beverly Jensen’s, whose superb fiction is a gift to all of us fortunate enough to read her.

In the end, The Sisters of Hardscrabble Bay is a greater treasure by far than any I could hope to find buried on a mountain. It is an artistic exploration of the capacity of even the most embattled of families to maintain its identity. “I’m stuck being a Hillock,” Idella’s drunken brother says bluntly in “Wake.” That each and every Hillock and Jensen in this collection should touch us so deeply is a tribute to Beverly Jensen, a writer of great humor, great compassion, and great knowledge of the human heart.



(For a full account of the remarkable story of how The Sisters of Hardscrabble Bay came to be published, see Jay Silverman’s essay at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/books

Summer Reading II

Some years ago, Garret Keizer, a writer from Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, published an acclaimed memoir called No Place But Here, chronicling his experiences as an English teacher at a local high school. Garret followed No Place But Here with several other books on subjects as diverse as working as a lay priest at an Episcopal church, exploring the concepts of “help” and “anger” in human relationships and society, and, in a highly-praised young adult novel, God of Beer, examining the troubling, and somewhat taboo, phenomenon of teenage drinking in America. With The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want: A Book about Noise (Public Affairs, 2010), Garret has published his best book to date. Hailed by both the daily New York Times and the Times Book Review as the best of several recent books on noise, The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want takes us from Japan to Holland to New York City to the Canadian wilderness to Garret’s own Northeast Kingdom township, in a brilliant and wonderfully human search for how we raucous, clamoring noise-makers may yet be able to enjoy “the most beautiful sound in the world.” What’s that? I won’t give it away. Read Garret’s witty, tolerant, erudite and beautifully written masterwork on the loudest species on earth and find out.

#

Over the past several years, the fiction of Chris Bohjalian has taken a darker turn. While Chris’s vision of our world as a place where it is never necessary and never right to treat others unkindly has remained as unchanged and timeless as the Golden Rule from which it derives, his acclaimed, previous novel, Skeletons at the Feast, recounts the horrific odyssey of a refugee family across eastern Europe during World War II, and is, in fact, one of the darkest, and most powerful, novels of the struggle to maintain our human decency in the time of war, I’ve ever read. In Chris’s latest book, Secrets of Eden, the acclaimed author of Midwives and The Double Bind takes a long, unsparing look at domestic violence. Like teenage drinking, which Garret Keizer addresses so honestly and originally in God of Beer, “domestic” violence has long been a kind of forbidden subject in America, so distressful and unthinkable that it has been almost off-limits, even in our fiction. No more. In Secrets of Eden, master-storyteller Bohjalian shows us, in crystalline prose and with deep empathy, how domestic abuse does violence not just to victims like Alice Hayward, shot dead by her drunken husband, but to entire families and communities, and not just in places like Taliban-controlled provinces of Afghanistan, but idyllic-appearing villages in Vermont, as well. I don’t want to give away the plot of Chris Bohjalian’s twelfth and best novel, but there’s a character in Secrets of Eden whom I absolutely fell in love with from the start and who now ranks with Pip from Great Expectations and Huck Finn in my all-time favorite pantheon of fictionalized young people. That brings me back to Chris Bohjalian’s personal vision. If my reading of Secrets of Eden is accurate, I believe that Chris is suggesting, in this heartbreaking but ultimately affirmative novel, that even in the face of the worst – and most violent – choices that life presents us with, we still always have the capability to do what is right and necessary to retain our identity as kind and loving creations.

#

You know what’s really exciting to a veteran book reviewer? To discover a new writer with a fresh voice and vision. I’ve just finished Creston Lea’s first book of fiction, Wild Punch (I love that title), and for my money, it’s the best collection of coming-of-age short stories I’ve read since Hemingway’s In Our Time. Though some of his stories range far out over the American landscape, Creston Lea knows his corner of northern New England the way Annie Proulx knows Wyoming and Ivan Doig knows Montana. He knows all there is to know about haying, ice-cutting, moto-cross racing, country music, itinerant laborers, footloose young people who reminded me of the characters of Kerouac and Kesey. These are brave, honest, powerfully felt stories from a remarkably poised and intelligent young writer. And that is news worth celebrating because, please, keep this in mind. Kindles and iPads and bookstores going out of business like family dairy farms, and people not reading as much because we’re glued to the internet or working three jobs to keep a step ahead of the repo men, and newspapers and book review sections going under, and – well, you get the idea. None of all the bad news for books, and it surely is bad, matters if courageous young writers don’t go right ahead anyway and pour out their good hearts and good stories for us the way Creston Lea has in Wild Punch. It’s an absolutely terrific work of fiction by the best young writer I’ve read in years.

Summer Reading

Meet Gavin Gresham, a self-styled cynic, who owns a sheep farm in the northern hills of Vermont. Gavin, the hero of R.L. Berenbaum’s very funny novel, Gresham’s Law: A Fable of Early 21st Century America, is also somewhat of a recluse. He’ll drop by the local diner for a chat and a snack, and he’s good friends with an older, neighbor couple. Other than that, Gavin’s happy to live and let live, and to be left alone. But when an exceedingly obnoxious letter appears in the local paper stating that anyone who doesn’t agree with the author’s religious position will “burn,” Gavin’s had enough. He writes a long rejoinder, beginning with the observation that “There is very little wrong in this world that couldn’t be made right by the absolute abolition of religion.” What follows, as all hell breaks loose in Gavin’s formerly peaceful little corner of the Green Mountain State, is an often-hilarious, very suspenseful, exceedingly intelligent and unsentimentally touching modern-day retelling of the Book of Job, with a redeeming love story included. R.L. Berenbaum, who “lives and writes in a turret in northern Vermont, assisted by a cat, Evil Donald,” is a first-rate storyteller with an engaging voice. Of Gresham’s Law, Reeve Lindbergh says, “In this intelligent, ironic, and thoughtfully crafted novel, Berenbaum offers a host of lively characters whose opinions are as stimulating as the northern climate.” I was rooting for Gavin from the start. As a matter of fact, in more ways than one, he reminded me quite a bit of myself. (Gresham’s Law is available in northern New England bookstores, and from Railroad Street Press in St. Johnsbury, VT - http://railroadstreetpress.com, or
http://boxcarandcaboose.com.
.

The Great American Book Tour: Week 8, Installment 5

For my two events in western New York State – Joe Hoffman’s excellent indie bookstore in Brockport, Lift Bridge Books, on April 26, and Hallwell’s downtown arts center, with Jon Welch’s renowned Talking Leaves Books, on April 27, in Buffalo – I decided to stay in Batavia, about mid-way between Buffalo and Brockport.

A few years ago, Batavia’s “Three Counties, One Book” program kindly selected my novel Northern Borders as their community pick, and invited me to speak at schools and libraries in their beautiful, upstate farming country. Coincidentally – or otherwise – Batavia is where, in the fall of 2001, returning home from a West Coast book tour, I had one of the strangest – and best – experiences of my life. Just before dawn, as I headed east on the New York State Thruway, an image flashed through my mind of a little boy, looking out of an upper window of a Vermont farmhouse at a man in the moonlight, smoking a cigarette and leaning against the barn door. The stranger was wearing a Red Sox cap, and looked somewhat like the great Sox outfielder Ted Williams. The image came and went in less than a second, but I immediately got off the interstate, went into a McDonald’s in Batavia – and proceeded to outline the major scenes of my 2004 baseball novel, Waiting for Teddy Williams.

Go figure, right? Probably I’d been thinking about the story, in the back of my mind, for years and years. Even so, it was a wondrous occurrence. Nothing like it had ever happened to me before or since – until, that is, last week.

This time, approaching the Batavia exit on the Thruway, I’d been consciously thinking about the best way to tell a story that’s haunted me for decades. Suddenly, in my imagination, I clearly heard a voice that sounded something like my own say, “The simplest approach is always best.”

Well. While I will readily concede that, like many another writer, I have spent my entire adult life dreaming up crazy stories (Disappearances springs to mind as Exhibit A), I’m not given to hearing voices. What was this all about?

Once again, I don’t have the faintest idea. All I know is that, over the next forty hours, in addition to doing my events in Brockport and Buffalo, I rewrote a dozen or so scenes from my new novel-in-progress from the simplest narrative perspective and felt – correctly or otherwise; we’ll see – that I’d found the heart of the story.

This much is clear to me. Writing, like any creative endeavor – for some reason, teaching also comes to mind though I taught for only a few years – is a very mysterious process. I suppose the same is true of any work that we do for the love of it. I just wish those mysterious “moments,” wherever they come from, would occur more frequently than once or twice in a lifetime.

Tune in next time for a portrait of a bookseller’s bookseller, in a place where you might not expect to find any bookseller at all.

The Great American Book Tour: Week 8, Installment 4

Some years ago Dr. Amy Rosenfield, a GP in between practices and a born bibliophile, decided to switch professions. Like me, Amy loves a good story – she’s a fantastic storyteller herself – so she took a job as a bookseller at Joseph Beth’s Cleveland indie, started several store-based bookclubs, and, in general, dedicated her life to reading, discussing and promoting books. Minutes after my event at Joseph Beth’s ended, Cleveland was hammered by a violent thunderstorm. I didn’t even know it was raining, however, until I left the store. I was too caught up in Amy Rosenfield’s personal take on the opening of one of her – and my- all-time favorite novels: Moby Dick. “You know,” she said, “when I reread the beginning chapter as an adult, I realized that Ishmael is depressed. He’s actually contemplating suicide. So what does he do? Well, he goes to sea to try the geographical cure. Now I imagine him as an old man, sitting in the back of a tavern, telling his great story to a young version of himself, a young Ismael. “Call me Ismael . . . . ”

At this point, gigantic jags of orange lightning lit up the sky. Tornado warnings were coming over someone’s cell phone, but I was so caught up in Amy Rosenfield’s retelling of Melville’s grand saga that I’d have sat there listening if the entire city of Cleveland had blown away and here, I said to myself, right here and now, this is why I set out on my great American book tour, my own geographical quest for readers and books and stories. (“Call me – Howard?” That doesn’t sound right.) Thank you, Herman Melville. Thank you, Dr. Amy and your indie colleagues, including, especially, Jon Welch of Talking Leaves Books in Buffalo, where I concluded the nationwide swing of my tour two nights later. First, though, came Howard’s Excellent and Totally Inexplicable Adventure in Batavia. Please see my blog tomorrow for an account of this eerie and unaccountable experience.

The Great American Book Tour: Week 8, Installment 3

Chicago has the damndest system of “tolling,” as they are pleased to call it, in the universe. Like college calculus, it’s simple enough if you understand it. I didn’t. I ran half a dozen or so toll booths before I even figured out what they were. Good job, Mr. Vermonter.

Roberta Rubin, owner of the Bookstall at Chestnut Court in Winnetka, on the northeast side of Chicago, has championed books, authors, and independent readers for 28 years. Decades ago, Roberta was one of the first booksellers to come up with the idea of using bookclubs as a way for indie stores to survive, and lectured widely on the subject. That evening the terrific staff of Anderson’s, over in Naperville, on the southwest edge of the Windy City, turned out a big audience (as usual) to hear the born liar from the Green Mountain State hold forth about “Transforming History into Fiction,” aka lying for a living.

Driving into Holland, MI, the next afternoon I was delighted to discover that I’d hit the tulip capital of the United States at peak blossoming time. I took a quick turn around the gardens at Windmill Island (beautiful) but was more impressed by the miles of tulip-lined city streets and downtown parks and more impressed still by Michelle Lonergan’s bookstore, the Tree House. Michelle grew up in South Jersey in a house with few books, but her dad built her a tree house in the back yard where she devoured books borrowed from friends and the local library. By the time she was eight, she wanted, someday, to own a bookstore.

Michelle, who describes herself as a “cynical optimist,” cited a recent Publishers Weekly article on the alarming decrease in the sales of hardcover books. Even so, she told me that when she “puts the key in the doorknob of the Tree House every morning and smells the books inside,” she knows that, come what may, this is where she belongs.

Now there, my bibliophile friends, is a great bookseller.

The Great American Book Tour: Week 8, Installment 2

A wonderful sign in the window of Garrison Keillor’s Common Good Books announces, “General Fiction and Non-fiction, Good Poetry, Classics All Sizes, Quality Trash.” Of course, Garrison composed it.
After a great event at the Common Good, on to Milwaukee, for decades the home of the great Harry Schwartz independent bookstores, which, sadly, went out of business several years ago. Noted bibliophile and long-time buyer for Harry Schwartz, Daniel Goldin, now owns and operates Boswell’s Books in a former Schwartz location near Lake Michigan. On the night I visited, he’d invited the senior AP English class from a nearby high school. The students wondered if the elephant in Walking to Gatlinburg was a symbol. Beats me, I said. For all I know, it could be. Afterwards, threading my way through the side streets of Wisconsin’s Lake City, looking for a cheap motel, I found myself missing my early years as a high school teacher. I was saddened, too, by the disappearance of the Harry Schwartz stores, but I knew that Harry would have been delighted with everything Daniel Goldin is doing to provide, with very good books, the city made famous by several very good brews. More later, folks.