William J Cobb on books & film

Driving west-northwest across Texas from the Gulf Coast is like viewing landscape-as-economic-chart. First you pass through the lively, jumping hives of San Antonio and Austin, where the Depression doesn’t seem evident, the freeways full of pickups and new cars driven by people hustling to work. If you then head toward the Panhandle, things veer down the Dilapidated Way. After (and before) Abilene a wide expanse of ranchland where plastic bags impaled on cactus and barb wire fences is a common sight. Weedy sidewalks, bleached storefronts, rusted cars in rocky fields. Few houses and few people. Most of the businesses seem abandoned, as do the once-mighty town squares of all the little towns between Abilene and the border at Texline (northwest Panhandle). I noticed this years ago, how the small towns were dwindling and the cities swelling, and wanted to title my last novel “Abandoned America,” until I heard about a book of photography with that title. (Plus I squirm at books with ‘America’ in the title, unless it fits.) Here’s a sign I saw in the abandoned zone closer to the coast, near the town of Sinton:

So here on the Texas coast of Mustang Island, where I misspent my highschool years and where the wind blows like a hurricane on any given day, which is today, naturally, we’re chasing two-year-old Lili around the pool area. It was a minor miracle that we managed to get her to build sand castles. I remember the old coffee commercial from the Seventies where some irritable guy says, “But it’s so windy at the beach!” This landscape is also the setting of Goodnight, Texas. Right now I’m watching the Coen Brothers latest film, Burn After Reading, the first one to follow No Country for Old Men. (Last Saturday we spent the night at the Hotel Paisano, in Marfa, Texas, where the cast/crew of Giant stayed while filming, a cool old hotel with a gorgeous ballroom, classic tile floors, and a fountain in the courtyard, where people congregated to have afternoon drinks. Some of the scenes of No Country were filmed in the Marfa area.) Burn isn’t one of the best Coen Bros movies, not in the same league as, say, Miller’s Crossing or The Big Lebowski, but it has its zany moments: the divorce lawyer and the plastic surgeon are razor send-ups of the devious professionals. Frances McDormand and George Clooney have great moments, both fast-talking, nervous types in the tradition of the madcap comedies of the Thirties and Forties. Brad Pitt is high energy but he seems to be trying too hard. It’s a perfect Coen Bros moment when the Asian girl says, about an online dating service, “Both of my friends got hooked up that way. With really special guys.” It echoes a similar moment in Fargo, but doesn’t feel like it’s stealing or self-plagiarism.

On The Day After of the Great Blizzard of March ’09 (The Weather Channel is calling it an Epic Storm. We got 13″ of snow. Nice but I don’t know about ‘epic’), I’m thinking aliens and such: A few nights ago I awoke in the middle of the night and looked out the French doors to my balcony and saw a strange glow in the sky. It was an orange-colored cloud and flashing lights in the northeast. From my balcony I can see a good forty miles or so (the house is on a hillside), northeast to Lake DeWeese and the Royal Gorge area. The lights and clouds, close encounters via Spielberg, were much closer, probably five miles or so. It could have been headlights somehow shining on a snowcloud. There was a bit of cloud in the sky, but this ‘shining’ was much lower than that. And there are a few roads in the valley there, but not many. I tossed it off as nothing more than that.
Until the next night on the local Colorado Springs news they reported a rash of cattle mutilations, the first of which occurred in Westcliffe. They’ve occurred all over the area of Southern Colorado, in wildly disparate locales. About a dozen or so. Now I don’t know. I’ve always wanted to see a UFO. . . . That said, I’m definitely a ufo skeptic. I probably wouldn’t believe unless I was abducted.

Back in 2006 I stumbled upon a book by Eugene Linden titled The Future in Plain Sight, which is a little gem of foresight. Published in 1998, it predicted our present financial collapse, the rise of religious extremism and terrorism, and a host of other ills, most of which have already come true. (One of which is looming: global pandemic. I’m not at all convinced of the certainty of a bird flu epidemic, which is sometimes put forward in popular magazine articles, but there are a host of other viruses that could break out. Richard Preston’s Hot Zone is the scariest book in this category, nonfiction, too, about an airbone ebola epidemic that surfaced near Washington, D.C.) Linden also wrote The Winds of Change, about global warming. He’s had an influence on my new novel, The Bird Savior, with his clear-eyed focus on the troubles ahead. Both books are excellent reads, and make a good campion to, say, E.O. Wilson’s The Future of Life. In this category the best of all, I think, is still Jared Diamond’s Collapse. (I like his especially because the first chapter, set in a valley in Montana, south of Missoula, is much like my home in Westcliffe, Colorado.) Ultimately his perhaps is the most hopeful, as well, from a logical sense: We should be smarter than the Easter Island culture. Even if it seems sometimes we’re not.

Back in 1988 it was and none other than Donald Barthelme called my one-bedroom flat in Jersey City and asked to speak with me. This was close to God giving you a call and wanting to chat. I’d been a fan of D. Barthelme ever since I started college and began to read good fiction. (His wasn’t the only mindblowing fiction I discovered early in college: I remember buying a paperback of Nabokov’s Bend Sinister at a Goodwill store, so naive that I had never even heard of Lolita: Before too long I had read all the Nabokov I could get my hands on, and though I don’t read him much anymore, he’s still one of my favorites.) Barthelme was calling to invite me to join the writing program at the University of Houston, which he directed at the time. (Now, all these years later, I’m directing the writing program at Penn State. Which seems a case of What Goes Around.) Today’s NY Times reviews a biography of Donald Barthelme by Tracy Daugherty, a good fellow and former student of his, an excellent fiction writer too. Barthelme passed away too young and too soon, and I ended up studying with Mary Robison at the University of Houston all those years ago: it was by studying Barthelme’s and Robison’s fiction that I mastered the art of using third-person narration. Back then I noticed most of my peers wrote first person stories, and many of them sounded the same. So I decided to master third-person, and have since found that as my mainstay. I was amazed at how fast Mary Robison could create a world in third-person, and in her best stories, like “The Dictionary in the Laundry Chute,” evoke a powerful emotional punch through seemingly ‘everyday’ details. She’s a good person, too, soft-spoken, humble, disarming. I learned from her that you don’t have to be an obnoxious monster to be a successful writer. Barthelme is flashier and more fantastic, with stories like “The School” and “I Bought a Little City” being some of my favorites. To this day when I see a big moonrise and am out walking with my wife, I’ll say, “See the moon? It hates us.” Lines from a great Donald Barthelme story in Sixty Stories.

Werner Herzog’s new documentary about Antarctica, Encounters at the End of the World, is worth it just to hear his voice decry such “abominations” as “yoga classes and exercise rooms” at the Antarctic Murdo Bay research station, but the real charm of the film is the philosophical soft touch about the kind of people who gravitate to the South Pole, people who are looking for the edge of the world. There’s a great metaphor about a doomed penguin and those people, even if Herzog insists he told the National Science Foundation people he would not make another film “about penguins.” He’s on a role here in his later years, having made three other knockout films in the last decade: Rescue Dawn, Grizzly Man, and The White Diamond. (I think there are others as well.) Where E and I (and Lili, two-year-old wunderkind) have been living for the last year, my second home, is Westcliffe, Colorado, beautiful and otherworldly in its own way. It has one of the lowest population densities in the country. (Back in the 1980s I lived in Jersey City, which has one of the highest population densities: I like it here better.) We have bears and, most recently, mountain lions in our yard. Here’s a jpeg of lion tracks we found minutes from our back yard:
 

photo taken 3.15.2009

This review originally appeared in the Dallas Morning News, Sunday October 12, 2008

Times Like These

Once in a while a book comes along that presents a vision of a disturbing past that bears queasy resemblance to our chaotic present. Dennis Lehane’s new novel “The Given Day” is one such book, a historical drama set during the Boston police strike of 1919. It melds the historical with the fictional so well that readers will be intrigued to guess what actually happened and what was invented. Most importantly, Lehane delivers this historical saga with style, wit, guts, and a bravado that elevates his work to the company of E. L. Doctorow’s “Ragtime” or Charles Frazier’s “Cold Mountain.”

Although it’s a full-figured book at over seven hundred pages, “The Given Day” is a fast, suspenseful read. Lehane, author of “Mystic River,” is known as a crime novelist, and it shows: The time frame is tight, with the events unfolding in a little over one year, while the cultural canvas is sprawling and epic. At the heart of the story are the bipolar characters of Danny Coughlin—a golden boy of his time, an Irish cop and the son of a police captain—and Luther Laurence, a talented but disadvantaged Black ballplayer who gets drawn into a life of crime early in the novel, who spends most of the story digging himself out. These two fictional characters bear the lion’s share of the drama, yet they also interact with historical figures such as Babe Ruth, Calvin Coolidge, and J. Edgar Hoover.

The novel opens with an epic scene that echoes the beginning of Don Delillo’s much frostier “Underworld” (1997): During a mechanical delay on a train journey shuttling the two teams of the 1918 World Series, the Chicago Cubs and Boston Red Sox, Babe Ruth wanders away from the station and happens onto a local Negro-league game. He asks to play, and is enjoying himself until several other players from the two teams wander over and turn it into an us-versus-them, white-versus-black game. Fearing the Negro league players will ultimately win and humble them, the best of the major league ballplayers cheat and fix the game, causing the black players to walk off in disgust. (This scene of cheating, coupled with a moment later in the novel when Babe Ruth witnesses ball players hanging out with gangsters, prefigures the Chicago “Black Sox” scandal of 1919.)

One of the Black players is Luther Laurence, who subsequently loses his job at a munitions factory and heads to Tulsa, Oklahoma to find work. He gets married and fathers a child, but also falls in with a dangerous crime kingpin by the name of Deacon Broscious, and his life goes downhill. Ultimately he heads north to Boston, where he meets and becomes friends with Danny Coughlin.

The Irish cops of the novel are both heroic and despicable. One of the worst of the large cast of characters is Danny’s father’s corrupt chum, Eddie McKenna. Early in the story McKenna manipulates Danny to spy on his fellow officers and their efforts to organize, dangling the promise of a promotion. Danny is also sent undercover to spy on the activities of Bolshevik terrorists, who bomb police departments and churches. One of Danny’s ex-lovers is a key figure in a terrorist cell, and although he tells his superiors that most of the “Bolshies” are nothing more than talk, he has to atone for his past involvement with the murderous vamp.

Danny and Luther’s plotlines converge at Danny’s father’s house, where Luther lands a job after fleeing a murder in Tulsa. Luther befriends the Coughlin’s Irish housegirl, Nora O’Shea, who is in love with Danny. But the Danny/Nora love affair is not without its heartbreak and turmoil. Danny’s time as spy against his fellow officers has the opposite effect intended: he becomes a key figure in the nascent policemen’s union, which leads to the Boston police strike of 1919.

“The Given Day” climaxes with the strike, and what a climax it is. To understand the horror that unfolds, it’s important to realize the dark side of the post-Gilded Age: there was no social safety net to speak of, and the working class was underpaid and underewarded, causing intense resentment between the haves and the have-nots. With the police on strike, drunken mobs rule the city. Here Luther becomes the keen observer: “Luther heard terror-screams and the Jordan Marsh men kept firing and the hive ran al the way back to Scollay Square. Which was an uncaged zoo by now. Everyone drunk and howling up at the rain drops. Dazed burlesque girls stripped of their tassels wandering around with bare chests. Overturned touring cars and bonfires along the sidewalk. Headstones ripped from the Old Granary Burying Ground and propped against walls and fences. . . . . Two men in a bare-knuckle boxing match in the middle of Tremont Street while the bettors formed a ring around them and the blood and rain-streaked glass crunched under their feet. Four soldiers dragged an unconscious sailor to the bumper of one of the flipped cars and pissed on him as the crowd cheered. A woman appeared in an upper window and screamed for help. The crowd cheered her too before a hand clamped over her face and wrenched her back from the window. The crowd cheered some more” (621).

A mixture of tragedy and triumph follows the strike. None of the principal characters emerge unscathed. The appearance of Babe Ruth functions as a great preamble and postscript to the novel: at its end he’s traded to the Yankees, instigating Boston’s infamous “Curse of the Bambino,” but he enters Manhattan wide-eyed and optimistic, thinking the future is to be “A good decade. So it would be” (702). In retrospect, his blessing of New York has its own irony, in that we now know the excesses of the Roaring Twenties would culminate in Wall Street’s Black October of 1929 and usher in the Great Depression of the 1930s. With the recent economic collapse caused in part by corporate greed, fraud, and great disparities of wealth, Dennis Lehane has offered a vision of the past that reflects the present, which makes for a knockout novel.—Wiliam J. Cobb

This review originally appeared in the Dallas Morning News, Sunday July 15, 2007
 

The Elegance of Being

“Out Stealing Horses,” the fifth novel of Norwegian writer Per Petterson, arrives in this country with much acclaim, having won several awards in Norway and England, and they are well deserved. It’s a story so full of mysteries both revealed and implied, a story both simple and emotionally complex, it would be criminal to explain too much about the plot, and in so doing spoil the twists and turns of fate that link the main character to many others, principally his father. What can be said is this: The story unfolds in parallel narratives of a summer in 1948 and an autumn in 2000; the action takes place in eastern Norway, near the Swedish border.

Petterson describes the landscape of pine and spruce forests, cold rivers, and heavy snows with a rapturous intensity, and the idyllic childhood moments are interrupted by lightning strikes of adult tragedy. It’s a novel that dares to cross the line between adventure narrative and philosophical rumination. It differs from standard philosophy in that it hints at the implications of the characters actions, and allows the reader the pleasure of puzzling out the motivations for behavior.

Told from the first person point of view of Trond, a sixty-seven year old man, the novel begins as if it were a meditation on aging and loneliness. Trond has led a successful life, and several times he admits he was always “the boy with the golden trousers,” i.e., the lucky one. But it seems his luck has run out. Three years earlier his wife was killed in an automobile accident, and he admits late in the novel that he could not go on living the way he had before, as a successful businessman in Oslo, so he moves to the countryside. He chooses a lovely region in eastern Norway, buys a fixer-upper cabin, and sets off for a life of solitude. His retreat from his past is short-lived: In comes a mysterious neighbor, Lars, who is both kind and helpful, and who, it turns out, played a crucial role in tragic events that unfolded some fifty years before, events which Trond has perhaps never recovered from, a fact which he is only now realizes.

His present life is filled with the routine of a retired man living alone: He takes his dog for walks around Swan Lake, he chainsaws fallen trees for firewood, he works to repair his decrepit cabin. He generally seems fit and in good mental condition, but as the story unfolds, his weaknesses appear. His physical health is more fragile than first indicated, and his mental and emotional quirks come to the fore: When he sold his home and business in Oslo, he didn’t even tell his daughter where he went. She tracks him down several months after this abrupt disappearance, and when she asks why he didn’t tell her or give her a call, he has no clear answer.

Lars’s appearance prompts the unfolding of events that took place when Trond was fifteen years old, when he spent a summer in this same region with his father. Although readers may come to judge him harshly by the end of the novel, Trond’s father is certainly a good and noble man from the outset: He was an active member of the Norwegian resistance under Nazi occupation, and he demonstrates courage, good sense, and mental acuity. He’s confident, strong, and admired by both men and women. Trond adores him, naturally, and during this summer he grows wiser and stronger in his father’s shadow. It’s a golden time that is encapsulated by a three-day journey on horseback they take at the end of summer, when they go “out stealing horses,” although no horses are stolen.

But adoration has its price. “Out Stealing Horses” is remarkable for portraying a realistic world peopled with admirable and endearing characters, caught in the vortex of events that turn out badly. A bone-deep sadness haunts the story, made all the more poignant by the beauty of the landscape and its people. Now and then a book comes along that deserves the label “classic.” Such books don’t change our lives, but they point toward a greater understanding of this puzzle of existence. “Out Stealing Horses” is in that class, a book that demands to be read and considered.—William J. Cobb

Back in 1994 it was I reviewed my first book and I’ve been at it ever since, with professional rigor (and sore eyes, at times), for the New York Times, the Houston Chronicle, and most recently, the Dallas Morning News. (I’m doing a book right now, J. Robert Lennon’s Castle.) The best side: now and then I get a knockout book at my doorstep, like last year’s favorite, Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses: the best novel I’ve read, outside Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, in several years. More recently I reviewed Dennis Lehane’s The Given Day (both of these were for the Dallas MN), which has a terrific and horrifying depiction of the Boston policemen’s strike of 1918, and some great fictional Babe Ruth moments. How else do you know what’s being published? Today’s edition of the NY Times reviewed a biography of John Cheever (Blake Bailey’s Cheever: A LIfe) that would no doubt be a great read. Cheever’s best stories, like “The Country Husband” or “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill,” are American classics, as they say. Plus the posthumous Seinfeld appearance is an added bonus to his prestige. He sounds like a drunken monster, but we won’t be tedious. I also reviewed Per Petterson’s To Siberia recently, also good but not a knockout like Out Stealing Horses. Petterson is a Norwegian, which is only one of the most gorgeous countries in the world: I spent a month there in 1984, hiking fjords with blonde Norwegian medical students.