In a book that seems tailor-made for me, nature writer Joel Greenberg has compiled a scrapbook of sorts, a collection of nature writing sharing impressions of nature in the Chicago landscape from the 1700s to early 1900s. “Of Prairie, Woods and Water: Two Centuries of Chicago Nature Writing” is a diverse compilation; it includes scientific articles and settler’s diaries, old newspaper articles and yellowed journal pieces hauled out of the archives.
Most of the reminiscences conjure landscapes now lost: the Kankakee Marsh, the great old-growth forests of Michigan, the once-unbroken sweep of the Illinois prairie. The writers seem to alternate between knowing these places are in danger–some stories end with a postscript saying that the habitat described is already lost, even back in the 1800s–while others seem to take this bounty for granted, assuming it will subsist and sustain forever.
There’s a callousness toward nature here that’s disturbing. Some of the articles from shooters and trappers convey wholesale slaughter, as old-time sportsmen aim shotguns to the sky and fill their bags with dozens of birds. There’s even an entry from an old target shooter who remembers when they used to compete with live birds, fifty at a time, right out of the trap.
But Greenberg does a good job balancing the perspectives on display. Some writers point out that pioneer families relied on the protein of the field and were vulnerable to the predations of wolves…not that it makes the tales of wolf hunts easier to read. Others lament the loss of habitat and indiscriminate killing; they work to stop the shoots or collection of birds for ladies’ hats.
As Benjamin T. Gault writes in the Audubon Bulletin in 1937, “the encouragement of ‘Crow Shoots’ and dynamiting them at their winter roosts, is all wrong as it has been practiced in our state and by the Conservation Department. It is wrong, I think, for the harm it does psychologically to our growing youth by encouraging murderous instinct.”
Like any historic compilation, some of the writing is wonderful and some is old, weird, baroque. But on the whole it’s a wondrous collection, an evocation of a world now lost. As Donald Culross Peattie writes in “A Prairie Grove” (1938), “There is no other land in the world with autumns like ours. We pile the treasure of the year into a great burial fire. Tongues of flame go up to the sky, the garnet of black and red oaks, the leaping maples and the flickering aspens and out of the midst of it all one exulting spire of light where a cottonwood shakes primal yellow at the primal blue of the American sky.”
“But the real question is are we few the last of a lineage? Will children yet to come harbor a longing for a thing they cannot even name? The legacy of the world is a fragile thing for all its power, but I know where you stand, Squire. I know that there are words spoken by men ages dead that will never leave your heart.”
A late novel, Cormac McCarthy’s “The Passenger” reads almost like a retrospective. The book compiles themes the author has addressed throughout his career, striving to offer some summation. The barfly bohemians of “Suttree” recur. We also find the isolation of “The Crossing,” the trapping and skinning of “The Orchard Keeper,” “The Road”‘s keening sense of a world lost, all compiled into a single elegy.
The plot of the book involves a deep-sea diver mourning his lost sister, who was a genius, a schizophrenic, a suicide. But the plot is just the framework. Sure, the early sections of the book offer a sense that something sinister may be going on. We open with a mysterious plane crash, and our protagonist, Bobby Western, feels hunted in the sections that follow, from his favorite haunt in New Orleans to drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico.
But the bulk of the book explores Bobby’s relationship with his sister. Because he’s a physicist, and she was a brilliant mathematician (their dad helped develop the atom bomb), their relationship also serves as a framework to explore the nature of time and causality.
As it develops, the book elaborates on the power of observation. Things are changed by being observed, physics tells us. But the modern world has also placed us all under observation, McCarthy seems to argue.
When Bobby runs into legal trouble–tax issues–he observes the difficulty of leaving the grid, even back in the book’s setting of 1980. Her sister is constantly observed by a circus of monstrous phantoms, foul-mouthed characters that represent her madness in alternating sections of the book. The biggest question, though, is what their relationship might have been without anyone else to observe and judge. She loved him, romantically, the book states, and he remains haunted by her, how things were, how they might have been.
“The Passenger” is a beautiful read, and often challenging, particularly in the sections where Bobby’s sister is visited by her madness. (McCarthy indulges his propensity for extravagant formulations here. The sentences are thick, and the obscure words–penetralium, heresiarch–pile up.)
Also challenging is McCarthy’s partiality for “outlaw” types, a soft spot I don’t share. Large portions of the novel are dedicated to conversations with erudite, outrageous men, the kind of dudes who steal pharmaceuticals and sleep with underage girls, all while elaborating on their philosophy and pointing out how wine should be properly chilled.
Their observations can be entertaining, but they become tiresome as well, interjecting the almost libertarian tone you could find in old Christopher Hitchens columns. (At their worst, these sections read like second-rate Ignatius J Reilly, another famous New Orleans denizen, although McCarthy’s writing rarely falls to that level.)
The book veers away from plot as it moves to its conclusion, occupying us instead with moments of solitude and asceticism that are also present in McCarthy’s previous work–I remembered the sojourn in the Smokies in “Suttree.” There are also a few sections that seem constructed to let him get some ideas off his chest…what’s up with the Kennedy assassination digression, for instance?
Like any McCarthy book, though, “The Passenger” alternates gritty plotting and shop-savvy men with long passages that build toward transcendence. He’s always searching, it seems, for how the world can be both cruel and beautiful. This book adds to that legacy, summing it up in many ways, even if it falls short of the height of his masterworks.
Quotes
“I always had a feelin the money didn’t mean all that much to you. Maybe that’s the problem.”
“I don’t know. A lot of money would probably move me. I could do some things I wanted. But you’ll never get rich selling your time. Not even doing hyperbaric welding.”
“Probably right. There’s more brain surgeons than there are hyperbaric welders, but you’re probably right.”
“I know that you think we’re very different, me and thee. My father was a country storekeeper and yours a fabricator of expensive devices that make a loud noise and vaporize people. But our common history transcends so much. I know you. I know certain days of your childhood. All but weeping with loneliness. Coming upon a certain book in the library and clutching it to you. Carrying it home. Some perfect place to read it. Under a tree perhaps. Beside a stream. Flawed youths of course. To prefer a world of paper. Rejects. But we know another truth, don’t we Squire? And of course it’s true that any number of these books were penned in lieu of burning down the world—which was their author’s true desire. But the real question is are we few the last of a lineage? Will children yet to come harbor a longing for a thing they cannot even name? The legacy of the world is a fragile thing for all its power, but I know where you stand, Squire. I know that there are words spoken by men ages dead that will never leave your heart.”
“But of course what really threatens the scofflaw is not the just society but the decaying one. It is here that he finds himself becoming slowly indistinguishable from the citizenry.”
“But I will tell you Squire that having read even a few dozen books in common is a force more binding than blood.”
“Friends are always telling you to watch out. To take care. But it could be that the more you do so the more exposed you become. Maybe you just have to turn yourself over to your angel.”
“You cant get hold of the world. You can only draw a picture. Whether it’s a bull on the wall of a cave or a partial differential equation it’s all the same thing.”
“What is the purpose of human charity wasn’t to protect the weak—which seems pretty anti-Darwinian anyway—but to preserve the mad? Don’t they get special treatment in most primitive societies?…You have to be careful about who you do away with. It could be that some part of our understanding comes in vessels incapable of sustaining themselves.”
A Midwest, mid-century, American coming-of-age epic, “The Lincoln Highway” takes to highways, railways and even an ill-fated boat to explore the shifting poles of loyalty, responsibility, and justice.
We follow several protagonists on this engrossing journey, but our first is Emmett. A native Nebraskan, he begins our novel returning home after a stint in juvie. He was serving for a crime that was more an accident–shades of Tom Joad–and he’s ready to move on to a fresh beginning, especially with his father dead, his family farm foreclosed on, and his little brother in his custody.
Complications ensue, though, when a couple former cellmates join his early parole…despite the fact that they haven’t quite finished their sentences. They’re Duchess, a wise guy with a detestable con-artist dad, and Woolly, a dreamy rich kid from New York who spends his days zonked out on little bottles of “medicine.”
Emmett wants to take his brother out West to California for a fresh start restoring houses. But Duchess and Woolly have their eyes on Woolly’s inheritance out east, locked up in his great-grandfather’s safe. The group embarks together, then diverges, with most of the novel covering their struggle to meet back up to settle old business. Along the way there are hobo camps and burlesque circuses, orphans lavished with strawberry preserves and fantastical compendiums of heroes of old.
Author Amor Towles has a propulsive effect, carefully structuring his reversals and twists. He also has a compelling, half-folksy style, blending his near-mythical exploits with a kind of homespun wisdom, like a Homer of the highway.
His characters are memorable and well-voiced. Beyond that, though, he uses his dynamic cast to explore larger issues of character. What’s the boundary between a hothead/trickster/screw-up and a menace? Can everyone be redeemed? Or are some people just too lost, even if it’s due to circumstances beyond their control?
In wrestling with these issues, “The Lincoln Highway’s” energetic pace and smooth tone can work against it. Towles can gloss over the messiness of his characters with another cliffhanger or some new dramatic entrance. But to his credit, his keeps the messiness present, leaving it for the reader to work on, all the way to the novel’s divisive ending. (I found the finale too convoluted and not in keeping with the characterization shown to that point, but I enjoyed the journey to get there.)
Quotes
“For no matter how much chance has played a role, when by your hands you have brought another man’s time on earth to its end, to prove to the Almighty that you are worthy of his mercy, that shouldn’t take any less than the rest of your life.”
“Standing there before his grandfather’s clock listening to his brother-in-law, it suddenly occurred to Woolly that maybe, just maybe, St. George’s and St. Mark’s and St. Paul’s organized every day to be an every-day day not because it made things easier to manage, but because it was the best possible means by which to prepare the fine young men in their care to catch the 6:42 so that they would always be on time for their meetings at 8:00.”
“As the old gent shuffled his way to the bureau, I scanned the room, curious as to his weakness. At the Sunshine Hotel, for every room there was weakness, and for every weakness an artifact bearing witness. Like an empty bottle that has rolled under the bed, or a feathered deck of cards on the nightstand, or a bright pink kimono on a hook. Some evidence of that one desire so delectable, so insatiable that it overshadowed all others, eclipsing even the desires for a home, a family, or a sense of human dignity.”
Set in one long night in a gay bar in 1970s California, John Rechy’s “Rushes” explores the cruising scene of that era. Explicitly sexual, it conjures the internal lives of its characters, channeling how it feels to be on the “sexhunt” in a dim bar centered solely on that purpose.
We meet a core group of friends/competitors. Endore, the authorial stand-in, is older but still attractive, obviously drawn to the sex and scene of the Rushes but wary of it as well, ambivalent about its self-loathing and superficiality. Chas is an unapologetic leatherman, a top man into sadomasochism. Bill is a young beauty who, we later finds out, likes to dominate through submission. And Don is too old and unattractive to make the scene anymore, but he still gets in with his friends, tormenting himself with all the men he can’t have.
The book takes us through a long night in the steamy bar, placing us in the mind of different characters as they reflect on the scene, their lust, their angst and limitations. The narrative can feel too internal at times, occasionally losing momentum as characters fixate on repeating themes and memories. Inciting incidents gradually introduce new complications, though. A woman ventures into the bar–a cruel, slumming, artistic fashion designer looking for stimulation. Two prostitutes find refuge there and are forced away. A young gay man enters on his first night out, and a self-loathing male prostitute outdoors rages against his clientele.
Throughout these scenes, Rechy shares what it’s like to be on the hunt. His characters are constantly checking out one another, scrutinizing fresh faces that enter the bar, signaling to test connections but not committing for fear of being rejected and shamed. The docks are nearby, and meat trucks too, after-hours destinations for anonymous sex. Danger lurks as well, as gangs of gay bashers cruise the streets, looking to attack and even kill gay men. Some might even enter the bars themselves to lure their prey outside.
With “Rushes,” Rechy seems to critique different movements in the gay scene at the time of publication. Endore seems skeptical of the leather fetishists and their associated humiliations, arguing that S&M is more an internalization of self-loathing than an embrace of gay men’s outlaw status. But he’s skeptical of monogamy among gay men too and criticizes the misogyny that erupts in their spaces, even as he admits he resents women venturing into the Rushes.
A successful lawyer but a failed cruiser, Don argues for the pre-Stonewall era as a more civilized time, the police raids balanced by better manners, a sense of class. But he’s obviously crumbling, falling into drunkenness, loneliness, irrelevance.
Each character is a cautionary tale, and the Rushes itself isn’t enticing. It’s scuzzy and desperate. A late-night descent into the S&M club next door, the Rack, is even more hellish. But Rechy captures that each place is alive with something beautiful, something that can’t be grasped by straight society. As Chas argues, “When you’re still walking the piers, a faggot all alone looking for sex, and it’s Sunday morning, you know you’re alive, man. Alive. Because you know you’ve been through the greatest adventure.”
The book itself attempts to weave that spell, to capture precisely the allure of the Rushes. In doing so, it conjures something almost like a bacchanalia, full of derangement and frenzy and even sacrifice. Endore and his crew seem both blessed and damned; Rechy does a great job sharing both aspects of their experience. From a historic standpoint, though, it’s hard to finish the book and not shiver at what would be coming for these characters next, as the 80s dawned and the AIDS epidemic erupted. But that’s not here. Not tonight.
Quotes
“As often as he comes to the Rushes, Don still feels an outsider in it, and is. In the homosexual world of the bars there are avenging ghosts who refuse exorcism: the relentlessly effeminate among the relentlessly–even when unsuccessfully–macho men; the faded “beauties” changing into “queens” and clinging to shadows and the shadow of memories; and the older men–often near-alcoholics–who refuse to disappear from the sexual arenas or to surrender to the tight dinner groupings of men their age and older, gatherings brightened or rendered event more desolating by an occasional, quite often discreetly bought, “boy.”
Don is one of the avengers.
“Have you chosen yet whom you will be pursued by, Endore?” Martin stabs.
Rage bursts. “When will you finally choose, Martin?”
“I choose not to choose,” Martin answers. “There is no greater power over the beautiful than to withhold desire from them.”
“Listen,” Chas says passionately. “Listen. When you’re still walking the piers, a faggot all alone looking for sex, and it’s Sunday morning, you know you’re alive, man. Alive. Because you know you’ve been through the greatest adventure. And you’re alive. Still alive! Despite the punks and all the yells of ‘Queer!” and all the raids–despite all their shit, the shit we live with, we’re alive! That’s the only victory we have, man, and that’s what makes being a faggot special. That you can survive all that–for an excitement like no other, and you’re always on the edge, and that’s when you’re most alive, when you know you’re still alive, and tomorrow, too, because tomorrow it all starts again, our only continuity. That’s the joy that only we faggots have. Because in between the busts and the headbashings and the screams for our blood–before whatever it is that finally takes us over–getting drunk or going crazy or, yeah, killing ourselves or just dying–we’re alive, and they can’t even feel, not even pain, but we do, pain and relief when it’s over, and you call it S & M and that’s ok. But we feel, and they’re dead–having to come here to sniff at our world, breathe our sweat.”
Intense, funny and charged with the nervous fear of the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Gary Shteyngart’s “Our Country Friends” blends a classic “country estate” novel with our all-to-familiar dystopian present.
As the novel begins, writer Sasha Senderovsky (a bit of a Shteyngart fill-in) invites a group of old friends to stay at the country house he shares with his therapist wife and their adopted daughter. There’s a main house and a series of little bungalows, surrounded by dying trees and sharing creaky plumbing, problems that Sasha doesn’t have the money to fix.
Our host is past his prime earning potential and hoping for a TV script to come through. This long-delayed project brings a bonus guest to the estate: a famous actor, unnamed, who is developing the script with Sasha. This partnership leaves Sasha beholden to the actor’s good will, even as the confined star stirs up the already tense “pandemic meets ‘Trump-country'” environment.
Sasha and his friend are decidedly not Trumpers. They are mostly immigrants, high school friends from New York City who’ve seen a range of success. A failed adjunct professor/grease monkey at his uncle’s restaurant is still hung up on his high school crush, who’s recently hit it big as the tech guru behind the “Tröö Emotions” app. There’s also a trust fund bon vivant and a former student of Sasha’s who grew up poor, rural and white and isn’t above stirring up culture-war resentments for publicity.
It’s a good cast, each distinct, prickly and lovable at the same time. They drink too much and fall into cliques (as well as in and out of one another’s beds). They tend toward the libertine, with outdoor sex and plenty of skinny dipping in the pool.
They also occupy an elevated social class, even if some of them, like Sasha, are doing so on credit. (He winces at a four-figure liquor tab but still signs the check.) Indeed, one of the book’s rare missteps is when Sasha’s student, Dee, obliviously reveals just how well-padded her bank account is. It’s an unlikely gaffe for someone who is supposed to have grown up counting every penny.
There are plot engines–an app that bewitches one of the guests, a social media scandal, a black truck that periodically sits outside the gates. And there’s the great ghost of COVID looming over everything, haunting our guests as they seek refuge from the dirty world outside.
Shteyngart captures the uncertainty of the early days of the pandemic, the hollow gestures of hygiene theater, the understandable paranoia and the countervailing desire to get drunk and hug your oldest friends around the neck. That said, “Our Country Friends” transcends the pandemic, addressing larger issues of friendship and success, betrayal and heartbreak. I thought it lingered too long in its final fadeout (like COVID itself, I suppose), but it was still a warm and rewarding read.
Quotes
“At their lower moments, they always overcame their parents’ programming, always offered each other more than they had ever been given.”
***
“She remembered the little fishes her father had used to bait the sea bass of Long Island Sound, the way they used to thrash on the hook, unsuitable for anything but dying between the teeth of a more important animal.”
***
“People were dying in the city. Some more than others. The virus had roamed the earth but had chosen to settle down there, just as the parents of Masha, Senderovsky, Karen, and Vinod had chosen it four decades ago as a place to escape the nighttime reverberations of Stalin and Hitler, of partition, of the pain that radiated not to distant memory but cracked outright from their own fathers’ hands.”
***
“Senderovsky watched his wife in the sundress return to her patients and her child’s lesson plans and thought of the raft of mystery that floats between two partners, even contented ones, as they turn in for the night. He wished he could fall in love with someone as his wife evidently had done. He had chased after beauty for such a long part of his life, until he had caught up with it and found it, like everything else, worthy of no more than a chapter or two of heightened prose.”
