In this very fictional story, my wife asks me about that sultry woman's voice in my office

My historical novel, "Zeppelins Over Denver," will be out soon from The Ridgeway Press. I recently proofed all 395 typeset pages and now need new glasses or possibly new eyes if they are available. I spent most of my working life editing my own work and that of others. Not everyone appreciates editing, as you may discover if your boss asks you to "take a look" at his article for the corporate web site. The editor's goal is to make every written piece shine like a diamond or at least like a good knock-off over at the pawn shop. Readable, it has to be. Comprehensible. Maybe even dazzling. 

Writers rarely read their published books because they have read them over and over again. You would think it gets old. It does. In the new world of self-published books, an editor should be worth its weight in gold but now we have computers and A.I. One thing that helped me through 128,373 words was a new gadget on Microsoft Word. It is the "Read Aloud" prompt. The writer blocks text and then this mellifluous female voice reads your text. OK, it's slightly artificial. I noted some grievous mispronunciations, but they are surprisingly few. What I wasn't prepared for was the artificial voice emphasizing chosen words. One of them is this: What? I caught a lilt in her voice. I was charmed. I decided to give her a name, Rita Read Aloud. She has personality. 

However, I was tempted to change Rita's voice into a male one because most of my fictional characters are male (but not all). I decided to ask Gary Google if this was wise. Responses were surprising. The male voices sound mechanical, robot-like. One respondent warned that if I switched off the female voice to male, I would never get Rita back. The finality of divorce. Suitably forewarned, I kept Rita and am happy I did. Somewhere around Chapter 27, I started talking back to her and we are now in a long-term relationship which has led to a world of domestic problems.

Wife: Who was that you were talking to in your office?

Me: That was just me.

Wife: Sounded like a female voice.

Me: Robot. Just a robot. On MS Word. A very bland robot voice.

Wife: I thought I heard her say WHAT? like she really meant it, as if she was responding meaningfully in some way, as if....

Me: I shut the office door slowly, you know, like that last scene in The Godfather when Michael Corleone shuts himself off from the love of his life. Just like that.

Ann Patchett pulls me into the lives of "The Dutch House"

Ann Patchett's novel "The Dutch House" was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. First place went to Colson Whitehead's "The Nickel Boys." I have yet to read Whitehead's novel but did read his amazing "The Underground Railroad." 

"The Dutch House" was my first Patchett novel. I don't know what took me so long. She's an amazing writer and owner of Parnassus Books in Nashville. Novelist and bookstore owner -- two full-time jobs. I read Patchett's novel via Kindle from Amazon as I require large-print books or enlargeable print e-books for my clunky eyesight. In the future, I will acquire my print books at indies such as Parnassus. I can get e-books at Libby and a large assortment of large-print books at the Ormond Beach Public Library. It's crucial in these dark times to keep alive the light of good literature and the nonprofit literary world. The fact that Tom Hanks narrates the "The Dutch House" audiobook is enough for me to get it just to hear what Hanks does to the first-person voice of the narrator.

"The Dutch House" follows the lives of a family and their house from the title. The house was built by a Dutch family in Elkins Park just north of Philadelphia. It's ornate and weird, inhabited by others after the aging Dutch wife died with no heirs. Buyer was Cyril Conroy, a World War II veteran and man of seemingly modest means. He loves the place. His young wife hates it. And his children, Maeve and Danny, grow up obsessed with it after their father's second wife throws them out. The tale is told by Danny.

It has a Dickensian flavor to it. Both the house and the characters loom large. A  bit like the painting of Maeve on the cover of the book's first edition (painting by Noah Saterstrom). The setting isn't the gritty hovels of 1840s London but the polite environs of  Philadelphia and New York City. I was caught up in their lives and was heartbroken at the end. I loved the characters so much I didn't want to see them go. That takes skill, bringing a cast to life so we are bereft when they exit the final page. I don't want a sequel but do want them to hang around for a spell like the ghosts who inhabit the house. 

The book ends with the lingering feeling that we all live parallel lives in the houses we have inhabited. How many times have you driven by "the old place" and been hit with a sense of longing?

That's "The Dutch House." 

One final note: I downloaded a "Kindle Unlimited" post-apocalyptic novel to read following Padgett. I read all kinds of books. But this one was all action and style. I won't name the book because it's a book and there's a writer who worked hard on it and I don't want to hurt feelings. I've written many novels, all unpublished, and it is a lot of work. So, as I cast around for my next read, I won't settle. 

There is a world of difference between a 125,000-word novel and a flash of 50 words

Spending my days and nights with a close reading of the formatted text for my historical novel, "Zeppelins over Denver." Much of my adult life was spent writing and editing so this is just another in a long line of projects. But, the process is different with a 125,000-word novel. If that seems like a lot of words, it is. But they were composed one sentence, one paragraph, one page at a time. I write and revise short stories, which is a slightly different task. A short story may be 5,000 words. In 2025, flash fiction has taken over the litmags and I am pleased that I've publish a few in print mags and online. It's a neat exercise to write a story that's a page long and not pages. Some very talented writers taught me the way. The always-busy Meg Pokrass has shown me and others the way. I recently had a piece rejected by 50-Word-Story that I thought was pretty good for a 50-word-story. I had revised it from a 250-word story but maybe that was the problem. Sometimes a 250-word story just wants what it wants. 

Back to the novel. The story must be compelling and the characters memorable. The writing must be crisp. And very importantly, the text must be error-free. This is the challenge with a 125,000 word novel in this day of self-publishing. Traditional publishers used to employ editors and fact-checkers. They still do, I suppose, but I don't know for sure because I've never been published by one. I did have a st6oory reprinted in a Coffee House Press anthology, "Working Words: Punching the Clock and Kicking out the Jams." ML Liebler was the editor. I've also had a creative nonfiction piece published in a Norton anthology, "In Short: A Collection of Brief Creative Nonfiction." But my historical novel is not being published by a traditional press. Thus, the work must be done by the writer. That takes time and attention to detail, lots and lots of details. Since my book is historical fiction, this writer must pay attention to period detail in the case of 1919 Colorado. What did people wear and how did they speak? What models of automobiles were on the road? What was it like to fly a biplane? Many questions that I try to answer as best as I can. 

An editor must pay attention to detail. But it is inevitable that mistakes will slip in. One must forgive oneself in the end. Nobody's perfect. We try to be. AI is available. My MSN Word keeps bugging me about the CoPilot AI program. No thanks, I keep saying. Will that ever become a necessity in the publishing world? My daughter uses ChatGPT when writing her college papers. The professor says it is OK as long as it is noted. Good grief. I might have used it when tasked to compare and contrast the Early and Late English Romantic Poets. In fact, I may just go to CoPilot and propose this very topic, see what the bits-and-bytes say. It might be fun. 

Not sure how the late Dr. Alistair Duckworth might respond. 

Oh yes I do: Off with his head!

In Percival Everett’s historical novel “James,” the whole world relies on the naming of names

I spent the past couple weeks with James. I knew him in my youth as Jim, Nigger Jim, from Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn.” On the eve of the Civil War, Jim and Huck go on a spree down the Mississippi. In Percival Everett’s novel, “James,” Huck’s name remains the same while Nigger Jim becomes Jim and then, at long last, becomes James. No accident that these are the last lines of the book:

“And who are you?”

“I am James.”

“James what?”

“Just James.”

I guess that I should issue a spoiler alert, that the main character is speaking at the end of the novel. But you don’t know where he is or what he’s doing. You don’t even know if it’s not an imagined scene, something from the always creative mind of Everett. So I’ll leave it at that.

James is a slave on a journey, sometimes with his white pal Huck and sometimes not as he and Huck get separated. We revisit a few of Twain’s characters, the Duke and the Dauphin among them (I’m thinking of you Jason Burge, The One True Dauphin of Mississippi) and others are new creations.

But as the Kindle pages turned, I was less interested in Everett’s Twain trail as I was by what Everett was doing with his own creation. It’s crystal clear early on when James is still in Hannibal talking to other slaves about proper diction. And it’s hilarious. Slaves know how to speak white man’s English (I would say proper English but this is the South) but they also need to master slave’s English. A hilarious scene, one that caused me raucous laughs that awoke the family. Slaves must dumb down their language to make sure white people are not offended by the possibility of a smart Negro. Even language is a slaveholder’s weapon. That scene really nails down what’s at stake in “James.” If you are a slave, everything you do must conform to the white man’s image of you and the owner’s sense of mastery over you. To challenge that leads to death.

As a slave, James sneaks into Judge Thatcher’s study to read. He knows Voltaire's "Candide" and John Locke even appears to James on the trail for verbal sparring matches. This journey is so much fun that you almost forget the stakes. But not quite. As I read, I thought deeply about slavery and its continuing hold on America. We are in the midst of a fascist coup by the same white men who gave us slavery and the KKK and Auschwitz. Massa Ron DeSantis gloats over his concentration camp in the Glades and plans to open more. Trump’s White Nationalist Stephen Miller plots the creation of a white nation, one without those pesky people of color.

But back to the book. It’s clear why it won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. A work of genius. I cringed in spots but I fear that not cringing would make me unrecognizable to me and to James, Just James.

A couple things about Everett. He grew up in South Carolina, educated in Florida and Rhode Island, but went West as soon as he could, as the saying goes. He spends time and writes about the West of Wyoming and New Mexico. I look forward to reading “Walk Me to the Distance” and “God’s Country.” There’s a funny Twain quote that might have come from Everett. “I’ve only been as far West as California.” It sounds like Twain but I can’t find confirmation that he said it. He traveled in what we know as the real West: Wyoming, New Mexico, Nevada, the gold-mining fields of California. But the quote has been used sarcastically by those in the inner West who say “California ain’t West.” Twain knew it. As you see in Everett’s books, he does too.

In the “James” acknowledgements, Everett writes this:

“Finally, a nod to Mark Twain. His humor and his humanity affected me long before I became a writer. Heaven for the climate; hell for my long-awaited lunch with Mark Twain.”

Always read the acknowledgements. You find gold nuggets there.

Post #4,000

Love in the Ruins is not just Another Roadside Attraction

I awoke thinking of Walker Percy's "Love in the Ruins or The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World." I finished the 1971 novel late last night. It has a satisfying ending which I won't divulge. It's set five years after the main action of the novel. It wraps things up but I was still left with this thought: This is a satirical sci-fi novel about loss and grief. 

It struck me in the same way as the movie "Arrival." I had to watch the film a second time to understand the ending as well as the beginning and middle. I felt a bit dim that I didn't get it the first time around. The second time I wanted to cry. 

They gave Dr. Louise Banks the same gift the Tralfamadorians gave Billy Pilgrim in "Slaughterhouse Five." She became unstuck in time, gift from the Space Octopoids who came to warn Earth and seek our help for a future calamity. Dr. Banks saw her future tragedy but lived it anyway, a brave thing. 

In "Love in the Ruins," set in some future time, the 45-year-old Dr. Thomas More has already experienced tragedy in the cancer death of his young daughter followed by his wife leaving him. Oh yeah -- he also faces the end of the world. He does his best to assuage his grief and fear with scientific inventions, sex, and gin fizzes. Nothing works. "To be or not to be?" What does he decide?

Percy was the son and grandson of suicides. After a bout with TB during the World War 2 years, he became a doctor and then a mental patient at the same hospital. Percy suffered from Depression and PTSD just as war veteran Binx Bolling does in Percy's 1961 novel "The Moviegoer." 

He is well-known as the writer who helped publish John Kennedy Toole's "The Confederacy of Dunces," another award-winning New Orleans-set novel about an unhinged character. Toole, of course, committed suicide allegedly despondent when nobody would publish his novel. Suicide, I'm told, is more than a passing sorrow. It figures heavily in literature, especially Southern lit.

I almost quit reading this novel. Several times. It's wordy and Percy does a lot of showing off with language. In places, his humor is more Keystone Kops than dark satire. I did laugh out loud in spots. Dr. More keeps getting into messes he causes himself. A Buster-Keaton-kind of hero. 

I first read this novel when I was 23. I am now 74. In 1973, I saw it as a romp, the prof's great example of the dark humor of the ages. We also read Tom Robbins' 1971 kaleidoscopic novel "Another Roadside Attraction." That too was a romp with deep undercurrents and portents. Robbins was born in North Carolina and grew up there and in Virginia. He referred to himself as a hillbilly and his editor called him "a real Southern Gentleman." Both his grandfathers were Southern Baptist preachers. Later on, he discovered Washington state where he wrote his books. 

I should reread Robbins' novel and see how I react 52 years on. It may mean something different to me in 2025. 

Drive-by photos of a closed Flannery O'Connor Childhood Home

 

Photos of the Flannery O'Connor Childhood Home Museum in Savannah (building in center). It was closed to visitors on the day we were there. Built like a brick fort, sturdy and tall. Savannah's early residents built tall so they could fire down on their enemies, whoever they might be: warriors from local tribes, the King of England's soldiers, Yankees, The Misfit, or any rabble who might storm the gates. This makes it almost impossible for this fallen-away Catholic to access the place in my e-scooter. The backyard garden might be accessible but it was closed tight on Wednesday but open Friday-Sunday. It's the meeting place for the Peacock Guild writing group. Members are critiquing and polishing their work for a June reading. As the story goes, the young O'Connor taught her chicken to walk backward in the garden. Read my 2023 blog: "In Flannery O'Connor's Garden of Life, chickens walk backward"

The Irish keep defining dark comedy in books and movies

Blame my errant imagination.

As I read "Glorious Exploits," a new novel by Irish writer Ferdia Lennon, I kept hearing Roddy Doyle. Not that Lennon is copying Doyle's distinctive Irish patter, but the way the two main characters spoke and approached life conjured Doyle's Barrytown Trilogy, specifically "The Commitments." Jimmy Rabbitte's mission is to bring the soul music of Sam Cooke, Wilson Pickett, and Otis Redding to 1990 working-class Dublin. The mission is doomed from the start but boy is it a fun ride. 

In "Glorious Exploits," unemployed potters Lampo and Gelon want to stage a Euripides play in 412 BCE in  Seracuse, Sicily (Syracuse now. in both Sicily and N.Y.). They decide to enlist a cast of starving Athenian warriors whose invasion has been defeated and the captured, starving, warriors imprisoned in a dismal rock quarry. Why starving Athenian players? Because the duo's favorite poet is Euripides of Athens and these Athenians are the only ones in Seracuse and they just happen to know The Master's latest work that includes Medea and The Trojan Women. Their quest is doomed, of course. But boyo, it's a fun ride, no bollix.

Irish writers tingle my Irish genes. I have never been to my grandfather's country nor to his rural county of Roscommon. But I've read their best writers and they live in me. Doyle, Yeats, Maeve Binchy, Flann O'Brien, James Joyce all tell wonderful stories grounded in Irish wit and lore. The Irish story is riven with heartache. The latest Irish-set movie, "The Banshees of Inisherin," focuses on a long male friendship that breaks up for unfathomable reasons and leads to tragedy in 1923. There are laugh-out-loud moments, a dose of charm, memorable Celtic music, and then the ending when doom shows up. Meanwhile, the Irish Civil War, where neighbor kills neighbor, wages across the newly-formed country. These two friends' relationship is doomed. But the telling is marvelous. 

It's the voice, nurtured over the centuries. Lennon has found it. In an interview, he says that he wanted to make sure that the book did not have that Merchant Ivory voice of serious dramas of the Classical Age. He succeeded. Lampo and Gelon are  Sicilian-Irishmen on a lark, spending most of their time chatting over flasks of suspect wine at Dismas's place. Must hand it to Lennon. Many sickening things going on in Seracuse. Wine is the only answer. But the author describes in detail the wine they drink and you will thank Dionysus for the local Tiki Bar (we have several here in Ormond Beach). It's illuminating to hear lines of Euripides from the lips of emaciated Athenians, all wearing leg shackles, dressed in ill-fitting costumes and gowns. There is a performance and I won't tell you how it ends once the curtainless stage is cleared. And there is a surprise ending which is very sweet.

I have to admit that the book's cover grabbed me. It's a traditional bust of the historian and philosopher Herodotus with googly eyes. 

Lennon was the subject of a Q&A interview in the Aug. 31, 2024, Observer. I include an excerpt here because it speaks to Ireland’s rich literary tradition and info about how contemporary Irish writers are supported by their Arts Council. I worked with writers for 25 years at the Wyoming Arts Council and for two years assisted with creative writing fellowships at the National Endowment for the Arts in D.C. It’s instructional in a time when the NEA, the NEH, and the Institute of Museums and Library Services are under the gun by Trump, Musk, and their techie minions who wouldn’t know James Joyce unless you wacked them on the head with a hardcover edition of “Ulysses.”

The Guardian's book critic wrote a review of "Glorious Exploits." Header: "Uproarious am-dram in ancient Sicily." I had to look up am-dram and it's British slang for amateur drama, those plays put on by your local community theatre.

From the Guardian:

Q: How do you explain the current wave of successful Irish novelists? 

A: I remember that when I was a student, James Joyce’s house was five minutes up the road: just seeing that plaque, there’s something nice about having that literary history celebrated around you. On a practical level, the structures in Ireland make it easier for writers. An Arts Council grant helped me write this book. I wasn’t in any way established, but you could submit a work in progress to a panel of your peers and if you’re lucky, you might get money that will give you a couple of months that could be the break. I feel part of the burgeoning moment in Irish literature has to do with the financial crash. A whole generation was devastated, in Ireland maybe more than most. There were no jobs, so you felt freer to do what you wanted, even if it made no money; I started writing in Granada [in Spain] while unemployed.

Discovering obscure maladies just one of many reasons to read John Dufresne’s “My Darling Boy”

Reading contemporary fiction has many rewards.

First, you get a whopping good story.

Second, when the writer knows their stuff, you feel it in your bones. This writer can write!

Third, you never know when you might run across a mysterious malady that might be one that you could have, really, personally. Alerted, you check it out.

Since Dufresne obviously delights in the odd, let’s talk about Dupuytren’s Contracture. In “My Darling Boy,” protagonist Olney Kartheizer mentions this malady of the hands as he contemplates a character in a story he might write for an imaginary family.

I thought, “I might have that.” As Johns Hopkins describes it on its web site:

Dupuytren contracture (also called Dupuytren disease) is an abnormal thickening of the skin in the palm of your hand at the base of your fingers. This thickened area may develop into a hard lump or thick band. Over time, it can cause one or more fingers to curl (contract) or pull sideways or in toward your palm. The ring and little fingers are most commonly affected.

Hopkins includes a video and photos. The contracture makes it hard to cut steak, hold hands with a loved one, and write a thank-you note. People over 50 from a Northern European background (it’s sometimes referred to as “Viking’s hand”) are the most susceptible. I viewed the video and thought, “I definitely have that.” So I’m calling my primary care physician to refer me to a hand doctor.

Dufresne is a writer who does his research so it’s hard to imagine he just pulled this out of thin air. There’s a reason to mention an infirmity that makes it hard to write or type with all fingers. It’s hard to write, period.

After many novels, story collections, and writers’ self-help books later, Dufresne has his craft well in hand.  

“My Darling Boy” is funny as hell and it will break the heart of any parent. It broke mine.

Olney’s mission is to rescue his son Cully from an opioid addiction. He might want to swim the Atlantic Ocean or fly to the moon instead. If you have experience with addicted children or any addicted loved ones, the first message you get at an Alanon meeting is “you have to let them fail.” That comes from AA too. At some point, there is nothing you can do that won’t take you down too. Tough love, I guess.

Olney won’t listen. He may be made of sterner stuff (offspring of Vikings?) but he isn’t. He loves Cully. Olney’s job at the Anastasia (Fla.) Daily Sun has been downsized from staff writer to book reviewer to copy editor to obit writer and then out the door. He is divorced and Kat, his wife, is remarried and in another town. He is the Elwood P. Dowd of Anastasia, stopping to talk with strangers and befriend them if possible. They become his cohorts in the search for Olney that takes him through the underbelly of Florida. And if you don’t think Florida has an underbelly, you ain’t looking out the window as you crisscross the state. Seedy motels, junkies on street corners, abandoned mini-malls with weed-choked lots. Oh, and street corner kiosks for time-shares. All there if you look. I always looked for underbelly when I traveled across Wyoming. I found plenty (no time-share kiosks in Rawlins though).

Dufresne has so much fun noticing. Maybe that’s why his work is included in the “Miami Noir” anthology (1 & 2) edited by Miami resident Les Standiford, a Ph.D. grad in creative writing from UU and once a seasonal park ranger in the Beehive State. Dufresne can be noir but he has so much fun with word play. The proprietor of a rundown motel uses malapropisms which wordsmith Olney shows mercy and only occasionally corrects.

The names of his small towns are wonderful. Melancholy is where his ex-wife lives and is the scene of much of the novel’s second half. At book’s end, Olney and his pal Dewey are off to find Cully. They come to a crossroads along one of those pine-straddled secondary roads. One way takes them to Gracious and the other to Whynot. come to a crossroads for Gracious and Whynot. Guess which one he takes?

Dufresne’s not Southern-born but he got here as quick as he could. He teaches creative writing at Miami’s Florida International University. He keeps company with Florida’s riotous writers. He shares the pages in “Naked Came the Manatee” with “Florida’s finest writers,” so says the New York Times Book Review. In it with Dufresne are Carl Hiaasen, Elmore Leonard, Edna Buchanan, Dave Barry, and Carolina Hospital.

I read Dufresne stories before I tackled this novel. Dufresne’s name often comes up with other Southern Gothic fiction writers such as Lewis Nordan who grew up in Itta Bena, Miss. I once worked with Nordan and, after hearing him speak to a group of writers, realized I had to read all his books. He blends the tragic with the hilarious which doesn’t seem possible until you read “Wolf Whistle,” a novel of the notorious Emmett Till murder. Read it and see.

But first, Dufresne’s “My Darling Boy.”

Winter is coming and it's time to stockpile soup for a nasty 2025

I blame Max Brooks.

Yes, the guy who wrote “World War Z” and the excellent graphic novel, “The Harlem Hellfighters” (artwork by Caanan White).

In his 2020 book, “Devolution,” Brooks combines a gigantic eruption of Mount Rainier and a Sasquatch invasion and civil war and the bumbling of clueless techies. All hell breaks loose.

Most people are woefully unprepared because we are Americans and live for the moment and ourselves. We do not stockpile food and supplies like the LDSers and Preppers. Why bother? Nothing’s gonna happen.

In “Devolution,” residents of the wired Greenloop community high in the scenic Washington state mountains must find ways to do without grocery deliveries by drone, solar power, and cell connections as they struggle to survive. The elderly artist in the co-op knows how to grow spuds from potato eyes and how to trap and dissect rabbits for a yummy stew.

I was thinking about that while staring at the canned soups at Publix. Look at all of those cans. They don’t need refrigeration. They don’t really need to be cooked as they are MREs. So, acting on instinct and paranoia, I grabbed a bunch of Progresso soups. You don’t even need a manual can opener as you can open the can yourself even if you have difficulties with aging hands as I do. I imagine that all of the refrigerated food is eaten or spoiled. We have long since eaten all the packaged crackers and cookies and snacks.

Soup will save us. I grabbed a dozen cans. Piled them high in the cart. When Chris caught up with me, she surveyed my shopping cart and asked, “Why all the soup?”

“Winter is coming.”

“This isn’t ‘Games of Thrones’ “

“Winter, it’s still coming.”

“I know. But not this week. And we have a fridge and freezer filled with food.”

“People are talking about a civil war. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.”

“You watched ‘Ghostbusters’ again?”

“But what if…”

“What if what?”

A crowd gathered by the soups. People stared at us, and then at the beautiful red-and-white cans of original Campbell’s, tiny tributes to Andy Warhol. Some wanted to get their own soup to stockpile for a looming disaster such as one the USA will face on Jan. 20, 2025.

Chris, alas, had her way. I put back most of the soups. We kept Campbell’s chicken noodle and Progresso creamy tomato and basil.

The rest of the shopping trip was uneventful. I managed to slip in a box of saltines and boxes of Band-Aids, the large kind, the kind you would use for post-apocalyptic wounds. I checked out and went home to continue reading “Devolution,” large-print edition.

And I had to ask myself: What if?

A buried cold case comes to light in Icelandic crime thriller "Reykjavik"

The closest I’ve been to Iceland is the Maine coast. No recent volcano eruptions in Maine. Maine weather can be cold but Iceland has it beat. If you speak Icelandic as do 330,000 of the island’s inhabitants, you may be really good with languages but have few people to converse with in Portland or Kennebunkport. Both places offer great seafood and rugged terrain. They share another facet of life: fiction, mainly atmospheric thrillers. Maine claims Stephen King. Iceland claims Ragnar Jonasson.

If you watch Netflix, “The Valhalla Murders” may have popped up on your much-watch streaming series list. Valhalla is Norse heaven or their version of it. A majority of Icelanders share Viking DNA and Iceland was once part of Norway. But the Valhalla in the series written by Thordur Palsson -is, to paraphrase one former resident, “a living hell.” It’s a facility for troublesome youth. It’s also home to predatory adults. You won’t be surprised to find out that one of its youthful residents is now an adult and bent on revenge for beatings and torture and rape by staffers. It takes eight episodes for the police to get their culprit. Along the way, you get many views of snowbound landscapes and slate-gray skies; frigid small towns and one big gray city, Reykjavik.

You don’t need me to tell you that the countries of Scandinavia have a reputation for gloom and doom. Norway claimed Iceland until 1944. Vikings were bloodthirsty conquerors (great sailors though). Icelandic sagas feature much bloodshed. You’ve seen Ingmar Bergman movies. There are also the bizarre worlds of Lasse Hallstrom in “My Life as a Dog” with a 12-year-old’s ruminations on a dying Soviet dog in space and “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape” with its Iowa teen protagonist as caretaker of his intellectually disabled brother and morbidly obese mother. Also, Sweden is known for the graphic violence of Stieg Larsson, author of three posthumously published novels that begins with “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” It gave rise to films in Sweden and the U.S. that were not designed for family popcorn night.

The latest energetic crime thriller from Iceland is “Reykjavik” by Ragnar Jonasson and Katrin Jakobsdottir. The title is important as the 1986 scene for most of the narrative. It also is the setting for the city’s 200^th anniversary bash and the famous summit meeting between Ronald Reagan and Mikeal Gorbachev. Murder happens against this dramatic backdrop along with the investigation of a 30-year-old cold case. On the way, we meet a terrific roster of characters and a plot that kept me guessing.

“Reykjavik” was translated by Victoria Cribb. Hats off to her for keeping the author’s pace and vision. Also, all the Icelandic names of people and locations. We get lots of details of everyday life which includes lots of coffee drinking. This story of death hums with life and makes it an enjoyable read. I have a feeling a filmed version is in the works for the streaming services. The author creates scenes that cry out for the cinema. We shall see what transpires.

One more thing: the co-author of Reykjavik holds a master’s degree in Icelandic literature. She wrote her master’s thesis on another Icelandic crime fiction author, Arnaldur Indridason. She now is prime minister of Iceland and previously was the Minister of Education. So there’s that…

Kudos for the books authors and editors who include a pronunciation guide to the characters’ names and also placenames. I’d like to see more of that in translated works.

"Sergeant Salinger" by Jerome Charyn will rip your heart out

I was gobsmacked by an historical novel written about a famous author’s experiences in World War II.

“Sergeant Salinger” by Jerome Charyn is about J.D. Salinger, the most reclusive of American authors. His war experiences and the PTSD that followed helps explain why he kept his distance from his fellow humans for most of his adult life.

But that’s not the whole story. We first meet Salinger as a young single on the make in New York City. He dates Oona O’Neil, the vampish daughter of playwright Eugene O’Neill, and hangs out at the Stork Club with the likes of Walter Winchell and famous people we recognize by their last names or nicknames. Papa “Hem” Hemingway is one of them. Salinger writes radio scripts and short stories and readers like them but they are nothing to write home about. The letters home come later when he has something to say.

Salinger gets drafted even though he’d been previously diagnosed with a heart murmur. It’s the spring of ’42 and Uncle Sam needs everybody, even “half-Jewish writers with heart murmurs.” You’d think that Salinger (he goes by the nickname Sonny) would land in a cushy stateside job writing press releases or speeches for generals. What happens is something horrific and unexpected, even for someone like me who knows Salinger’s stories of PTSD veterans (“For Esme with Love and Squalor” and “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”). Salinger told these stories from the inside out. The author’s “Nine Stories” broke my heart when I first read them all in my 20s. Another heartbreaking story about returning vets is “Hemingway’s “A Soldier’s Story.” In “Sergeant Salinger,” there’s a scene when a jaded Hem visits Salinger in a Nuremberg psych ward and calls his own story “amateurish.” Hem groused that everything was behind him. He published “The Old Man and the Sea” in 1952 and it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and Nobel Prize in 1954.

Lest you think Charyn has employed his magnificent storytelling skills to make it all up, think again. I did too. Until Part One: Slapton Sands, the section that follows Prelude: Oona. Salinger is a Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) NCO, who accompanies invading troops to interview prisoners and others who might spill the beans on Nazi war plans. He speaks German. He’s been drilled in all the tricks of the interrogator’s trade. While preparing for the D-Day landings, he’s witness to one of the army’s biggest tragedies. In a practice run for Normandy on Lyme Bay on the Channel side of England, a live-fire exercise goes astray and German’s Kriegsmarine speedboats sneak in an torpedo LSTs, spilling overloaded troops into the ocean. There are 749 casualties, some interred in mass graves, and Charyn documents it.

I told myself this couldn’t possibly happen. I looked it up. It happened. That’s when I knew we were off on a wild ride. We go to Utah Beach on June 6, 1944. Salinger is in the thick of it with the Fourth Division. They get into hedgerow battles with dug-in German troops and 82^nd Airborne “sky soldiers” (paratroopers) who are keen to even the score with Nazis who shot their comrades out of the sky when they dropped into the wrong spot. I looked that up too and it was much more gruesome than featured in “The Longest Day,” book or movie. Anywhere, for that matter.

Kudos to Charyn for doing his homework. He is a brilliant writer, one I’ve liked since getting hooked on his Inspector Isaac Sidel novels. We are in the shit with Salinger all the way through occupation duty in Germany. And he comes home which we all know. Salinger humped his “Catcher in the Rye” manuscript through Europe and wrote until he couldn’t write any more. The novel ends with the manuscript in his tiny retreat on Sleepy Hollow Lane, a street that Salinger invents because of its locale near the setting of the famous Washington Irving story. Nobody but family can find him there. Until he finishes his war-battered manuscript and it becomes a best seller. "Catcher in the Rye" still makes waves. 

Publisher is Bellevue Literary Press of New York, a small press with origins at Bellevue Hospital, noted for its Psychiatric Unit (the Ghostbusters were interned there, briefly) and the medical offices where Dr. Lewis Thomas wrote the best-selling “Lives of a Cell.” I haven’t read most of its authors who write, Bellevue notes, “at the intersection of the arts and sciences.” They’ve also published other books by Charyn, including his latest “Ravage & Son,” a “vintage noir” set in Manhattan’s Lower East Side during the turn of the last century. I have pre-ordered it. Charyn has other historicals. Look them up at his web site at jeromecharyn.com

He may be "A Gentleman in Moscow," but he doesn't get out much anymore

In a May 16 post, I was only a few hours into reading Amor Towles "A Gentleman in Moscow." Things seemed especially grim at that juncture so I blogged this:

The Count is charming and it’s great fun to read about him and his situation even though you know it’s going to end terribly. Not as terribly as it did for the Romanovs but still terrible. The ending of Book 1 clued me in on a possible fate for the Count.

It helps to read a novel to the end before commenting. I won't spoil the ending but will say that it was not what I foresaw. Towles has a way of planting clues that may be MacGuffins. Very clever. He's also a great writer with a flair for language that I only see in the best books. When I open a book, I want to go for a ride and Towles takes me on an extraordinary one.

The world is filled with intriguing cities and Moscow proves to be one. But it's not a locale I turn to automatically. "I feel like reading a big Moscow book today, one from the scintillating Soviet era." Most of us know Moscow through one of the long-dead classic Russian writers. Others have been fascinated with its dramatic World War II battles, me included. The real stories behind the battles for Moscow and Stalingrad are gruesome and uplifting. Remember, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were allies then.

Alexander Rostov is an aristocrat. Many of them were sent to the gulag or executed during the regime's early years. Count Rostov is threatened with both until it comes to light that he did a favor once for one of the Soviet bosses now in charge. He is sentenced to a house arrest at the Metropol Hotel, the swankiest inn in Moscow. The Count already lives there in a luxurious suite. The bosses move him out into a cramped room in the attic. If he leaves the hotel, he will be shot. So Count Rostov tries to make the best of it. Beginning fiction writers are often told that a compelling character faces a challenge. The story is in how that character reacts. And that's what we have in this novel. He's no longer a world traveler and man about Moscow. His bank accounts have been frozen. He is persona non grata to those Soviets who know which side their bread is buttered on (it's the Red side).

The long journey through the count's life is worth it. Many surprises await you.

A look at the past and possible future in A Gentleman in Moscow and California

I’m reading two books concurrently. One is labeled historical fiction and is Amor Towles’ “A Gentleman in Moscow.” The other is a sci-fi post-Apocalyptic novel “California” by Edan Lepucki. Meanwhile, here I am, living in the present tense.

Towles wrote a historical novel I am very fond of, “The Lincoln Highway.” The title grabbed my attention because I live a mile or maybe two from the route of the original Lincoln Highway. A history marker in downtown Cheyenne speaks at length about it, calling it “The First Transcontinental Highway.” A huge bust of Abraham Lincoln marks the high point on the Laramie Range where the highway crests and then shoots down Telephone Canyon, a long, looping downhill run that is an adventure during a blizzard (if the road’s open) and leads you to Laramie’s fine craft beers and indie restaurants if you make it.

An NPR reviewer in 2021 described the book this way:

The Lincoln Highway is a joyride. Amor Towles' new Great American Road Novel tails four boys — three 18-year-olds who met in a juvenile reformatory, plus a brainy 8-year-old — as they set out from Nebraska in June, 1954, in an old Studebaker in pursuit of a better future. If this book were set today, their constant detours and U-turns would send GPS into paroxysms of navigational recalculations. But hitch onto this delightful tour de force and you'll be pulled straight through to the end, helpless against the inventive exuberance of Towles' storytelling.

So, it’s 1954 in Nebraska and points south and east. Quite a ride. As an admirer of “road novels,” this is a great one. “West with Giraffes” by Lynda Rutledge is too although I’ve already written about it. Must mention here that Kerouac’s “On the Road” features a pivotal scene at Wild West Week in 1948 Cheyenne. What we have in miles and miles of asphalt and concrete are roads. Recently, I was pleased to see that Gen. Pershing, commander of all the armies who married a young woman from Cheyenne (a strategic move – she was the daughter of a U.S. senator), commissioned in 1921 a roadmap of the U.S. showing the Lincoln Highway as a priority number one route and the road from Cheyenne to Denver as priority number two. Take that, Colorado! Pershing hated your guts.

“A Gentleman in Moscow” is a very different story. It is a big novel and I just had to have a hardbound copy from B&N.com. It is 1922 in Moscow, U.S.S.R., and Count Alexander Rostov has been quarantined at Moscow’s famous Metropol Hotel. He’s not sick. But he has the ability to infect the populace with highfalutin attitudes, a crime in the new communist state, where everyone is equal but some, we suspect, are more equal than others. The count is a snob and what we might call a ladykiller. He’s accustomed to women swooning over him and the pickings are quite slim on the corridors of the commie hotel. Still, he finds a way. Government apparatchiks check up on him and his dwellings and they try to train hotel staff to not call the count Count or Your excellency. To no avail.

The Count is charming and it’s great fun to read about him and his situation even though you know it’s going to end terribly. Not as terribly as it did for the Romanovs but still terrible. The ending of Book 1 clued me in on a possible fate for the Count.

Lepucki first got my attention through a recent interview in the Los Angeles Times. While most of it is about her new novel of time travel and family, “Time’s Mouth,” “California” is about family and apocalypse. Very down to earth and that’s the way the author likes it:

“I want there to be sex in my books. I want there to be periods and childbirth and feeling bad. There’s a lot of vomiting,” she says, laughing. “I feel like in a lot of contemporary fiction, the characters are not in their bodies in the way that I think in life we are.”

I read that and agreed that there is not a lot of periods and childbirth and sickness in most books. If described at all, sickness often is described romantically, as in the ravings of a sick Cathy in Wuthering Heights or the pining of a tubercular John Keats ("Bright Star" a fine Jane Campion film about Keats and Fanny Brawne). There is shit in “California” and it stinks. But that’s not the main story. A pregnant woman and her husband try to navigate the confusing and dangerous future world where all things fall apart. I’m only 120 pages into my Kindle version checked out from Libby but the author has my attention.

Is it wise to read historical novel and post-apocalyptic fiction at the same time? God only knows, if there was a God and he/she/it actually knew anything.

Mary Pat Fennessey looks for "Small Mercies" in Dennis Lehane's latest novel

Reading a Dennis Lehane novel is no walk in the park. It is if your park is filled with intrigue, betrayal, revenge, murder, drug overdoses, child abuse, and race riots. You get all of that in his latest novel, “Small Mercies.” It’s a harrowing ride through the Boston South End we read about in “Mystic River,” "Shutter Island," and the Kenzie-Gennaro mystery series (“Gone, Baby, Gone”).

The setting is the very hot end of summer in 1974 Boston. Americans are on edge due to the Saudi oil embargo. Lehane writes that everyone was driving around with at least a half-tank of gas so they didn’t have to spend their time in long gas lines. But there’s a bigger issue in the mostly-white areas of the city: court-ordered busing. Some of the Irish-American kids are going to be bused to a formerly all-black high school in a black neighborhood. Black children will be bused into all-white South End schools. The setting is about as territorial as it gets and a bomb is set to go off.

That bomb is Mary Pat Fennessey. She’s a native of the Southie projects, daughter of an abused household who passes on some of that abuse to her own family. One husband has been killed and the second one is estranged. Her son Noel returned from Vietnam with a habit and he dies from an overdose. Mary Pat only has her 17-year-old daughter Jules. Jules goes out with friends one night and doesn’t come home. A young black man has been murdered and Jules and her friends were somehow involved. Everyone tells Mary Pat to be patient, her daughter will turn up, you know how kids are. But Mary Pat has been pushed too far this time. Irish mobsters try to buy her silence and that tells her one thing: her daughter is dead because she’s witnessed a murder and someone is going to pay. Many someones pay dearly at Mary Pat’s hand.

Lehane does a wonderful job weaving Mary Pat’s vengeance with rowdy anti-busing rallies, the oil embargo, and the poverty and dysfunction of Irish-American Boston. The author takes us on a tour of neighborhoods and the entire city. Even Sen. Ted Kennedy makes an appearance. This is what is happening in Boston in August and September 1974.

The scene seems eerily familiar to a reader in 2023. Lehane makes class resentment very clear through the eyes of his characters. The inner-city white Boston neighborhoods have sent more kids to Vietnam than almost any other place in America. Most young men get drafted because they work menial jobs and do not have college deferments like all those kids across the river in Cambridge. When Mary Pat visits Harvard to seek help from her campus janitor ex-husband, you feel her disdain for the hippies in the city and the privileged white students protesting the war which won’t be declared over for another year.

If all of this sounds familiar, it is. These class resentments have been buildings for decades and politicians and media blowhards on the Right have tapped into it. It’s sad, and the book is sad. It’s a personal story. You feel Mary Pat’s rage in your gut and this reader is both shocked and saddened by her vendetta.

I lived in Boston 1972-73. I missed the fireworks of 1974. If I had been paying attention, I might have felt the city’s aching heart. Dennis Lehane’s gift to us is we get to feel what it was like to live in the Boston of almost 50 years ago. One hell of a story.

I looked at “Small Mercies” as a historical novel. It’s still a rough place in 2023. Real estate web site Upgraded Home talked listed Boston’s 10 most dangerous neighborhoods. South End – Southie -- was number three.

Our advice? If you find yourself in South End, keep an eye out for thieves, don’t get into arguments with people who just came from the local bars, and get a security system for your home.

And then there’s this from a recent issue of Boston Magazine:

In the last few decades, the South End has rapidly gentrified, once again becoming one of the city’s most stylish neighborhoods.

Mary Pat might not recognize the place. Then again, she might.

The land of historical fiction is a great place to visit

I belong to the Historical Fiction Book Lovers Facebook group. I spend a lot of time there suggesting books on various topics. I'm surprised by the number of novels that I've read that are based on historical events or eras. One person in the group asked about Native American historical novels and I rattled off some titles: "Mean Spirit" by Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan, "Children of the Lightning" by Kathleen O'Neal Gear, and "Ridgeline" by Michael Punke. Hogan's 1990 book is about the infamous Osage murders in Oklahoma in which tribal members were murdered for their oil rights. If it sounds familiar, it's also the subject of the the non-fiction book, "Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI" by David Grann. The book's been transformed into a movie due out in the fall. In it, the newly created FBI plays a role in exposing one of the grisliest conspiracies in U.S. history. While I knew about the Osage murders, I didn't know that the FBI blew the case wide open and that it helped propel it to bigger and stranger and unconstitutional things. But they're the good guys in this story. 

"Children of the Lightning" is an excellent novel by Wyoming writer Gear. The setting is the Central Florida East Coast and the Natives who made it their home in pre-Columbian times. Gear is not Native but she did her homework. I did some of my growing up in this part of Florida in the 1960s and 1970s. As I read the novel, I imagined Florida without the condos, tourist traps, and air conditioning. A slice of paradise but one with panthers and snakes, alligators and sharks. A wonderful read.

I reviewed "Ridgeline" for WyoFile in 2021. It tells the story of the Fetterman Fight (formerly called the Fetterman Massacre) along the Bozeman Trail's route in Wyoming. It's told from the POV of the tribes and cavalry with one particularly poignant view of the event through an officer's wife's secret diary. Punke wrote "The Revenant" in which mountain man Hugh Glass gets mauled by a bear and has to find his way home through the Wyoming wilds. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Glass but it's the imagined bear that steals the main scene. Grisly and scary. In high school, Punke was a history interpreter at Wyoming's Fort Laramie. He's also done his research on Red Cloud's War and has written a terrific novel. 

As I contemplated these books, I thought about books by Sherman Alexie, Debra Magpie Earling, and Joseph Marshall and poetry by Joy Harjo (Muscogee) and Simon Ortiz of the Acoma Pueblo. We're also seeing a revival of Native American series and movies. "Reservation Dogs" is an all-Native production that evokes the present and the past on the rez. Humorous and deadly serious. "Dark Winds" is another series featuring Navajo cops created by Anglo writer Tony Hillerman. In "1883," the bad guys are the killers from the Wyoming Cattlemen's Association and the guy in the white hat is an Indian who doesn't wear a hat. We writers like to see characters who defy stereotypes. We also like to see the times portrayed as what they probably were and not the whitewashed version as seen in old Hollywood westerns. 

I've read a lot of books. I have to mention one I'm reading now. "West with Giraffes" by Lynda Rutledge is a kooky tale of a 17-year-old hobo (Woody Nickel) in 1938 who volunteers to drive two giraffes from the East Coast to the San Diego Zoo. It's told from the POV of Nickel at 100 in a retirement home who writes his memoir and imagines one of the giraffes outside his window. 

I love the imagination writers bring to history. That's what fiction is all about. So many novels I admire were once just novels and now can be described as historical fiction. Every World War II novel including "Catch-22" and "Slaughterhouse-Five." Novels about the Old West, the Great Depression, even the 1960s and Vietnam. What was new is now old and that pretty much describes me too.

I discover Donald Westlake's novels and reminisce about John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee

I found Donald Westlake's Dortmunder books and they are fantastic. Always a caper going on. Always sharp dialogue and lots of humor. Westlake passed away in 2008 but I can see he's in the same school as Carl Hiaasen, Elmore Leonard, Janet Evanovich and Jerome Charyn. Maybe a dash of Don DeLillo too. So far I've read two of the volumes, "The Road to Ruin" and the first Dortmunder novel, "The Hot Rock." It was published in 1970. I didn't look that up until I finished but there were clues placed throughout. The cars they drive, the characters' language, ubiquitous phone booths, no personal computers. Its throwback quality didn't bother me. He had a skillful way of incorporating all of that into the narrative.  

What other crime-adjacent novels of that era would show such wit? I thought of John D. MacDonald, for instance, and his Travis McGee character. McGee probably had too much machismo for these times. He could be funny and ironic. He called himself a "salvage consultant" and lived on his "Busted Flush" houseboat docked at the Bahia Mar Marina. McGee's erstwhile sidekick is Meyer, an economist always ready for a McGee caper. He dwells on a neighboring boat named for his hero, John Maynard Keynes.

I worked at a Florida bookstore in the '70s and I brought MacDonald's novels to my mother Anna Shay (R.I.P Mom) and she devoured them. Me too. Travis and his Busted Flush houseboat. I could always see McGee's houseboat through MacDonald's imagination. Back in the '80s, my brother Dan and I visited Bahia Mar and stopped at Slip F-18. We thought about the McGee we knew from the books. Slip F-18 was declared a literary landmark in 1987, a year after the author's death. 

I did my usual Google search for Travis McGee and came up with an article by Kris Hundley on the Visit Florida site (couldn't find a pub date). The second paragraph about the Bahia Mar Marina set the tone for the story:

There's little room left for a boat bum like Travis McGee. 

She described present-day Bahia Mar in gritty detail.

Bahia Mar touts its ability to accommodate yachts up to 300 feet, even squeezing in a 312-footer recently for a month-long stay. The marina's 3,000-foot dock along the Intracoastal sports one mega-yacht after another. flawlessly polished hulls gleaming, white communications domes looming 50-feet overhead, docked so closely together that the uber-rich could step from one vessel to another without ever touching the ground. Not an inch of precious real estate is wasted.

Bahia Mar must have considered the literary landmark plaque dedicated to MacDonald as "wasted space." It now sits in the marina's office. Hundley wraps up the piece this way: 

A boat bum might seem forgotten among such glitz. But inside the marina office, the woman behind the desk said that not a week goes by that someone doesn't wander in, looking for the slip once occupied by Travis McGee. She is not sure what the fuss is about: she's never read the books. 

Made me want to bang my head against the desk. MacDonald and McGee would have had a few things to say about the wretched excess of 21st century Florida. As a self-described "salvage consultant," McGee usually was coming to the aid of a trusting soul who had been ripped by someone who would own a 312-foot mega-yacht. His price was always half of the recovered loot. When the client objected, his usual response was "half of something is better that nothing." MacDonald also wrote the best-selling "Condominium" which tore into the thoughtless development going on in coastal Florida which has not abated in the 46 years since the novel's original publication. 

During his lifetime, MacDonald got great reviews from the likes of Hiaasen and Kurt Vonnegut. Here's what Vonnegut said about MacDonald's work:

“To diggers a thousand years from now, the works of John D. MacDonald would be a treasure on the order of the tomb of Tutankhamen."

I feel a need to reread Travis McGee, see how he holds up in these fast-moving and confusing times.

Mike Miller posted an updated article on Travis McGee on Jan. 28. It was on the Florida Back Roads Travel site. In it, he writes about how he first came upon MacDonald's character when his father visited him in Florida in 1964 and gave him a copy of "The Deep Blue Good-by." His father was reading the latest novel, "Nightmare in Pink." Miller read "Deep Blue" and was hooked. He's read the entire series, some of them twice, and is a devoted fan. Read Miller's essay to understand what makes McGee tick, and why his books are still in print. 

My mother died too young in 1986, a McGee fan to the end. Mike Miller's father died in a St. Cloud, Fla., nursing home in 1986, the same year MacDonald died. Miller Senior's dying message to his son was "Nightmare in Pink." 

Now that's a fan.

In "Alas, Babylon," The Big One drops and we see what happens

I was eight years old in the fall of 1959. We lived in the southwest Denver suburbs and my father worked at the Martin-Marietta plant further south. Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons plant was seven miles to the northwest. Further north were swarms of missile silos in northern Colorado, southeast Wyoming, and eastern Nebraska. During the school year, we participated in duck-and-cover drills at our neighborhood school. Nukes were a fact of life. The Cold War was in its prime. 

1959-1960 is the setting for Pat Frank's novel, "Alas, Babylon." The title (I read the 1993 HarperCollins trade paperback edition) is taken from scripture, the origin of so many book titles for classic novels. This from Revelation 18:10 in the King James Bible:

Standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas, that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come.

Randy Bragg and his brother Mark grew up in the hamlet of Fort Repose, Florida. Randy served in the Korean War and went home to live the life of a bachelor attorney. Mark went into the Air Force and was a colonel in the Strategic Air Command in Omaha. He and Randy shared a code, “Alas, Babylon,” if it looked as if World War III was about to break out. One day, Randy gets the code from his brother who sends his wife and kids to Fort Repose because it will be safer than Nebraska’s Ground Zero.

Fort Repose was like so many 1950s Central Florida small towns. Its history included Native Americans, Spanish conquistadors, Confederate troops, and rednecks. It’s sleepy, hot and humid for half the year, site of Florida natives and a smattering of Yankee retirees known as snowbirds. African-Americans were called Negroes and some unflattering names by the ruling Whites. The living was easy but also separate and unequal. Disney existed only on TV and the movies. 

Bam! As Randy Newman wrote much later in his song, "Political Science:" 

Let's drop The Big One, and see what happens

And then:

Boom goes London, boom Paree/More room for you, and more room for me/And every city, the whole world 'round/Will be just another American Town.

Newman's satiric take is closer to my Strangelove-style attitude of "WTF were we thinking?"

Fort Repose is just another American town surrounded by important Russki targets in Tampa, Orlando, Jacksonville, and Miami. Boom goes Tampa and boom Miami. Nobody really knows how it started but survivors have much to deal with.

That's the great thing about Frank's novel -- he writes in detail about the daily struggles of a small town beleaguered by a Cold War turned hot. Randy is the only Army Reserve officer in town so he assumes command. He’s a good officer, mainly, although he does boss people around a bit. He also organizes a vigilante squad to go after “highwaymen,” nogoodniks who have beaten and murdered people in the town. They even hang one as a lesson to all.

The book is about survival, post-apocalyptic-style. It made me wonder how I would survive. I have no skills to speak of. Randy is a shade-tree mechanic, hunter, and fisherman. His cohorts in the town know which end of the rifle to point at deer and the occasional ruffian. They knows how to catch fish and crabs, where to find salt, which plants are edible. There’s a doctor in town and a retired admiral with his own fleet of small boats. There’s a love interest. And the ending is sort of happy.

As I read, I had to put aside my 2023 aesthetics. The Whites treat the Blacks as second-class citizens except when they need their automotive or farming skills. The attitude is not much different from characters found in Flannery O’Connor stories and William Faulkner novels. They were born into it and acted accordingly. Our family moved to Central Florida in 1964 and attitudes hadn’t changed much. My father worked on rockets at the Cape where before he had worked on the kind of missiles that rained down on the Reds in “Alas, Babylon.” Our integrated high school basketball team got into many scrapes when we ventured outside our beachside tourist town to play teams in the hinterlands. Places like Fort Repose.

If I was reviewing this book now, I’d call some of the language and attitudes archaic even racist. The book itself is solid. Frank knows how to tell a story and he did his research, not surprising when you learn a bit about his background. He was a Florida writer, too, living in a place like Fort Repose. He asked the question: what would my neighbors do if the Big One dropped? The author delivered. I read a book about nuclear war set and written in 1959, 63 years ago, a book I had never heard of. My sister Eileen sent me her copy which she already read. Not surprisingly, the cover features a bright red mushroom cloud.

Let’s drop The Big One now!

Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932, captures the city between the wars

I’ve always been fascinated with Paris in the 1920s and 30s. The inter-war period. The tensions of those years add pizzaz to any book. So many writers lived and worked there. A sojourn to Paris was almost mandatory. Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce. Artists, too, notably Picasso. Discovered some others as I read “Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932,” a 2014 novel by Francine Prose. The author tells her story of the 1930s and wartime occupation through the pages of imagined letters, memoirs, and journals by the book’s principals. The two main characters were inspired by real people. Gabor Tsenyi is a Hungary-born photographer who hones the craft of low-light nighttime photography as he prowls Paris streets, brothels, and bars. Lou Villars is a French woman athlete who ends up torturing prisoners for the Gestapo. Gabor is based on the famous photographer Bressai. He is best known for his pics of the demimonde who hung out at Le Monocle, the “Cabaret”–like club that attracted the city’s artists and LGBTQ crowd that dared to be cross-dressing club regulars in the thirties but risked danger when the war came. Villars is based on Violette Morris, a lesbian athlete who came under Hitler’s spell at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

The era is an attractive one for writers. Many of those who fled to Paris were survivors of the Great War and facing Great War Part 2 in 1939-45. Some 70 million residents of Planet Earth died in the Great War. It was, as historian Barbara Tuchman and others have written, the war that changed everything. Four-plus years of horror were embedded into the conscience of a generation that was tagged with the term “lost generation.” Survivors may have been lost but not as lost as the millions of ghosts who roam Ypres and Verdun and forever inhabit Europe’s psyche. An entire generation of young people was almost wiped off the planet. Small villages in England, France, and Germany lost every one of its young men. The world never got over it, nor should it.

This showed up in the work of the era’s creatives. Bressai’s famous photo, “Lesbian Couple at Le Monocle 1932,” shows a hefty woman in a man’s suit sitting next to a thin woman in a sparkly dress. The look on their faces can be interpreted many ways. To me, they look to the future with a mixture of dread and hope. It attracted the book’s author, was even the catalyst for years of research and writing. Did they stay together? Were they rounded up like other “undesirables” by the Nazis? Prose wondered too, as a similar photo by her fictional photographer is crucial to the arc of the novel. As I read the novel, I decided to look up this photographer and found his work all over the web. He captured a Paris that was both romantic and squalid.

It took awhile for me to get into the novel’s rhythm. It seemed a bit contrived at first. And then I got into the flow of the intermittent narratives. I was both a reader and a writer studying the technique as I went along. Most of the samples picked up where the other left off. But not always. The reader has to do some work to tie together the narrative threads. After a hundred pages, that became part of the book’s charm. Who is speaking, and when, and can this narrator be trusted? Don’t we always wonder if the teller of a tale is trustworthy or not?

Almost as much fun discovering new novels as it is reading them

My sisters sent my wife Chris some Barnes & Noble gift cards to ease her path through chemotherapy. I went right to B&N Online and ordered three novels. Chris requested "Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald," a NYT bestseller by Theresa Anne Fowler. It sounds fascinating. The book apparently was the inspiration for the streaming series "Z: The Beginning of Everything." I watched it and was a bit disappointed and I can't really say why. I can read the novel (the book is always better!) when Chris finishes.

The story of the Fitzgeralds is high drama by which I mean terribly sad. I wrote a prose poem, "Rockets Over Fitzgerald," after watching Fourth of July fireworks from St. Mary's Churchyard in Rockville, Maryland. It was published in Poetry Hotel. 

I remembered another author with the last name Fowler as I was browsing. Connie May Fowler is a Florida native who writes beautifully, about people and about Florida, about everything really. After meeting Connie at Literary Connection in Cheyenne, I read her excellent novel, "The Problem with Murmur Lee." I ordered for Chris "How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly." I lost track of time as I read its opening section at the B&N site. It takes me back to summer solstice days in central Florida when the temp is 92 degrees at 7 a.m. and rising. 

The best batch of stories I've read in a long time is "Florida" by Lauren Groff. My favorite may be "Dogs Go Wolf" published in the New Yorker and available on audio at online when you go to the August 21, 2017, issue (I listened for free for some unknown reason). The story is about two little girls who get stranded on on an island and the creative ways they find to survive. Groff's style is captivating. What a story. I look forward to talking to Chris about it, see what she thinks of it. 

Fiction welcomes us into strange new worlds

Lisa See's latest novel, The Island of Sea Women, could have been set on a distant world. On a little known volcanic island , women have been harvesting their food from the sea for generations. They are called haenyeo. They go into the ocean year-round but only when the shaman says so. These women practice rituals for the sea goddess. They float out to likely spots, breathe deeply, and dive to the sea bed for edible sea creatures. They eat some of the catch but keep most for family and to sell at the market. Many have been lost to wicked currents or injury. They persevere through genocide and famine and family feuds.

Otherworldy, right? Reminds me of the Fremen of  Arrakis harvesting spice and fighting off sand worms. 

But the island of sea women is a volcanic island named Jeju south of the Korean mainland. The women are real and have been diving for generations. See bases her excellent novel on these women.

“Every woman who enters the sea carries a coffin on her back. In this world, the undersea world, we tow the burdens of a hard life."

The story opens with the main character, Young-sook. We experience the culture through her life, from a child during Japan's World War II Korean occupation to 2008 as to old lady who still dives.  Her life is a series of challenges within her haenyeo clan, her family, other islanders, and invaders from Japan (World War II) and the U.S. (Korean War). See's story time travels, jumping from a present-day setting with Young-sook as a clan elder all the way back to her turbulent youth. Jeju now is a tourist hot spot with the usual assortment of clueless visitors. One of them is the granddaughter of her childhood friend Mi-Ja. Now the fully Americanized granddaughter butts into Young-sook's life and wants the real story about the conflict that shattered a friendship and sent Mi-ja off to America. The island people are survivors. Young-sook may be the most stubborn member of her clan. She resents the young woman but ends up opening up her life to her. And to us. 

Think about your image of 21st century Koreans. BTS, BlackPink and K-Pop. The bustling modern city of Seoul. The new Korean cinema, films such as Train to Busan and the Squid Game series, and comedies like Kim's Convenience about a Canadian-Korean family's convenience store. The Korean-made Korean War film Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War, may be an even more in-your-face war film than Saving Private Ryan. There is also the hermit authoritarian kingdom of North Korea which, to many Koreans, seems like another world. And is. Witness some wonderful novels about the North. My favorite thus far is The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson. It's illuminating how Americans are seen through the eyes of others. Those who know their history would not be surprised. 

The imaginary world helps us see the world in all its glory and horror.