Time to get down to them here, brass tacks, that is. Strange expression isn't it? Wonder exactly where it comes from, what it means? The particular tacks I'm thinking of right now are the books I mentioned in the entry I wrote yesterday: The Memory of Running, and The Secret of Hurricanes.
Ron McLarty's book, The Memory of Running, was first brought out as an audiobook three years ago when he was unable to find a publisher for it. Which is a complete mystery to me - when one thinks of all the dreck that gets published, day in day out, that this compellingly wonderful book had trouble seeing the light of day, one can only say WTF? A blurb from Library Journal says this:
Library Journal
Stuck without a publisher for this first novel, actor McLarty did an audio original with Recorded Books that Stephen King raved about in Entertainment Weekly. But how many people know that it was actually librarian Tia Maggio (Middleburg PL, VA) who brought the book to the attention of agent Jeff Kleinman? Maggio fell in love with the tape, used it in a book group (some listeners cried), and even got the author to come and read from the manuscript. "The characters are all so real," she explains of the book's appeal. Eventually, the book was sold to Viking for $2 million, with a Warner's deal and the sale of rights to 12 countries quickly following. Not bad for the gentle tale of washed-up Smithy Ide, who takes an impulsive bike ride across America to search for his sister.
It's the story of Smithy Ide, an overweight chain-smoking living-in-denial drunk. Smithy is a total loser, who works in a factory in Providence RI, doing quality control on action figures. At night he drinks, smokes, watches TV and tunes out the world. The novel begins at the point where this assiduously unexamined life is about to change completely.
I just wrote a paragraph about that change, then deleted it - I don't want to give away any of the details of this story. Suffice it to say that Smithy sets out on an extaordinary journey across the country, supposedly on the errand of claiming his long-vanished sister's body. In the sense that it's a novel about one man's journey into reclaiming his life, I suppose it could be called a picaresque novel, among other things. This is a story of salvation, resurrection, hope in the darkest of situations. Characters who have been broken in body and soul find redemption, without sentimentality or false expectations, a very human redemption in a world of human flaws, loss, love, and mystery. Mystery, yes, that's exactly the word I wanted. Love and redemption are perhaps always, in some way, mysteries.
Here's a link to the Bookbrowse page on Running. You can read a long excerpt there, decide for yourself if it doesn't make you need to immediately lay hands on it somehow. It also has make me decide to get my bicycle out of the garage and get it tuned up.
Next, Theresa Williams' small lovely novel, The Secret of Hurricanes. I like a book this size, it reminds me of the format of many of the books published by Algonquin Press of North Carolina. Yes, I also judge books by their cover, uh huh. That too. No, really, I think everything about a book should be pleasing, including the physical format. I read this book last Sunday, curled up in pillows, almost not moving from beginning page to final page. Theresa warned me it was a painful story, and I had read some reviews before I started. Theresa is herself a member of our AOL Journal community, and we have been journal friends for a while now. I feel very privileged to be able to say that.
The novel flows in a poetical, almost stream-of-consciousness style from the mind of Pearl Sterling, a woman of 45 living in an old trailer in a small town near the North Carolina coast. Pearl is unmarried, a loner, and, now, mysteriously pregnant. During much of the book Pearl is addressing her as-yet-unborn baby, whom she is sure is a girl child. We see Pearl's current life, and learn about her childhood and teenage years as she talks to the baby and to us. Her life has been a storm of devastating experiences, loss, abuse, confusion, lovelessness, isolation. She has weathered them, as her home state has weathered hurricane after hurricane, and has made a life for herself. Not a life most people would think amounts to much, but she knows it's a kind of miracle. Pearl weaves rugs for sale to the tourist trade, not anything fancy, but handmade useful things. She weaves them of scraps of castoffs from other peoples' lives, creating what are called ragrugs. I find this craft a metaphor for her own life, which she has created out of the bits and pieces she has salvaged from the ruins. We are also given bits and pieces from Shakespeare and from the troubled lives of the Kennedy clan, lives Pearl studies and scrapbooks. From the salvaged bits and pieces, new craft, new life. Life hits us the way hurricanes do, suddenly and drastically, but there's not much we can do to avoid the consequences of either life or hurricanes. I think the secret of hurricanes is to weather them, ride them out. Take what's left, and when the sun comes out - take it.
Here is Pearl musing at the end of the novel:
"You floated past dead pigs and horses, past cedar trees where little drowned children came to rest. You climbed the stairs to attics and roofs as the rivers filled your homes and covered the heads of gods in your churches. And though you've got your regrets, hands reached for that drifted away, you were saved, and that's your center now. You hung on to your scant lives.
Now when you see the sun, take it. And when you see the rain, remember. The rain's still a blessing when you consider how much water in a lifetime a person drinks.
Look at the sky. Think, even as you fear its bigness or its darkness or its noise, one day you may forgive it.
A little. Be thankful. Yes, be thankful! And, above all, be ernestly kind."
I found a lot of echoes of other southern writers in this book, Dorothy Allison and Flannery O'Connor in particular. And when I did some research on Williams as a writer I found this page with an interview, also this one, and found that she acknowledges both writers as influences. On the first site you have links to lots of stuff, including an excerpt from the book. As for Theresa herself, she's right here in our journal pages, come meet her and share her deeply felt journal on writing.
In an odd way, I think these two novels have a common theme. Both of them find hope and beauty in lives that most would consider fit for nothing but the trash heap. As an inveterate trash picker, I say - right on! I have found some amazing treasures set out on the curb, or at the dump.
