Just Finished -- The Darling

The Darling by Russell Banks -- My first introduction to Russell Banks was an afternoon in the car, driving toward New Orleans and listening to This American Life on National Public Radio. I'd chanced upon it while changing stations between towns and happened to catch it at the very beginning of Banks's reading of Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story about a narcissistic man's affair with a homely woman. It was good-- the kind of story where you hear lines and think, "Wow. I wish I'd written that." It stayed with me for a long time. But there was something "off" about it. And I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Until I read The Darling.
The Darling is the story of Hannah Musgrave, a 59-year-old woman who owns a farm in the Adirondacks and whose life remains a mystery to everyone around her. Through her narrative, Hannah tells us about how she had been a priviledged child of the '60's and a member of the violent radical Weather Underground, who fled the United States and began life anew as the wife of a mid-level bureaucrat in the African country of Liberia.
It is the story of her life as a wife to her African husband, a mother to her three African children and caretaker of a number of chimpanzees in an American pharmaceutical research facility in Liberia, and her betrayal of virtually everyone who loved her -- her parents, her friends, her children, her husband, her chimpanzees -- against the backdrop of the turbulent '60s and the political upheaval surrounding Liberia's civil war.
I had a difficult time reading this book, mainly because the main character was so unsympathetic. Frankly, if I hadn't been stuck at my daughter's school for three hours, I might've put it down and not finished it.
Oddly enough, I got the impression that Banks wanted us to feel sympathy for Hannah. Banks did a wonderful job in his portrayal of Hannah's mother, whose clueless narcissism helped explain Hannah's own self-centered nature. But it failed to excuse it, and I got the feeling after finishing the novel that he hadn't quite fleshed Hannah out completely, even though she seemed aware that she was selfish and was not able to feel the proper emotions a wife; friend; daughter; and, particularly, mother; should feel.
He never quite completely developed the character, and it occurs to me that this is what bothered me about Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story. Perhaps it's intentional. Narcissists aren't fully developed characters. They are, instead, two-dimensional creatures incapable of the full range of real human emotions and empathy. If that's the case, he succeeded brilliantly.
The only real emotional attachment Hannah makes throughout the story is for the chimpanzees in her care, and I never could quite figure out why. The background story of Liberia's history is fascinating, and there is real tension in the plot.
I have read stories by Banks, however, that are simply wonderful. Rule of the Bone was brilliant, and I recommend it to all. I also recommend Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story. It's a fine piece of writing that left me mulling over it for weeks after I heard it. To hear it read by Banks, himself, on This American Life, go to: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1059

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On the Bedside Table

The Darling by Russell Banks
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
Collected Poems by Philip Larkin
God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens

Just Finished - The Judas Field

The Judas Field by Howard Bahr -- The story of Cass Wakefield, a confederate soldier during the Civil War, his friend and compatriot, Roger; and the young orphan boy, Lucifer; who stumbled into their lives and onto the battlefied during this country's most horrific war. Twenty years after the war, the scars that linger, both literal and psychical on the landscape of the South, her defenders and her citizenry culminate in a shocking but inevitable climax.
This book left me weeping openly and dumbstruck at the talent that Howard Bahr has for some of the most beautiful, poetic prose I have ever encountered, even while describing the ugliest moments of our country's history. The characters in this book grappled not only with an enemy of their own house, but the ghosts of the dead and dying whose presence was ever constant, a God whose seeming indifference challenged their faith, and -- most of all -- with themselves, whose demons followed them from the battlefield to haunt their dreams and waking moments forevermore.
With dialogue typical of the quaint Southern patois 150 years ago, Bahr's characters are sympathetic, even while committing atrocities that would shock today's calloused reader:

Well," said Lucian, "there's no sense in praying a-tall, if you ask me."
Roger laughed again and slapped the boy's leg. "There you have it," he said. "No sense in it a-tall. To ask for protection is pure lunacy, lad, especially when the other side is doing the same, and to the same address. That's exactly why everybody prays, you see; it's all we have to offer commensurate with the madness."
"But if God -- "

"Hush," said Roger. "Be still and listen. You must have your faith, and it will be sore tested when you see what's left after a fight, what's hanging in the trees and spread over the ground -- that place you saw back at Muscle Shoals was a garden by comparison. You look around, and you might be tempted to ask where God was when all this happened."
"Well, where was He?" asked Lucian.
"He was there," said Roger. "He was there all along, watching and grieving...." "...We have lost pretty much everything, but faith we must not lose. That is why we pray, and fervently -- but not for preservation, mind. That article is left to you and your pards, not to God. To ask Him for it, and be spared when so many are not, will only doom your faith."
"What do you ask for, then?" said the boy.
Roger pulled the quilt around his shoulders. "To be forgiven," he said.
They were quiet then. The snow swirled around them, borne on a cutting wind, and through it ghostly shapes began to pass, bending, searching, speaking softly. Little stars of candlelight pricked out in the whiteness as men gathered their belongings. A murmur rose from the camps; the army was stirring, its vast and myriad soul already in motion toward the mystery that waited beyond the river.

This is not a book for the lazy reader. It's a book to be savored, to marvel at, to grieve over. A beautiful, beautiful book.

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Just Finished - Water for Elephants

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen - This is the story of Jacob Jankowski, a 90-year-old nursing-home resident coming to terms with age and disability as seen through the lens of his past as a lonely young man during the Depression whose leap onto a night train landed him in the middle of a three-ring circus -- literally.
This was a quick, easy read that couldn't help but be fun. What's not to love about the down-and-dirty story of Carnival workers on a traveling circus, replete with a menagerie of big cats, camels, chimps and one big, tragic, lovable elephant named Rosie?
It's a simple story where the villians are villians and the heros are...well, human. Doesn't require too much thinking on the part of the reader -- just the kind of book to take to the beach or absorb after a long day at the office.

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