Bowlaway: a novel

 Bowlaway: a novel

Elizabeth McCracken (2019, Harper Collins)

“They found a body in the Salford Cemetery, but aboveground and alive.” How’s that for an opener! “A body,” because Bertha Truitt was unconscious, lying in the frozen-over early spring grass, with no footsteps to show how she got there. The year is 1900, or thereabouts. Bertha’s of an indeterminate, middling age, and has nothing whatever to say about her past. The bag she has with her adds to the oddity, containing as it does a small wooden ball and a narrow wooden object, which turn out to be a candlepin: she’s going to bring the town a new sport. In short order, she builds a bowling alley, with a cellar below and an apartment above.

Truitt’s Alleys welcomes all comers, and Bertha attracts a claque of women bowlers. It would be scandalous not to at least conceal them with some kind of curtain, except that Bertha Truitt won’t think of such a thing. Let them ogle, let them gawk, if they will–her sublime unconcern sets them at naught. Joe Wear, the cemetery watchman who discovered her, becomes the manager of the lanes; Dr. Leviticus Sprague, the doctor who was there when she came to, becomes her husband. He’s a black man–Bertha’s unconcerned about that, too–with relatives on a farm Down East who are waiting for him to come to his senses and come home.

Elizabeth McCracken gives us the whole of the twentieth century in the history of this modest bowling alley. It survives Bertha’s death in one true-but-unlikely misadventure, and Dr. Sprague’s death in another; it survives the Depression, by being the cheapest entertainment in town. Nahum Truitt, her son (can it be so?) comes down out of Maine to take over; he marries, and raises two sons to carry on a while longer. A neon sign goes up; pinball machines are installed; the human pinsetters are replaced by automation; the seasons turn.

McCracken has a distinctive gift for strangeness, both in language and in narrative. The story of Truitt’s lanes, or of candlepin bowling itself, is a story of genealogy, and of love. “Maybe somebody else had invented the game first. That doesn’t matter. We have all of us invented things that others have beat us to: walking upright, a certain sort of sandwich involving avocado and an onion roll, a minty sweet cocktail, ourselves, romantic love, human life.” That crescendo from sandwich to human life is comic, in its way; it’s also profoundly true, if you’re in the mood to let fiction can get past your defenses.

For dessert: I listened to WBUR’s Only a Game religiously for the entire 27-year run of the show, and still miss it, of a Saturday morning. In 1994, in the shadow of the Ken Burns Baseball documentary series, Only a Game had a crack at New England’s own candlepin bowling, in about as many minutes as Burns needed hours. Enjoy– 

https://www.wbur.org/onlyagame/2018/07/27/candlepin-bowling-ken-burns

A Gentleman in Moscow

A Gentleman in Moscow

Amor Towles (Viking Penguin, 2016)

“It is not the business of gentlemen to have occupations.” Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, recipient of the Order of Saint Andrew, member of the Jockey Club, Master of the Hunt, must surely be considered a gentleman. But in 1922, in Moscow, all such honorifics are definitely considered surplus to requirements. A committee of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs has sentenced the count to the most internal of all possible exiles, the Metropol Hotel just a few city blocks from the Kremlin itself. He’s been living there for four years, since his return from Paris. What brought him back? “I missed the climate,” he quips to the committee, which is not amused.

If you have to be confined to one building for the rest of your life, you could do worse than the Metropol, a legendarily cosmopolitan hotel in the center of Moscow, cheek by jowl with the Bolshoi Theater and the Kremlin. There’s a barbershop on the premises, as well as a coffee shop, a bar, and two restaurants, one of them extremely fine. At the outset, though, the Count feels the walls closing in on him. The prospect of endless days reading the paper in the lobby, where the revolving door taunts him with the unattainable out-of-doors, looks like soul-crushing ennui.

All the more so since he’s left his long-term lodging, a suite on the third floor. His status as a non-person affords him only an attic room once used by valets who accompanied well-to-do guests. Happily, though, he makes the acquaintance of Nina Kulikova, age nine. He’s not a man with much use for children, as a rule, but the two become fast friends, and she shows him backstage and below-stairs dimensions of the Metropol that it had never occurred to him to be curious about. “In the time that Nina had been in the hotel, the walls had not grown inward, they had grown outward, expanding in scope and intricacy. In her first weeks, the building had grown to encompass half of Moscow.” Under Nina’s tutelage, Count Alexander is capable of the kind of attentiveness that will let him experience the same thing.

His gift for friendship will be an abiding asset over time, as will his acute social sense: he’s just the man you’d want to place the diners at a party for forty, having consulted for his grandmother as a youth. It’s a talent he brings to the Boyarski, the five-star restaurant on the second floor of the hotel, where he joins the staff assisting his friends, Andrey, the maitre d’; and Emile, the redoubtable chef. He’ll have need of all his friends when Nina reappears as a young woman, only to hand off her little girl and disappear again.

As time passes, we see Russia and the Soviet Union mostly at an ironic distance: “Let us concede that the early thirties in Russia were unkind.” Various congresses and committee meetings are held in the hotel, and there’s one terribly dislikeable employee who rises through the ranks by virtue of his utility as a government stooge. But if the hotel is a prison, it’s also a refuge, where good conversation can be had over good food and drink.

I hear that a miniseries of this book is airing on Showtime this spring. I’m leaning toward giving it a miss, though. As with Towles’s other books, which I recently reviewed, the writing itself is a great part of the pleasure. In my mind’s eye, Count Alexander Ilyich should have been a role for Claude Raines, complete with a quiet courtesy, a certain twinkle in the eye, and a great capacity for watchfully awaiting developments. Maybe I’ll just read it again.

 

 

 

published by email, May 2024

Silent Cavalry

Silent Cavalry: How Union Soldiers from Alabama helped Sherman burn Atlanta–and then got written out of history.

Howell Raines (2023, Crown Publishing)

        This one’s for the folks back home in Alabama. Many of my friends there are, like Howell Raines, descended from the settlers of Winston, Walker, and surrounding counties. Birmingham’s industrial base attracted thousands of men whose Scots-Irish ancestors had scratched out a living in the last mountains of the Appalachian chain. The residents of Winston County, in particular, have long enjoyed a reputation as combative and stubbornly independent people. They went so far, during the Civil War, as to secede from Alabama, declaring themselves the Free State of Winston. While this was more a slogan than a reality, the county sent more people than any other, to cross Union lines and form up as the First Alabama Cavalry, USA.

         That so many Alabamians took up arms for the Union is one of those stories that falls between the cracks of the standard histories. Howell Raines went looking for the history, and for the reasons it has tended to be lost. He’s actually been thinking about this for most of his life, in the background of his long career as a journalist. (I’ve been familiar with his name since the late 1960’s, when he worked at the Birmingham News with my father.)

        The First Alabama came into being after General Ormsby M. Mitchel pressed down from Nashville to seize Huntsville and Decatur in the spring of 1862, shortly after the battle of Shiloh. Controlling the Tennessee River was an essential step to splitting the Confederate State into two parts. It also made Northern lines a relatively short walk from all over north Alabama, and an attractive destination compared with conscription into the rebel army at the point of a gun.

       Contemporary reports from Union officers praise the unit’s toughness; it saw valorous action at the battles of Chickamauga, Lookout Mountain, and Missionary Ridge; Sherman used a couple of its companies in the vanguard of his march to Atlanta and beyond. Raines says, “Hill country partisan that I am, I take the First Alabama’s lack of legendary status as proof of the suppressive power of Lost Cause historiography.” The Lost Cause is a manufactured myth, in which “the war was not a heroic crusade to abolish slavery; instead it became a tragic story of undeserved suffering inflicted on a noble, if misguided, class of southern aristocrats….”

       The myth’s manufacture is quite an interesting story in its own right. An editor of the Richmond Examiner brought out a book called The Lost Cause in June 1866, which ascribed ‘aristocracy and chivalry’ to the slave-holding way of life: “The civilization of the North was coarse and materialistic. That of the South was scant of shows, but highly refined and sentimental.” The late-nineteenth-century historian William Archibald Dunning, of Columbia University, sent Lost Cause acolytes into leading universities all across the South, ensuring that the academy would tell a harmonious story for most of the twentieth century.

      In that context, the mystery of the First Alabama’s disappearance from history is not so hard to parse. Neither the University of Alabama nor the Alabama Department of Archives and History had any interest in memorializing Alabama’s poorest and least Confederate county. Lost Cause historians regarded men from the hills with scorn; by definition, they couldn’t have done anything noble or meritorious. In their loyalty to the Union, they were, by definition, traitors. Howell Raines begs to differ.

      This is a dense, chewy book. If you don’t already know a Bankhead from a Debardeleben, it might be a bit rich, but I found it delicious.

Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician: a novel

 

Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician: a novel

Daniel Wallace (Doubleday, 2007)

     “Every night Henry remained open to the possibility that this was the night his powers would return.” It’s hard to imagine a more down-on-his-luck man than Henry Walker, Negro Magician, in 1954. He’s been with Jeremiah Mosgrove’s Chinese Circus for four years, and his magical powers are long in the past. He was hired because, if a crowd comes to see a Negro doing magic, and he can’t do any, they’ll at least get some comedy out of it. 

 

      “How low he had fallen. The memory of all he had once been taunted him.” This is a story about memory and storytelling. We’re going to hear his story as he has told it to his friends from the traveling show: JJ the Barker; Rudy, the Strongest Man in the World; Jenny, the Ossified Girl; and Jeremiah Mosgrove himself. 

 

     From Rudy, we get the story of Henry’s family coming down in the world, when he was ten. His mother died of TB, the house was lost to the bank, and his father took a job as janitor at a resort hotel. Henry and his nine-year-old sister, Hannah, had the somewhat illicit run of the place, and Henry has a fairy-tale encounter with a magician. Mr. Sebastian begins by teaching him tricks, proceeding to invest him, apparently, with magic, so powerful that he makes his sister disappear. It’s the kind of disaster a boy might never recover from. 

 

      Mr. Sebastian disappears too, as you might imagine; a desultory police search finds nothing. Henry and his father get on with their Depression lives, and find a manager for Henry’s career as a magician. Tom Hailey spots the pair as desperate enough to go for his suggestion that Henry pass as a Negro, with the aid of a sunlamp and some pills Hailey can provide. When Henry suggests that this might be telling a lie, Hailey says “Lying? Hardly. Do you think I could be in business for as long as I have if I were a liar? Absolutely not. It’s an illusion, Henry. It’s part of the act.”

 

      It’s an illusion that couldn’t be sustained if the black teenager had a white father, and so Henry faces another loss, another disappearance. “It’s not the number of losses but their size that counts….a boy whose mother dies before his ninth birthday, whose luminous sister is stolen from him before his eleventh, and whose father falls into the hopeless arms of death and lies there dying a little bit every day in plain sight of his son and the world–these are the real losses, the ones that tear into the body and bleed the soul.”

 

      This all sounds pretty bleak, but I found it compelling, too. The Chinese Circus is a perfect distillation of sacrifice and loneliness, but Henry has true friends there. The story of his life and losses gets told enough different ways, from enough different angles, to introduce doubt about which is the true story. The magic, for one thing–do you want to believe that Henry could saw a woman in half, and put her back together? Where did it come from, if it’s real, and where did it go? Was Mr. Sebastian the Devil, or was Henry just dazzled?

 

      And of course, a story can be true even when it isn’t quite factual. A story that’s all loss can still be beautiful. We go through life accepting hearsay evidence as the best we can get; we live first, and understand later, if we ever do.

March 1, 2024 by email.

Tom Lake

Tom Lake: A Novel

Ann Patchett (2023, Harper Collins)

    Sixteen-year-old Laura showed up at auditions for Our Town just to help out at the registration table. But you never know: watching the first people trying out gave her a strong sense that she could do a better job, so she filled out a form (casually dropping the ‘u’ from her name), stood still for a Polaroid headshot, and won the role of Emily for the first time.

    That’s chapter one of the story the now fifty-something Lara is telling her three daughters in the summer of 2020. They have a good deal of time for stories, because they are all home in Michigan, on the family cherry farm, working long days to get the sweet fruit in. There aren’t as many migrant fruit pickers as usual, but the daughters have been in these orchards all their lives. It’s familiar work, in beautiful circumstances.

    The story they want is how their mother knew Peter Duke, before he went on to become a dream-boat movie star. A decade before, when they were emerging teenagers, their father had dropped a bombshell: “You know your mother used to date him.” Since they’re now nearly as old as Lara was then, they want the real story. And she’ll give it to them, though not exactly all of it.

    Peter and Lara were thrown together in a season of summer stock at Tom Lake, a pretty little Michigan town whose theater provides work for up-and-coming actors; it’s also a refuge for third-rate television stars whose names will sell tickets. Lara is tapped to play Emily because she knows the part; she’s actually been to Hollywood and made a movie already, but this role is really her wheelhouse.

     Peter is to play her father, Editor Webb. He’s not yet famous, but he’s easily the most charismatic and athletic man in the company, the sort of fellow who can do a handstand on the back of a chair, in the middle of a conversation. Such casual physicality is part and parcel of the intensity of the compressed summer season. The actors indulge in lunchtime swimming and evening tennis, drinking and late nights, romances and betrayals, as though they’ll be twenty-four forever. It’s in the nature of such bubbles, however, to pop and be gone.

     Though her one movie was an artistic success, Lara is thoroughly content to have wound up as a wife and mother in northern Michigan. The setting is an intentional nod to Chekhov; as in The Cherry Orchard, developers “are the enemies of stone fruit. They would leave just enough trees in the ground to justify calling the place Cherry Hills or Cherry Lane, then pull the rest up and build pretty white summer houses with picture windows and wraparound porches, places we could never afford.”

     At best, growing fruit is a tough business: sometimes the crop fails. Other times, everyone grows so much that the price craters, and nobody makes any money. “The farm is either the very paradise of Eden or a crushing burden of disappointment and despair manifested in fruit, depending on the day. I would love to leave my child Eden. The other stuff, less so.” 

    As surely as anything, though, you can’t leave your child only one side of the coin. For every first-act Emily, the smartest girl in school, there’s a third-act Emily, dying in childbirth, leaving a young husband who doesn’t know what hit him. Like Our Town, this book is about growth, change, and memory. It’s about how lovely the ordinary is, and how fleeting; and also how mothers and daughters can never fully know each other’s stories.

Feb 1, 2024