Because Trent demands I keep my promises…

Instead of posting the syllabi or giving brief thoughts on the classes so far, I will give brief reviews of the books we have read for ENG 545.

The Home Place by Wright Morris:

This was my first experience with the experiment form of photo-texts. Wright Morris combines black-and-white photographs with text to construct a story about memory, nostalgia, spatial boundaries, time, and family. Clyde Muncy returns home to Dust Bowl Nebraska after the Great Depression destroys his life in New York. He struggles to come to terms with the changes in his life, and gain acceptance from the family he left behind. At the core of this story is a man trying to come to terms with the most eternal question in literature: Who am I?

The photographs and text play off each other in a variety of ways: sometimes the images match the words perfectly whereas on other pages image and text seem to have no descriptive correspondence (though, it may have a thematic one).

I think this was the hardest part of reading a photo-text novel, figuring out how one should read a photograph. In class we spent a lot of time theorizing the nature of photographs. Is it a moment in time trapped forever, atemporal, like a memory (an image we can look at and smile about, but never return to)? Or do photographs possess a real life to them since they are of real objects that exist? A nostalgia that keeps those images alive forever…

According to John Hollander’s introduction to the book, Wright Morris was “a major American novelist.” I honestly never heard of him before this class and certainly never thought of him alongside Hemingway, Faulkner, or Cooper (you know, major American Novelists). Still, I am glad to have read the novel and may re-read it in the future (but it’s more like one of those novels I might re-read in like 10 or 20 years rather than one I am going to come back to again and again every couple of years).

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

This great novel combines genres and blurs the lines between myth, coming-of-age, Romance, and Western novels. Our hero, John Grady, crosses the border of Texas with his buddy, Rawlins, to an Eden-like Mexico. There another boy named Blevins joins up with them and there is endless foreshadowing that he will lead them into trouble. They eventually settle at a ranch in which John Grady commits an unforgivable act against his master’s forbidden possession, and thus the hero falls from grace and Eden transforms into hell. Our hero must go through hell and back again on his quest to return to his one true love, learning in this process about the true nature of the world, and growing up into a man at a terrible price.

It provides the archetypes and structure of a traditional myth, the motivations and conflict of a Romance, the milieu and setting of the Old West, and the overarching plot of a Coming-of-Age novel. McCarthy writes in a sometimes over the top purple prose strewn with religious allusions and imagery that still manages to work. The many gaps in the story allow for a reader to interpret and re-interpret character motivations in many different ways, yet still gives enough development to create a memorable and unique personalities.

The story deals strongly with the concept of causation (a philosophical topic that could fill many upon many books, let alone this one blog entry). Are we fated by God or destiny itself to our roles in life and our particular actions? Are we powerless and thrown about by those with more social power than us and thus not really autonomous? Or do we have freewill and make our own choices? Is it a combination of one or two of these? All of these?

There are many other themes such as class, race, cultural identity, which interrelate with the above. Also, there is a repeating motif of borders and fences that serve all the themes of the story. These motifs of fences and borders play out with ironic humor when you historicize the novel and consider how Mexico and Texas were once a single land. There’s also a very strong feminist characters who play a major part in the story. In fact, there is so much going on in this novel I suspect that I could come up with a thousand different ways to read it. So all I am going to say is that for me, I found the issues of causation, fate, and agency to be the most interesting.

Admittedly the style of the novel, especially the dialogue without quotations or speaker tags, is off-putting at first, but it really picks up in the middle. Safe to say this is one I am definitely going to read many times again in the future.

Close Range: Wyoming Stories by Annie Proulx

These short stories are all connected by flawed human beings struggling to find themselves in the harsh land of Wyoming. The real problem I have with Proulx’s writing is its constant meandering; she throws in a lot of unnecessary details and all the stories end up feeling way too long. Often times the characters aren’t really all that interesting, which makes following them through a long story that much more painful. She also has too many characters in quite a few of the stories, making it hard to keep track of names and preventing us from identifying more strongly with the various protagonists. However, what really frustrates me is that most of these stories would’ve been great stories had she cut the extra characters, extra words, and extra details; it is quite apparent while reading these stories that this author has a lot of talent, but perhaps likes her darlings a little too much.

For example, in the story “Governors of Wyoming” we get one scene told from the viewpoint of the rancher whose ranch is about to be vandalized by political activists trying to save Wyoming from government-subsidized beef industry. Most of the story is told from the political activist’s point-of-view from beginning to end. This change of view for this one fairly long scene in which we really just get a background of a bunch of characters who only play small roles at the end (shooting the trespassers) is totally unnecessary for the story to be told effectively.

I was pleasantly surprised to see Proulx play around with magic realism in stories like “The Bunchgrass Edge of the World” which has a girl who speaks to a talking tractor and “The Half-Skinned Steer” which includes a folktale about a bloody red-eyed cow who escaped after being half-skinned that turns out to be very real. Yet these stories also had too many superfluous details. And seriously, “The Half-Skinned Steer” included in John Updike’s The Best American Short Stories of the Century? I’ve read many stories better than that one within this very collection.

“Brokeback Mountain” on the other hand is truly a poignant experience. The same can be said for “Mud Below” — a story about a man who takes up bull-riding to come terms with his identity and the father who walked out on him. You have to love two stories that can cause you to get choked up. “Job History” told entirely in exposition in the form of a character’s job history and his family’s job histories is a wonderful story about how free enterprise can be constrained by outside forces (such as the government, nature, war) and the binding power of systematic class structures (or to put it simpler, it is very difficult to escape your social class). Ironically, these stories are where her writing is the clearest and most concise.

Many of these stories appeared in the New Yorker, which might explain my negative reaction to them. When I read The Best American Short Stories 2006, most of the ones I disliked came from the New Yorker.

This review articulates many of the same thoughts I had, though I enjoyed more of the stories than the reviewer did.

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Now, the last question remains: what DeLillo am I reading? What Morrison?

Well, you’ll never know. Unless, of course, you stay tuned for a future review near you….