Homer & Langley - E. L. Doctorow

I came across this book after reading about the Collyer brothers on Wikipedia and seeing it mentioned in the popular culture section. I’d read and enjoyed Ragtime and found the brothers fascinating subject matter, so checked it out from the library. The story is told in elegant prose form the perspective of Homer Collyer, a blind pianist who lives in a Harlem brownstone with his brother Langley, an obsessive hoarder. Through his eyes (or ears, rather) the reader passes through the early years of the 20th century into the 1980s, encountering bootlegging gangsters and roving hippies, observing two world wars, and generally chronicling the century as it matures, ragged and cynical, into its twilight years.

The book takes significant liberties with its facts and chronology—the actual Collyers died in 1947, and Langley was the musician, not Homer—but sticks close to key events (the gradual recession from society, the begrudging paying off of their mortgage in one fell swoop, their untimely end) proposing a thesis on the brothers recalcitrant hermitism, speculating on the impulse that made these bizarre introverted men effectively immure themselves in rubbish collected from the streets over decades.

The plot is episodic, structured only in the natural progression of the brothers’ lives from youth to old age. Having the narrator be a blind man was an interesting choice and one Doctorow handles effectively. His limited description of images was handled deftly, and I don’t recall spotting him describing something he couldn’t have known. The fact he’d had sight as a young man allowed him some context, at least; I expect it would be a greater challenge to write a novel with a narrator blind from birth.

Homer & Langley didn’t pack quite the punch that Ragtime did, but it was still worth reading, and encouraged me to grab another Doctorow book at some point.

Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder - Caroline Fraser

I didn’t read the Little House books growing up (I was more of a Wayside kid), and the little of the story I know outside of pop culture comes from overhearing snippets my wife read to our daughter. I assume this makes me something of an atypical reader of Prairie Fires. In truth, my interest was mainly in the time and place where the books were set, and I picked up Prairie Fires expecting it to expand on the historical context of the American Frontier. It did do that to an extent, though Laura’s frontier years comprise at most 1/3 of the book. The rest splits in focus between Laura and her daughter Rose. Had I known this going in, I may have been less inclined to begin the book in the first place.

I’m glad I didn’t know it, though, because the Rose Wilder Lane is a fascinating—if infuriating—personality. Though largely forgotten now as anything other than the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Rose Lane was a formidable author in her own right. Prodigious and unscrupulous, she wrote biographies of famous men with only cursory research, leaning in to speculation and outright invention without the slightest shame. Her stories sold to major magazines for alarming sums, yet whatever money she made she got rid of so fast it was almost as if she were allergic to it. Aggressively giving and resentful, her mother’s keeper and dependent, she is a study of contradictions. I’d be surprised if she didn’t have some sort of personality disorder.

Devotees of Little House will likely enjoy the details of how the books were revised, and the symbiotic amalgam of mother and daughter that forged them. I enjoyed it too, though mostly I liked reading about these two very strange, not entirely likeable, but inarguably influential women. Fraser wrote neither a hagiography nor a hatchet job, but painted an honest, thoughtful, unflinching portrait. Her prose is excellent, lightly adorned where useful but not overly florid, rich in detail and context.

I greatly enjoyed this book, and might even pick up some of the Little House books now.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West - Dee Brown

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee was a title I’d always heard without knowing much of its contents. Its connection with American Indians was obvious from context, but whether it was a film or a novel or what I didn’t know. As it happens, the book is a historical chronicling of America’s western expansion in the second half of the nineteenth century, told entirely from the perspective of the tribes that were displaced or destroyed. It is a sad book, sympathetically told, and an important one, in that it collects the words and recollections of a people who were rarely allowed t ospeak for themselves—certainly not in as wide a forum.

There is a depressing repetitiveness to the book, which proceeds chronologically forward and, for the most part, geographically westward. In each chapter we meet (or occasionally revisit) a tribe, and watch as the same cycle repeats itself: pressure fro mwhite settlers forces the indians to accept some sort of treaty. The treaty is either a swindle from the outset, or bargained in good faith but reinterpretted later to be more beneficial to the United States government and less to the tribe. Tensions rise until the tribe is corralled into a reservation or goes to war with an enemy it cannot beat. Tactical intelligence sometimes brings brief victories, legal or martial, but the tide is inexorable, and it sweeps always west.

Though unflinching in its portrayal of history, this is not a bitter book. There are good white men who see the Indians as human beings and want to do right by them, and cynical tribes who ally with the American soldiers against other Indians in order to secure better terms for themselves. Yet individual goodness cannot perservere against an unfeeling system, and those who attempt to resist are either worn down into apathy or destroyed. In this sense it reminds me a bit of The Wire, a more modern example of flawed but good people bashing their heads against an unfeeling system in an effort to budge it an inch, and coming away with nothing for their troubles but pain.

Brown’s writing is strong and crisp, capturing some of the poetry of the men for which it speaks. Long passages are sometimes quoted which give particular evidence to the lyrical nature of native tongues, rich in metaphor and anchored closely to the land. I wouldn’t call Bury my Heart a light read, but it is an engaging and important one.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem - Joan Didion

Joan Didion was one of those names that cropped up for me during six years of University English courses, without being clearly moored to anything. I knew she was a writer, and that her work (or rather, her most significant work) occured somewhere in the middleo f the 20th century, but that was about it. Something goaded me to finally look her up and request her most celebrated book from the library, but I can’t remember what exactly it was.

In any case, it was fortuitous, since Slouching Towards Bethlehem is an intriguing piece of work, a collection of essays written over a period of several years and capturing, among much else, the sour notes of the Summer of Love that would burst into promenance after the Manson Murders. Her gaze is incisive but not uncharitable, and she treats her subjects humanely without coddling them. There are some more reflective pieces itself, such as On Morality and much of the latter section, Seven Places of the Mind, which includes meditations on different locales where Didion spent some time. I didn’t agree with all of her conclusions, though I enjoyed reading them.

Didion’s prose is excellent, sleek and beguiling, filled with rich imagery without getting bogged down in itself. The grouping of pieces may be somewhat arbitrary, decided I’d guess more with what she thought was her best work rather than for any deeply held thematic ocnstant, but I think that works fine. It was nice to bounce around between subjects and styles, to get a sampling of her work rather than a one-note treatment. I’ll be interested to seek out some of her lesser known work in the future.

Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression - Studs Terkel

I came across Studs Terkel years ago after reading Max Brooks’ World War Z and learning that he’d modelled the book’s conceit off of the older journalist’s work. Terkel is, along with Svetlana Alexievich, the foremost practitioner of oral history, a form if journalistic prose that compiles stories individuals transcribed from different individuals and stitched together into a cohesive whole. The result is a kind of tapestry, through which a larger story emerges from the mingling of various strands.

Hard Times covers the Depression in the United States, ranging all over the country and a ross time, with a focus on recollections from 1928 to the early 40s, though participants are free to go where their reminiscions take them. While there us no shortage of hard luck tales, Terkel avoids homogenaity, talking to union men and big business types, artists and activists, socialists and staunch Republicans. He speaks with major figures, including members of Roosevelt's cabinet and the man who ran against him in 36, but also a lot of ordinary folk. Plenty of those he speaks with cruised through the depression just fine, while others suffered terribly. Interestingly, he speaks with some folks who were too young to experience the Depression firsthand--often the relatives of participants who had--offering an interesting counterpoint.

There isn't much to say about the prose, as nearly all is transcriptions, but the interviews are sharp and focused, the anecdotes interesting, and you don't get the sense that Terkel took pains to sanitize unpopular opinions. Some of these folks are downright unpleasant, but they still get their say, same as everyone else. Anything less would be untrue.