Watching TV and Reading Two New Books with a Sense of Place

What I watched this week

Biden made Speaker Johnson squirm!

Photos from the New York Times

Reading

I’ve been reading two very recently published books by two authors I like: Tommy Orange and Tana French. While the two books are very different in most respects, I have been struck by how each of them is permeated by a sense of place and by a community in this place. The Native American community in Oakland, California is the focus for Tommy Orange. A rural hamlet in the wilds of Ireland is the focus for Tana French. Both authors have written about these communities in previous books as well, and I looked forward to reading these sequels. Although each book is about much more than one topic, I’ve concentrated on the sense of place in each one.

The Hunter by Tana French

Tana French: The Hunter 
(published March 5, 2024)

This is a huge book with lots of rambling descriptions of the small community of Ardnakelty in a backwoods area in County Mayo, Ireland. As a reader, you either have to be very patient or very tolerant of long descriptive passages to enjoy these colorful passages for themselves alone, rather than as prologue to any suspense that the author might decide to build. You have to enjoy the slow portrayal of a bunch of individualists with a huge back story and relationships and rivalries going back to their school days and even to their grandparents. You have to enjoy finding out which ones know and tell all the gossip and which ones can keep it to themselves. You have to empathize with the Irish people who find a dry summer heatwave unfamiliar and agonizing: and it lasts until almost the final chapter of the book.

In this mix is Cal, a stranger, a former Chicago policeman, who has lived in the town for two years and was featured along with the rest of them in the earlier novel, The Searcher. And the central character is Trey, who is fifteen and trying to control her chaotic environment.

While one expects a Tana French novel to be some sort of murder mystery, no murder happens until halfway through: it’s all personalities and an emerging story of a possible con by a recently-returned native son and how he winds up the locals who have never left. As one of the characters says: “I’ve been local all my life.” (p. 244) They know each other well: another character explains, when asked to identify the accent of some unknown men: “Ardnakelty. Even just over the other side of the mountain, or across the river, they talk different. These were from round here.” (p. 302) And when there’s finally a murder and a detective he turns out to be a Dubliner — and you should hear what they say about Dubliners.

The main characters’ faithful dogs have a major role in depicting life in rural Ardnakelty.
I found these photos of some of the famous Irish dog breeds, though the dogs in the story are mutts.

Two dogs show up on the first page, and accompany their two masters, the local girl Trey and the American ex-pat Cal, throughout the book. Dogs are an integral part of community life in Ardnakelty. Just about every important character in the book also has at least one dog, and the dogs relate to one another in a kind of mirror to their people. Right from the start we learn about Trey and Cal’s two dogs:

 

“Her dog Banjo lollops in wide circles off the path, snuffing and burrowing among the thick heather, which is too brown-edged and heavily scented for July. … Every few minutes he comes bounding back to tell Trey, with small happy puffs and moans, what he’s found. Banjo is a mutt, black and tan, with a beagle’s head and body set on the legs of something stubbier, and he’s a lot more talkative than Trey is. He got his name from a banjo-shaped patch of white on his belly. … Cal Hooper, the American who lives down near the village, has Banjo’s litter-mate and named him Rip, and if a plain name is good enough for Cal’s dog, it’s good enough for Trey’s. Besides, she spends much of her waking time at Cal’s place, meaning the two dogs spend much of their time together, and it would sound stupid if they didn’t match.” (p. 1)

Trey — in her relationship to Banjo and to Cal and with the rest of the characters — is a perplexing teenage mystery to those around her, especially Cal and Lena, a local woman who is Cal’s romantic partner. They constantly — maybe repetitively — react to her combination of insight and immaturity:

“He can’t be sure, any more, what she’s capable of. When he thought she had none of the artifice other teenagers develop, he was wrong again. She’s just been saving it, and tailoring it, for when it matters.” (p. 313)

“Lena spent the whole drive looking for the right way to go about this, but all she found was the looming, intractable sense that she’s out of her depth. Someone else should be doing this, Noreen or Cal or someone who has a bull’s notion of how to deal with teenagers; anyone but her.” (p. 406)

While I enjoyed the local color, the relationships among the characters, and the build-up of events, ultimately I found The Hunter to be disappointing. All in all, it was too rambling and too long. While it didn’t exactly lack focus, it also didn’t exactly stay focused either. For much of the novel, the plot centers on two men who intend to trick a number of local people out of a lot of money through a get-rich-quick scheme, but then this con falls apart, and the focus changes. Much of the plot depends on knowing the ending of the previous novel, and the main revelation (which I can’t say because it would be a spoiler) is in my view kind of a let-down. The novel, in my interpretation, turns out  not to be a police procedural or a detective story at all: more of a social history. As the New York Times reviewer says: “The secretive village is a trope as old as mysteries — as old as humanity itself.” (link)

Ireland is always a focus for American celebration,
especially Saint Patrick’s Day which is coming up soon.
My neighbors already have their holiday banner up.

 Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange

“Walking around Lake Merritt you see all kinds of people in Oakland, the hipster, the homeless, the homeless hipster, the mixtape mixed-race CD-pushing rapper, the serious runners and the casual runners, the joggers, the stoners, the casual blunt smokers, the power walkers, the slow walkers that talk endlessly, the stroller pushers, and then just so many young people with blankets on the grass. It didn’t used to be like this around the lake, people always walked it, but now it is a kind of scene, with food trucks in tow.” (Wandering Stars, p. 184)

Tommy Orange’s new book has much more history than his earlier book There, There. In the early chapters it goes back much further to the lives of the Native American ancestors of the modern residents of Oakland who were in There, There. These predecessors were above all survivors, who managed to dodge the official efforts to exterminate the Indians, and who evaded annihilation in a variety of determined ways. In Tommy Orange’s view: “all Indians alive past the year 1900 are kinds of miracles.” (p. 102)

Tommy Orange: Wandering Stars 
(published February 27, 2024)

Oakland became the home of Native Americans who were victims of the vicious Indian schools that deprived children of their heritage in the early twentieth century — including the ancestors of the main character of the book: a teenage boy who is being raised by his two grandmothers, Opal and Jacquie (as they are viewed by Native Americans; actually they are sisters and one is literally his grandmother). Oakland played a role in the way Opal thought about meeting his grandfather. In her mind, she relives this:

“You will think he is white or part white but he will recognize you as Indian and ask where you’re from. The question will throw you at first, because you’re from Oakland, so you want to say you’re from here, but you don’t know what here means for a moment, did it mean modern times, did it mean Oakland, did it mean America? And where would you be from if you were a real Indian? Oklahoma? You will know that’s not true, that Indians were from every single corner of the country—beyond the country. You will have read about hundreds of tribes, each with their own languages and customs and creation stories.” (p. 113)

As the reviewer in the Washington Post expressed it: “As ‘Wandering Stars’ sweeps through the decades, Orange gathers up moments of love and despair in stories that demonstrate what a piercing writer he is. But then, about halfway through the novel, we arrive in 2018, more than 150 years after the Sand Creek massacre. Here, Orange flares his wings and touches down for good in the home of Orvil Red Feather, the teenager wounded at the climax of ‘There There.’” (link)

 Now Oakland is the center of life in the novel, and appears in many of their thoughts. For an adopted dark-skinned child of rich parents, who befriends Orvil:

“Anyone’s skin color in a place like Oakland, that could be okay, that could be nothing to mention, normal even, but Oakland had a lotta sides to it. And it had these hills, these Oakland hills, as they were called in code, meaning not the flatlands, meaning not the east, meaning there was money up there, real estate value, multimillion-dollar views of Oakland.”

For Orvil, aware of being a child of several generations of Oakland Native Americans, the local neighborhoods in the poorer part of town were critical:

“The neighborhood is not that deep into East Oakland, but not near Lake Merritt either, a kind of central East Oakland sometimes called the middle extent, because most of Oakland is East Oakland, but to tell anyone where they live in Oakland, if asked, they might just say they live in the Dimond.” (p. 157)

Opal and Jacquie, the grandmothers, have many memories; for example a conversation about the Mormon temple in Oakland:

“You remember Mom used to tell us the Mormon temple was Disneyland?” 

“She told us a lot we knew not to believe,” 

Opal says. “You didn’t believe her?” 

Jacquie says. “I did. Enough that I looked it up later. You know Walt Disney got his inspiration from Fairyland way back when? And Frank Oz, who was one of the other main Muppet guys, he came out of Fairyland too? All that magic in the world, that came from Oakland.” (p. 187) 

The main character, the young boy Orvil, has a lot of promise. The two grandmothers have high aspirations for him. But circumstances lead him to become addicted first to painkillers and then to worse. It’s sad, but at the end. he describes his painful path to recovery, creating his identity, and eventually can go back to Oakland. 

“I was all about being from Oakland and being Native and feeling like I belonged to something older than the country. Opal never talked about the people who first lived in Oakland. And I hadn’t thought to look it up.” (p. 296)

Update March 16: For a really comprehensive review and interview with the author see the Guardian article titled “Tommy Orange: ‘My whole family has has problems with addiction, including myself.’”

 

Reviews © 2024 mae sander

Shared with Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz.

Dogs dedicated to Eileen’s critter post.

Reading and Watching This Week

I reread There, There by Tommy Orange, which I originally reviewed in 2018 (link)
I am now reading the newly-published sequel. My recent visit to the Museum of the American Indian
included an exhibit about broken treaties between the US and the Native Americans. Totally relevant here!

A Beautiful Bird Book

Thanks to Deb at Readerbuzz, who reviewed this last week, I bought a copy —

there was a great price on amazon.com.

I’m reading this wonderful book a little at a time. It’s very packed with information about birds.
The large format enables images of many birds at their full size.

The details of each bird’s capabilities illustrate the general way that birds are adapted to life on earth.

New on Streaming

I have only watched a few of the episodes from the first 12 seasons of Vera, but now started the new one.

Finally Read

Finished this book on my second attempt. 

Colson Whitehead is a brilliant writer. During the last few years, I’ve read four of his literary and historical novels which are fantastic. Zone One was published in 2011 — a very different type of book. It’s about an apocalyptic future where a plague is turning humans into living skeletons that eat not-yet-turned humans. “There were hours when every last person on Earth thought they were the last person on Earth.” (p. 108)

The book is centered around one character who goes by the name Mark Spitz (because he can’t swim). He is a very average American, but somehow a survivor. Whitehead  shows Mark Spitz’s consciousness of the apocalyptic scene that has replaced a recognizable America — especially New York. There are wonderful observations of middle-class people who had a comfortable life until faced with disaster. Food descriptions help to set the horrifying atmosphere in a nightmare world: Whitehead is a wizard with working food descriptions into the narrative to make it come alive. I marked many passages; here’s one about Mark Spitz:

“On impulse he purchased a deluxe combo juice at the café on the way out and decided not to say anything when the pimply skel dropped a banana slice into the blender. He hated banana. He drank it anyway, blowing into the striped straw to dislodge a plug of pulp, and stepped out to the sidewalk into the rush-hour stream of the dead on their way home, the paralegals, mohels, resigned temps, bike messengers, and slump-shouldered massage therapists, the panoply of citizens in the throes of their slow decay. The plague was a meticulous craftsman, dabbing effects with deliberation.” (p. 133)

Mark Spitz works with others to try to restore humanity by destroying the living skeletons and disposing of the corpses — anyone can see that they are zombies, but Whitehead is such a clever writer that the word never appears in his text. A search of the Kindle edition turns up only one use of the word which is on the copyright page as a keyword for library searches!

I’m really happy that Whitehead turned his fantastic gifts to creating novels that I’m more enthusiastic about. I think he’s one of the best authors writing now.

Strange Weather We’re Having!

Tuesday, February 27: Record High. Detroit was 73°

Wednesday, February 28: More than 35 degrees colder!

Temperature dropped as low as 19° F by Thursday morning.

Blog post © 2024 mae sander

Shared with Readerbuzz and Eileen’s Critters.

 

"There There" by Tommy Orange

“You know what Gertrude Stein said about Oakland?” Rob says. Dene shakes his head no but actually knows, actually googled quotes about Oakland when researching for his project. He knows exactly what the guy is about to say.  

“There is no there there,” he says in a kind of whisper, with this goofy openmouthed smile Dene wants to punch. Dene wants to tell him he’d looked up the quote in its original context, in her Everybody’s Autobiography, and found that she was talking about how the place where she’d grown up in Oakland had changed so much, that so much development had happened there, that the there of her childhood, the there there, was gone, there was no there there anymore. Dene wants to tell him it’s what happened to Native people, he wants to explain that they’re not the same, that Dene is Native, born and raised in Oakland, from Oakland. Rob probably didn’t look any further into the quote because he’d gotten what he wanted from it. He probably used the quote at dinner parties and made other people like him feel good about taking over neighborhoods they wouldn’t have had the guts to drive through ten years ago.  

The quote is important to Dene. This there there. He hadn’t read Gertrude Stein beyond the quote. But for Native people in this country, all over the Americas, it’s been developed over, buried ancestral land, glass and concrete and wire and steel, unreturnable covered memory. There is no there there. (There, There, pp. 56-57). 

The paragraph above explains the title of There There by Tommy Orange, a novel about American Indians who live in Oakland, California. The paragraph also offers a hint of the complexity of the book.

There There has many characters, all of them narrating their stories. They search for an identity that doesn't even have a single name, though they mostly use "Native." One wrote:

"We are Indians and Native Americans, American Indians and Native American Indians, North American Indians, Natives, NDNs and Ind’ins, Status Indians and Non-Status Indians, First Nations Indians and Indians so Indian we either think about the fact of it every single day or we never think about it at all. We are Urban Indians and Indigenous Indians, Rez Indians and Indians from Mexico and Central and South America. We are Alaskan Native Indians, Native Hawaiians, and European expatriate Indians, Indians from eight different tribes with quarter-blood quantum requirements and so not federally recognized Indian kinds of Indians." (p. 185).

A key idea in the book is that Natives live in many places, mainly not reservations:

"We came to know the downtown Oakland skyline better than we did any sacred mountain range, the redwoods in the Oakland hills better than any other deep wild forest. We know the sound of the freeway better than we do rivers, the howl of distant trains better than wolf howls, we know the smell of gas and freshly wet concrete and burned rubber better than we do the smell of cedar or sage or even fry bread— which isn’t traditional, like reservations aren’t traditional, but nothing is original, everything comes from something that came before, which was once nothing. Everything is new and doomed. We ride buses, trains, and cars across, over, and under concrete plains. Being Indian has never been about returning to the land. The land is everywhere or nowhere. (p. 24). 

Food, clothing, dances, songs, family connections -- every part of their identity is questioned and problematic. 

"They only knew about Indian tacos because their grandma made them for their birthdays. It was one of the few Indian things she did. And she was always sure to remind them that it’s not traditional, and that it comes from lacking resources and wanting comfort food." (p. 181).

And they also have parents, siblings, homes or no homes, smart phones, computers, drones, games, favorite literary works, jobs or no jobs, money or no money, ambitions, and more. Besides the passages about identity, the book has a suspenseful plot and lots of complications. It's not a boring work of navel-gazing, it's about convincingly presented individuals with all sorts of challenges in their lives. I found it very readable and likable. 

Some Highly Rated Books of 2018

I've been reading three books this month. All were published in 2018, and all with very good reviews, including winning or being short-listed for some prestigious prizes. A brief report on these:

Number One Chinese Restaurant by Lillian Li.

I enjoyed Number One Chinese Restaurant because it surprised me. I didn't realize that I had a stereotyped expectation for a book about the owners and workers in a Chinese restaurant, but I did. It's a very good book: good plot, well-drawn and numerous characters, lots of action.

The author seems aware of these stereotypes. Her characters have a painful awareness of who they are and who other people think they are: their identity as waiters or busboys or Chinese restaurant owners. They know themselves, and they know how their customers, their bosses, their business contacts, their children, their parents, their wives or husbands, and their lovers think of them.

One waiter, who has been working 6 days a week for 50 years, for example, performs for the customers:

"He hobbled off, cutting a comic figure as he swung his left leg in front of his right. He could still fool the customers into thinking his lurching walk and shaky hands were part of his character, a Chinese Charlie Chaplin who might look as if he’d spill the tray but never did." (Kindle Locations 358-360).

Despite his success, the owner, Jimmy Han, fears stereotypes too:

"Han was hardly reinventing the wheel with his menu. Northern Chinese cuisine could be summed up in three words: meat, onions, and garlic."(Kindle Locations 473-474). 

"All around him were restaurants that were out of his league. The pizzeria boasting eight-hundred-degree ovens and ninety-second Neapolitan pies; the sushi restaurant owned by a Japanese chef with a show on Netflix; the French bistro with tasting menus starting at $145 a person. What would the Glory have? Peking duck carved tableside, like on a fucking Carnival cruise!"(Kindle Locations 1864-1866).

"Was it tasty? Sure. But was it authentic? Was it anything to be proud of? Only the Peking duck fit the bill. His father, not for want of trying, had never figured out how to prepare the duck faster than the traditional way, with the fowls shipped down from Long Island, their skin air-dried then brushed with sugar, and finished off with slow heat in a rotisserie oven. Everything else on the menu was a scam." (Kindle Locations 2090-2093).

“We’re a Chinese restaurant,” Jimmy said. “We buy what’s cheapest.” (Kindle Location 4832). 

My brief review doesn't really get at how the development of characters and situations in this book worked to explode my stereotypes, but it really did a great job!

Florida by Lauren Groff.

"Of all the places in the world, she belongs in Florida," is the description of the hapless helpless woman in the last of Lauren Goff's short story collection. It could be the description of every heroine in the book. Some women in these stories are single,  some have problem husbands, some are homeless, some abandon small children, and a few of them dwell obsessively about climate change or piling-up worldwide trash: "the world my children will inherit, the clouds of monarchs they won’t ever see, the underwater sound of the mouths of small fish chewing the living coral reefs that they will never hear."(Kindle Locations 2191-2192). 

It's a tragic world but somehow sometimes also funny; it strangely makes me think of Carl Hiaasen's hilarious stories in very similar settings -- like swamps and run-down apartment houses. When the air conditioning goes off, civilization goes with it. Even when Goff's women run away to France or to a Northern State, they can't escape their Florida identity.

In one story, a mother is left in the Florida wilderness with her kids. She writes

"I made scrambled eggs with a vengeful amount of butter and cheddar, also cocoa with an inch of marshmallow, thinking I would stupefy my children with calories, but the calories only made them stronger." (Kindle Locations 779-780).

A different story features a woman who escapes her usual life to live briefly in Normandy with her two small sons. She takes them for something to eat in a shack on the windswept beach; her drifting thoughts go from the food to her distant future:

"There, protected by a lufting sheet of clear plastic, she orders three buckwheat galettes with cheese and egg, and one salted caramel crêpe for dessert. At home they eat sugar only on holiday or in emergencies— she knows it is a poison; it can make you fat and crazy and eventually lose your memories when you are old, and she has a severe horror of being a stringy-haired cackler in the old-age home; she has boys, she’s not dumb, she knows that sad obsolescence will more than likely be her fate if humanity even lasts that long..." (Kindle Locations 2350-2353).

Milkman by Anna Burns.

The narrator of this book reminds me of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Septimus her strange doppelgänger. So sensitive that life just gets in their way. So fearful. Rubbed so raw. So unable to deal with a very difficult present.

In Milkman, the present is really difficult. The unnamed narrator lives in an unnamed town that's torn by violence between two unnamed religions. She has a "maybe-boyfriend," sisters and brothers-in-law, other relatives and friends, and all of them live in a world of tight and somewhat unnamed expectations. For example, maybe-boyfriend has a friend who is interested in cooking, and would like to be a chef. What this means:

"... male chefs – especially of little pastries and petit fours and fancies and dainties to which one could level the criticism ‘desserts’ and which chef here was a maker of – were not in demand and not socially acceptable. Contrary to other chef parts of the world, a man here could be a cook, though even then he’d better work on the boats, or in a man’s internment camp or in some other full-on male environment. Otherwise he was a chef which meant homosexual with a drive to recruit male heterosexuals into the homosexual fold." (Kindle Locations 492-496).

I haven't finished reading Milkman, because I find it a struggle to read it and face the narrator's problems. I promise to finish it soon. (UPDATE: I finished it. It gets better and better in the second half!)

What I plan to read next:
There, There by Tommy Orange