Don Carpenter’s first novel Hard Rain Falling, is almost as bleak as a book can be. The main character, Jack Levitt, was given up at birth by young, troubled parents who both died young. He was raised in an orphanage where kids had to fend for themselves against the cruelty of others.
My wife bought me this book after I started reading about Buddhism and riding a motorcycle. In the story, the author and his ten-year-old son ride a motorcycle along the back roads from Minnesota to California. As they cross mountains and canyons and deserts, the author reflects on the man he used to be during the years he wrestled with big philosophical questions.
Those questions include, What makes a good life? Why does our current life of material abundance feel so alienating and spiritually unfulfilling? What is it in our culture and our way of thought that led us to create the world we see today? Is there a better way?
In 2017, Syndicate Books published the collected works of Margaret Millar. Bless them for that. The quality of Millar’s writing, the strength and depth of her mind, her psychological insights and her unusual powers of observation and description should have kept her work in print forever.
Millar’s 1946 novel, Experiment in Springtime, appears in the second volume of the Syndicate collection, called Dawn of Domestic Suspense. The back cover blurb describes Experiment as:
Fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross sets out to avenge the murder of her father in 1880s Arkansas. She hires the hardened and hard-drinking US Marshal Rooster Cogburn to track the murderer, Tom Chaney, through Indian country and bring him to justice. Along the way, they pick up a Texas Ranger named LaBoeuf who is seeking Chaney for crimes committed in Texas.
Mattie is iron-willed, single-minded, guileless and pure in her intentions. She comes from a salt-of-the-earth Christian family, which puts her at odds with the jaded Cogburn who has spent his career hunting down men who have proven themselves immune to ordinary justice. Both characters are practical and unsentimental, though their temperaments have evolved from very different experiences.
This is one of the best novels I’ve ever read. The author, Humphrey Cobb, fought with the Canadian army on the front lines in France in World War I. While he points out that the events of the novel are fiction, much of what he describes is obviously based on what he witnessed in the trenches, and the core of the book’s horrifying plot comes from actual historical events.
The book opens with two soldiers watching the tired march of a bedraggled infantry unit. Duval is fresh out of school and has not yet seen any action on the front lines. He’s excited to blaze a path to glory. Langlois is a veteran who has already served with this unit, the 181st Infantry. He has no illusions about the nature of the war.
Having just read Jean Hanff Korelitz’ The Plot, I found this book to be a difficult slog indeed. The Plot is genre fiction (a thriller), and as such, the author takes care to limit her cast to a manageable number of characters, to delineate those characters clearly, to define where and when scenes take place, to focus the scenes on consequential action and dialog, to build tension and steadily advance a coherent plot.
You’ll find none of that in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, and it’s not because he’s a bad writer. It’s by design.
This is an exceedingly clever novel. The inside flap of the dust cover gives three definitions of the word “plot,” and this book is about all three:
The Tenth Man opens in a German prison near the end of World War II. Thirty or so Frenchmen, civilian prisoners of war from all walks of life, are packed together in a dingy cell. Cut off from the outside world, and with nothing to do, they hang on to an old watch and an alarm clock, reminders of order in a world that has fallen into chaos, while they glumly await the war’s end.
The only information they can glean from the outside world is the noise they can hear through the prison wall. Though they’re in German-occupied territory, behind the lines, every now and then they hear a grenade or a burst of gunfire.
We first meet Norwood Pratt, a red-haired twenty-three-year-old from Ralph, Texas, as he’s being discharged from the Marines on account of family hardship. His father has just passed away, leaving his sister Vernell with no one to care for her. Vernell “was a heavy, sleepy girl with bad posture. She was old enough to look after herself and quite large enough, but in many ways she was a great big baby.”
Norwood leaves his California Marine base in such a rush, he forgets to collect the seventy dollars owed him by his friend, Joe William Reese.
The unnamed narrator of Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold pieces together a picture of events that unfolded on an infamous day twenty three years prior. In a small town at the mouth of a river on the Caribbean coast of Columbia, in what appears to be the second decade of the nineteen hundreds, a wealthy young man with no apparent enemies was murdered in broad daylight, in front of a crowd that included most of the town’s citizens.