The Store: Second Chat
The Store chat part deux, covering about 100 more pages, in which we open with a Sunday brisket having been obtained from the local butcher by one party and a well-mixed dark & stormy in the hand of the other…
Diablevert: Are you still hating it [The Store]?
Dreadful Penny: I don’t hate it so much any more, but it really irks me, and I feel REALLY bad reading it on the train, since there’s an n-bomb on nearly every other page.
Diablevert: Are you worried that people might read it over your shoulder or something?
Dreadful Penny: I dunno… occasionally I get a glance at what my neighbor is reading. It just feels wrong.
Diablevert: Your superego is perhaps larger than mine. On the other hand, the Boston commuter rail is considerably more whitebread than the Brooklyn subway, plus the seats are bigger.
Dreadful Penny: I should probably be less paranoid. I’m developing a larger appreciation for Stribling’s plotting… I’m at the part where the Col. is in jail for the night, and there was definitely some pleasure in watching him try to ineptly figure out his crime.
Diablevert: Yeah, I couldn’t believe he nicked the stuff! I thought that was well done, the whole in-for-a-penny-escalation of the situation with the bargeman, plus the subsequent self-justification.
Dreadful Penny: Every misstep just gets compounded. It’s like the Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead of early Pulitzers.
Diablevert: Word. But compounded in an interesting way; it’s never entirely awful, there’s always some ambiguity there.
Dreadful Penny: At this juncture, it looks like the Col. might actually pull it off!
Diablevert: I’m a little past you, so I wouldn’t care to comment on that. Suffice it to say there are consequences, but not perhaps the ones one might immediately expect, which I really quite like. I like this book, O erstwhile co-blogger. I like moral ambiguity an authorial reserve in a novel and I think Stribling’s really very good at painting a picture of this whole town–he knows this place cold, and is adept at showing every angle of it. So far I’m finding it a fascinating place to observe in that sense–the way Stribling teases out, say, the persistance of the near-familial bonds between former slaves and former slave owners.
Dreadful Penny: The lingering owner/slave dynamic is really interesting… since you’re farther, don’t spoil it, but I can’t help but hope Gracie will hightail it out of there with the money… turning the whole thing into a madcap caper! There is something vaguely condescending about the way he so clearly demonstrates the inner hypocrisy and blindness of a lot of these characters, though. Something a little Tarkington-esque with the superior tone? It’s not really in the narrative voice, as much as the way we’re consistently seeing into people’s heads.
Diablevert: I don’t think I find it so; the characters aren’t necessarily punished for their hypocrisy, and even the flawed ones are given many moments of compassion and complexity. I don’t think I’d want to live there or anything, though. But take say, Jerry, the other character’s whose viewpoint we get quite a lot of–he has these boyish vanities which are silly on one level, which Stribling makes clear, but he also makes clear the essential innocence and naivete which drives them.
Dreadful Penny: I did love the scene where the Col. convinces him to go back to chapel and they’re speaking nearly completely at cross-purposes, but still feel entirely sympatico.
Diablevert: And I think that’s very true, and I like that ….he does a lot better at letting things lie there and speak for themselves than Tarkington ever did in approaching almost the same material. Like, BT has to give you a two page riff on Hamlet in order to dress down George Amberson for his self-involvement; Stribling’s content to write a few lines of dialogue between Jerry and the country boarder to show you basically the same thing. It’s a pat on the head, not an overhand blow with a mallet.
Dreadful Penny: I do care what happens next, and to see what character we’re going to follow next, and that’s pretty good for a Pulitzer.
Diablevert: See, I knew I’d get you over to the dark side.
Dreadful Penny: Poor fat Ponney, though… and I don’t think I’m going to be able to handle the scene when Sydna inevitably finds out that the Col. is kind of a tool.
Diablevert: Ah, you don’t know the half of it….so far I think the Sydna thing has been adeptly handled, though there may be more too come from where I am. I think going into this after some of the other Pulitzers i was braced for this fraught subject matter to be rather ineptly handled, but so far I’m surprised and pleased.
Dreadful Penny: That’s a welcome sensation on our Pulitzer journey!
Diablevert: For all that Stribling uses dialect, and I think he does show some definite class and color biases here and there, I think so far he’s been quite good at treating the black characters with as much depth as the white characters. Do you have any take on that?
Dreadful Penny: I suppose. My white guilt has mostly been showing and I shut down a little when I get to the dialect. I’ll try to think about that in the next block of pages… I do feel great pity for Gracie (as implied earlier) and I’d like to hear more about her. Oh, and Landers! The sad lonely postmaster who doesn’t walk alone! I like him too.
Diablevert: Toussaint, too, I think has just as much inner life as Jerry, although we get much briefer snatches of him. And the scene where Miltiades goes back to his family far and discovers he has a namesake who can write his name. That brief little thing was, I’d venture, one of the best written bits in all the books so far.
Dreadful Penny: Awww. I liked that too.
Diablevert: Just in the sense that Stribling is juggling a hell of a lot symbolically there and manages to bring it off.
