The Store: Final Chat
Dreadful Penny: The Store! I was not expecting shit to go all wrong in quite… nay, at all… the way that it did.
Diablevert: Oh, really? Hunh. There was definitely a point in the book where I was like, “Is it possible that we’re going to read a novel set in the Deep South in this period that doesn’t have a lynching?” And I was kind of like, “possible…but not probable….” Felt like an undropped shoe to me.
Dreadful Penny: I pretty much assumed that everything would go horribly awry with the Col.’s business dealings and his marriage would shatter and Jerry would be crushed and everyone would sadly fade into the sunset. Then again, I can never figure out the end of a mystery either, so I’m probably more gullible than the average reader.
Diablevert: I think I might have thought that if I hadn’t read somewhere along the way that this book is the middle in a trilogy.
Dreadful Penny: It is? I so wish I didn’t know that.
Diablevert: Sorry.
Dreadful Penny: But I think I got all my OCD completism out with all that Bromfield.
Diablevert: See, I think I’d be much more inclined to read the rest of this series. Probably if I merely sit here a rest a while the fever shall pass, but I’m definitely way more curious about what happens to Stribling’s characters than I was with Bromfield’s. E.B. always felt a bit paper-mache; Stribling’s seem likely to have been ripped off from real life, but at least they feel real.
Dreadful Penny: I would agree with that. Just plain more happened in this book than the average Pulitzer…. I was actually reading to see how everything was going to play out after the first 100 pages, in a pretty enjoyable way.
Diablevert: Agreed. I’ve been reading a bit about Stribling; apparently he made his living in the pulps for years before getting more serious work published (and even during) and I think you can feel that in this – the plot is twisty, but neatly twisty, if you see what I mean.
Dreadful Penny: I do. Everything and everyone is interconnected… oh, before I forget, I want to correct an earlier misreading of mine… I don’t know why I thought this, but a few chats ago, I think I described Landers (the postmaster) as black, which he totally isn’t. In retrospect, I don’t know why I thought that, but it became totally clear later that he’s white, and, anyway, just wanted to publicly show that I know how to read and stuff. (Also, poor Landers.)
Diablevert: Really? I don’t think you did, but maybe I’m remembering wrong. For me that neatness was where it fell down a little, in the end – did you find the ending shocking?
Dreadful Penny: The lynching shocked me. It felt pretty inevitable once Lucy wanted to bring lawyers into the deal, and Cady was released from jail, but I wasn’t quite expecting everything to go down like it did, more on coincidence and bad luck than anything else.
Diablevert: Mmmm. Thinking about it now: as I was reading there were points were I half-thought, or half-hoped, that Stribling might let him get away…yet when it did come I wasn’t shocked. All along I’ve had a feeling that part of what Stribling was doing was trying to show how fucked up this all was, and inasmuch as that is the author’s project then you can’t skip the lynching. So it felt more ironic that tragic to me, not tragic with extra irony dolloped on top, which is what I think he was going for.
Dreadful Penny: I’m also not 100% sure that Stribling wasn’t using Toussaint’s death as a way to deepen a tragic ending for the Col. (losing the son he never knew he had). The weird supernatural element at the end seemed like an off note also.
Diablevert: I think that’s part of what he was doing, sure. And I think he backs away from Toussaint at the end of the book….in order to elevate this properly, we should have had a chapter from Toussaint’s point of view explaining his decision to go to court over the wagon, etc., in parallel with the Col.’s decision to steal the cotton. An echo of the obsessive idea leading to a fateful, seemingly small decision which then becomes and all-encompassing, life-changing event – except instead of choosing to become a scoundrel Toussaint decides to risk his life to stand up for his rights. You could have kept all the random irony in – the fact that he’s lynched as an afterthought, along with the thieves (although that also seems like a clear JC reference) and it would have been much more heart-wrenching
Dreadful Penny: Have you read Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow? A similar plot line happens in that book…. trying to get justice for a vandalized car gets the man’s wife killed, and then he becomes a domestic terrorist, and it just all goes south.
Diablevert: Nope, never read it.
Dreadful Penny: Well, the Ragtime plotline and Toussaint’s storyline are similar… a quest for a small act of justice with property blows up in the man’s face. Word to the JC reference… I thought that was a bit much. Also, was there a lingering bit of plot weirdness in the fact that the Col. invents a thief in the beginning of the book? I kept thinking that people were mentioning/looking for them throughout the book.
Diablevert: No, he invents a companion – says he was travelling with a beater to account for the time when he was selling Handback’s cotton downriver, and the guy who gives him a ride gets all psyched and is like, “I bet the guy who gave you a ride was the thief that’s been plaguing the county!”
Dreadful Penny: That’s right… so are the thieves at the end that same thief? Because that would tie up neatly.
Diablevert: I think so. It’s the country. There’s not so many. It’s mentioned again, I think, when the Col gets arrested – at one point the Sheriff has to leave to go follow up on something, and I think it’s suggested that it has to do with the thieves. But whatevs, let’s skip plot. What’s your take on Stribling, at the end?
Dreadful Penny: Liked it much better than I expected to, almost in spite of myself.
Diablevert: In spite of yourself?
Dreadful Penny: Yeah… I was a big naysayer in the beginning, with the dialect, and the Klan leader/Confederate general/overseer main character, and the general “being a 1930s Pulitzer winner” thing working against it. But, actually, it was a pretty good novel. Even if I wanted to smack all the characters upside the head at some point.
Diablevert: So far I’d say the 30s have a better batting average than the 20s, although that’s an argument for another day.
Dreadful Penny: And we will certainly have that argument later.
Diablevert: What did you think of the Sydna/Milt marriage? Sydna’s mother, Drusilla, surprised me right into being one of my favorite characters in the book. I think she felt a little too much like the author’s mouthpiece, at times, but I was surprised and intrigued by her…. resignation, her sort of desire to stay true to herself. Like, she could easily have married Milt, saved her house – everyone would have been pretty much happy, except her. And she wouldn’t do it, because she was like, fuck you, I don’t want to be the angel on the top of your Christmas tree, the final ornament adorning your fantasy
Dreadful Penny: The Sydna/Milt marriage was icky to the extreme. Her idolization of him, his sense of himself as a dirty old lech and her as an angel of youth, the weird fact that he could have been her father with only a small time slip. I found the whole Drusilla/Milt courtship a little odd… it seemed like there was a strong class barrier against it on the first go-round, then his pining for her seemed half-assed (and more running away from poor fat Ponny) and then the weird conflation of her with the manor house on courtship part deux. Plus Sydna’s idolatry of him.
Diablevert: Yeah there’s bound to be a letdown there at some point (re: Sydna/Milt) these are the kinds of things that make me curious to read the follow-up. If there was such a strong class barrier, how’d he nearly get up the altar with her?
Dreadful Penny: I actually have no desire to watch that fall apart. There is no plot line that makes me more uncomfortable than shame/embarrassment.
Diablevert: We are alike in that, but I didn’t really feel embarrassed for them so much.
Dreadful Penny: I wasn’t positive that the class barrier was actually in place… in fact, I thought it was kinda tough to figure out where the Col. fit into Southern white class structure. Being an overseer seemed like manual labor, but being a Confederate officer would elevate your status… it seemed like he ping-ponged between classes.
Diablevert: He was definitely upwardly mobile, and I agree he was hard to peg
Dreadful Penny: Anything else you’d like to cover for The Store? You seemed to like the book throughout… what was your end assessment?
Diablevert: Well, I am curious what you thought Stribling’s point was, in writing it. I have my take particularly after reading a bit more about Stribling personally. I definitely think he’s been one of the most withholding of our authors – Cather liked Claude, and Tarkington was condescending toward George; Stribling is harder to nail down. So I am curious what you think he was trying to do with this: does he think these people admirable? Contemptible?
Dreadful Penny: I know absolutely nothing about Stribling that isn’t in this book. I don’t even know what “T.S.” stands for. So I don’t feel like I can make a comprehensive claim that The Store is making a certain statement on racism, or the South, although I do think that he was appalled by racist violence and being kept from education. To me, the most consistent message of the book was to show the havoc that hypocrisy, or being willfully unaware of your own nature, will wreck in your life. Characters were constantly at cross-purposes with each other, or shocked at some desire in one person that they would display pages later, and they nearly always suffered for it. I felt that there was a lot of truth in the way he portrayed human motivation, and the thought processes someone goes through when they’re trying to justify something to themselves that they deep-down know isn’t right, or even the best idea.
Diablevert: Yeah. I think one thing I liked about it was that it made me feel the flip side, too – the sort of fundamental fear and presumption, of people having their power taken away… the how-dare-you-ness of the Toussaint trying to hold the Col. to his contract. To understand better what it was like to seethe world that way, which culminates in the lynching. Or in Handback’s death – he feels that too, briefly, when he realized Grace means for her and her son to escape to the North and pass as white.
Dreadful Penny: In those moments I would waver between feeling sympatico with the character and then reeling back when they crossed a moral line… like Jerry at the end, when after all that BS about enlightenment and spirituality, won’t go get Toussaint out of jail in an actual act of compassion. Or the scene you cite, when Handback was appalled when he figured out what Grace wanted for Toussaint. This seems like one of your favorites so far… yes?
Diablevert: At the moment I’d put it below Age and Bridge, probably above Cather. Maybe third?
Dreadful Penny: That’s pretty damn good for a dusty old book they had to haul out of the public library stacks for us.
Diablevert: I wouldn’t put it like, third all time or nothing. The writing itself lacks the lyricism I appreciated in those other books. But yeah, I like dryness, sardonic humor, irony, and making mixed up people with lots of good and bad in ‘em.
Dreadful Penny: All good with The Store? Do you have a copy of Lamb in Her Bosom? If so, does yours have a well-endowed Southern matron on the cover? BECAUSE MINE DOES!
