DreadfulPenny: So I totally crammed for tonight and read 100 pages of Lamb in His Bosom in the last three hours. And, let me tell you, this book is quite literally soporific.
Diablevert: I kept finding myself zoning out on the nature stuff. It’s not bad, nature-stuff qua nature stuff, but it just reminded me of like, really boring PBS docs from when I was a kid, with all these long pans of the forest or a branch or something. Not to be all MTV generation – which probably marks me as old, actually – but I kept wanting to get back to the plot
DreadfulPenny: Dude… it’s like Little House on the Prairie, but NOT told through the eyes of a spunky 11-year-old.
Diablevert: I never read Little House. It never appealed to me. I kept thinking of it, in an appallingly bigoted way, as the Cracker Scarlet Sister Mary
DreadfulPenny: I read the Little House books repeatedly as a child, and would obsessively type out parts of the Little House cookbook (probably because of an early obsession with hog fat)… but that’s neither here nor there.
Diablevert: Hog fat? Do tell.
DreadfulPenny: One of the most famous parts of Little House in the Big Woods is the hog-butchering, or “everything but the squeal” scene, where they make cracklings and eat the pig’s tail and blow up its bladder and use it for a balloon. HAPPY DEAD HOG DAY!
But Lamb is pretty episodic so far… la la la marriage and homesteading and cotton-planting and OH LOOK a trip to town and now some adultery.
Diablevert: Oh, you must be a bit a head of me. I’m like literally on page 99 of my edition.
DreadfulPenny: I just finished chapter 10… sorry for the spoiler. What just happened in yours?
Diablevert: Uh, let’s see – Lias just went into a reverie about how Margot’s no good for him and angries up his blood, and Major the hound died, fairly brutally
DreadfulPenny: Oh, yeah, I’m a bit ahead of you then. Sorry.
Diablevert: Nah, I knew all that cackling over the broken plates would lead to no good. (Unless I’m totally wrong. In which case I suppose let me abide in my ignorance.)
DreadfulPenny: Wrong, so far… although I’ve got the same suspicions for later in the book. Once you break a plate with a man, you just know there’s a tawdry bedding in your future.
Diablevert: For sure.
DreadfulPenny: So, did you also get that Vince (which is such a Guido name for this book, it seems) had his way with Margot in her earlier life as a tavern wench? I mean, that’s pretty thinly veiled, but I wasn’t 100% sure of the timing of all that.
Diablevert: Oh, yeah. I didn’t think that was veiled at all. I thought it was pretty clear – I mean, when Lias says he’s going to marry her, he just blurts out “She’s a slut” and then we get some close third of him thinking he has direct knowledge of this. Speaking of which, for the back of beyond, people see to get a lot of play…
DreadfulPenny: Word. I was a little distracted by all the ponderings over the river delta and the grass growing et al. And I agree… between this and Scarlet Sister Mary, I think it’s hot time in the backwoods most nights.
Then again, what else is there to do? Even if you settle down for a little fun candy-pull, you might get burned in the feet by boiling sugar until they look like white slab bacon (an image that might have lessened even my considerable verve for bacon).
Diablevert: Yeah, that was interesting. Actually, that brings up an interesting trope in this book – tons of awful shit happens, but it’s all random and doesn’t seem to mean anything. Like, the rattlesnake bite in the second or third chapter – I was totally expecting the baby to be stillborn or have some kind of birth defect. But nope, no problem. And then Seen gets her feet boiled off, but then seems to turn out fine a few chapters down the line – it gets mentioned again, but it’s not crippling her, clearly. And then the dog breaks for the baby, but no harm no foul even though he has to be put down…
DreadfulPenny: I actually enjoyed the creepy image Cean had of this snake baby growing inside of her after the bite. There’s a lovely bit about what it feels like to be pregnant that I liked a lot, actually, in all that description.
Diablevert: I agree – Miller’s descriptive powers are more than decent, she has some fine passages, she just goes to the well too often. It reminds me of a cake with too much frosting.
DreadfulPenny: Poor Jake, though, having to shoot his dog… if he were a character in a YA novel, he would have had more sympathy, but instead it was just a throwaway with a backhand.
Diablevert: Speaking of Jake, I thought the book was going to be a little different, with that mildly incestuous implications of the first passage. I dunno, I have the feeling I’m reading that differently than a typical 1930s reader, maybe.
DreadfulPenny: Oh, yeah! Me too! Then I was thinking that it’s probably just pretty damn cold in those backwoods cottages and they only had a few beds for the whole family.
While I can see that some of this lyricism is well done, at the sentence level Caroline Miller is a bit of a hot mess. There was this deliriously redundant sentence on the first few pages of the book that nearly made my inner copyeditor give up. Her syntax is all twisted and redundant and just plain awkward most of the time. There’s a passage on p. 17 of my copy that illustrates this, where Miller’s talking about her name and she takes, like, 6 sentences to essentially say “Cean was a weird name, even for us hillbillies.”
Diablevert: Yeah, I think I know what you mean…my inner copy editor is for shit, I can’t point precisely to errors like that, but you’re right, you can feel it flow wrong sometimes. Over-explaining is her besetting sin. We don’t get one paragraph of winter settling on the woods, we get six, and it’s like goddamn Goodnight Moon, we’ve got to visit every blessed creature of the forest.
DreadfulPenny: And flowers… there’s a lot of floral description happening. Some of it symbolic, some perhaps not… all contributed to my nap around 5:00 this afternoon.
Diablevert: Heh. I’m glad it’s not just me. Sometimes I’m a city kid when it comes to the pastoral.
DreadfulPenny: Nope. I don’t mind a fair amount of country writing (and I’ve got especial fondness for reading about really rural Appalachian style life)… but this is pretty tiring so far. There’s, like, no dialogue in the novel, either, which DEFINITELY slows things down.
Diablevert: But I like the quotidian. I rather enjoyed the bits about Cean settling into her new home; the idea of what you’d have to do to settle into a place like that. And the poor calf.
DreadfulPenny: Awww. Poor calf. And hound dog. And pet white rat. Animals do not fare well in this book (a good warmup for The Yearling).
Diablevert: Man, I hadn’t got to the rat yet. Also, this is set at an odd time, it seems to me. I think it’s like, 1830-something? I don’t think I’ve read any other book that really dealt with this era of American history. I mean, Little House is similar in theme and setting, but it actually takes place, like 50 years later and 1500 miles west, doesn’t it?
DreadfulPenny: Little House is all about westward expansion and the frontier. But Lamb is just pre-Civil War, yes? In Alabama or Mississippi (I don’t think they’ve mentioned a state yet, but it’s south of the Carolinas and north of Florida).
Diablevert: Georgia, I believe. On the Florida border. Before the Mexican War (since Florida’s still Spanish) and that was the 1840s, I think. When the interior of parts of the east coast were still a frontier of a sort.
DreadfulPenny: Word… good call Go geography!
Did you get to the part where Cean expresses weirdness about slaves… because she can’t imagine a black person as a housekeeper with its hands on her children? WEIRD.
Diablevert: Nah, haven’t mentioned that yet. Although it’s clear from Jake’s thoughts on the trip to the Coast that he’s like, never seen a black person.
DreadfulPenny: Oh… well, wait for it, and tell me what you think when you get there.
Diablevert: Speaking of race, I really do keep comparing this book in my head to Scarlet Sister Mary, though.
DreadfulPenny: Because of setting and general sexiness?
Diablevert: This too, seems to be as hardcore about romanticizing, in many respects, a way of life that must have been pretty brutal. I mean, there’s lots of bad accidents and things in the book (at least the bit s I’ve read so far) but nobody’s ever permanently harmed by them. And while there’s some mention of Seen being nostalgic for Carolina, and you know, people, everybody else seems fine with what must have been an incredibly isolating lifestyle. Except for when Vince reminisces about getting the letters from his Mom. But other than that, this is pretty glossy – it’s all huckleberries and bounty.
DreadfulPenny: I was thinking that, too… although you do get passages like the one where Cean is churning butter and she’s hoping that someday they will have spices but first they need stuff to trade for them AND Lonzo has to actually carve the jars to keep them in. Which gave me this overwhelmingly oppressive sense that they had to make every single thing they ever needed, and how exhausting that must have been.
Diablevert: That’s the thing, when you step back and think about stuff like that, I feel as you do – like, “damn, that must have sucked.” But in the book it’s presented very warmly.
DreadfulPenny: I dunno… I get the sense that all that self-sufficiency is pretty hard. Plus, when you go to pick huckleberries, you’ll get rattlesnake-bit.
Diablevert: Mmm, maybe I’m not being fair; a lot of bad things do happen. Maybe it just seems glossy because of all the lyric nature bits. One way it differs from Scarlet Sister Mary is that in that book the narrator takes this sort of light-hearted attitude toward the rather strict brand of religion endemic to the culture, and implies that half the island does, too – but here the main characters, especially Vince, all have these long interior monologues about how God is/will send them suffering for their sins, they kind of revel in it…it’s a real old country-style, hell-fire and brimstone system, and the tone of the narrator seems just as kindly and benevolent when explaining how the father thinks God killed his kid because he loved her too much….
I feel like there’s an incongruity there; Scarlet Sister Mary seems outright anthropological at times, the plot only existing to hang the observations on; this too is kind of plotless, but it doesn’t have the quite the same distance….or maybe better say, it’s just as distanced, but it doesn’t seem detached….Like the authors’ imagining her great-grandpappy, not peering over a bush at a strange new culture.
DreadfulPenny: Yeah… it feels more autobiographical than anthropological. I’ll think of the comparison as we do the next section of the book. Anything else on this installment?
Diablevert: Nope.
DreadfulPenny: Word… you make some great points about Scarlet Sister Mary… it will be good to have something to pay attention to for the next 100 pages.
