Diablevert: I just finished the book.
Dreadful: I finished it yesterday (praise the Lord… I was not a fan).
Diablevert: I read the last 60 pages or so over the course of an hour or two. I wanted to speed up but too much was happening.
Dreadful: That’s pretty damn fast… I kept getting bogged down in scenery.
Diablevert: Really? I rather liked it. The scenery was a bit slow, true.
Dreadful: Alrighty then… we’ve got a discussion on our hands.
Diablevert: You go first then. What did you hate?
Dreadful: I think I just had a stylistic epiphany about all the scenic description in these books….we don’t need as much these days, because we have color photos and Google and know what shit looks like
Diablevert: Hunh.
Dreadful: I think the modern reader is pretty much given to skip over most descriptions of trees and rocks and scrub and such.
Diablevert: I agree that there was quite a lot in this book. It bothered me less, I think, than in some of the others. Because it was much more varied, and because there seemed to be more point to it.
Dreadful: The scenery wasn’t the only thing I disliked (I am that ornery). I wasn’t a huge fan of the narrative structure. I never strongly felt the passage of time in the book.
It seemed like Clay was the same emotional age throughout, but really, didn’t years pass?
Diablevert: I think it takes place over the course of maybe two years or so? Clay is a born crank, I can see your not liking him. But I’m not sure how much you expected him to change, going from 17 to 19 or whatever. His character is pretty much fully formed at the start of the book.
Dreadful: See, I thought a lot more time than that passed. Didn’t Clay and Luce spend more than a few seasons camped out in that marshy coast (in Washington state)?
Diablevert: No, I think it was only one winter. They get there in the late fall and stay the winter, and during that time meet the other coast settlers. Sometime in the spring the cattle ranchers there decide to move off and try and find some more land, and they go with them.
Dreadful: Huh. Ok.
Diablevert: It makes a lot more sense that there were only there one winter, since apparently they didn’t knock boots once during the whole time they were playing house by themselves. That was a big surprise to me; I thought it was simply implied, but then Davis goes and inserts a deliberate sex scene and makes a big deal of it. So I assume they weren’t meant to be Doing It the whole winter.
Dreadful: I also assumed they’d been Doing It that whole time, but Davis just chose to describe that one time closely for narrative impact? Man, I kinda blew by it, and that is thoroughly unlike me. Normally, I read for boobs. (That’s how I got through Clan of the Cave Bear in 7th grade.)
Diablevert: I don’t think so, because Luce doesn’t get pregnant till after that, and Davis says something about her finally being sure of him, and so she lets him, and he almost doesn’t want to because of the build-up, but he knows rejecting her would be too cruel. Most explicit sex scene so far, I believe. Not that it was explicit by modern standards. But definitely less allusive, more concrete.
Dreadful: Wait… there must have been some similarly spicy stuff in Scarlet Sister Mary?
Diablevert: There’s a scene with Mary and June, July’s brother (or vice versa, can’t remember now) where they sit on the porch and she decides to let him, and I think there’s a kiss. And then the next page is a new chapter and it’s all “Meanwhile, Mary had become the town whore.”
Dreadful: Ha!
Diablevert: Something like that, anyway. They describe her belly bump early on, but the activities that led to it are pretty much passed over.
Dreadful: That’s where kissing will lead you, ladies!
Diablevert: Word.
Dreadful: So I said two things I didn’t like about the book (trees and time)… give me some stuff you liked about it!
Diablevert: What I thought was interesting about this book is that I felt like it wound up veering between nihlism and amorality, and the ending where they decide Making an Effort Is What Makes It All Worthwhile felt tacked on
Dreadful: Hmmm… nihilism might be a philosophically strong word? Amorality definitely, though…. horses were pretty much more important than people throughout.
Diablevert: A good third of the book is Clay bitching about the frontier settlers either being weird, wound-up assholes who destroy the land and are too stupid and beat down to make a success of anything they do, or else making a success of things by being tightfisted bloodsuckers willing to cheat and scratch and scrounge and gouge somebody’s eye out for a nickel.
Everybody’s kind of an asshole, kind of not, a little bit, maybe 5 percent, which was interesting. And I thought that scene where the old lady gets up from her fever bed and walks her land for the last time was quite striking and powerful
Dreadful: I agree with that… I liked the paragraph about her where it says that she hated the fieldhands, but would still give them a serious breakfast, and basically hated everything else but still did right by the world.
And the description of Wade Shiveley’s lynching was hardcore.
Diablevert: That, to me, was also interesting. I don’t quite trust Clay — or his narrator, whichever you prefer — but to me it was an interesting account of what the frontier must really have been like.
Dreadful: Also, I felt like it was like an occupational handbook for the frontier. You could be a sack-filler! Or a grass-cutter! Or shepherd! Or tollbridge collector! Or horsetrader! Or a cheap hooker! So many opportunities!
Diablevert: The whole moral arc of this book is interesting. Our hero and his love interest are both murders in their way, and they don’t even feel that bad about it.
Dreadful: Didn’t you feel like the book just kinda ended? Like it could have gone on for hundreds more pages or they could have cleared up who killed who at any point and it would have been just about the same?
Diablevert: There definitely is a way in which the travelogue structure is a deliberate device in order to show us all this stuff. It has a knowledge-dump quality which is a little forced and unappealing. But each of Clay’s pit-stops had something of interest, I thought.
Dreadful: A new crackpot at every stop!
Diablevert: I especially liked the super-bitter atheist Civil War Veteran.
Dreadful: We generally think of novels as being plot-driven or character-driven, and this was sorta neither.
Diablevert: Yes, there was some plot in it, but the plot didn’t drive it. In a way I can’t believe this book won, because weren’t they still including the word “wholesome” in the description back then? This book is the furthest thing from wholesome.
Dreadful: Word to that. It is a vivid picture of American life, though… even if it makes everyone look like a cheat, murderer, or wastrel.
Diablevert: Yeah, I think that’s what I liked about it. Writing qua writing, it’s not first-rate work, but the setting is something I’d never even thought about before, and his attitude toward it and description of it is so unexpected it’s fascinating.
Dreadful: It was also interesting to me that some minor characters got names, but more important ones never did, like the horse-trader or the Indian boy with the crippled hands. (I don’t think any of the native characters had names, actually.)
Diablevert: Yeah. To return to the over-arching theme of this blog, The Past: Super Fucking Racist, the attitudes toward Native Americans throughout where fairly appalling.
Dreadful: WORD! That would be an awesome new title, btw. Insanely racist.
Diablevert: on the other hand, it was interesting in that in the time he’s describing, Native cultures are still alive enough that you can describe them as having all these differences and subtleties, even as you’re being all, “every Indian is completely worthless, btw.”
Dreadful: I think every single native woman was a cheap whore…. or not even getting paid for it.
Diablevert: Did that not strike you though, his moral attitude? Because aside from that, there’s a lot in this book that would be a drag in a similar way as say, Lamb was — too episodic, too descriptive. (But I thought Honey‘s characters had more interior life in general, and Davis was, very much so, a great noticer of things, which an essential ingredient of being a good writer.) You seem to have noticed this attitude but not been particularly surprised by it
Dreadful: I think I disliked Honey in the exact same way that I disliked Lamb in His Bosom… while I will concede that Davis is a more skilled noticer, there just wasn’t enough else going on for me.
With Now in November, I loved the poetry of the writing. Not much had to happen for me to be down. Or even So Big, which is nowhere near my favorite book… I just cared more about the people in the book. Not that I can’t enjoy a book about unsympathetic characters, but Clay wasn’t enough of a character for me to either empathize with or really love to hate.
Diablevert: I didn’t mind him. I can see what you’re saying, though.
I dunno, even right up until the end I was expecting him to have to kill Luce and them himself or something. Well, not the very end. I suppose it would be better to say, reading the book gave me the sense there would be no price to pay even though both of them have killed a couple people, but 30 years experience reading other books gave me the sense that there had to be a shoe dropping somewhere
Dreadful: Yes! And that’s why the end was so unsatisfying after all that, I think. You can’t help but think, “Really? That’s it? She just confessed to a DOUBLE HOMICIDE.” I wanted to go all Law & Order on that shit and get old Orlando Geary back in there.
Diablevert: Not a double homicide. Two separate homicides.
Dreadful: Good call. You win on police procedurals.
Diablevert: I was more impressed that he stuck to his guns and went for the “romantic” ending.
Dreadful: If by “romantic,” you mean “someone’s still gotta shoot a horse.”
Diablevert: Hey, it wasn’t the bay mare, at least.
Dreadful: Animals do not fare well in prize-winning books. (On a sidebar of awesomeness, there was a 6th grader in my library today wearing a “Save Wilbur” t-shirt.)
Diablevert: And I did like how everything came back around again. The crazy drive down the mountain that was the first interesting part of the book recast at the end.
Dreadful: I actually hated how everything was connected in the end! Like, all of that rambling episodic whatever and now everyone knows each other and it’s like a French farce but with a wagon train instead of a Parisian boudoir.
Diablevert: It reassured me a bit that Davis was good enough to be doing stuff on purpose. Clay met everybody twice, which did seem a bit contrived. I mean, I’m sure there weren’t a super-lot of people in remote interior Oregon in those days, but c’mon.
Dreadful: Exactly. That pissed me off. I thought Davis substituted coincidence for actual dramatic events one or two too many times.
Diablevert: I can see that. It didn’t bother me that much. I suppose a lot of what you think of this book depends on your interest in seeing total weirdos accurately described. I quite like that. The looney lone settler Clay and the Indian boy meet when he first takes off, or the Civil War Veteran, or Capt. Waller.
Dreadful: Normally, I would say my “intimate portrait of weirdo” interest level is quite high. Now I think, not so much.
Diablevert: You only like gothy chick weirdos, man. If they’re not dying of consumption you’re not interested.
Dreadful: HA! You wound me, my dear, but the wound bleeds truth. I liked Jeff Bridges in True Grit!
Diablevert: He’s a lot like what’s-his-face, Burden. Literally what’s his face.
Dreadful: But, yeah, mostly I like my weirdos in moldering wedding dresses or such like.
Diablevert: Actually, I thought Burden was interesting, too, come to think of it. There was an incredible degree of complexity to that man’s character — or at least to his actions — and I thought it was interesting that Davis lets it ride and ends up having him be a friend to Clay….I mean, basically he works himself up into having Wade Shively arrested/lynched because Wade pissed him off over a parking space. But once he decides to do it, he’s cunning and methodical and cold as ice about making sure it happens. Yet because he is loyal to Clay I think we’re supposed to end up liking him? Clay does, at least.
Dreadful: Wade did seem to get the shaft throughout. His own dad rushed to disown him.
Diablevert: Word. Although Wade also seemed like an asshole, and he did for sure kill his brother. Yet he got his moment of glory at the end.
Dreadful: Moral relativism is a bitch.
Diablevert: You end up hung from a haystack. Or at least I think he was hung from a haystack, I got a little fogged on the set-up there, having no familiarity with haystacks outside of the Impressionism section of the Met’s poster carrel.
Dreadful: Just don’t drop your needle in one! Ha ha ha…. ha. sigh. I didn’t love the book, so we covered everything I was gonna say (scenery, episodic-ness, the past is mad racist, etc.)
Diablevert: Well, I could go on about it, but you were seem bored and irritated by the book, so I think we can skip it.
Dreadful: At least we have the crazy-sauce that is Gone with the Wind to look forward to.
Diablevert: Yeah….There is that.
Dreadful: I do feel a little bad about not liking it (or many of these other early Pulitzers)… like there’s something lazy about myself as a reader for not getting into most of these books. I mean, I don’t need a ton of explosions or anything… but I would love some books that are at least a little more plot-y, or more character-y… or more something-y.
Diablevert: I wonder what Gone with the Wind will be like. Besides terrifyingly long.
Dreadful: Yeah… one edition at my library clocks in at 1440 pages. And I’ve already read Gone with the Wind once! But that was literally about 800 books ago, so I gotta re-read it or you’ll demolish me in our discussions.
Diablevert: Demolish you? HULK DOES NOT INTEND TO DOMINATE DISCOURSE.
Dreadful: Your rapier-like wit is the verbal equivalent of “Hulk Smash” to my ever-echoing “meh”
I just mean I already don’t remember a thing beyond Scarlett, Ashley, Tara, birthin’ no babies, and some glorification of the KKK. Whee doggies. Gone with the Wind is a hot pulpy mess.
Diablevert: Sweet. I caught most of the movie once and I’m kicking myself because I’m afraid I’ll remember too much of the plot and it’ll be a slog.
Dreadful: Nope… the movie has like a third of the plot and skips most of the Reconstruction stuff.
Diablevert: Oh……oh, dear.
Dreadful: SPOILER ALERT.
Diablevert: Alright. My loins, I must gird them.
Dreadful: You just sit back and enjoy the Confederacy.
Diablevert: It’ll tie in nicely with my addiction to the Times’ Civil War blog
