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The Misadventures of Oliver
Booth: Life in the Lap of Luxury by David Desmond
(Greenleaf Book Group, Paperback, 205
pp., $14.95)
Reviewed by Susan Jo Parsons Are you familiar with all those pricy, luxury shops
on Worth Avenue in Florida's glamorous Palm Beach? Well, Oliver Booth's "antique" shop isn't one of
them. His shop is around the corner from Worth Avenue, where the residents of Palm Beach "have no reason to go,"
as one Palm Beach socialite puts it. Oliver's shop is full of Mexican replicas of French Louis this or that furniture
which he tries to pass off as the real thing. Oliver himself is no treasure. He's fat, balding, sweaty, selfish and
conniving. He's a tyrant who constantly berates his shop assistants who come and go with the change of tides. But Oliver's
"impeccable grooming" and "fashionable dress" show he's trying and he does have a dog, so he can't
be all bad. Or can he? So begins The Misadventures of Oliver Booth: Life in the Lap of
Luxury by David Desmond.
Oliver's shop isn't exactly
successful due to the out of the way location and the fact that the Mexican wholesaler forgot to scratch off the "hecho
in Mexico" inscribed on the furniture. So Oliver decides to drum up some business for himself by attending an elegant
society dinner, where he hopes to rub shoulders with rich potential clients. He gets snubbed by the waitstaff, though, and
placed at a table by himself in the back of the room. Irritated, he ends up drinking too much of the complimentary champagne
and lands himself and his tight-but-elegant outfit in the pool. At this event he meets Bernard, a French waiter who is doing
an internship at a local ritzy country club. Oliver hires Bernard to work as his assistant at the antiques shop part-time,
which Bernard agrees to do for the extra cash around his waiter gig.
One
happy day, a certain wealthy "society doyenne," Mrs. Van Buren, pops in the shop with her bratty grandson, Martin,
who has a bad case of diarrhea. At first Oliver refuses to allow the boy to use the toilet, but then he recognizes Van Buren.
While her grandson messes up the bathroom, Mrs. Van Buren notices the one genuine French antique in the shop, which Bernard
picked out, and purchases it. At this point, Van Buren and Bernard join forces to humiliate Oliver. Van Buren contracts
Oliver and Bernard to furnish her guest house with French antiques and funds a trip to Paris so they can build her collection.
Unfortunately, the book loses something when it leaves Palm
Beach for Paris. The French are stereotypically rude and snobbish and Oliver predictably insults them with his mere existence.
That is not to say the book is without merit. When the characters return to Palm Beach, the reader is introduced to a delightful
group of local women who gather for a weekly self-help meeting at a country club to "trumpet the intellectual, emotional
and physical failings of their husbands." The sole male in the meeting, Todd Flank, better known as the "Toxic
Bachelor" attends to seek out "fresh blood" among the dwindling population of Palm Beach's "unconquered
women."
Also fun is the meeting of the Aesthetics of
Construction Engineering Subcommittee of the town of Palm Beach which includes a group of 65 plus men wearing "a uniform
of sports jackets and slacks in a rainbow of pastels." Their approval or disapproval of renovation or new mansion projects
depends solely on whether or not they have cocktails on a regular basis with the architect.
As I read I began to doubt that the book is Oliver Booth's story because most protagonists have some appeal, and they
usually change. This is not the case with Oliver. Then I considered whether perhaps Bernard, the happy-go-lucky young French
waiter turned shop assistant, is the protagonist. By the end of the book I had swung back to Oliver, but the word that came
to mind was pathetic. This is how Mrs. Van Buren and Oliver leave him.
Despite the fact I couldn't find a sympathetic character to cling to, I enjoyed the slice of Palm Beach life Desmond offers.
I would love to read another book set in Palm Beach by this author if he promises to skip the trip to Paris. Susan Jo Parsons is Publisher of
The Florida Book Review
Duma Key
by Stephen King (Scribner, Export Ed., Hardcover, 592 pp., $28.00) Reviewed by Susan Jo Parsons
When Stephen King takes on Florida, beachgoers have to worry about a lot more than sharks, sting-rays and man o’ war
lurking under the lovely blue-green waters. In his latest book, Duma Key, King unleashes the supernatural
on a small, isolated island on the southwest coast of Florida.
Edgar
Freemantle, a wealthy, middle-aged Minnesota businessman, loses his arm in a construction accident. Brain
damage from the accident makes his memory a bit unreliable. “Bring over the chum and sick down,”
he says, but he means, “Bring over the chair.” Freemantle isn’t taking life without his
arm well, and directs his fury at his wife, Pam. His therapist gives him Reba, an anger management doll
with “a fluff of orange lifeless hair” and “glassy blue eyes,” so he’ll have someone else to
yell at. It doesn’t help. Tired of the abuse from her frustrated husband, Pam
leaves him. “Quitting birch,” he says. “Bitch, Edgar,” she corrects
him, “The word is bitch.” Once a happy man, he sinks into despair and contemplates
suicide. Edgar’s psychiatrist intervenes and suggests a geographical change. So
off to Duma Key Edgar Freemantle goes, in search of a new start. When
he arrives at Big Pink, the two story rental house set on stilts on the shore of Duma Key, he finds he is one of only three
residents of the island. He doesn’t care to meet the others until he can walk the distance between
their two houses, so they exchange friendly waves and shouted greetings on the beach each morning as Edgar pushes himself
to recover from his accident. Elizabeth Eastlake, a wheelchair-bound elderly woman, stares out to sea.
On her lucid days she discusses art; on her bad days she smashes tiny porcelain doll figurines on the floor.
The other inhabitant is Elizabeth’s friendly caretaker, Wireman, who refers to himself in third person and sips
green tea on a beach chair. Edgar has occasional visits from Jack, a friendly young local man who lives
on the mainland, who was hired to help Edgar with errands. Edgar’s only other companion is Reba,
the sullen anger management doll. He imagines her saying “Ooouu, you nasty man,” whenever he
approaches, yet sets her on the pillow next to him in bed each night. In
his isolation and effort to heal, Edgar turns to painting, a long-lost hobby, and finds he has more talent than he thought.
In fact, it’s almost as if a divine power takes over as he paints. His mood improves, he grows
stronger and finally makes it to the other end of the key where he befriends Elizabeth and Wireman. Edgar
wonders why Duma Key has escaped the over-development on the rest of Florida’s coastline, and bit by bit he pieces together
the dark, horrible past of the island, centered around Elizabeth’s family. When odd things begin
to happen at Big Pink, like the appearance of three pairs of wet footstep prints on the carpet, and Edgar’s hand taking
on a life of its own when painting, neither Elizabeth nor Wireman is surprised. The strangeness escalates
and the past crawls out of the sea to terrorize Edgar. The battle becomes personal, and soon Edgar realizes
he is the only one who has a chance of fighting the evil forces. While the creepy spirits of the past are intriguing,
it’s the characters in the present who make Duma Key a rich book. It’s hard not to
love Edgar Freemantle as he honestly faces the brutal kick to the groin life has given him. You want to
pull a seat up to Elizabeth Eastlake’s wheelchair and listen to her stories. You want to give Wireman
a hug when you learn of his tragic past, but you’re also amused by his witty banter. Describing the handful of tourists
who come to Duma Key for a short time every winter, Wireman says: …Wireman is just explaining February on
Duma Key, muchacho. I’m going to be fielding everything from emergency queries about what to do if one of the Baumgarten
boys gets stung by a jelly-fish to where Rita Mean Dog can get a fan for her grandmother, who they’ll probably stash
in the back bedroom again for a week or so. You think Miss Eastlake’s getting on? I’ve
seen Mexican mummies hauled through the streets of Guadalajara on the Day of the Dead who looked better than Grandma Mean
Dog. She’s got two basic lines of conversation. There’s the inquisitive
line—‘Did you bring me a cookie?’—and the declarative—‘Get me a towel, Rita, I think that
last fart had a lump in it.’ Other fun characters are the happy-go-lucky Jack who tunes into the Bone, the local rock station, Edgar’s
college-age daughter, Ilse, who learns about love the hard way, and a local art patron, Mary Ire, who gets sloppy drunk with
envy over Edgar’s painting ability. Duma Key is definitely a book to
tuck into your beach bag this summer. It’s an exploration of human nature and resilience as much
as a supernatural tale by a master of horror. But keep a careful eye on the shore lest a cold wet hand
grabs your ankle and drags you out to sea.
Susan Jo Parsons is Publisher of The Florida Book Review.
From
May to December, by Patricia MacEnulty
(Serpent’s Tail, Paperback, 312 pp., $14.95)
Reviewed by Stephanie Woolley-Larrea
“I don’t like being in prison, but I sometimes think we’re always in prison. We just
don’t always know it,” says Alice, one of Pat MacEnulty’s characters in From May to December.
Alice is an inmate at North Florida Correctional Institution. She, major characters Nicole
and Sonya, and nine other women, are given an opportunity to create and heal through a writing program
taught by Lolly and Jennifer Johanssen, sisters more different than alike, living in Tallahassee, Florida. The
lives of the women intersect in this well-plotted novel about the many forms redemption can take. The prison scenes are
a little less than half of the novel. By sitting in on Lolly and Jennifer’s writing sessions, the
reader learns that the female inmates are guilty of violent crimes, thieving scams, bad circumstances, or some combination
of the three. As they work together to write a play, each woman demonstrates a desire to improve her situation.
However, MacEnulty is very pragmatic in her portrayal of life in a women’s prison and in describing the circumstances
which can make such self-improvement difficult to impossible. Meanwhile, Lolly and Jennifer each have a journey to take;
Lolly’s is physical while Jennifer’s is emotional, but both have to learn to make peace with their history in
order to move forward. As they travel together to the prison or spend time in and around Tallahassee, the
reader learns to like each of them as they learn to like each other. Whether or not you have spent time in the Panhandle,
you will note the detail with which MacEnulty has enriched her setting, from the canopied roads to the local businesses to
the drives along the Gulf Coast. Through character detail and the use of voice, MacEnulty accomplishes
the difficult task of keeping the characters differentiated from each other. Although the audience may
wish for different results, MacEnulty is realistic without being melodramatic or overly sentimental. The
past is important, the novel tells us, but ultimately it’s your present behavior which determines the future.
Stephanie Woolley-Larrea is a mother, writer and teacher living
in Miami, Florida. She went to college in Tallahassee and ate at every restaurant mentioned in MacEnulty’s
book. See her writing blog at www.the-green-shirt.blogspot.com.
Matucumbe
by James A. Michener
(University of Florida Press, Paperback, 165 pp., $21.00)
Reviewed by
Mary Jane Ryals
Oh, those damn
rich, successful writers. They have all the luck. They
send to lit. magazines, and get in because of their names. They can get their grocery lists published, while many writers
are scratching to buy groceries. But even Pulitzer winners
and best selling authors have their failed books. Take
James A. Michener, who tried to get a short novel, Matecumbe, published without success in the 1980s.
According to one of Michener’s ghostwriters, Joe Avenick, this novel was soundly rejected in Michener’s
lifetime. Michener’s Random House editor, Albert Erskine, said this romance novel sounded too much
like Michener’s 1954 novel Sayonara. Perhaps
Erskine lied. “More likely, it was rejected because it’s not very good,” said one recent
major review.
The story takes two romances and parallels them. Mary Ann Mays, an abandoned mom of four in Pennsylvania,
finds the wallet of Paul Reynolds, an available investment banker. He falls in love with her immediately,
marries her, moves the family into a nice house, and provides security and love.
The parallel story involves Melissa Tomlinson, a Philadelphia librarian who travels to the Keys and meets Joe Carlton,
a cop. He falls in love with her, marries her, and provides love and security.
There’s kindness to the characters, and Michener’s typically sweeping detail describes the Florida Keys
geography well. The description of the Dolphin Harbor Inn shows muscular writing. Michener
says the inn had been “…built like a lean-to, jutting outward from an ancient-looking restored lighthouse that
had the distinction of being one of the first structures ever built in Islamorada. It dated back to 1909,
when automobiles were novelties and wagons loaded with the catch of the day rattled along the dirt roads of what was then
a sparsely populated fishing village.” Michener’s taut writing combines history and physical
description in two sentences to give readers a whole scene. But
the book’s two plots never connect, and they have no suspense or conflict or even complication. I
wanted to like this novel. But the thoughts and dialogue so work against themselves, the novel would be
better with most of it cut. Take Joe’s line of reassurance to Melissa as she’s leaving to return
to Philadelphia: “’Someday soon, my lady,’ Joe commiserated, with his arm around her shoulder, “there’ll
be another time, another dance.’” The women characters
are one and two dimensional—thinking a lot about their blonde hair or about shaving their legs—while the unbelievably
sensitive men all care deeply about these women. In one section, Melissa thinks, “As she continued
to contemplate her date, Melissa searched her memory but couldn’t recall, even in high school, ever having gone out
with a guy who had so many muscles.” You get a formula romance
without the intrigue or indulgences of the formula’s pleasures. The
“Afterword,” though, by ghostwriter Joe Avenick, should get Michener’s historians’ and critics’
mouths watering. Michener (1907-1997) had begun a third marriage in Philadelphia at the time he met Missy
DeMaio in the Florida Keys (Avenick introduced them). They began a torrid love affair. This
novel, apparently, is Michener’s attempt to work out “some issues,” as we now love to call these messy parts
of our lives.
Mary Jane Ryals lives in Tallahassee. She’s published a book of short fiction, and has a poetry collection,
The Moving Waters, forthcoming with Kitsune Books.
Tourist Season by Enid Shomer (Random House, Paperback, 272 pp., $13.95)
Reviewed
by Susan Parsons
Enid Shomer’s
short story collection, Tourist Season, begins with a knock at the door. Fifty-something year-old
Iris Hornstein peers over the aluminum flamingo on her porch screen and sees two Tibetan monks, Lu and Wangrit, standing there.
She quickly tries to get rid of them, “I don’t contribute to charities without reading about them first.”
“We don’t want your money,” they answer. Instead, Lu and Wangrit have
come to inform Iris that she is “the reincarnation of the Great Adept, his holiness, the Saint Amarjampa.” At first
Iris protests--she’s Jewish after all. But then her husband Aaron comes home, a man who has “a
stocky body and curvy legs, like a Matisse, and lack[s] the competitive spirit and ambition that destroyed her first two marriages.”
Aaron insists the reincarnation makes perfect sense since Iris literally glows when she has an orgasm. As
Iris considers the idea, she recalls certain moments of spiritual clarity while working out at her gym. And so Iris and Aaron,
accompanied by Lu and Wangrit, leave Florida for Tibet to begin Iris’ training for sainthood. The stories in this collection
introduce women at challenging points in their lives. In “The Other Mother,” an adoptive mother
has to come to terms with a dark secret and “Rapture” gives us a soon-to-be divorcée who reflects on her
failed marriage, her career and her certainty that she is going to die. In the title story, “Tourist Season,”
a woman copes with having her recently retired husband around the house all the time. Two female porn writing
colleagues reveal their misconceptions about each other in “The Hottest Spot on Earth.” With a name like Tourist
Season it’s not surprising that most of the stories are set in Florida--from Hallandale Beach to Fort Myers to
a fictitious North Florida town named Sweetheart. Sweetheart, in fact, appears in two stories about Garland,
a young woman who is struggling to find happiness in all the wrong places. The one disappointment about the book is that the
two Garland stories are kind of a tease. You grow attached to the character and the town of Sweetheart
and want more. Tourist Season is filled with quirky characters in
surprising situations, but the most engaging aspect of the book is Shomer’s witty description. In
“Laws of Nature” for example, Shomer writes, “Several years before, when Helen turned sixty, she had become,
for all intents and purposes, invisible, except for isolated body parts at doctors’ and dentists’ offices…Socially
speaking, she no longer counted, like being naked in front of the dog.” Shomer, an award-winning poet, is a
resident of Tampa. She has said she plans to follow up this collection with a novel. I
hope it’s about Garland.
Susan Parsons is the Publisher of The Florida Book Review.
St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves Stories by
Karen Russell (Knopf, Hardcover, 256 pp. $22.00) Reviewed
by P. Scott Cunningham
Coral Gables High graduate Karen Russell’s debut short story collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls
Raised by Wolves has no shortage of home-grown imagination. Fairy tales and children’s stories of all stripes combine
with Floridian brushstrokes to form her adolescent stories of sleepaway camps for insomniacs, haunted underwater caves, and
forbidden ice palaces. One (“from Children’s Reminisces of the Western Migration”) even reads eerily
like a riff on the old computer game “Oregon Trail,” and only a native Floridian could describe hanging rain drops
as “the icicles of the tropics.”
Most of the stories are narrated in first-person by some middle
child trying desperately to fit in, free at last to use the vocabulary he has acquired by spending too much time beneath the
lamp light. Made-up words like “flamingular” mark these narrators not only as Floridian but also as icons of that
age when we’re just beginning to feel the power of our own intellect. When the voice occasionally breaks down, it’s
because the language has left the character to pack in as many multisyllabic words as possible—a common problem for
first-time authors. More often though Russell’s voice feels magical and age-specific. In “City
of Shells,” when the narrator corrects an assessment of her friend Laramie as “sophisticated,” she sums
up every girl I was in love with in middle school: “What the teachers actually mean is that Laramie has huge boobs;
that she smells like coconut oil and unfiltered Camels; and that she gives it up to high school boys named Federico.” Many
of her sentences are poetic: “I wish someone would murder a sheep every night of my life,” while others are refreshingly
hilarious, such as this one, used when describing a woman who, as part of her job as Zamboni driver and disc jockey for an
adult ice rink, wears a yeti suit: “She was abominable in the best way.” What sometimes
eludes Russell, or perhaps falls victim to her lyricism, is endings. Most of the stories feel as though they should end on
an ellipsis. “Haunting Olivia” for instance, the New Yorker story that launched Russell’s career,
has a sound premise—two boys in search of their drowned sister—but ends on the exact same note of regret it began
on, with the two boys no closer to any form of conclusion, real or imagined. The title story has
no such shortcoming. “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” is about—in a delightful instance
of truth in advertising—a pack of fifteen werewolf children sent to a Catholic finishing school to learn to behave like
young ladies. Besides being the perfect metaphor for adolescence, the werewolf conceit allows Russell to reduce her characters
to the raw emotional responses that drive all good fiction. In the course of literalizing all sorts of clichéd animal
metaphors for human behavior—“We would snarl at each other for no reason;” “Being around other humans
had awakened a slavish-dog affection in us”—Russell taps into something ancient: beneath all of our golfing and
table-manners lies something untrainable, dangerous, and beautiful. This to me is the task of fiction—stripping away
the details that conceal, like a skin, the archetypal human animal, and Russell accomplishes it in a way that feels fresh
and true.
P. Scott Cunningham is a
Florida Book Review Contributing Editor and a regular contributor to the
New Times. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Pool, Court Green,
Cider Press Review and Mc Sweeney’s Internet Tendencies.
The
Last Flight of José Luis Balboa by Gonzalo Barr (Mariner Books, Paperback, 208 pp., $12.00) Reviewed by Louis K. Lowy
Miami is kinetic, lazy, dangerous, ridiculous, old-fashioned,
trend setting, bigoted, welcoming, and one of the most exciting cities in the country and arguably the world. Gonzalo Barr,
in his premiere collection of nine short stories The Last Flight of José Luis Balboa, winner of the Bread
Loaf Writer’s Conference Bakeless Prize, has seized the heart of this sub-tropical metropolis and exposed its arteries
to the reader. He conjures up a cast of characters that could only come from the steamy over-crowded expressways, brightly
painted high rises, creamy shores and beached Cuban exile rafts that are Miami.
Braulio, the title character in the hilarious “Braulio Wants His Car Back,” tries desperately to get his shyster
friend, Pepe Luis, to return his vehicle. The story, like a downhill snowball gaining girth and momentum, is reminiscent of
a Buster Keaton comedy. It ends, as all great Keaton shorts do, with a climax that brings not only laughter but also a touch
of pathos. Barr explores Miami’s dark side just as brilliantly
in the title story “The Last Flight of José Luis Balboa.” What starts as a fantasy on the beach for out-of-towner
Pete Burger becomes a nightmare of reality. The author takes us behind
the curtain of the magic city in “Faith” and reveals its illusion in the guise of Trip Perez, the shock-and-awe
news anchor who confronts everyone but himself. Most impressively, Barr
has the ability to illustrate the hopes and dreams of Miami. In the touching “A Natural History Of Love” sixteen-year-old
Silvia, the daughter of upper-middle class second-generation Cubans, deals with being dumped by Rolly for refusing to go all
the way. In the process, the reader not only experiences the awkward not-quite-a-child but not-quite-an adult years, but also
the angst of balancing the world of the older Cuban exiles and the modern Cuban-Yuppies. From the chapter ‘The War Of
My Grandmother’s Black Beans’ - Silvia explains: If I don’t exhaust every hyperbole to describe
her black beans . . . my grandmother will say, “Ay, Silvita doesn’t like the food.” There’s
no turning back. It’s the first volley in the war, a battle cry to my grandfather, who then pipes up about the loss
of Cuban values among the Youth of Today. From the specific – you don’t like my black beans – my
grandparents extract the general – you reject your Cuban roots. From the individual – you look down
on the Cuban – they get the universal – your entire generation despises everything Cuban, thus assuring
the Imminent Demise of Civilization as we Know It.
Barr’s use of description and minutia had me nodding my head in sympathy and rooting for his heroine as he skillfully
brought resolution to this coming-of-age tale. Recently, I sat on my front porch, beneath the pearly quarter moon, and thought
of Gonzalo Barr’s short stories as I soaked in the sounds of south Florida - the steady distant traffic, the wind gusts,
the rustling hibiscus and the booming salsa. It came to me that Barr’s collection can best be summed
up by his character Trip Perez, the newscaster in the aforementioned “Faith,” as he tells his attorney that he
is purchasing a sculpture: “I’m going to take it.” “Does this thing have a name or don’t they do that anymore?” “It’s
called Ecce Homo, which means, my dear counselor, ‘Behold, man!’” To read The Last Flight
of José Luis Balboa is to behold not only man and woman but also the shimmer and dissonance that is Miami.
Louis K. Lowy, a retired firefighter who lives in Miami Lakes, FL, is a struggling husband and father,
struggling writer, struggling musician, struggling filmmaker, struggling student, and an accomplished struggler.
Love and Ghost Letters by Chantel Acevedo
(St. Martin's Griffin, Paperback, 320pp., $14.95)
Reviewed by Yaddyra Peralta
In Love and
Ghost Letters, seventeen-year-old Josefina Navarro falls in love with Lorenzo Concepcion, a charming loafer in 1930s
Havana, despite his warning: "I have no money, and I drink rum and whiskey." Her father Antonio, a high-ranking
police sergeant, cautions her that Lorenzo will lead her down a path to penury and hardship, but, entranced by Lorenzo's
forthrightness and unbridled sexuality, she doesn't listen.
Immediately after the wedding, Josefina's new husband drags her off to El Cotorro, a dust-covered town so destitute that
when a baker's cart overturns young and old alike mob him. Despite this harsh introduction to a life of poverty, and her
husband's constant infidelity, pride keeps the new bride and her father apart. After he is presumed dead in a student-led
riot, she begins to receive ghostly letters signed "Tu Papa"-Your Father. But lest you think the novel is taking
a turn for the magical realist, the letters are actually addressed from a live Antonio who emigrated to the U.S.
Chantel Acevedo's debut novel re-imagines the lost world of pre-Castro Cuba, a time when the island was just a short ferry
ride away from Key West. Spanning close to fifty years, the narrative lovingly takes its time at each stop, whether it be
Josefina's European-style Havana bedroom complete with its own pianoforte or her new home in El Cotorro, its resident
orisha (Santeria god) crawling with cockroaches.
There are
a few surprises along the way, like when Antonio Navarro decides to let Cuba think he is dead. Without papers, he scams his
way onto a ferry to Florida where a customs agent, Mona Linde (lovely monkey in Spanish) takes a shine to him and takes him
home to Miami Springs, in return for some lovin', of course.
Unfortunately, there are not enough surprises and too many false starts. Characters like Lorenzo, and, later, his grown children,
take risks and run away several times to Havana and for a few brief pages attempt new lovers, new enterprises-sometimes illegal
ones-only to give up and return home dejected. Antonio himself, for no reason other than homesickness, decides to return to
the island after Mona Linde's death. Josefina's reaction to this reunion is one of disappointment, and I sure know
how she feels.
In the last third of the book, as the timeline
veers closer to the Cuban Revolution, the characters left on the island begin to shrink like dying flowers. And though this
may be a statement about the effect of historical developments, this reader would have preferred active characters not overwhelmed
by outside events. Yaddyra Peralta is a second-year student
in the M.F.A program at Florida International University. She is also the current art editor for Gulf Stream Magazine.
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Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen
(Modern
Library, Paperback, 912 pp., $16.00)
Reviewed
by John Bond Peter
Matthiessen's Shadow Country imagines the life of hard-working, hard-drinking,
hard-whoring, hard-living, dead-eyed Everglades pioneer Edgar A. Watson, a historic figure. Mister Watson, Planter Watson,
Emperor Watson, Desperado Watson, Bloody Watson, Killer Watson sired no fewer than 12 children by at least seven women, three
of whom he married, at least four of whom he loved. More than 25 murders across 40 years were laid at Watson's feet, two
of which he was tried for, at least three of which he conspired in and some number of which he likely committed. The evidence
of his involvement in most is circumstantial.
The
2008 National Book Award winner, Shadow Country, 892 pages, is an abridged re-presentation
of three previous Matthiessen novels: Killing Mr. Watson (1990), Lost Man's River (1997) and Bone by Bone (1999). Meticulously researched,
the story was a quarter century in the crafting. It is much more than an edit, with nearly 400 pages excised (the largest
part from Lost Man's River), individual paragraphs and sentences re-crafted, lesser
characters grown into greater ones. Nearly all the characters of Shadow Country are
historical, the details of their lives real. It is almost impossible to distinguish where the historic record leaves off and
Matthiessen's imaginings begin. Most of his speculation involves the deaths ascribed to Watson; Matthiessen supposes what
might have been but cannot be known.
The book begins
and ends the same hour, the afternoon of Monday, October 24, 1910. In the aftermath of the Great Hurricane of 1910, the 55-year
old Watson brings his motor skiff, Warrior, ashore by Ted Smallwood's Chokoloskee Island store, built atop an Indian shell
mound where gulf and ‘Glades meet. He seeks to convince a pack of 20-some neighbors, mostly good folk, that he is not
guilty of murdering two men (hog thief Green Waller and gunslinger Dutchy Melville) and a woman (Big Hannah) who had worked
for him; indeed that he has done justice against their true killer, his in-law Leslie Cox. While his third wife—it is
her 21st birthday—cowers with their two children beneath the store amid the stinking corpses of poultry drowned by the
storm, his neighbors put 33 bullets and an uncounted number of shotgun loads in him. A key question of the story is whether
the killing is self-defense or vigilante ambush. "A powerful, charismatic man is shot to pieces by his neighbors-why?"
Matthiessen says in his Author's Note. "It is the why? that matters."
Matthiessen
roots his tale vividly in place. Watson's Everglades is presented as paradise and purgatory. Florida's flora and fauna,
the iconic and less so, serve to reveal Watson, his world and the people around him. In potent but somewhat lesser degree
Matthiessen crafts Arkansas, where Watson was imprisoned for horse theft, and the Oklahoma Territory, where he allegedly bushwhacked
the outlaw queen Belle Starr; antebellum and reconstruction Edgefield County, South Carolina, where Watson was born; and Fort
White ‘in the Suwannee River country of north Florida,' whence he flees under suspicion of murder at age 15, and
where he is charged with murder some 35 years later.
Matthiessen
manipulates time and voice artfully. Book I moves from the killing back to Watson's arrival in the Everglades in 1892,
then forward again to his burial in Fort Myers, hinting at violent doings in Watson's past. It is told in a rhythmic sequence
of first person accounts by 12 of his friends, neighbors and relations, some of whom fired upon Watson that fateful day. In
Book II, Watson's son Luke, a history professor, seeking to understand and hoping to exonerate his father, reconstructs
Watson's personal history much as Matthiessen himself must have done, ferreting out details from Watson's childhood
in South Carolina's Piedmont in the 1860s, then carrying forward past Watson's death to the effects of his life on
those he touched, through Prohibition into the early days of the Great Depression. Book III gives Watson's first person
account of his life, from birth to moment of death with insightful meanderings into his genetic and cultural antecedents.
Watson descends from fiery Celtic Borderers, ‘a suspicious breed of feuders and avengers.' The son of a shrewish
mother and an alcoholic and abusive father, ‘a poor relation of stern, prosperous kin,' and a child of the beaten,
angry, resentful Confederacy, Watson lives a strange but strong code of honor, encompassing personal responsibility and enterprise,
revenge and vendetta.
Matthiessen is among other things,
a master of voice-his novel Far Tortuga is written entirely in the dialect of Cayman Islanders. In Shadow Country, the varied voices of the backcountry ‘Glades, and the red clay Piedmont are especially
earthy and ring true. Wary and defiant reconstruction-era African-Americans, servile slaves and servants, field hands, half-breed
crackers, southern aristocracy, schoolmarms, hard-edged entrepreneurs, redneck sheriffs all speak here, each distinction subtle
yet clear, melding eye-dialect and diction to imply origin and place and culture.
Only
briefly does Matthiessen enter the points of view of blacks and women, though he in Book I delves somewhat more deeply into
the minds of ‘mulatters and half-breeds.' It seems a wise choice. He can describe their lot, but recognizes that
he cannot really know them. The brutality of their existence is revealed almost exclusively through the harshness of their
lives, how their destinies are ruled by the whims of white men around them, and through the racism demonstrated in the everyday
thoughts and actions of common people.
Through the eyes of the storytellers Matthiessen unfolds the growth of Florida:
the near-extinction of wild birds and alligators by plume and hide hunters, Key West wreckers, cattlemen, Spanish-American
War profiteers, orange growers and sugar planters, sand-dredging roadbuilders and railroad men, swamp-selling hucksters, and
the oily lawyers and politicians who enabled the worst of them. Again, from the Author's Note: "...it might be argued
that the metaphor of the Watson legend represents our tragic history of unbridled enterprise and racism and the ongoing erosion
of our human habitat...the ills of our great republic as perceived through the eyes of backcountry Americans..."
Matthiessen's telling of the Watson legend has been variously
compared to Joseph Conrad (Ron Hansen, NY Times), Faulkner (Tom LeClair, NY Times)
and the dark side of Twain (Ron Carlson, LA Times). Though its messages resonate,
Shadow Country is more than anything a character study, steeped in the never-ending
storyteller's question: why do people do what they do? Not proselytizing nor speechifying, not polemical, Matthiessen
lets the characters and their lives reveal their place and time, and how Florida became what it is. A SCUBA instructor, boat captain and pilot, John
Bond has written six non-fiction books about poker. His short story "T-Bird" appears in Best American Mystery
Stories 2007. His website is johnbondwriting.com
All or Nothing by Preston L. Allen (Akashic Books, Paperback,
252 pp., $14.95) Reviewed by John Rodonis
All or Nothing Carries an Ace in the Hole
You call your job and whisper, I don’t
feel good. I can’t come in.
Then you
shower, put on your uniform, and tell your wife, Well, goodbye, hon, I’m off to work.
Then you go gamble. ...and so begins, All or Nothing, a fast-read fiction by Preston L. Allen
that begs, borrows, sweats, steals, spins, shoots and shuffles its way from the Indian casino slots of Miami to the high-stake
poker tables of Vegas—and back. In the process, Allen deals out a plot and flip-flop of character
perhaps a bit too serendipitous, while, to his credit, realistically portraying the desperate, manic and nerve-wracking world
of the compulsive gambler. Allen certainly seems well-researched, even well-versed, as he both subtly and
grossly captures the insidious nature of compulsive gambling. An eccentric character named Professor, presenting
a theory on the essence of sexual desire, likens the casino to the alluring “roundness” of a seductress, one who
uses men and women alike for her own hedonistic desires, then discards them, temporarily relieved of their “discomfort”
and spent till next time. Through the protagonist P’s first person narrative, Allen examines the flaming
abyss compulsive gambling burns in its victims’ guts, self-esteem and bank accounts, the desperate, myopic immediacy
it incites, the self-destructive need it feeds on, the families and relationships it destroys. For with gamblers, it really
is all or nothing. Usually nothing. Take it from a reviewer who’s been there. Allen is right on the money here. If someone
says, Buy some medicine for me with this $20, my life depends on it, and you go to the casino, you will blow all of your money,
all of the money in your ATM up to the daily maximum, then dig around in your pockets for whatever spare change you have remaining,
and blow the $20 your friend gave you, whether his life depends on it or not. You will leave with nothing. Every penny you
have goes into the machines because you never know when lady luck is going to dance with you. Tonight, I blew all of my loose
cash, blew my daily max on the ATM, then went out to the car and found three quarters and 26 pennies in the toll tray. That
made a dollar. That was all I needed. The doomed P. is a “comfortably married” man who works
a second night job to support his habit first, then his family. He’s a number pattern-analyzing, ATM keypad-pounding,
dig-in-the-seats-for-lost-lunch-money school bus driver slot addict who manages to convince his wife (who has an eye for antiques,
but seems blind to reality) they’re rolling in dough. Along the way, P. accumulates three
lawn bags full of ATM receipts he keeps in the garage to offset taxes should he score big. The $100,000
he’d won (and slots ate) wasn’t big enough. It never is. Allen constructs his
plot around wild, sometimes convenient, swings of fortune. P. befriends “C.L.,” a slot-crazed
woman he employs to curb his own compulsivity. Soon after, just as casino security closes in on a disguised
P who has been barred due to never elaborated on IRS problems, P makes one final desperation slot play and wins $160,000.
When he brings his winnings home, his wife, sick of it all, dumps him, refusing the money. P and
C.L. move on to Las Vegas where P. discovers—at least for a time—a heretofore unknown discipline and success. After
P. strikes it rich, women are more than willing to “barter” with him in his suite for money to scratch that indelible
itch. “C.L.,” “E.V.,” “S.” and “Missy” (the “twelve-step” initialization
of names reminds us that these people are addicts), are female characters so degenerately entrenched in “the game”
they’ll do anything for another chance to “hit it hard” at the one-arm-bandits, chasing the “ping
ping” payoff of hitting “the big one.” P.’s willingness to fund their addiction is their “luck.”
As for what happens to his, you’ll have to read the book. All or Nothing is a recommended read, one that weaves a world where people live and die waiting
for “their numbers” to appear in ordered redemption. And if this place proves unrecognizable, then the reader
has certainly had little experience gambling. And my most earnest advice would be to keep it that way.
John Rodonis is an organ transplant recipient majoring in living to its fullest a second chance at life, while studying
English Lit. at FIU.
You Can’t Get There From Here and Other Stories by
Leonard Nash (Kitsune Books, Paperback 180 pp., $15.00) Reviewed by Michael Trammell
Having
grown up in south Florida in the 70s and 80s, I know well the world Leonard Nash captures in his debut short story collection
You Can't Get There from Here and Other Stories. Nash nails the sense of place here, from
the street names to the landscape's flora, from the withering humidity to the anemic listlessness of spirit that haunted,
and in some cases still haunts, neighborhoods in Palm Beach, Broward, and Dade counties. These stories
also work well to show the change that occurred as the area boomed in the 80s and 90s. Young professionals
from the new guard clash with rugged long-time residents, some of whom barely have enough cash for the week's groceries.
The opening story "Sharks" captures this clash especially well. The piece's narrator,
Mitchell T. Garvey, has worked with cars for decades. Sonny Peterson, the dealership's new sales manager,
sees Garvey as a dinosaur, a goof-ball who cares too much about the customers and walks to work instead of drives. Garvey
longs for the times when relationships mattered, before the bottom line became the overriding principle. He
remembers how his father's "fleet customers sent him Christmas cards and tickets to Dolphins games" and how
the former owner "would put on one of his plaid sports jackets and shoot another loud commercial for them to run during
the late movie on the UHF stations." But Peterson bluntly explains the new reality: "If the good
lord Jesus Christ waltzes into this place, you have to be ready to sell him an Edsel with bald tires and a blown head gasket."
Not recognizing the importance of relationships also haunts "What More Do You Want?" which is one of the
more poignant stories in the book. Oscar Pierce, the piece's protagonist, seems to have only a dim
notion of what his wife, now dying of cancer in the hospital, once meant to him, and what a new acquaintance, Abraham Johnson,
can truly offer. Pierce views his wife's possessions as garage sale items he can sell for cash to play
at Gulfstream horse track. Johnson, though big-heartedly trying to give Pierce a job, only seems useful to the protagonist
as a tipster on the ponies. Not until Pierce, desperate, tries to pawn the kitchen's huge refrigerator
does he start to understand how much his heart has dried up.
The characters' desperation, the blue collar and unglamorous settings, and the sparse prose in Nash's collection
will remind readers of Raymond Carver's minimalist stories. Like Carver, Nash too likes to experiment
with pieces that are short and scaled down to the bare minimum of words. This book's very short pieces
at times resemble the taut miniatures of Carver's What We Talk about When We Talk about Love. Some
critics have argued that these works don't pack the power of Carver's more fully fleshed-out stories, and the same
might be said of Nash's narratives. The stories in You Can't Get There from Here that
open up and truly give the story time to soar are arguably the ones that transport readers the greatest distances.
Michael
Trammell is the editor-in-chief of the Apalachee Review. His work has appeared in New Letters, Pleiades, G.W.
Review, and other journals. He's a Research Associate in Business Communication at Florida State University, where
he teaches professional writing and presentation skills.
An American Family: The Baby With The Strange Markings
by Harry Crews
(Graham Press,
Hardcover, 115 pp., $20.00)
Reviewed by David Ash
In A Pig's Eye
The Old South
will never rise again.
Not in Florida.
Not anywhere.
It is fading quickly into the long shadows
of cypress bayous, moldering swamps and the gray hollows of Appalachia. Replaced by Super Walmart, American Idol, NASCAR,
meth-amphetamine and the Cracker Barrel.
Some say good riddance to seedy
juke joints, cut and shoot bars, break-your-back dirt farms and dark history of slavery and racial intolerance. But there
is a danger the baby will be hosed out with the bath water. A handful of musicians and writers cling to what Flannery O'Conner
called the "wise blood."
In the darkly beautiful BBC documentary
Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, which pursues the soul of the poor white South
through the eyes of blues singer Jim White, retired professor and writer Harry Crews stands at the center of a dirt road and
tells us:
"Truth of the matter was, stories was everything and everything
was stories. Everybody told stories. It was a way of seeing who they were in the world. It was their understanding of themselves.
It was letting themselves know how they believed the world worked. The right way and the way that was not so right."
Like most Florida writers, Crews is not even from here. His 1978 nonfiction
work A Childhood: The Biography of a Place chronicles a tenant farm family's journey
south from Georgia. It remains the hard scrabble classic of Florida literature.
In his recent novel, the grimly unbeautiful An American Family, many wrongs somehow
lead to a right. The protagonist, Major Melton (major meltdown), a junior college professor, is cuckolded by his best friend
and sexually humiliated by his wife. Friends and family prick and torment him, salt his open wounds. A demented pit bull howls
from a too-short leash tied to the last remaining tree in his planned community, Crippled Horse Acres. Madness prevails.
This is not a tale for the prude or faint of spleen. Crews' secondary
characters are unrepentant, unsympathetic, guiltless white trash. You will not take them home to meet your mother. The writing
is untaut, broad stroke, grapeshot hurled from a cannon maw. Yet there is authority to the voice and self-mockery.
There is a child at stake. The infant has a strange birth mark on his penis. Major doesn't know if the baby is his or
not. He may be driven from his own home. "Major felt as if nails of ice had been driven into his spine." Much is
at stake in this hallucinatory nightmare, and, somehow, Major remains intact through it all.
Crews' characters have often journeyed to the periphery of normal and flung themselves into the lake of fire. His raw
metaphors and surreal humor wage war against the forces of mediocrity and commodification.
If Kierkegaard believed life could only be understood backwards, Crews believes it can only be known turned upside-down and
shaken.
Count the Old South down and out? In a pig's eye.
David Ash is a veteran, ex-cop, writer and bibliophile
living in Longwood, Florida.
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