Dead Animals

Currently reading: Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S., Cynthia Barnett

Just finished: Coal Black Horse, Robert Olmstead

I'm a sucker for a horse story. The titular character kept me reading Coal Black Horse, but I had a hard time appreciating the virtues of this Civil War novel due to the author's diction. Here's one example: "He walked a shambling gait, his knees to and fro and his shoulders rocking." Maybe someone should digitize this; I tried to visualize it and failed. (How do you "walk a gait"?) Here's another: "[Men] came and went; they ached and pained. They laughed privately and cried to themselves as if heeding a way-off silent call. They were forever childish, sweet and convulsive. They heard sounds the way a dog heard. They were like the moon; they changed every eight days." American men. They were different in 1863.

The story gets underway when Robey Childs is sent off by his mother to bring his father back from the war. (It's unclear at first if they live in the south or the north.) Where, Robey asks, will I find him? Go south, go east, then go north, says his Delphic mother. All right, Robey says, and off he sets on a "cobby gray horse with pearly [?] eyes". A cob is a small, sturdy saddle horse, so why does such a horse break down before they get to the general store (which you'd think wouldn't be that far from home)? However, this circumstance does inspire the extremely generous store owner to give Robey a replacement horse, a coal-black "Hanovarian." (A quick search indicates that German warmbloods--or German coach horses as they were then called, a category including Hanoverians--were first imported into the United States in the 1880s, making Robey's coal-black "Hanovarian" an anachronism.) As a character, 14-year-old Robey has sleep-walked through his role thus far, for all the volition he's shown, but he's awake enough to feel inferior to his splendid new horse. As well he might. The horse saves his bacon more than once. There's a believable misfortune when the coal-black horse is stolen, followed by a miracle: the U.S. Army agrees to return his horse during a war involving cavalry.

Olmstead does better at penning scenes of violence. An attack on a train yard is described minutely, with the general chaos of battle providing a backdrop for the particular details of human and equine carnage. A desultory love story, on again, off again, is less successful, possibly due to the characters' speech, somehow laconic and mannered at the same time. The author is good at scenes involving unlikely actions brought on by desperation; these scenes almost verge on magical realism, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were historically accurate. And Robey's father, although briefly seen, believably gives meaning to Robey's mythic quest.

On the whole, though, the book is undercut by inexact or awkward writing: "women with green hides sewn to their feet" (ouch), "[h]e was not so intent on hiding as he was avoiding being seen" (and the difference between hiding and avoiding being seen is?), and "gaunt horses with pinch-nosed hackamoors that wrung their tails" (you tell me how it's possible for a hackamore to wring a horse's tail). Since I've never read anything by Olmstead before, I was glad to run across the story "Walking with Syd," a meditation on guns, dogs, death and suicide, which displays less vexing diction. "Walking with Syd" contains this true statement: "Children, or children-like people should not be allowed to name. It is no fault of theirs. They don't know all about names and how they mean...." In the context, that is exactly right.

Adorable Loonies

Still Reading: Two Years before the Mast

Currently Reading: Coal Black Horse, Robert Olmstead

Just Finished: Nature Girl, Carl Hiassen

Adorable loonies--and I'm not talking about Canadian currency (which just got more adorable by achieving parity with the dollar). Nope, this adorable loony is the main character in Carl Hiassen's Nature Girl. As I read, I kept thinking, "There's someone Honey Santana [eye-roll] reminds me of. Who could it be?" Reading on: "Right. Serge Storms."

Hiassen has always written about people who, if they aren't crazy, are at least caricatures, and vice versa. Here, a possibly bipolar protagonist encourages the willing suspension of disbelief in one's readers. Good thing, too, since Honey is the main engineer of Nature Girl's wholly improbable plot. She also has a tendency to hear dueling tunes in her head; e.g. "Smoke on the Water" v. "Rainy Days and Mondays." Without the bipolar aspect, my willing suspension wouldn't have been quite so willing. (Tim Dorsey, you've served the cause well.)

Rudeness in Florida--the road rage of entitlement yuppies and rednecks alike, the window-rattling truck muffler of the kid next door--is pretty much a given and something with which everyone must deal. Honey's quirk is that she can't deal; her quest is to school one snotty telemarketer selling "ranchettes" in Gilchrist County, who, because Honey didn't hang up, grievously insults her. If she can make him see the error of his ways, the world will be a better place for her boy Fry. Through subterfuge and manic energy, she tricks the telemarketer into paying a visit to her neck of the woods: Everglades City and the Ten Thousand Islands. If he can see the glory that is wild south Florida, he'll be a changed man. Or not.

From a kayak outing perfectly set on a river feeding into Chokoloskee Bay (tangled mangroves, spiderwebs, herons, gray pelicans) to the dead python on the Tamiami Trail, Hiassen's eye for Florida is superb. His descriptions of wild and not-so-wild Florida as well as the seamlessly inserted accounts of Florida history make me wish Hiassen would try to write a straight literary novel of the state. I've been reading and enjoying Hiassen for years; at long last, speaking just for myself, I'd be ready for something new and different, if not completely new and different: a Hiassen novel where the humor takes a backseat to the message.

Hello, World

Having never had a blog, I see the material as notes on what I'm reading now, with occasional sidetrips. Whatever else it turns out to be, it's going to be idiosyncratic.

Currently reading:

• Two Years Before the Mast, Richard Henry Dana, Jr.
• Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties, Robert Stone

About to read:

• United States: Essays 1952-1992, Gore Vidal
• The Mistress's Daughter, A.M. Homes

So, Robert Stone. My introduction to Stone was Children of Light, which I've seen described as his worst book and the only work of his I've seen remaindered. So much for critics: it remains my favorite Stone work. Take one Gordon Walker, a fragile, glib, selfish screenwriter-actor who's separated from his wife and invariably cranked on coke, add him to a movie set where his presence is unwelcome, and have him try to recreate a halcyon romance with Lee Verger (Luanne from the bayou to her friends), a schizophrenic actress on the comeback trail and just as fond of a toot--well, the equation equals a trainwreck it's hard to look away from. Children of Light contains a favorite Stone leitmotif: the sinister married couple who seem to have been together forever. Here, that couple is Patty and Walter Drogue Jr., respectively a trophy wife before the phrase was current and the director (both first seen naked in a hot tub in the equally naked company of Walter Drogue Sr., a Hollywood legend, and all of them cracking wise). It's a book full of sordid delights and economy of description, with a harrowing ending and humiliating coda. Something for everyone, in other words.

As a not-fan of memoir (although I'm willing to make exceptions), I found Prime Green mainly interesting for the fictional origins it reveals: the real-life Maoist horoscope-writing hack who appears in Dog Soldiers: "Don't be afraid to ask for a raise, Sagitarrius! Your boss always keeps some of the value of the labor for himself!" We learn that Merry Prankster Neal Cassady's parrot is the model for the highly annoying fictional character Willie Wing's parrot in "Porque no Tiene, Porque le Falta, from Bear and His Daughter. Presumably Neal Cassady is equally the model for Willie Wings--much pickled, I'd guess. Or possibly not.

Distillations from real life transmuted to compelling fiction fascinate a certain turn of mind (which I possess), but this fascination is pretty closely related to the fascination with gossip--not, I'd guess, the reason an author would hope you'd read his book. The sharpest insights in Prime Green often come from hindsight: Stone writes that he bore witness, "unwittingly, to a worldwide development," the so-called "War on Drugs." The ensuing havoc, the "damage to American and foreign jurisprudence, the outlaw fortunes made, the destroyed children, and the gangsterism are all well known." And Vietnam makes Stone curious about his own country and "the manner in which it contrived to live at home," an impulse to which I suppose we owe his books. Prime Green offers an oblique glimpse of the man and his life, but Stone saves his harshest, most critical eye for his fiction.