Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks -- A Book Review

Photo: cover of the paperback book, from its Google.com page.

Very, very well-written account of a young girl's life on Martha's Vineyard and in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the 1660s. Though the book is more known to be about the first Native American to graduate from Harvard College, it is really about this girl and her Puritan family. Narrated by Bethia, the book is a comparison between her life as an Other, and that of a native Wampanoag named Cheeshahteaumauk, called Caleb by Bethia's family after his Indian family dies of disease, probably smallpox. (He dies of disease, too, of consumption, not long after he became the first Native American to graduate from Harvard College.) This is a book, like all her others, to read and enjoy, and to learn from and emulate if you want to be a writer. I can someday hope to become nearly as good--though that is doubtful--but I cannot become better.

Bethia loves life on the island, despite its hardships. Let me rephrase: She loves the island more than she loves her life on it. Her chores and responsibilities are endless. She loses her parents and her younger sibling, all three in horrible ways. She can read and write and she has intelligence and opinions--all bad in 1660s Puritan Massachusetts, especially on the island. Her daily life, with and without her best friend Caleb, and her family, are equally interesting and distressing to read about.

She follows Caleb and her older brother to Harvard. Her brother is next in line to lead the family and to become a preacher like their father. Except, he's not intelligent, not good in the ways of leadership or human nature. He can't read as well as she, and he can't learn the Bible's languages as well as she. In fact, she's a helluva lot smarter than he is, and they both know it. In fact, Caleb, the "salvage," the other and the lesser in that time, is also smarter than he is in all of these things, and he knows that, too. Despite all this, Bethia goes to Harvard with them because it is her indentured servitude that will pay for her brother's education there, so that he can become more in their society than she can, though everyone knows she deserves it more. She steals a bit of an education while she can, eavesdropping on lessons, learning from the other students, etc., but it is not a life she is destined to overtly benefit from.

In lesser hands, Bethia would fall in love with Caleb, and run away with him, and such, but these are not ordinary hands, and she does not do this. Bethia as a child was confused about her true feelings for Caleb, and maybe she did have what we would call a crush on him for a few years, but overall she outgrows that, and they become perhaps even closer, a brother and sister that would have continued had he not died. She leaves with another man, rather happily, from that Harvard disaster, and lives in Italy for a time, before she comes back and sees Caleb in his final days. The book is told in three parts, the last of which is a bit more sad than perhaps it needed to be, but who am I to judge? It's all enthralling. You'll feel like you're there, and you'll care about everyone.

Brooks clearly is painting a parallel between Bethia's life in 1660s Puritan Massachusetts and that of women in 2000s America. She does this in every work, and continues to do so here. As usual, it is not overt, or heavily done, and you don't feel preached to. This outlook, again as usual, enhances the story and does not detract from it. In fact, that cultural comment is not the story. As always, her story is her story. Bethia and Caleb, two others in a career-long character list of strong others, are her vehicles to tell this story. They themselves are not the story, per se. This is a distinction that all writers trying to say something should understand: your characters tell the story, but your characters are not the story. They drive it, of course; the story is not a river and they the mere floaters. But the story is the tide, and the characters either swim with it, or they swim against it. Brooks is excellent--here, and especially in March, her Pulitzer-winner--at showing the tides of the times she sets her stories in. It is one of the many things she does masterfully.

So this book is a story of the time, but also of our time. There is an other of every time, as we see today. I suspect maybe a female of African-American or Mexican descent is writing a good book about that as I type this.

Blog Tour--My Writing Process

Thanks to my friend Jane Wilson, I am participating in the Blog Tour, in which authors write about their writing process, and their writing, by answering the same four questions. Jane posted hers last week, March 3rd, at http://redroom.com/member/jane-wilson. Go check it out. And thanks, Jane, for asking me to blog my two cents' worth.

So, if you're silly curious enough to read four questions and answers about my writing process and my writing, here you go:

1. What am I working on?

My goodness, what am I not working on? I'm always working on multiple projects, which I used to think meant that I was super-creative. But now I think it means I'm not as focused and organized with my time and with my projects as I should be. I'd get more writing finished if I did one thing at a time. For the record, I do not encourage the multiple-project method, unless you are much more organized than I am, and you tend to finish a piece after a decent length of time.

Anyway, I'm finishing a thriller / mystery, titled (maybe), Mattress Girl, though I may stick with its (too) old title, Cursing the Darkness. (I'm sort of sick of that title now, but it fits the work very, very well. And Mattress Girl is not the main character.) Feel free to comment on which title you think sounds more interesting. This is maybe 80% done. A sequel (or prequel) is in minor stages as well. 

I'm also writing a short story, "Cribbage," about a father / son bonding memory, considered by the narrator after his father has passed. This has proven to be a little too close to home, and difficult to finish. 

I'm also working on a historical horror novel about a nasty, evil creature that took part in the plague in Rome and the Great Fire; in The Black Plague that killed a third of Europe (though I focus on the village of Eyam, England, which quarantined itself during the Plague and lost about 80% of its people); in the TB epidemic in New England from 1880-1895; and possibly in the Spanish Flu Epidemic of 1918 and, if I'm really gutsy, in the AIDS Epidemic, circa early-to-mid 1980s. (Because that's what it was, and is, and I'm not sure, even 34 years later, that we've totally realized that as a society.) I'm actually about a third through this one, though it's in fragments. I speak of Book 1 of this project, which I expect to be a trilogy, at least. 

And did I mention I was drafting a novel told from the POV of the maid (who really existed) or of a servant (who really didn't) of Lizzie Borden, in 1892? And two memoirs?

I also write book reviews for an online mystery magazine. You can see why I do not suggest this juggling-writing method.

2. How does my work differ from others of its genre?

I try to turn each genre on its head, or to at least introduce something new to it. I'm writing Cursing the Darkness because I've been reading mystery, and noir, and detective novels, and combinations of those, since my early teens. The darkness, the loneliness, the lone man standing on his own (but not being as alone as he thinks he is) against the evils and ills of his society, of his world--all of that resonates with me. I feel I often do much the same thing, though I'm not a detective. I suspect, though, that I could be a good one, but I wouldn't be able to work in a constrictive environment, like a police force. I wouldn't be able to stand the politics, the red tape, looking in the faces of murderers and abusers and rapists and not being able to beat the hell out of them, the frustration of having to let go of an unsolved case because of the next case...

The memoirs I write because I have something very specific to say in them; to be honest, they're in such an infancy that I don't know how they'll be different yet. Except for its main subject, of course...

The short story in general is a form I like a lot. It's immediately gratifying for the author, in the sense that they're finished faster than a novel, and the editor's Yes or No comes back quicker than an agent's or publisher's does. Mine are different, I think, because I focus on an aspect of the story's genre, or themes, that are not as tread upon as are others. "Hide the Weird," for example, differed because it focused on the minute details of one potential death, one incident, and it ended with a "knowing" detail that was a little different, a little quirky. I like that about short stories, that you can focus on one thing, and turn it around, or amplify it...

The historical horror novel will be different because it takes a bit of the vampire trope (though it's not exactly a vampire, per se) and focuses more on the European vampire myths rather than the American neck-biter. (There's no neck-biting, for example.) These bad dudes are quite nasty because they're more life-drainers and spirit-suckers, like the original European and Asian ones were. They are not Victorian blood-sucking stand-ins for repressed sexual urges--if I can be so bold. And these are not things you'd want to have a romance with! No one gets lovey-dovey about these guys. It's not even an option. These are things you want to run away from, fast--if you can. That's difficult because they tend to hide in the footsteps of bigger catastrophes--like fires, and plagues, and viruses. But they also hide in the biases of the society's reaction towards these catastrophes--and that's another way this trilogy is different. How can you run from such a thing in Eyam, England, during the Plague, when the town's already quarantined? While people in New England in the 1880s and 1890s, for example, were dropping from consumption, a few unfortunate folks were succumbing to this demonic thing--which hid in the footsteps of the TB, and its way to kill even mirrored TB's symptoms. So that's different, too.

3. Why do I write what I do?

Whoops--I kind of answered that in the paragraph above. Though, actually, the real answer for this is because it interests me. A lot. I've got something to say, something to show, and I know I can do so in a different way than what's already been done--at all, or recently, or both. My characters tend to surprise me, which is always good, and I tend to surprise myself. I write some things and I think--Wow! I didn't know I was going to go there! I'm rarely in love with what I write, but it's a blessing when something comes out just right, and a little bit different. "So Many Reasons to Celebrate the Season" worked like that. Didn't even know it was going to come out that way, and say what it said, until it did. "Hide the Weird" was a little more planned in my head, but the ending was still a nice little twist / surprise for me. And so that's why I write what I do as well--to surprise myself, to complete something of my own unique creation that really works. It's like a mechanic making his own engine and liking how it purrs. It's rare for me, but it's blissful when it happens.

4. How does your writing process work?

Oh, Lord. Well, here's the nasty, evil truth, and I'm very ashamed to admit this, but...I don't have a writing process. At all. I don't write the same thing every day, or even consistently. I don't write at the same time every day, or even (what I feel is) consistently. I don't outline. I do listen to music, and I do draft. A lot. When I can. Whenever my job doesn't consume me; whenever I conquer my own fear, or frustration, or lack of focus, or whatever it is (Steven Pressfield calls it Resistance, which is as good a name for it as any) that prohibits me from sitting my butt down and working on one project consistently, at the same time every day, until it's done. This is maddening beyond belief; I would literally tear my hair out if I thought I could afford to lose any more of it. I do not advise my working method, if I can even call it that, for anybody. Sit your butt down and work on one thing (or one big thing and one smaller thing) at one time. Otherwise it'll all paralyze you like it often does me. It is a minor miracle that I've gotten as many projects done as I have, and that I've been published as often as I have. Every finished piece is a miracle baby--even the ones that don't sell. I'm proud of them all, in some way. They're all a piece of me, and they all came out hard.

Well, that's it. Thanks for stopping by! Next week, please check out the writing processes of these three good writers:

Manuscript Info. Garnered from More Free Stuff

Okay, for this as of yet untitled ms.--maybe The Gravediggers?--we'll start with the exhumation of 6 or 7 bodies in 1888 RI, as the father of these people had had a disturbing dream, that he'd had an orchard (which he had) but that half of the trees in his orchard would soon die.  He recognizes this as an extended dream-metaphor, thank you, Freud, and this makes him listen more to his family's eerie complaints.  His wife has been getting sick, and 5 or 6 of their children had already died.  Sarah had been the first, about 19 years old; another daughter was next, though this daughter complains of seeing Sarah, at night, sitting with her (on her?) in bed, causing her pain.  This daughter dies, another gets sick, and has the same complaint.  The last straw comes when the mother gets sick, and a son, who is of age and about to marry a girl in a neighboring town.  The mother complains of the same thing about Sarah.  So all of the bodies are exhumed, and all have their hearts burned on a nearby rock in the family cemetary, and all the problems stop. The mother recovers, but the son, after marrying the girl in that neighboring town and becoming a promising young farmer, dies. 

Nothing is ever recorded about his death, so, ah ha!, that's how "it" spreads.  Vampires, consumption (tb), or plague, I don't know.  But I'm hoping for all three.  Other isolated cases (one family member) will be mentioned also, but only in the form of consumption, to highlight the panic, but to also show how the panic and ignorance of others hides the true demon.

This all sounds like the hokey local superstition and folklore that it is, but I can make this work in fiction.  I'm pretty sure.


This summary of information was obtained through the materials gathered from the free e-books in my free e-Google.  Though I understand that Google may one day soon take over the world--the entire company would make a decent James Bond villain--I have to admit that it is incredibly convenient and useful.  I've got a couple of emails, my other blog site, and my free books all there.  And when I write, I save that writing to a flashdrive, to my emails, to my harddrive, to my Scrivener, and to my free Google documents storage.  I do not work for Google, I swear.  Not only did I get the above composite information from those free books, but I can also get the clothing, speech, beliefs, etc. from the very old books that I saved for free there, too.  My goodness is this convenient and useful.  I repeat: I do not work for Google.

So this is the beginning of yet another new work.  Wish me well, everyone, as I have a tendency to start new stuff with really good ideas and then stop them cold when I get bored with them.  This stuff here, for example, is the root of WIP 7, all novel-length.  I hope to do some combining and shuffling, but, boy, I don't know.