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.

The Witches: Salem, 1692 -- How A Society Can Go Mad, Then and Now

Photo: from google.com/books, at this address.

Incredibly thorough, this book seems somehow meticulous and yet all over the place at the same time. I mean that in a good way, though I could maybe understand those reviews I've read that appreciated that less than I did. I'm a guy whose thoughts are kinda all over the place anyway, yet I somehow manage to reel it all in and be very productive on most days (not lately, with a long-lasting sinus infection and head cold combination happening), and hopefully averagely productive on my worst.

This book is like that: it tells the whole Salem story, from every possible viewpoint, in a very omniscient POV that considers the victims, the accusers, the judges, the politicians who let it all happen, the social milieu, and the background history--often all in the same page or two. It never spins out of control, though a few times it may look like it's about to. It's written in a cyclone fashion, its winds reaching far, and like that storm it pulls it all together memorably.

And memorable this is. Its author, Stacy Schiff--a Pulitzer-Prize winner--clearly intended this to read like it does. It's almost Umberto Eco-like, except he really does spin out of control, especially after The Name of the Rose. And those who don't enjoy his ride will find his latest novels impossible to read. (I can read The Name of the Rose straight through, but it's mentally taxing, and his other books are just taxing, like James Joyce at his most internal.) Anyway, Schiff writes here in that whirlwind fashion, yet even the all-encompassing winds have everything under a microscope.

So though it's far-reaching, it's still concise and very readable. Its short asides or tangents exist to show the human side of the hysteria and tragedy. One passage, about a teenage girl, tracked down at her grandmother's house in another town, is chased by men with sticks and dogs. She gets away for awhile, but what must that have been like? Schiff offers the image, and imagines how it felt.

That's what I really took away from this. You get the facts, as you would expect to. You may know, for example, that Arthur Miller's The Crucible strayed a bit from the cold truth. John Proctor, for example, was not anything like Daniel Day-Lewis, even with bad teeth. In history, he was a plain-talking tavern owner in his 60s. He did not have a battle with his conscience; a great percentage of those who hanged did so pleading their ignorance for the entirety of their captivity. Those who "confessed" never saw jail time to begin with--except for one, who did hang anyway. That was George Burroughs, the town's former minister, and an extremely strong man who survived Indian massacres in Maine--and who was apparently despised for that, close and afar. His hanging is perhaps the book's, and Salem's, biggest mystery.

But you get the personal sides and the surrounding history. Indian attacks were common and a constant fear--to the point of hysteria. If that wasn't bad enough, you had catastrophic winters, rampant disease, socio-economic chasms (lots of homeless women and indentured servants, who were routinely raped and/or beaten), extreme gender bias (being an outspoken woman was not wise), a stifling belief system, and a theocracy that epitomizes the necessity for the Separation of Church and State that this country even now so often ignores and forgets.

You get it all. Because don't you want to understand why it happened? This is Nazism in a microcosm, right here in New England. In short, at first, if you were different, you were screwed. If you were a social undesirable, you were accused. Then, if you were in a position of economic power, like Rebecca Nurse and her family, you were accused. Predictably, it didn't stop until family members of the judges and politicians (especially Governor Phip's wife) were accused. How can Harvard-educated men, the wisest and the smartest in the country, take part in this, and allow it to happen? Well, here's how.

And it can happen again. Just take a town (or a country?) at social war with itself, and throw it a bone, and watch it all happen. There were dissenters, sure--until they were immediately accused and thrown in jail. That, predictably, shut them up real fast. The threat of that then quickly shut up potential dissenters, until finally nobody (besides a few untouchables in Boston, so close yet so far away) spoke up. It doesn't take much of an imagination to see this happening on a large scale.

Let's just hope it doesn't.

But here is how a community can go mad. And it's not from any one thing, but from a perfect storm of the worst elements of human nature: religious fundamentalism, ignorance, intolerance, e theocratic government, greed, jealousy, a male-dominated society, a conviction of belief over intelligence and common sense--even from the most educated men of their time. In a world where belief trumps knowledge (See what I did there?), where disinformation and misinformation is gospel, where belief in what you can't prove trumps what can be proven (I did it again.)--Well, how can disaster and chaos NOT happen?

March

A book so well-written, it causes envy and jealousy within me. How could I possibly expect to write as well as this? If all published works had to be this well-written, few authors would stand a chance.

I realized while reading this that most of Geraldine Brooks's sentences were detail-in-action. (And certainly not the other way around, which mars many works of good writers.) Her sentences are doing one of two things: they're either description, or they are action. Too much of either one would be boring, even if it's well-written and boring. Therefore most of her sentences are a combination of the two, detail-in-action.

In this, she takes a mostly-absent character from Alcott's Little Women (which, embarrassingly, I have never read, though I have it around here somewhere) and fills in his gaps. Where did March go when he enlisted? What did he do? Well, he did these things.

This book is a masterpiece (and therefore worthy of its Pulitzer) of its time, and of its rendition of the people of its time. Yet like all good works, it makes the reader understand that the people of its time are also the people of this time, and vice-versa. Here you have racism among the Northerners and the Southerners, and neither is treated like a stereotype. And so it is today. March comes home a bitter soldier who has seen and done too much, and who has brought with him a PTSD and a Blakian Experience that will never be undone. And so it is with returning soldiers today.

This is a book of all times, of all wars, of all soldiers and of all victims. Wars in Iraq, Syria, and anywhere else of any time will be similar to Brooks's Civil War rendition here.

The sudden POV shift jarred a little, and the shift back to March disoriented a little (I had to go back  to be sure that it was his turn again), but the reader will see the necessity of the shifts. Brooks could have superficially prepared the reader, perhaps by placing character names at the beginning of each chapter--a la George R. R. Martin in his Song of Ice and Fire books--but such is not her way. You'll be able to bear it and move on.

She does an interesting thing with Grace, who seems to turn up a little bit more coincidentally than maybe she should--but the reader will see the necessity for this as well. Brooks gets away with these two things that would have torpedoed lesser writers (such as myself).

This was a quick, intelligent and gripping read that sounds all too true, and will perhaps leave you a little emotional throughout, and certainly at its end. But you owe it to yourself to read it, if not for the great writing and experience, then perhaps to better understand a returning soldier you happen to know today.

Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague by Geraldine Brooks

Extremely well-written book by the Pulitzer-prize winning Brooks. Very evocative and very clear, you will get a you-are-there feel while reading it.

Unlike other books that gave me the same feeling, I also got an oddly detached feeling while reading this, even though I was immersed in it and felt like I was there.

The only explanation I had for this--which I felt while reading--is that the book was oddly too well-written, if that's possible. I think it is, because I've felt like that before, while reading James Joyce, who, to be fair, intentionally writes his books with himself in mind. I don't think Brooks purposely does that here, but her book was still so sparsely well-written that it drew attention to itself and lightly loosened my otherwise solid suspension-of-disbelief while reading it. I can only say that this must be a good problem to have. It will not shock you out of the book, and despite the good writing, it'll still land a punch or too, and it covers some grotesque scenes without losing the grossness of it all, as glossed writing sometimes does.

The plot is pretty simple, though a lot happens. In fact, an awful lot happens in this, a book about a small town that quarantines itself during the last Great Plague in England, in 1666. I'd read that plague towns not only quarantined themselves as a town, but as individual dwellings in that town, as well. In other words, not only could people not go in and out of the town, but they couldn't go in and out of individual homes, either. I'd read that homes were shut up--with the sick and not sick of that family together, so that the sick would definitely die, and the well would almost definitely get sick. And if everyone survived the plague, they still might starve--and that guards would be posted outside. Sometimes these people would hang a noose towards an unwary guard and hang him so they could escape. Only certain physicians and healers, and the town carters and gravediggers, and maybe the town's clergy, could still walk around and go in and out of infected homes.

Well, that doesn't happen here at all. The main character is in THE infected home--the one where the London cloth merchant resided, thereby bringing the Plague to Eyam (according to tradition). Then her children die of it as well, so she is definitely in an infected house. Nothing is ever mentioned in the book about homes themselves being quarantined--just that people would naturally stay away from them. That doesn't happen with the narrator's home, either, though she is definitely the town healer after the town's real healers get killed by the townspeople, who feared they were witches. Of course.

I make this sound much more questionable here then the book ever is. Geraldine Brooks, an award-winning reporter and world traveller, who wrote some very important pieces from some very harrowing places, certainly does her research for this historical fiction novel, which is why you'll feel like you're there. And certainly she cannot be blamed for maybe taking a creative license about the home quarantines--after all, how much can happen in a story if the main narrator can't see anything or go anywhere? I'm keeping that in mind, as Eyam plays a part in one of my WIPs, too.

Anyway, this is a deservedly popular novel by an author who I haven't heard too much of since, for some reason. I have March, which I'll read soon, by her, and reading this book has made me want to read Anita Diamant's Last Days of Dogtown again, and maybe start her Red Tent, too. So if historical fiction is your bag, or if you like good writing with believable female narrators, or if the Plague or the time interests you, you should read this book, as a great many have.

Quick Jots

I completed a rough sketch of the three acts of The Gravediggers, and have been working hard at just writing, and not thinking too much.  Thinking too much, researching too much--such things are purposeful distractions and resistances.  So I've just been writing--chapters, fragments, sketches, etc.  But you need to structure all that sometime, so that's what I've done today, after celebrating Mother's Day with my better half and her mother.

I started reading Geraldine Brooks's Year of Wonders, about Eyam and the Plague.  I wanted to see what she famously did there, so I didn't do badly what she's already done so well.  The writing is exceptional, though a little Hallmark Hall of Fame for me.  But she deserves her accolades, and her work with the Wall Street Journal certainly earned her the Pulitzer.

I've surprised myself by not downloading and using the Dragon voice software.  So far, haven't needed it.  But I know where in this work, and in other things, I will.

I've tidied up the office a bit, bringing some stuff to redeem at Newbury Comics (for $12, not bad) and brought the rest to Salvation Army.  I've decided to bring many of my books to my workplace and store them there, sort of start a decent-sized library.  That'll clear up a lot of space in the office, as will donating the bed.

Writers write.  So far I'm still plugging away.  This work hasn't been as easy as Cursing the Darkness was.  Then again, none of them have been since.  But I'm told they're much better.

"Hurly Gurdy Man" sounds creepy as hell to me.  I can't use it in the book, of course, but it always brings up dark images for me that will go into the book.  Hard to believe it's a flower power song.  I like the verse that George Harrison supposedly offered, which were never put into the official song:

When the truth gets buried deep
Beneath a thousand years sleep
Time demands a turnaround
And once again the truth is found...

Now that ain't flower power.  Another stanza that isn't, that is in the song:

Histories of ages past
Unenlightened shadows cast
Down through all eternity
The crying of humanity

'Tis then when the hurdy gurdy man
Comes singing songs of love
Then when the hurdy gurdy man
Comes singing songs of love...

My question is this: When we're at our weakest, our most defenseless, how do we know those "songs" are truly of love?  What if the hurdy gurdy man was as Hamlet's thought of his father's ghost, a demon in disguise, using our sadness against us to damn us?

That's a writer's mind at work.  Yup, that's how I roll.

Unaccustomed Earth

A quick plug for Jhumpa Lahiri and Unaccustomed Earth, as I posted on my Goodreads.com page:

As the Pulitzer and many other accolades will tell you, a very talented writer whose work is void of immature characters doing immaturely self-destructive things--a rarity considering most of what I've read for this Masters class.  Eight interconnected stories from differing POVs, none of them with a clunky sentence.  Literature that is easy to read, not highbrow or condescending.  Highly recommended.  30 editions since the 2008 publication date also shows you something.  Very accessible.

I feel like I'll create something tonight, and not just do the business end of sending the stories out, but right now, after running around for the past few weeks, and the past few days, and the last 12 hours, non-stop, I need to re-charge the ol' batteries.  I hope to post later that I got more creating done.  If I don't, I didn't.  That's bad.