Enchanted Prose

Haunted house, mountainscape, characters – a Southern Gothic novel (Appalachian region, Blue Ridge Mountains, North Carolina; three generations spanning the 20^th century): For a blog that prizes prose above all, The Barrowfields is a stunner. It wins for beautiful, atmospheric, sorrowful prose. A blend of formal, literary/poetic, Appalachian dialect, conversational, and a bit of legalese. Versatile prose that rhythmically evokes “eloquent sadness” set in a beautiful, forlorn place with a heavyhearted clan.

To get a feel for the melancholy tone, listen to a piece of classical piano music played by our narrator, Henry Aster. Chopin’s C-Sharp Nocturne, he says “begins in sadness, moves to bittersweet remembrance, and then returns again to sadness.” Much like this standout debut:

A concise, tantalizing Prologue hints at someone’s existential angst. As opening lines go, it grabs like the opening line of Daphne du Maurier’s gothic romance novel, Rebecca: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” Why is that line so famous? For one thing, the unknown narrator’s voice flows poetically, and it enigmatically forewarns. Compare Lewis’opener: “The desk is the same as he left it.” In case we don’t notice a similarity, he repeats the cadence and unease with two closing lines, first from the opening line of Albert Camus’classic The Stranger: “Mother died today” followed by “I’m beginning to understand.” Which, of course, the reader doesn’t, hooked to figure it out. That doesn’t happen until page 346 of a 348 page book, keeping us in the dark as to the novel’s overshadowing mystery: Where did the character who abandoned his writing table go? The scant details the Prologue offers inform us that the he in question was working on a novel, apparently cast-off nine years ago.

The significance of the unpublished novel is examined within the larger context of three-generations of the Aster family, recounted for us by third-generation narrator, Henry. They all come from “an achromatic town high in the belly of the Appalachian mountains,” evidently inspired by the North Carolina mountain town region the author is from.

Old Buckram is a fictional “town of ghosts and superstitions,” population in the hundreds. The “streets and sidewalks are lonely and seldom traveled” as this is a place of “unrelenting poverty” where decent people persevere like Helton and Maddy, Henry’s grandparents, because “mountain folks have a hell of a lot of character and ruggedness.” The landscape right outside of town – the novel’s namesake – is equally ominous. The Barrowfields is a mountainous area “where by some mystery nothing of natural origin will grow except a creeping gray moss which climbs over mounds of rocks and petrified stumps.”

Already, dark features of a Southern Gothic novel unfold:

• premonition about a deflated character
• woebegone, small southern town
• eerie landscape
• strong sense of place
• mournful passages

Exploring what it means to call a novel Southern Gothic is even more germane to The Barrowfields because the narrator’s father, also named Henry, is all-consumed with the gothic works of Edgar Allan Poe, William Faulkner, and William Styron. His highbrow fanaticism with the great books of literature starkly contrasts with the dirt poor, remote community barely eking by, thereby setting him apart. The outsider character a gothic feature. Picture him wearing a “long black rider’s coat,” à la Poe.

We come to know father and son in another sinister setting: their out-of-place “immense house of black iron and glass.” A haunted house another characteristic of the genre. The rest of their immediate family includes Mother (yes, Henry refers to his parents old-fashionedly) Eleonore, and Threnody, his sister nine years younger. Her odd name signals she’s another character out-of-step with the community. Their “lonely old house” (and Old Buckram and the Barrowfields) all loom large, like characters.

The house is an “architectural curiosity” once owned by a tobacco magnate of R. J. Reynolds. Shadowed in the mountain hollows, turns out Henry has good reason to view the house as a “vulture house.” At the end of Part 1 (the novel is retrospectively structured in four parts), he swears to himself: “I’m not coming back here … This place, with all its bleakness and sorrows, is not for me.” Years later, we see how “a place where your soul resides and where all your ghosts and demons still persist will remain for all the years of your life no matter how far away you travel.” (Apparently, quoted from his mother’s favorite book by the aviatress Beryl Markham.)

Fortunately, Eleonore has other interests – horses, flowers, birds – that nurture her optimistic, sweet spirit like the “soul of a little songbird.” She needs bolstering as our sense of foreboding becomes a reality for a family cooped inside a “monstrous gothic skeleton” of a house with a ghostly past. Henry’s father is an absent presence, devoting every waking (and drinking hour) when he’s not small town mountain lawyering sequestered in a “cubical chamber” surrounded by his coveted library of rare books. Meanwhile, everyone else – innocents – must bear the brunt of his “unspeakable melancholy.” Innocent characters another element of Southern Gothics.

Whereas Eleonore is the hardiest soul, her son denies the heavy burden weighing him down; Threnody, who idolizes her brother, is the most transparently affected. Brother and sister share their father’s intense need for reading and storytelling. A lifeline for this isolated family.

Phillip Lewis is a lawyer from these rural mountain parts. By creating two lawyerly characters – father and the son who becomes one – he has found a novelistic way to pay tribute to small town southern lawyers who “quietly do more good for people and communities than probably anyone would realize.”

The author has also conceived of another key character who combines darkness, mystification, innocence, and romance – another gothic element – Story. An apt name for she has a baffling backstory Henry gets entangled with. They meet in his senior year of law school; for Henry its love at first sight. She’s beautiful, but he seems also attracted to her as he recognizes “some distant sadness from wounds afflicted long before.” As a consequence, their relationship moves tentatively, though the dialogue is crisp and charged. Whenever Henry is around her he’s “melting” or “desires her to the point of delirium.” When he’s not, he can’t sleep or concentrate and drinks heavily. The reader can’t help but think: like father like son.

Googling, I learned gothic literature also contains a comedic component. Admittedly, I struggled with that one as nothing seemed in the least bit funny or darkly humorous until Henry adopts a giant, unruly, loveable dog whose witty antics include destroying Henry’s collection of “Wordsworth, Yeats, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge …” Of Buller Henry amusingly observes, he “apparently preferred the romantics.” Picture a devoted alpha dog barreling at you, all licks, comfort, and lightheartedness.

Before law school, even at college, Henry endured a “cloistered existence.” In law school he makes friends, particularly with J. P., whose coarseness sticks out, reminding us how different Henry really is from his peers.

Henry’s passionate about timeless things – literature, music, night-gazing. So while the novel has a brooding spirit, there’s also an inspiriting thread about enjoying all that’s beautiful before time runs out.

An overarching theme, highlighted by citing Thomas Wolfe on several occasions, is whether any of us can truly go home again. For years Henry did leave the macabre house – to Connecticut for college, Chapel Hill, North Carolina for law school, and Charleston, South Carolina where Story is from. You’ll see, though, that “no one can never leave a place completely.” Perhaps, the most potent message of all.

Lorraine

Conceptualizing Invisibility, Conceptual Art (New York, Connecticut, Berlin; 1968 – 2016): There are many ways to describe this psychologically complex, artistic novel but harmless isn’t one of them. By the time the full measure of harmfulness sinks in, you’ll be two-thirds through and in awe of how such exquisite sadness could be so exquisitely written.

Apropos to its creative rendering, avant-garde art is the medium linking two generations of emotionally damaged, estranged protagonists – a mother and the son she abandoned at two. Yukiko – Yuki – Oyami is so sad and dazed “it was as if someone peeled off her skin so that the whole world felt achy and glowing.” A struggling-to-be-an artist Japanese-American immigrant whom we meet in 1968 at age sixteen after ten years of living in-between the Village and Chinatown. In-between-ness, a fringe existence, a “constant state of disorientation” and loneliness, feeling you don’t belong anywhere, define Yuki.

Jay Eaves, her adult son, struggles differently. A Japanese-American-French-Canadian owner of a Brooklyn art gallery specializing in Asian/Asian American art by female artists, he’s profoundly angry, lost in his marriage, terrified of new fatherhood. Not surprisingly, he doesn’t represent Japanese artists but it takes time to absorb the weightiness of the emotional scars of his mother’s abject rejection because Jay’s contemporary story is told in shorter chapters that progress non-linearly.

Yuki’s chronological, longer chapters reflect the significance of art and her downward spiraling as headings darken over the years. The novel opens at its most hopeful, with shiny chapters named for colors like Quinacridone and Celadon Gold. Later titles are foreboding, named for bleaker colors like Caput Mortum (brownish-plum) and Ivory Black or brighter paints like Vermillion that “always poisons.”

Yuki and Jay haven’t seen each other until the novel’s hauntingly beautiful three-page Prologue, when an unrecognizable son comes knocking on her Berlin door. Yuki greets him aged beyond her sixty years, bundled up in scarves, cold as she was always skinny, a “habit of deprivation” that seems anorexic. Jay dreaded coming, but was duty-bound. He’s just loss his loving father, who bequeathed his Connecticut estate to Yuki; he has papers for her to sign. It’s not until the last sentence on page 3 that the reader surmises her child is male. Enigmatic prose that beguiles and turns pages for we want to know: What drove Yuki to desert Jay? Who was his father? When did she live in Connecticut? Why did she leave? What brought her to Berlin? Mysteries that unravel little by little, cleverly.

Artistry is also seen in the originality and acuteness of the prose evoking emotional pain. A psychologist would have a field day diagnosing the emotions depicted. Yuki says there’s “no place she could imagine being happy,” so leave happiness off this clinical list. At the beginning, she wished to do something her parents would be proud of her, but even then she was melancholy. As her life spins unhappier, she accepts years of a physically abusive relationship with an older man (not Jay’s father) if only to be shocked awake. The author seeks to jolt and awaken us too. This is not a making-it-in-America immigrant experience. This is all-out alienation.

Finding a way to express herself through art takes on a life of its own. Detached from her Japanese culture and clashing with the American, worlds that call for translations, she’s drawn to art as “light and shadow required no translation.” It makes sense, then, that the sixties and the seventies are crafted as Yuki’s most vivid years, echoing an influential era of radical experimentation with art. Since she’s forever dissatisfied with her art, trying to breakthrough with various art forms – photography, watercolor, drawing, painting – we wonder if Yuki ever found moments when she was happy at her craft and did she make “it.”

Was she ever even a happy young child? When we’re introduced to her she’s already hungering, though she appreciates her mother’s “perfection” of preparing special Japanese foods. Both parents are stoical: her mother for adapting to this strange new land and her father for bearing the enslavement of a Japanese internment camp. Though he’s a successful Japanese car company executive, he’ll never forget what our “ugly country” did to him. So he awaits returning to Tokyo in six months, which is when Yuki’s coming-of-age story kicks-off.

She’d been biding her time. Until she befriends dazzling Odile, gets so caught up with her beauty Yuki chooses to completely cut herself off from her parents and culture, remaining on. While she still wants to be a “good daughter” from afar, you’ll see how wildly and sadly her plans go astray. By the time she’s in a relationship with Jay’s rocklike Canadian father, her body and soul have been so battered there’s even an “ache in her eyes.”

All this pain has redeeming value: at least she knows what she wants her art to say: “communicate even one ridge of pain.” That’s the point of the novel. Painting a daunting tableau of a range of dislocated emotions when ties to family, home, culture are severed. What does identity loss, emptiness, anonymity look and feel like?

In this picture’s foreground are ambivalence, turmoil, violence, and artists pushing boundaries: Jay’s “Chinese and Korean, on both sides of the Pacific” art patrons who felt “at best ambivalent about the Japanese”; scorching TV and magazine cover images of helicopters delivering body bags and the faces of traumatized Vietnamese girls; and the rise of modern art movements inspired by artists like Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, whose names are brushed on the pages. Avant-garde art that assaults the “soft-touch” of Japanese calligraphy, also embellished across pages. Especially poignant is the Japanese character for Love. Complicated to write, like the love Yuki seems incapable of and Jay frightened of.

Yuki and Jay’s voices exhibit two sides of grief. Yuki’s is the sensitive voice of a shy “ghost girl.” Depression turned inward, with loud voices screaming inside her head. Jay’s profane voice is rage and sorrow turned outward.

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan describes herself as “British, Chinese, Japanese, and American.” In an interview, she explains that she “spent her life alternately between London and New York, each time missing the other place, feeling as if there was more home there than here.” Her debut novel, then, is personal, which is why it feels so topsy-turvey authentic.

Some current events are also relevant thematically. There’s an art exhibition by an experimental Japanese artist who came of age during the sixties that’s causing a sensation at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. The artist, Yayoi Kusama, has been living in a mental institution for thirty years. Washington Post art critic Philip Kennicott describes some of her works as a “somber sea of sadness” and the overall effect is:

“not so much the visual repetition that stuns you, rather, it’s the solitude, the kind of solitude that inspires thoughts like ‘I am trapped in my life …”

Kusamo’s exhibition is visually stunning; Yuki’s feels muted and somber. Yet both might be suffering mentally alike.

There’s also recent reporting on the “invisible wounds” of traumatized refugee children, and other accounts of the psychological stress the anti-immigration ban is having on Dreamers.

The trauma of separation is boundless.

The conceptual art movement of the sixties, in which originality of the idea not the aesthetics was paramount, seems inexplicably odd to many. Yuki, I think, is imagined as a conceptualist. Likewise, “odd” is a word Yuki perceives of herself. It’s also the same apt descriptor for Jay’s bald, old, diabetic cat Celeste, whom he can’t let go off. But it’s not odd why. Animals love us and are devoted to us in ways humans sometimes can’t. Celeste assumes a strong presence, reminding us of our essential need for attachment.

Yuki agonizes to find her artistic voice – what to say and how to say it. To contrast, Buchanan’s voice seems effortless, purposeful, and deeply emotional. Quite an exhibition!

Lorraine

A deceptive mystery set in London’s “Swinging Sixties” (October 30, 1965 – November 18, 1965): On the surface, this is a mystery about a moody actress gone missing in a moody city. Like all crafty deceptions, it turns deeper than that. Miss Treadway and the Field of Stars is a heady mix of historical fiction when “the world had decided it would make no more sense.” A novel more serious than the lighthearted title suggests.

Moods move upbeat and downbeat. Lively backdrops transport the “baroque loveliness” of the “largest theatre district in the world” along with the sultry, Caribbean-influenced jazz scene. Biting social/cultural commentary on racism and prejudices towards people of color, immigrants, the gay community, and others not “English as toast” presents a tumultuous city of dramatic contrasts amidst a “great wave of malevolence.” London is multi-layered, like the novel.

Since this is a novel tied to a London play (Field of Stars) penned by a British author who is also a playwright it caught my attention, believing if you write what you know it’s likely to feel authentic and be crafted in atmospheric prose. That it is. Miranda Emmerson knows London’s “Theatreland” (Soho, West End). She also knows the faces of other London neighborhoods as the search for the vanished starlet Ionathe Green – Lanny – traces and races through London like a street map.

The actress’ costume dresser-turned-gumshoe Anna (Miss Treadway) was the last to see Lanny leave the Galaxy Theatre, described in glimmering prose:

“A world of angel faces, ribbons and masks; opera glasses in their little cages, pill-box hatted ice-cream girls in sharply starched black and white. It was a world seemingly unchanged in the past fifty years, a place suspended in time.”

Emmerson’s prose is also historically accurate. Be forewarned it’s populated with the same offensive language denigrating people by the color of their skin as you’d find in an historical novel set in America’s Deep South. The ugly “c” word was apparently “common parlance in the sixties” of Britain, particularly fervent as an influx of immigrants flooded into the country from the Caribbean and Africa. The anti-immigrant movement was not restricted to blacks. Sentiments against the Irish were fierce too. Trying to understand this disturbing history, I learned that in 1962 Britain passed its first Commonwealth Immigrants Act, eerily reminiscent of the anti-Muslim ban the Trump administration proposes. This London is an equal opportunity discriminator against all persons differing.

At least we can take heart that the author has created a shining character from Jamaica: Aloysius, a proud accountant. His elegance, gentleness, compassion, and handsomeness inside and out leap off the pages. You’ll fall in love with him. He joins Anna on her consuming hunt for Lanny, for she, unlike the police, feels an urgency to find or find out what happened to the leading lady. He’s attracted to her and protective, realizes she can’t do this alone. The two meet at a rocking jazz club, a client of his, after Anna learns Lanny was spotted at the Roaring Twenties (out of sync with her go-it-alone persona). It’s one of a number of legendary nightspots depicted in the novel, where the music of Jamaica – Ska – pulsates.

Mini-skirts were also the rage. So conservative, bookish Anna stuck out with her oxfords and “librarian’s clothes.” Yet Aloysius (also a literature lover) sees her as “beautiful,” as she sees him. After four unkind years in London (except for his landlady who treats him like her own) adjusting to the “white person nod,” Aloysius confides he’s only “had the pleasure of an honest conversation about twice a year.” Anna, who shies away from intimacy for a reason that becomes clear at the ending, isn’t sure if Aloysius manifests “beauty from his features” or the “kindliness he exuded.” It’s both, which is why she admires and respects him. This gentle-man begs us to be better than we are. “Why do we need to refer to the color of people’s skin?” he implores.

Like an interesting play, the novel delivers an ensemble of diverse characters. Some represent goodness; others definitely not. All seem to share a deep desire to reinvent themselves. Of course it’s the good ones who make the novel hum.

Here’s a glimpse into some characters without giving anything away:

• LANNY: Forty-year-old Irish American diva “charming the Home Counties.” Hasn’t forgotten her tenement-Boston early years. Not much is known about her when she disappears.
• ANNA: Despite top billing, probably the fuzziest. Twenty-some and reserved, we know there’s something in her past she wishes forgiveness for. As her search with Aloysius intensifies, so does their relationship.
• ALOYSIUS: “Genteel voice,” even when he’d be justified to act otherwise.
• OTTMAR: Owner of a Turkish café that’s a “little slice of Istanbul,” where Anna used to waitress. Worried sick over one of his daughters, rebellious Samira. Can’t understand “why the love he had to offer seemed to cure nothing at all.” We feel his pain.
• LEONARD: Owner of the Galaxy Theatre and an apartment close to Ottmar’s café. His profanity flashes “manic grief” and resentment over the discrimination he endures as a gay man.
• BARNABY/BRENNAN: Irish detective on the West End police force who has changed more than his name. Wants to succeed so badly he’s let his marriage and fatherhood go adrift.
• JAMES: Reporter who broke the story, “Disappearance of a West End Star.”
• INSPECTOR KNIGHT: Barnaby’s cynical, foul-mouthed boss in no hurry to investigate a missing, aging actress.
• SAMIRA: Perhaps the most outside of them all, reflective of the novel’s unflinching treatment of the immigrant experience. “No one is like us,” she cries. “No one’s Turkish. No one’s Muslim” … “at school I’m this thing. This thing that doesn’t fit. I feel like dirt.” This may not be the novel we’re expecting, but it’s exemplary.
• ORLA: Brennan’s Irish wife, another goodhearted soul leading an awfully lonely existence. She “had a light that shone on the people around her,” making her despair even more egregious. Lives in a “bubble” with her baby girl, Gracie.

As the plot drives headlong looking for Lanny, these characters call out for a more mindful, accepting society. Ottmar asks: “After all the thousands of years and all that philosophy and religion and books and poetry, after the millions of elections and debates, that’s as good as we get?” Similarly, Aloysius wonders: “Maybe we all have to look out for each other?” Questions that will linger long after the mystery is solved.

So grab your Columbo trench coat, Aloysius’ fedora hat, Anna’s ticking-clock determination, and Barnaby’s notebook to crack the case. Don’t get too distracted by the “little Versailles” theatre district, marketplace hustle of Covent Garden, jazzy rhythms, Turkish delights, Soho hippies, Georgian residences, moonlight over the Thames, and all the mayhem. A lot to take in.

London’s shifting “Swinging Sixties” may have “seemed romantic” to the dreamers in the novel, but it reveals a darker underbelly. Along the way, many characters also reveal they’re hiding something. They’re not – we’re not – as different as others would like us to believe.

Lorraine

Mercy under the Big Top (Holocaust, 1942-1944; Darmstadt, Germany and Thiers, France): Tear-jerker alert! Pam Jenoff has outdone herself in her ninth historical novel of unimaginable feats during an unimaginable historical era.

The gut-wrenching movie Denial about Holocaust deniers, released as anti-Semitism is rising, screams there’ll never be enough stories drawn from the Holocaust. Not just the inconceivable acts of horror, but the inconceivable acts of heroism, endurance, self-sacrifice. The Orphan’s Tale is all that, and more.

Two female narrators recount this death-defying story of circus aerialists when the “entire world hangs in the balance.” A survival story where love bloomed “in the most unlikely of places.”

Two pieces of Jewish history unforgettably converge: centuries of Jewish circus families and the heartbreaking account of “Unknown Children” dumped in a boxcar headed to a concentration camp – unknown even to Jenoff, a former State Department diplomat on Holocaust affairs. The novelist cannot forget nor wants us to, so she’s woven together unfamiliar truths and emotional fiction into a page-turner that may leave you in tears. As it left me.

A prologue opens the novel 50 years hence at an art exhibition on “200 Years of Circus Magic” held at the Grand Palais in Paris. French (and German) words are sprinkled throughout, invoking the two countries where the novel is set. You’re hooked because we’re not told whose voice we’re hearing. We do know this person planned for months to sneak out of a nursing home to get to France. By the end, you’ll figure out whose voice this is, bringing a little closure. Not much as this tale’s not meant to ever feel closed.

In the next 25 or so pages, you’re swiftly introduced to the plight of two women whose first person accounts narrate: Noa is 16 and Astrid 10 years older. At first, their only connection is they’ve both lost their families as a result of the war. Linked by sadness, for different reasons.

Noa’s parents threw their young, unworldly daughter out of her Dutch village home when she became pregnant by a Nazi soldier. Astrid, an aerialist with a “body like a statue, elegant lines seemingly carved from granite,” comes from a 100-year-old Jewish circus family – Circus Klemt – forced out of business in 1930 by the Nazi regime. Based, I think, on the internationally renowned Jewish Circus Lorch, which lasted 130 years. I’m not certain since it’s one of a surprising number of Jewish circus families Jenoff cites. In 1942, Astrid went looking for them in Darmstadt, Germany, but they’ve disappeared. Also in Darmstadt is the winter training grounds of Circus Neuhoff.

That’s where Noa and Astrid’s connection deepens as they both find refuge in this circus inspired, I believe, by Circus Althoff, also historically referenced in the novel. Adolph Althoff saved Jews during the Holocaust like Herr Neuhoff does. Both employed a Jewish performer who was a member of the Lorch family.

Both men also went to extraordinary lengths to hide Jews among the “chaos and intensity of the circus.” Neuhoff’s small stature (5’3”) belies his huge heart undeterred by a heart condition (like Althoff.) The novel is replete with dramatic contrasts like this, “characters in the wrong storybook.”

Noa speaks first. It’s 1944 and she’s made her way to Germany, eking out an existence cleaning bathrooms in the Bensheim rail station. She detects sounds coming from a parked boxcar, rashly rushes out into the freezing snow risking being spotted by the German police, an act that alters her destiny. Actually, her fate was sealed when she gave birth to her Jewish son at a German hospital expecting he’d be adopted by a German family since she’s blonde. Did she know the Lebensborn program was “one of the most secret and terrifying projects” aimed at creating a “racially pure” society? Nothing suggests she did.

Grief, sorrow, guilt propel Noa to the boxcar featured on the cover, loaded with crying infants, crammed and packed so densely she can’t find a space to step into. Somehow she stretches far enough to grasp one baby boy; continually regrets she couldn’t save more. He’s circumcised, a Jewish baby, like the one she abandoned. This time she’ll fiercely protect him no matter the danger. Much of the novel reads at this breakneck pace.

Imagine Noa at this moment. Her makeshift sleeping arrangement in the railway’s closet is now impossible. Then imagine what it felt like when she meets ringmaster Neuhoff, offering her and her baby, Theo, refuge on the condition she perform with one of only a few aerial artists in the world who can execute the triple somersault – Astrid, whom Neuhoff is also protecting. Noa must learn the Flying Trapeze: flying through the air with a flimsy net nearly touching the floor.

Astrid’s lost more than her circus parents. Her prowess is what she clings to. “The air was all I had known,” she says. The two begin working together, more like battling as training to “take flight” takes years of mastery. Yet they only have a few weeks before they travel to Thiers, France!

For Astrid to catch Noa she must trust her, which means Noa must come clean about Theo. How to trust when “everyone needs to hide the truth and reinvent himself in order to survive”? A moral dilemma that plays out over and over, as both women harbor secrets.

The circus is a “great equalizer,” so others have hidden pasts too. Peter, “a sad clown fitting for these dreary times” is key because of his deepening involvement with Astrid. Astrid and Noa’s complicated partnership grows too. These relationships drive the nail-biting suspense.

This is a full-fledged circus – more clowns, acrobats, Fortune Teller, Gypsy, elephants and tigers and their trainers, other “defying gravity” acts like the High Wire, and a cast of workers that make this “huge enterprise” function and dazzle even though behind the scenes it’s plain old hard work, not at all exotic.

What is alluring is Jenoff’s lyrical prose evoking the world of aerialists. “Circus artists are every bit as intent as a ballet dancer or a concert pianist. Every tiny flaw is a gaping wound.” Here technical proficiency is a life-or-death proposition – cradle swings, hock-and-ankle catches, swing passes. And, the show demands presence, charisma. “Think graceful,” Astrid commands Noa, “dance, use your muscles, take charge.” The “audience is all around us like sculpture,” so Noa must also learn to think “three-dimensional.” The “lights and a thousand eyes upon you change everything,” so Noa must also learn to flash “personality, flair, the ability to make the audience hold its breath.” What a relief Noa displays “agility and strength” owing to earlier gymnastics training. Still, you’re gripped when she climbs the ladder to heights most of us dare not go and struggles to learn how to let go.

Against the backdrop of the Holocaust, its unimaginable the circus even existed. Like this unimaginable tale of finding family when millions were lost.

Lorraine

“Wonderfullest” sequel to an American classic (Western and Indian Territories around the start of the Civil War to 1876): It takes boldness and a master to craft an “owdacious” and masterly sequel to a Great American Novel. Huck Out West, Robert Coover’s 11^th novel, is just that.

Told through an adult Huck’s eyes in a mostly “melancholical” voice, this collage of adventure tales follows Huck “over a fair number of years and persons” after he declared in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn he’s “got to light out for the territory” so Aunt Sally can’t “sivilize me.”

Huck Finn is “one of those books everyone knows, even if everyone has not read it,” wrote American Literature professor John Seelye in his introduction to the 2009 Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition. So if like me you’ve “disremembered” Huck’s earlier escapades, take heart for this outstanding novel stands alone.

As a blogger, though, I sampled a ridiculous fraction of the voluminous critical analyses of the essence of Mark Twain and his masterwork – influence, language, themes, inventiveness – to have some basis for judging the cleverness of Coover’s sequel.

For I was at a disadvantage. I’d not read any of the author’s extensive body of work, unaware of Robert Coover’s “reckonition.” Professor Emeritus of Literary Arts at Brown University is “widely acknowledged as an innovator in the field of post-modern American fiction.”

Plainly, I don’t profess to be a scholar of either author. You don’t have to be to relish what Coover has achieved.

Before introducing a bit of what Huck Finn gets mixed up in, here’s some things that may surprise. For starters, Huck Out West is a wickedly disguised series of serious history lessons in America’s westward expansion. If you’re not an historian, you’ll recognize many historical references, but perhaps not all.

Another surprise is the timelessness of Twain’s social commentary. Huck was invented in 1876 but his moral code is as relevant today as ever. That’s because Huck Out West hits at the core of human nature. Huck’s moral compass still prevails. “It’s not easy to stand up for something when you’re the only one,” says Ben Harper, one of Huck’s childhood friends who periodically pops in, stays for a brief while. (Tom, Jim, and Becky make appearances too.)

The prose is an unexpected joy. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn takes place in the pre-Civil War slavery era. Thus the controversy over its offensive, prolific use of the “n” word as Twain, like postmodernists, sought “trueness.” By my count, the repugnant historical word appears twice in Huck Out West. Given the sequel’s Civil War and post-Civil War setting, the language (and hideous actions) illuminates racism towards a different population: Native Americans. And, it continues to reflect Huck’s poor Missouri education, filled with bad (and humorous) grammatical usage – a few examples herein – as well as regional southern dialect, as Missouri was considered part of the South back then.

The concept of time is fuzzy. The novel doesn’t begin at the beginning. It kicks off someplace in the middle when Huck has spent “many seasons” in the territories. Timelines help put context to the historical events. What year is this? Along the way, Coover provides clues as to the novel’s timespan: Huck’s a rider for the Pony Express, legendary but it only lasted from 1860-1861; Huck hears the President was shot (1865); the ending falls around the centennial celebration of Independence Day, 1876. Presumably then, Huck Out West opens in the middle of these years, 1870? But try as I might I couldn’t pinpoint Huck’s precise age, a desire triggered in part by Huck’s telling us on page one that he “spent nigh half his life out West.” The novel is referred to as “iconoclastic,” which I learned includes this kind of disordered chronology called fragmentation. Suffice it to say Huck’s now a grown-up!

Not according to Tom Sawyer. Tom tells Huck his problem is he’s “still living in a dream world that don’t exist.” Cheers for Huck if that means he didn’t turn out like Tom, someone who “loved a good hanging” and wasn’t “scrupulous about consequences.” Huck rails against the “grabby emigrants” who came west searching for fortunes; sadly Tom has become one of them. Huck’s rallying cry is against the “meanness of the whole human race.” This was the Wild West, when “awful things had happened.”

Not everything is harrowing. Huck’s atypical attitude toward American Indians, particularly the Lakota Sioux of today’s South Dakota, is a highlight. That doesn’t mean he fully understood the plains Indians for there was a stint when he killed buffalo, until he learned the tragedy it was.

The novel opens in the middle for good reason. Huck’s been bitten by a poisonous snake, saved by the Lakotas, leading to a “proper friend,” Eeteh. Eeteh’s plight humanizes the Indian Wars. Huck lives among the Lakotas for the cited “many seasons.” In fact, his teepee is the closest he comes to feeling he has a real home. With Eeteh, he delights in “jawing,” drinking whiskey, smoking a stone pipe, and listening to the myths of the Great Spirits. Eeteh is different than his tribe, so the two share an outsider connection. A peaceful fellow who revels in laughter, he contrasts with the Sioux known as relentless fighters – Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull show up too.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is set in a fictional town, St. Petersburg, based on Hannibal, Missouri, where Samuel Langhorne Clemens grew up. Similarly, in Huck Out West, a principal town is Deadwood Gulch (in today’s Nevada), drawing from Twain’s travels to Nevada Territory with his brother in the 1860s. He lived in Nevada for a stretch, reminding me to tell you that while the novel paints realities, some “stretchers” are thrown in too. (Mostly, they’re Tom’s.)

Huck’s adventures are the stuff of Western moviemaking. Expect to “beflummoxed” by the “stampeed” and “masacreed” and all the “rapscallions” – “vegilanty gang,” highwaymen, drunkards, charlatans – and greedy prospectors willing to do anything for “glittery yallow rocks.” All characterize the up-for-grabs mentality and lawlessness marking this shaping period in America’s history – justice another thread.

As far as Huck’s concerned, the discovery of gold is “bad-luck.” What’s “importantest” to him, makes him “comfortabler” is comradery, Nature, and a deep bond with horses. His attachment to two – old Jackson and Tongo a wild stallion he gentles – touch us. Breakaway scenes of Huck riding bareback across the landscape on this powerhouse horse no one else dare ride are stirring imagery. So is Huck’s brave act to rescue a herd of Indian horses seized by a mean-spirited Cavalry General – abuse/escapism/freedom, a running theme.

Huck’s “bad luck” comes when he refuses to do what “General Hard Ass” demands he do. (He’s worked a spell for both the North and South sides of the Army.) No surprise Huck’s not a “good soldier” for he’s got a mind of his own. Huck is forever fleeing the General, one of my history lessons: The General is fashioned on General George Armstrong Custer who led the Black Hills Gold Rush portrayed in the novel. (It ended in 1876, another indicator of the novel’s timespan.)

The romantic elements of the Old West are here too. Huck’s a bona fide cowboy. He wrangles horses, protects wagon trains and stagecoaches, and drives cattle over the famed Chisholm Trail along a desert “as lonely and as sad as me.”

Huck warns “life don’t rarely turn out like you think it might.” True, but it’s “sejested” you come along for this “jeanie-logical” ride anyway. It’s one heck of a journey. Or, as Huck would say, “heck-stasy.”

Lorraine