Enchanted Prose

Why one woman’s selfhood journey resonates (New York City and Long Island, New York & rural northeastern Pennsylvania; 2001 to present day): Searing and soaring, Kelly McMasters’ memoir-in-essays that span and shift over twenty years emotionally affects us differently than traditional memoirs.

“A truly successful essay collection can reveal the author processing experiences at many different points in time and through many different lenses . . . the distance afforded by some multivalent lenses can allow an author to regard one’s younger self as a different character, a different persona. This can create an unease or uncertainly that is exciting, and also very relatable to the reader.”

Elizabeth Kadetsky, “The Memoir in Essays: A Reading List,” Lit Hub, April 29, 2020

Nineteen essays, each stunning, building on each other. Personal, with an honesty that must have been emotionally exhausting to dredge up and make sense of. Influenced by historical events, cultural discord, and a philosophy of appreciating the good not solely the bad. More of a coming-to-terms with the way things must be, but not until tirelessly trying to change the trajectory. The tone is melancholy, sorrowful, poignant, nostalgic, at times wondrous, but not bitterness. “There’s romance inherent in loss and nostalgia,” McMasters graciously says.

Calling The Leaving Season a memoir-in-essays versus a memoir magnifies the push-and-pull tension of a contemplative journey of self-discovery, even if aspects are unlike ours. Navigating different stages of life – coming-of-age, career, motherhood, divorce, single parenting – resonate. When to make a life-changing decision to leave a place, job, city, marriage? What’s gained and lost? Reflections that give voice to the choices, juggling, and struggles women face, exploring what it means to be a woman true to herself, needs, family?

The opening line of, “Home Fires,” the first essay, sets the stage with one of McMasters’ two sons asking: “WHAT SHOULD WE SAVE, MAMA?” The profound question isn’t just what would you take if you had to flee a fire, but an existential one. What should you pay close attention to that matters most to you?

The prose is emblematic of someone who’s dwelled in the world of books and words. As an only child, McMasters found solace and pleasure in the library near her Long Island home. Contributor to a delightful, eclectic array of magazines – literary, tech-related, pop culture, children’s – she’s been teaching words as an English professor at Columbia University and elsewhere; today at Hofstra University, circling back to her home roots.

Home as a physical place, geographical/environmental landscape, and deeper psychologically isn’t something just thought about in these essays. In 2017, the author co-edited the essay collection, “This is the Place: women writing about home.” She’s also written the 2008 award-winning, “Welcome to Shirley: a memoir from an atomic town,” about her hometown near Brookhaven National Labs, adapted into a documentary.

The Leaving Season is predicated on a dream that may not have “ever truly existed in the first place.” We sense the handwriting on the wall before McMasters, perceiving leaving as failure, tugging at our heartstrings because she tried so very hard to make the dream of a place and a marriage work out.

Opening in Manhattan 2001 when McMasters found herself standing outside the World Trade Center watching the twin towers burst into flames, staring in disbelief at people jumping out of the windows of burning skyscrapers. “Home Fires” summons up a “spectacularly dramatic catastrophe” and then, in the next breath, linked to the emotional catastrophe of a ten-year relationship, six married, with a “moody” artist anonymously named R. ending in divorce. “Marriage, after all, is just one long exercise in controlled burning,” she concludes.

McMasters didn’t leave New York City after 9/11. She did after 2006, when the USS Intrepid got stuck in the Hudson River leaving for its new home and identity: the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum. Metaphorically, that’s when it hits her that the “girl I once was still stuck.” She’s twenty-five. In “Intrepid,” the second essay, she assesses: “Sometimes, staying docked seems the safer option. But everything in New York moves on eventually.”

Before the moving, leaving, a few essays are interjected about her backstory with R. Unsure of herself, she was drawn to his “certainty” and differentness. “Invigorating, or terrifying,” but emotionally draining more than anything else. Pained when the impressionistic portrait painter refuses to paint her picture, and yet, fantasizing of not only having a room of one’s own but a home, alone, like Georgia O’Keefe. (Marriage wasn’t in her plans, nor motherhood.) Later in the “Stone Boat,” R.’s artistry is characterized as “exaggerated expressionism” with an “obsession with color and pattern.”

R. had been successful in the avant-garde center of the art world, but a rude awakening awaits when the couple move from Brooklyn to an isolated (on ten acres) “1860s eyebrow colonial farmhouse” in a rural “area with more cows than people.” Three hours from Manhattan, yet worlds away. “Part of the allure is to be a different person yourself.” But how far are you willing to go?

This was a place of “savagery and beauty,” where the “normal rules of society did not apply.” Driven by hunting seasons, broken men “powerless became the powerful.” For a while, McMasters gets lost in sharing the “wonders” of Nature, harkening Rachel Carlson, with her two young boys. When she looks back now she sees herself “separate from the person I know myself to be out in the rest of the world.” 

Playing psychologist, we see a marriage likely doomed from the start due to a string of bad luck compounding on itself. R. had his first heart attack at thirty-nine right before they married; his second right before they moved into the farmhouse. Was he suffering from clinical depression gone untreated? How much of his disinterest was affected by his medical condition? Anger ignored before they left New York City? How much was he affected by the “feral quality” of a place not even on a map that unfolds in the essays, “The Cow,” “The Ghosts in the Hills,” and “Lessons from a Starry Night”?

How much pain could have been prevented had they focused on thoroughly vetting the stone farmhouse in need of tremendous repair and renovation, R. could no longer do? McMasters assumed, no griping, all the mounting bills, balancing several literary jobs at time including commuting to Manhattan. Mounting too was her anguish of a father disengaged in co-parenting, fatherhood. Intensified in the essay that gives the collection its name, “The Leaving Season.” But, she persists. For the sake of her children, not for herself.

It’s not until the gorgeous essay, “Bookshop: A Love Story,” that McMasters does something for herself and her dream comes closest to reality. Bursting with joy, hope, and a bit of “much-needed magic,” she and R. opened a joint bookshop and art studio on the closest Main Street to where they lived in Honesdale:

“Ultimately, it’s this love of books that buoys me,” she wrote in a column she pitched for The Paris Review, “Notes from a Bookshop.” This is when she realizes how much of herself she’s lost. Sadly, the dream lasted only a year.

“Our Castle Year,” “Suspended Animation,” “Finding Home,” and “End Papers” amplify the leaving, progressing to a heartfelt belief “family doesn’t have just one meaning.”

The Leaving Season shows us there’s dignity and grace when your dreams don’t come true. “By taking away, I could be creating room for more.”

Lorraine

Painting a literary portrait of a 19^th century female trailblazer on a larger canvas than the art she left behind (Boston and Brookline, Massachusetts, and world travels; 1861—1924): Do you ever feel you were “born at the wrong time”? Isabella Stewart Gardner did.

“Is there anything more exciting than being understood?” she’s imagined asking. Is there anything more exciting than reading a novel by an author who shows us how deeply she understands her subject?

Boston’s Emily Franklin, a “lifelong visitor” of the Isabella Garner Museum in Boston’s Fenway area, seems ideal to capture the evolving “selves” of a woman who believed we’re “always finding our next selves.” Franklin’s literary selves include poetry; over twenty novels for adults and young adults; memoirist; and editor of short story collections. Still, a high-flying act to singularly compose an historical novel about someone whose husband “wanted to make me happy” but “did not always understand what might make me so.”

The Lioness of Boston – even the lions have multiple meanings – is an outstanding read about a woman before her time. The prose is exquisite – elegant rising to poetic, evoking Isabella’s artful soul.

Most of the novel is set in Isabella’s grand, six-floor, townhouse-mansion on Beacon Street in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood, once swamplands, where she lived when she married John Lowell Gardner – Jack – at twenty, moving there in 1861 during the Civil War. By the time the vision of a museum becomes a reality, Isabella’s collections outgrew their home. Located about fifteen minutes away, the museum sits on parkland designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, befitting Isabella’s love of walking through Boston’s Public Gardens, America’s first. Venturing out alone was scandalizing, one of many outrages that followed her through decades. Mostly structured chronologically, the novel lets you see her evolution.

Among the novel’s pleasures is tracing her early feminist thoughts and actions. Invigorated by more men than women who accepted her unorthodoxy as they were actually interested in what she thought, initially Harvard men of the arts and sciences. Drawn to progressive mindsets, proponents of aesthetics yearning to be “more than I was,” the novel reads like a Who’s Who of famous and lesser known painters, writers, suffragettes and activists of other social causes. The lioness was an outspoken free-thinker, romanticist, lover of beautiful things and landscapes. Above all, a fierce seeker of a purposeful life.

Franklin opens our eyes to a woman who left her mark on an aristocratic society, though she’s been more likely known more for the unsolved 1990 art museum crime of stealing thirteen paintings (a $10 million reward awaits) rather than for everything contained in her museum of memories: paintings, rare books, objects d’art, sculptures, antiques, and more, including its Italian architectural design because Venice stole her heart.

Divided into four Books subtly titled with ISG’s different names characterizing her unfolding selves – “Belle,” “Mrs. Jack,” “Isabella,” “Isabella Stewart Gardner” – Isabella comes alive using three literary approaches: chapter narratives; intimate Intermezzos that reveal her innermost thoughts, feelings, intentions; and an epistolary format reflecting the abundant letters she exchanged.

The letters, interspersed, begin early on with her sole two yet dear female friends, Julia and Harriet. (Julia from her early Paris boarding school days; both she and Harriet Jack’s sisters). Expanding to the blooming relationships she cultivated with men, along with growing friendships with other nontraditional women. Isabella had contempt for “intolerance” in all forms, championing injustices towards women and men, such as gender inequality, the right to vote, gender identity, slavery, and anti-Semitism. For that alone, she should be remembered.

One of her closest male friends was the painter John Singer Sargent, who wrote in a fictionalized letter he needed “to remind you always to shine within, no matter who the onlookers might be.” His artistic style of “bringing light into the darkness” matches Isabella’s yearning “to matter. Or have what I do matter.” Someone who wants to “help us find the courage to be ourselves.”

Literary Henry James and the Jewish painter Bernard Berenson exchanged voluminous letters with Isabella. Fascinating Franklin made them her own when the Museum houses cases of the originals.

“Belle” is the self who says: “Parts of me longs, truly longs, to belong. And still another part wonders at a greater land.” For painfully too long she fought to be accepted into the exclusive, Puritan, elite upper-crust Boston male world – the “Boston Brahmins.” Having come from New York City’s upper-class, she wasn’t prepared for the severity of being judged as so out-of-place. The difference between a predominately homogenous New England community to a more culturally and ethnically diverse metropolis a factor in the prevailing conventions she confronted that made her feel a “sad magic to being a female.” A “gnawing emptiness.” Isabella fought gallantly, except for an exceptionally fragile period of grief and despair when she suffered three tragedies. Hers is a story of how “strength is from suffering.”

Travel saved Isabella’s spirit and soul repeatedly thanks to Jack, a Boston Brahmin who nonetheless opened the “wideness of the world” for her traveling the globe together for months at a time.

The Who’s Who includes Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who saw himself as an “awakener” and Isabella “trying to be awakened.” Also, artists and writers James McNeill Whistler, Mary Cassatt, Edith Wharton, George Sand (Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin who dressed like a man since it was much easier to be one), Maud Ward Elliott; and activists Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe (Maud’s mother). The historical figures you’ll meet could easily make up an Appendix of Enlightenment and Insight. For instance, Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler was the first black woman in America to become a physician; Harvard’s first art professor Charles Eliot Norton, whose legacy lives on in the Norton Lectures; and painter Bernard Berenson who illuminates Jewish persecution in the 1800s.

What’s not to love about a woman who refused to “build a fortune or find meaning at the expense of others”? Who speaks about a “candied afternoon,” acutely aware of special, fleeting moments in her emotional roller-coaster life.

One of Isabella’s delightful awakenings happens with Jack when they traveled to Paris to the gallery of another female art pioneer: Berthe Moriset (see https://enchantedprose.com/pow-right-in-the-eye-thirty-years-behind-the-scenes-of-modern-french-painting/). The Berthe we’re treated to introduces Isabella to many struggling artists, such as Edouard Manet and his painting “Sunrise Over Water” with its “quality of realism infused with sadness” before the art movement became known as Impressionism.

“Art makes you desirous. What more could we want?” says Berthe, whose “grace and sadness and art and purpose, all sheathed in the act of not being sure what she was doing, only that she wanted to keep doing it” describe Isabella too. She may not have possessed the equilibrium of Julia and Harriet, who between them had seven children, all boys, but showed her grace in other ways. Motherhood consumes a big chunk of Belle’s early days, leaving a lifelong effect on her.

The Lioness of Boston is every bit a triumph as Franklin’s eventually triumphant subject. I closed its 369 pages the day Boston’s Harold Kushner, Rabbi Laureate and mega-bestselling self-help author passed away. One of his books, “When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough: The Search for a Life that Matters,” sums up Isabella’s questing life.

A reviewer called Kushner’s first book “Why Bad Things Happen to Good People” a “spiritual survival manual.” For anyone needing inspiration for a path forward to live their lives with existential purpose, The Lioness of Boston offers ways for healing and setting us free.

Lorraine

Standing up to Fascism (North Holland, mostly Amsterdam and Haarlem, the Netherlands; 1940 — 1945): They say people break. She never did.

“How does evil spread?” asked the literary voice narrating this forgotten story of a heroic non-Jewish Dutch Resistance fighter, ignited when the Nazis took over the Netherlands in 1940. She admired people “who stand up for their beliefs, because the world is currently drunk on war.”

She left so little documentation behind to protect those she loved, collaborated with, and for the mission. Award-winning historian Buzzy Jackson turned to historical fiction to dig up as much as she could and imagine the rest to craft the breathtaking To Die Beautiful. Had Jackson not visited Amsterdam’s Dutch Resistance Museum, historical fiction readers most likely would still not even know her name: Jannetje Johanna Schaft before the invasion, transformed into Hannie Schaft afterwards. Later becoming known as The Girl with Red Hair (the title of the UK edition).

Jackson makes the unbelievable believable. You’ll be caught up in a whirlwind of emotions, thoughts, and heart-stopping suspense reading this electrifying novel. Anne Frank, the “most famous victim of the Dutch Holocaust,” looms heavy. Her diary left an accounting. Hannie left no such thing.

You may be asking, like Jackson did, why one of the few female WWII Dutch resisters is unknown to most of us considering more Dutch Jews perished in the Holocaust than in any other European country: 75%! Jackson notes and explains in her brief “Historical Notes,” suggestive of how deeply immersed she was in telling this story from the viewpoint of humanity. To Die Beautiful is historically based, but it’s an emotionally-driven powerhouse.

Capturing the segregation, fear, humiliation, rage, grief, loss, hunger, separations, and disappearances of those who were subjected to, witnessed, and lived through five traumatizing years of the Dutch Holocaust when Jews and their families were persecuted, rounded up, arrested, tortured, murdered, The Nazis adopted a scorched earth regime that also included non-Jews perceived as “Jew-lovers,” and ordinary Dutch citizens starved, looking as if they too had been forced into concentration camps most shockingly during the “Hunger Winter” (The Dutch Famine). Warning: the brief video below may be too disturbing to watch:

Jackson has put on a seasoned novelist’s hat, using charged prose grounded in historical realities: real people, places, events, timelines, atrocities, resistance operations. Glued to the 400+ pages, you’ll read at a faster clip than a novel half its size.

To Die Beautiful is a harrowing reminder of what tyranny looks like.

Agonizing to see what happens to Hannie, but we’re also in awe of what she does. Awe at how far someone is willing to go to protect two Jewish friends and save the lives of countless other Jews for the highest-minded of causes – to save humanity. Despite violent sabotage assignments to thwart the Nazi’s Operation Silver Fir that killed Dutch resistors and up-close Nazi assassinations that put the reader tensely into death-defying scenes, the Resistance’s refrain was: “Stay Human.” The novel a fierce reminder of what the bravest of souls can do with steely determination and still find a way to show their humanity when innocents came in harm’s way. A stark depiction of the lowest bar of humankind and the pinnacle of the highest.

Johanna Schaft wasn’t born with an “urge to resist.” Jackson shows us when that emotional force was kindled at age seven, with one of the many one-liners that grab our attention: “I wasn’t always an only child,” Hannie says on the opening line of Chapter 1. She became an only when her twelve-year-old sister Annie died thirteen years before the “sour tang of Nazism began to spread into every corner of daily life.” From the time she was a young girl to a twenty-year-old law student at the University of Amsterdam Johanna hits us again confiding she became “an expert at being nobody.”

Johanna kept to herself. Avoided being a trouble maker, she says was easy since she was “plain” and “shy.” (Not so plain with her “bright red hair”!) That all changed, she changed including her name, when she became best friends with two young Jewish women who were sister-like: Sonja and Philine. This came at a time when “nothing I was being taught about justice seemed to apply to the quickly changing world outside.” The evils of Nazism marked the birth of Hannie Schaft.

The novel calls up a stunning line in former Secretary of Defense Madeleine Albright’s book Fascism: A Warning: “If you pluck a chicken one feather at a time people don’t notice it” — until the chicken is stripped bare and it has taken hold of a nation. What a crushing, demoralizing defeat for the Netherlands proud of its centuries-old history. “The very reason refugees from fascism were drawn to the Netherlands was because we were known as much for our religious tolerance as for our windmills and wooden clogs.” And yet, in a mere five days the Nazis clobbered any notion of toleration.

The Nazis also waged a psychological war. They did everything to “chip away at the resources and morale of the enemy.” So too did the Dutch when the absence of a Dutch “military front” meant the “minds of the people became the front.” The significance of uplifting and sustaining morale in the Ukraine War cannot be overstated.

Hannie’s story includes four other resistance fighters. Two experienced men who trained and worked with her: Hendrik Oostdijk and Jan Bonekamp. Both feel real. Jan was, “willing to do things others wouldn’t do.” Hendrik is one of the few fictional characters, symbolic of the “brave Dutch men” who fought to save their citizens. Hannie’s relationship with Jan is a tender thread, deepening, stirring, and consequential. From there, she joins forces with two teenage girls, notably sisters: Truus and Freddie Oversteegen. A formidable Resistance trio. Non-fiction books and films have memorialized their legacy, but again Jackson provides a unique historical fictional focus. 

So many Nazi acronyms will curdle your blood, the unleashing of their police, military, and intelligence arsenal. But the acronym to remember stands for the name of the Dutch Council of Resistance: RVV, for Raad Van Verzet.

The first one-liner that sticks with you and circles back is the opening sentence in the Prologue dated 1945 Amsterdam: “You can walk right past your fate your whole life without seeing it.” It does give a window to Hannie’s fate but not anywhere close to her destiny. 

Hannie’s parents rightfully remembered too as they hid Sonja and Philine in the attic of their home in Haarlem no questions asked. We must never forget those who stood up to Fascism, informing us of how to react to political events today.

Anne Frank was hidden in an attic for two years. She died at sixteen in an infamous German concentration camp, Bergen-Belsen. The novel introduces a Dutch camp that began as a place for refugees, Westerbork, turned into a holding railway station for transporting Jews to concentration camps, far less familiar to us. It used to be the Dutch Theater. The Nazis desecrated it into a Holocaust site. Anne Frank went through there. “Not wanting to arouse the temper of the Dutch people,” Westerbork plucked this chicken slowly.

Orange is the color of the Netherlands. Its meaning dates back to the country’s 16^th century founder William I of Orange. The Dutch Resistance adopted it. Orange is the code for Courage.

Lorraine

A character-driven novel illuminates the complexities of a humanitarian crisis and a love story in the poorest country in the world, hoping for peace but rarely seeing it (South Sudan on the border with north Sudan; November 2001 to August 2002): Ghost Season is a must-read.

Especially if you want to better understand why Sudan, independent from Britain since 1956, and South Sudan split from the north in 2011, have been at or close to war for nearly all those years. And why South Sudan, where the novel is set, the poorest country in the world — #167 out of 167! — and one of the most diverse ethnically, culturally, and religiously hasn’t been able to achieve a lasting cease-fire.

“What fiction gives you that journalism can’t is this emotional, visceral experience of living things through characters you care about. That can give you a different understanding,” said Fatin Abbas in an interview about her deeply absorbing, affecting, enlightening historical novel.

Reading Ghost Season when the newest cease-fire in Sudan didn’t last; when thousands have already been added to the already millions of refugees; and evacuations by other countries rescuing their citizens is taking place, pulls you in with immense authenticity.

Ghost Season arrived when the humanitarian crisis in South Sudan couldn’t have been worse. Now it is. We can’t even begin to imagine what 9 million people in a country of 12 million have and are going through. Glazing over numbers on that monumental scale, Abbas knows living amidst a few, diverse people up-close helps us comprehend the enormity.

Ghost Season is about relationships. Relationships that form and change when people from different walks of life and experiences come together. Their voices are vehicles for grasping South Sudan’s long story of struggles and conflicts. Vivid, through exquisite prose. Lyrical. Nimble, equally authentic from the tender to the fierce. Gentle at an unhurried pace shifting to terrorizing and fast-moving.

It wasn’t until the end of Part I (of seven parts) that I came up for air to google Abbas’ background to try to figure out how she could equally put us into such contradictory scenes as if we were there, observing both. Just like one of her female characters, schooled in “observational photography.” (See Dena below.)

Turns out Abbas was born in Sudan, raised in Khartoum, the capital, spending the first eight years of her life there. The last without her scholarly father, an English professor, jailed, deemed a political enemy. When he was released, the family fled to America and became US citizens. So what drove a young woman, before she became an award-winning scholar known for her non-fiction Sudanese commentary (and more, see https://www.fatinabbas.com/), to return to Sudan to work for an NGO humanitarian organization? The place her novel revolves around. Still, to finely pull off the transition from academic to emotional perceptiveness in harsh environments that test people calls for an entirely different skill set. Differences abound everywhere.

Optimism to make a difference is at the center of the goodwill of Ghost Season. Set at a compound of an unnamed NGO humanitarian organization in the South Kordofan region at the international borders of southern Sudan and South Sudan. The NGO’s logo features palms in prayer, a familiar symbol of peace, embracing others with similar missions.

South Sudan separated from the Muslim-controlled government in Khartoum that adheres to Arabic traditions in a hopeful move towards democracy. Predominately Christian, the new country follows African traditions, comprised of sixty-four tribes, mostly people of Nilote ethnicity who speak different languages.

Labeling significantly oversimplifies the diversity of challenges and what’s at stake in South Sudan. A landscape of dwindling natural resources spectacularly affected by: 1) geography and climate, the overwhelming dry and wet seasons; 2) desert and semi-arid landscapes, also grasslands and swamplands (the Sudd cited, https://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/6276/); 3) the irony of impoverished people in a country of rich resources (such as oil, Chinese workers in the novel’s background; gold in the news since that’s what Russia is after to fund the Ukraine War; and 4) climate change severely degrading already grim conditions. How else to explain a flooding river disappearing in three months, shocking another character in the story? (See Alex below). Climate change depicted as ground zero should shake the world.

All these issues – poverty and the desperate need for humanitarian aid; access to clean water; Sudanese Arab nomad cattle herdsmen and farmers resettling to South Sudan competing for the same resources as the Nilotes, pitting black against black, all represented by the five characters Abbas has dreamed up with clear-sightedness.

The first chapter introduces the characters so you won’t get confused or forget who they are, their differences, and roles. No one knew each other at the start; intimately they know one another by the end:

ALEX: Surveyor and Mapmaker. White, the only one. From the US. His job is to identify “villages, cattle migration routes, water wells, and grazing pastures” since the current maps are fifty years old. Seems to be the one to take charge of the compound, but at twenty-seven he’s too disoriented, fearful, and tense to be able to. Unbearable, sizzling heat contributes to his daze.

WILLIAM: Translator. Catholic, a “Nilot man” even though he’s returned from Sudan educated. Better off because he’s working at the NGO compared to others treated as-less-than, slave-like. Thirty-three, elegantly dressed and proud, he takes on what Alex cannot.

MUSTAFA: Hardworking “errand boy.” The poorest. A street-smart, twelve-year-old kid, willing to do all the unpleasant chores and whatever else, for money. Attached to William.

DENA: Cinematographer, unsure of what she’s filming. Born and raised in Sudan, her family fled to Boston. She’s returned for unsaid reasons that drive Alex nuts. The unfolding story shows her what to record.

LAYLA: Cook. Arabic nomad from Sudan, she nurtures everyone. The love story between William and Layla sets up intense drama. The most endearing relationship, as William patiently woos Layla for as long as he can, acutely aware that her heart isn’t supposed to accept his love. Their future on edge, uncertain, like everything else.

Of the female characters, you’ll love Layla from the start but the same can’t be said of Dena. Closed-off, she’s not at all receptive to Alex’s friendliness, though she warms to Layla and is intrigued by Mustafa. Fearless and low-key, whereas Alex isn’t the laid-back type. Who can blame him here? Plenty of obstacles, while Dena is free-floating hiding behind her camera. There’s a feminist focus in terms of conventional Layla compared to unconventional Dena, and how women bear the crushing burdens fending for their children and themselves. So many widows, victims of heinous wars.

For William and Layla: how long can two forbidden people manage to keep their love? For Mustafa: how long can someone in dire poverty stay out of trouble? For Alex: how long can an American aid worker remain in a place he has no idea “how he was to find his bearings?” For Dena: how long can someone stay closed-off when their life is threatened?

For us: in spite of a deeply personal connection, a scholar’s insight, stirring prose, we still ask: how Fatin Abbas pulled off this powerful heartwarming and heart-wrenching debut novel?

Lorraine

A literary artist paints big themes of America’s West and other frontiers through an FDR New Deal visual artist (fictional town in Wyoming, also Seattle, San Francisco, Florida; 1937): “We don’t know how any minute of history will play out,” says Val, the WPA New Deal muralist narrator-protagonist of Charles Frazier’s intriguingly told new historical novel.

Capturing the majesty of the American frontier landscape when America was limping through depressing economic times, The Trackers is living history America is still contending with. The prose is old-fashioned storytelling: muscular dialogue, jawboning, tall tales, legendary stories. It wraps art and adventure with economic, cultural, political, and moral themes into a mystery.

In 1997, judges of the National Book Award called Frazier’s debut mega-bestselling novel Cold Mountain “a vastly compelling narrative, and a useful mirror in which to witness ourselves and our perplexities.” The same can be said of The Trackers, Frazier’s fifth American history novel.

A fuller description might add how art critics described Val’s iconic heroes – painter and muralist Diego Rivera who left his mark on Thomas Hart Benton, depicting America’s grit and industrial engine – as: “socially and politically wide aesthetic vision, storytelling focus, and utilization of symbolism.”

The Trackers – a brilliant title since it has multiple meanings – begins and returns to Wyoming when it was still a wild frontier although historically the Wild West ended in the early 1900s. The standout prose isn’t a romanticized version of America’s Old West, even though twenty-seven-year-old artist Valentine Montgomery Welch III, Val, is a dreamer. A do-gooder who also needs money. The power of money is a big, conflicted theme: its role in America’s expansion, greediness, politics, relationships. 

Val’s coming-of-age evolves from idealist to realist. The art plot embraces aspiration and optimism. Thanks to a former art professor, Hutch, Val landed a New Deal art commission to paint a mural in a small Wyoming town’s post office (one of 1,400 painted around the country). Val can’t put into words what he’ll end up painting, but he has a mental image of “the energy of America” that should reflect the region’s culture and hopefully lift the community up. The value of public art at a time when dreams were crashed is another thread.

Val’s progression spins-off the initial plot. The subplot consumes a chunk of the novel, turning Val into a detective.

Both storylines originate from Val’s benefactor: John Long, a wealthy cattle rancher who owns hundreds-of-acres and was recently married to younger wife Eve, with movie-star looks and mystique. Val’s plum deal comes with the perk of Long’s hosting him on his “enormous log-and-stone cabin” ranch property, complete with rustic cabins, horse barn, and that classy red convertible Packer on the cover resembling National Park WPA Poster Art.

Page one hints at whether Val’s stay will be as lucky as he feels with his first impression of the Long Shot ranch “hunkered against the world . . . As architecture, it made me wonder who it was afraid of or, conversely, who its anger was aimed at.” Prescient, because the more time Val spends with the couple, the more curious he gets about their relationship as tensions are exposed but not discussed. Eve is not the emotional kind, Long has his own agenda, and Val is in over his head. 

Eve is a mystery. Once a cowgirl singer in a traveling band, she has a vagabond’s soul. Jaded, she believes most of life is a business transaction, except for dreaming. Val will come to question whether his dreams were worth the risks of doing business with Long.

Old Faro, Long’s longtime ranch hand cowboy comes across as scary, gun-toting. Don’t be fooled by his machismo as he’s a horse whisperer who keeps his sensitivities to himself. 

Long has strong political ambitions, aiming for Governor, preferably US Senator. How Eve feels about that sets off alarm bells today on how far people will go for political power.

What Val has going for him is he’s cynical enough, and catches on reasonably quickly. Long, the guy with all the money, calls all the shots. Val, then, is willing to do his dirty work.

The mural will be painted fresco-style in the tradition of Mexico’s Rivera. The fictional Wyoming town Dawes might be a nod to former US Senator Henry L. Dawes and The Dawes Act of 1887, which impacted the Wind River Reservation. Long’s ranch “stretched west across sage hills to distant blue-black pine mountains in front of ghostly snow peaks flat as drawing paper against the sky, the Wind River Range.”

Historically and symbolically, Dawes represents power land grabs and injustice. The legislation deceived, billed as more land for American Indians but intended to get that land into the hands of White opportunists. Long, an art collector, owns some paintings by Charles M. Russell (1864-1926) known for “celebrating Indigenous cultures . . . while his art is considered historical, his spirit is timeless,” the C.M. Russell Museum states. Likewise, the novel‘s spirit feels timeless, and subtly makes a statement about America’s shameful treatment of Native Americans.

From the first sentence – “A Muddy Black-and-White Newspaper Photograph” – Frazier’s prose hooks us. Whether you view the novel from the standpoint of Art (each of its five Parts are named for the colors of Val’s palette: “Ten Thousand-Foot Blue”; “Charcoal and Umber”; “Rust and Chartreuse”; “Cinnabar and Azure”; “Indelible Black”), or as a detective story almost doesn’t matter. Honestly, we’re happy to go wherever Frazier wants to take us.

His prose sings – grandly, nostalgically, shadowy, sultry. It conveys Western ruggedness, breathtaking landscapes, the freedom of wide-open spaces and endless skies. Also looming is “whether the heaviness could overwhelm our desire to lift and fly to a better place.” Frazier isn’t just writing about a bygone era, but pointedly for today. Evidence includes: 1) Faro speaking of America’s future as he “how bad it’s gonna get . . . that’s how you’ll know the world has gone to hell”; 2) Hutch telling Val their world is a “different, harder world we were living in after the giddy” Roaring Twenties; 3) The Dust Bowl symbolizing the climate-change world we’re living in today: “drought conditions,” “front-page apocalyptic photographs,” “black blizzards,” “flooding rivers”; 4) Billy the Kid and other outlaw storytelling bringing out America’s increasingly violent culture; 5) and citing bad Supreme Court decisions.

Eve’s singing evokes a “mood more than a song.” Like Frazier’s prose that evokes moods contrasting the Depression against new feats of architecture Val found “oddly hopeful.” “Hope can sometimes be a sad thing, that or embarrassingly unhip, but I couldn’t help myself,” he says.

“Love and rejection and retaliation” are other moods coloring the prose. Whose love? Rejection? Retaliation?

Do you believe as Eve also does? “There’s not but one true trail through the world, and all the truth you can say of it is it’s there. Everything else is a guess.” 

What about Val, who wants to have faith in public art to “elevate the country, maybe by only an inch, but every upward movement, however small accumulates”? One of the questions we guess at is whether today’s America would endorse a revitalized WPA art deal for the public good and struggling artists if it weren’t a money-making proposition?

Frazier wants us to reflect on what we could gain from the lessons of the past.

Lorraine