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.”

From the Detroit Industry Murals
by Diego Rivera
via Deb Nystrom [CC BY 2.0] on Flickr
America Today by Thomas Hart Benton
via Garrett Ziegler [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0] on Flickr

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.”

Wind River Range
by Fredlyfish4 [CC BY-SA 4.0] via Wikimedia Commons

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.

Water Girl by Charles M. Russell
via WikiArt [Public Domain]

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

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Dark shades of grey in an insular world of pretty pinks (Manhattan, and ballerina stories elsewhere; 2001-present day): Ballet is a supremely beautiful “visual art form.” Ballet is a supremely destructive aesthetic discipline. Clashing perspectives on an all-consuming artistic endeavor, and what happens when you’re no longer part of the ballet “cult.”

Alice Robb – a former “bunhead” who trained intensively for ten years at the most prestigious ballet school in America when she was young – the School of American Ballet (SAB) founded by Russian “creative genius” and choreographer George Balanchine (“Mr. B”) – has written an absorbing, frank, eye-opening memoir that’s not just about her early ballet life and the aftermath, but stories of other ballerinas, renowned and not.

Drawing its title from the authoritative words and philosophy of a ballet master who left his mark on the ballet world, “Don’t Think, Dear” is remarkably thought-provoking.

The desire to feel “special” overriding everything else, it’s no wonder that at thirty ballet is still etched in Robb’s “psyche and behavior.” Striving but not there yet to “break the ballet mindset,” it seems Robb isn’t the only one reckoning with the legacy of Mr. B (See: https://www.washingtonpost.com/theater-dance/2023/03/28/balanchine-city-ballet-ballet-podcast-/).

“The dream of being a ballerina begins with the dream of being beautiful.” What does it mean, though, to be made to feel you’re not “good enough”? To weigh yourself against everyone else? Competition so fierce it leaps off the pages.

Robb’s dream was to dance for the New York City Ballet (NYCB), one of the top ballet companies in the world, also founded by Balanchine. The SAB a training ground for the dream of becoming a “chosen one,” which meant having the perfect female body; “artistry and technique;” and the submissiveness Balanchine demanded of his girls.

Robb is a dreamer, starting with her first foray into her “post-ballet” writing life Why Do We Dream”. In this deeply personal insider’s look at her unfulfilled ballet dreams, she also takes an outsider’s examination of what she gained and lost. Her memoir is wrapped up in her dreams as well as the dreams of countless others, writing from the dual vantage points of Beauty and the Beast. Robb cites, among other issues “isms” such as sexism, favoritism, idealism, masochism. How far should someone go for the sake of Art? When is the line crossed?

Robb tells us she was “born in 1992: the Year of the Woman.” Back then, she “loved the hyperfeminine trappings.” Today her quest is to be “feminine but strong,” as opposed to ballerinas so weak from starvation yet they “danced through their unbearable pain,” Virtuosos of how to “suffer in silence.” Of how to disconnect from one’s body. A “perverse relationship with pain” that stuns and horrifies those of us in awe of ballet’s beauty and elegance. Time and time again, though, Robb reminds us that pain for a ballerina is a “source of pride.” Is this beauty-in-the-eyes-of-the beholder? A ballet culture gone terribly wrong? Seeing the world through a “ballet lens” versus a more objective assessment? The answers not as clear-cut as you might think.

Balanchine’s approach isn’t a classical one like the dancers in the oldest ballet company in the world, the Paris Opera Ballet, the inspiration of Edgar Degas’ paintings Robb loves.

The Dance Class, Degas
via The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Mr. B’s legacy is one of “aliveness, an energy that was new to ballet.” Great artists create something others haven’t. That doesn’t mean we have to think everything about Balanchine’s techniques and style are triumphant in achieving the effect of “ethereal fairies.” By making us take off our rose-colored glasses, the legend disturbs us too. 

The audience for this artistic and cautionary tale well-exceeds ballet lovers. “To dance is a universal impulse,” even babies rhythmically move to music Robb points out. Broader than that are females obsessed with counting calories, have distorted body images, and battle anorexia and other eating disorders. (Affecting 30 million Americans, twenty million women according to this account.) Greater still are compulsive perfectionists. What are the benefits of pursuing perfectionism in one’s craft versus the damage of pursuing the impossible-to-reach goal of perfectionism in life?

Robb’s book reads like a perfect vision of a memoir: combining the intimate with stories of ballet student friends, interviews, and an extensive reading and recounting of other ballet memoirs, novels, research studies, blogs, magazines (dance and psychology); and watching numerous documentaries and movies. Way too many to cite, but you’ll find them listed at the back of the book in her “Reading and Viewing” suggestions and a twenty-page, single-spaced bibliography.

Full of contradictions, a few include:

  • Ballet objectifies female bodies. Is this art, “sexual harassment,” or “mental torture”?
  • We visualize ballet as the epitome of grace, whereas Mr. B sees his girls as “obedient animals.” 
  • Is ballet a stunning example of “stoicism” or “masochism”? Keep in mind every dancer worships Balanchine, wanting to push themselves way beyond their limits for him.
  • Is this kind of behavior “resilience” or a “concession to a toxic culture”?

While reading ballet terms, one word you know but not in the context of ballet is “lengthen.” Code for “lose weight.” Another word we likely haven’t heard is “thinspo,” which stands for “thinspiration.” Ballet’s devotion may be inspirational but it comes waving a red flag. 

This certainly isn’t the only ballet memoir published, but it certainly feels wide-ranging. A sample of ballet memoirs Robb dissects depicted in the images below include Misty Copeland’s Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina; Margot Fonteyn: A Life by Meredith Daneman; Suzanne Farrell’s (with Toni Bentley) Holding on to the Air; Little Dancer Aged Fourteen: The True Story Behind Degas’ Masterpiece by Camille Laurens; Bunheads by Sophie Flack. They provide insight into what the culture means and demands, as well as the mental health benefits and deleterious focus on nothing else in a girl’s/woman’s life.

Not all ballerinas are in companies that relentlessly drum into a female’s head the “fat talk,” but Robb’s story seems to represent them. Which is why twenty-eight-year-old ballerina Michaella DePrince’s story and trajectory is so beautiful and uplifting. Escaping from the horrors of the Sierra Leone war, she danced with the Dutch National Ballet and the Dance Theatre of Harlem, now with the Boston Ballet (See: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/14/arts/international/for-michaela-deprince-a-dream-comes-true-at-the-dutch-national-ballet.html). Feel good watching her performing and looking athletic: 

The pink pointe ballet shoes on the cover symbolize both the exquisite imagery and the pain of breaking in “custom-made shoes” that are “far from ready to wear.” Detailing the process is even painful to read. Robb’s characterizations are likened to a “crown of thorns,” a “bed of nails.”

Who knew there’s a world of “mother’s-of-dancers” online message boards? Robb disgusted by them calls them “cesspits of parental anxiety,” scornful of mothers who use their daughters to fulfill their unrealized dreams. These moms are different than the strict Tiger Moms who want their children to succeed; they’ve gone to extremes for their own selves. 

One of Robb’s ballet student friends says, “Perhaps I can show the world that one defeat doesn’t mean the end.” Robb speaks about learning that the happiest former ballerinas found a way to “keep ballet in their lives.” The sense the reader gets, confirmed by Robb, is that writing is now her way.

We are the beneficiaries.

Lorraine

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What happens when you can’t take the inequity and inequality anymore? (Central Massachusetts, present): It’s always exciting when a new novel by Ellen Cooney comes out.

Cooney writes refreshingly unique novels that leave impressions and challenge us to think about what her finely-drawn prose is really telling us. A Cowardly Woman No More, released today, well-fits that description.

Evoking Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, forty-four-year-old Trisha Donahue claims to be a proud “company woman.” Is she really? Her first-person voice is restrained, as if she’s hiding something. Does she really feel “lucky, lucky, lucky” as she keeps coaching herself?

Trisha’s company is nameless and located in a nondescript office park somewhere in the middle of Massachusetts. The initial sense you get is it could be anywhere; later you tweak that to anywhere where conventionality thrives.

C0oney, who lived and taught creative writing at numerous Boston and Cambridge universities, sets her eleventh novel at a beloved, old-fashioned, estate-like country restaurant, the Rose & Emerald, a bus ride from the company. Taking place on one life-altering day – the company’s annual Banquet Day – this is the day a woman who’s made sure “what was going on inside me has stayed inside me” is no longer able to hide.

The country getaway may be “unfussy and earthy,” but Cooney keys us in that it’s “always ready for a brawl.” Coupled with Trisha’s depiction of herself as a “master of mysteriousness” – also reflecting Cooney’s refined prose that also has an air of mystery to it – we’re captive. What’s going to happen to Trisha on this day? By page six, she tells us she’s going to be awarded Employee of the Year. So why does she add: “This made it worse”?

Cooney, in her underplayed prose, tips us off that today is a rare day for Trisha by opening with the townspeople believing a comet crashed into the country inn, a rarity. When Cooney says on the first line that the “Rose and Emerald has “come back from the dead,” she’s forecasting Trisha’s awakening from a long-drawn-out sleep. The comet theory is later corrected to a meteorite; the surreal picture already established. Contradicting Trisha’s assessment that hers is a “normal, ordinary” life, today is anything but.

At 206 pages A Cowardly Woman No More resonates. Despite the eccentricities of what Trisha does when she can no longer constrain herself, the absurdism witty, it’s the underlying wisdom that strikes and sticks. Easy to race through the pages, but you might miss all the implications. Cooney’s prose is so well crafted there’s a lot more going on than it might seem. Don’t tell all; don’t show all. Make the reader think.

Since Trisha’s story has a corporate plot, with Trisha having given so much to a company that says one thing but doesn’t really love her back, A Cowardly Woman No More is a feminist novel, but it’s more than a Me Too tale on gender equity and equality. It asks us to look closely at ourselves and wonder if we’ve let daily living take the joy out of life. When Trisha says, “You never forget your first time of joy,” the lyrical line makes us pause, trying to remember ours. When she qualifies that statement with, “I was existing, for just a few moments, in a world where it was possible to feel joy,” we stop to re-read the sentence to absorb a life where there hasn’t been many moments filled with happiness. Hers has been a life of “otherness.” Not just hers, but the lives of countless marginalized others struggling to be respected and appreciated.

Understanding what aches Trisha goes back to her early childhood raised on the “wrong side of the tracks” by parents who were invisible factory workers living in a rowhouse. A life marked by condescension and ridicule, even for being smart and ambitious. What we see is a woman determined to exceed everyone’s expectations.

Trisha overanalyzes things, so she’s well-suited for her analyst position in a HR department in which she’s the only woman on a team of ten. Not lost on us is that although women have bucked male-dominated fields in Human Resource departments, this company hasn’t progressed.

We admire Trisha, root for her, but when she tells us her secret – that she’s a “coward” – we feel sad for her. In today’s world, a woman must be a fighter.

Long ago, when Trisha was young and part of a “girly gang,” she did something brave. But that Trisha is long gone. “What happened to me?” she asks as we do. Does this have anything to do with her lack of any real friendships?

Despite being married with two sons, Trisha’s loneliness echoes a country in a loneliness crisis. A mental health crisis. “How low can I sink”? she worries. When does someone reach their breaking point?

As Trisha’s mind works overtime, her aching soul is palpable. She also suffers from acute self-consciousness that’s led to terribly low “self-confidence, so hard to get by without, so easy to never have.”

Cooney has now written over the past ten years three novels on soul-searching. Following in the footsteps of her acclaimed 2020 novel One Night Two Souls Went Walking, also slim yet explicit in wanting to know “What is a soul?” (see: https://enchantedprose.com/one-night-two-souls-went-walking/), the reader is on the lookout for Trisha’s hidden soul. A different soul is the emotional bond between humans and their pets in The Mountaintop School for Dogs, where rescuing dogs rescues people (see: https://enchantedprose.com/the-mountaintop-school-for-dogs-and-other-second-chances/).

On the face of it, the employee recognition award is something to be proud of. In this case, though, it’s a disguise for an indignity. One piled on top of another. Like a house of cards, when does it collapse?

Trisha’s private life is fairly unknown. Her husband isn’t in the picture much except when they first met over a song. He seems supportive but you feel a sense of disconnect in the immediate aftermath of this revelatory day.

Past and present intermingled, dramatically including the once magical setting of the Rose & Emerald, which used to be Trisha’s fantasy-world. Only three miles by bike for a young, impoverished girl to escape the realities of her worlds-away hard life.

“Writing is like flying,” Cooney said in an interview. What comes flooding back to Trisha in a “memory sweep” feels like a rush of free-flowing consciousness thinking, bursting open after being bottled up for too long.

Having dressed for the event erratically yet remembering to wear high-heel shoes is a sign something is amiss. (Trisha’s attire plays a role in the plot.) Later when she becomes disoriented, people she remembers and doesn’t fly by. With time to think, she asks herself a litany of questions she should have asked a long time ago. One question that’s delightfully edgy and razor-sharp brings Trisha’s situation up-to-date is: “Why does anyone even bother wearing a bra?” referring to the “Pandemic Bra Revolution.”

In One Night the female narrator asks if “a soul can speak to another soul?” Trisha’s unraveling speaks to girls and women crushed by the limiting rules and expectations of others. While it’s hard to imagine that 50% of all women around the world suffer from low self-esteem, Trisha speaks from one woman’s soul to another.

Trisha makes us think about ourselves. What we might do differently to move beyond who we’ve become? Asking us whether our soul is at peace? Or, is there more to life that we can do?

Lorraine

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Using humor to tell difficult truths about ourselves and society’s woes (Murbridge, fictional town in Western Massachusetts, 2019): “The turn of a doorknob, the beat of a heart.” One minute your life is on track, the next it’s plummeted off the rails. That’s the serious premise of Tara Conklin’s new contemporary novel in which she takes on the role of comedian to deliver hard truths disguised as humor.

COVID triggered, prepare to fall under the spell of magical mushrooms and absurdist reactions to traumatic events. On the surface, Community Board imagines a lost soul character in the throes of a nervous breakdown after an out-of-the-blue divorce that devastates twenty-nine-year-old Darcy Clipper’s safe life, setting off two other major life crises: feeling abandoned by her BF parents and job loss. Forty pages – that’s all it takes to destroy one’s sense of self.

The truth is Darcy’s wild tale reflects the emotional trauma of millions, greater than the 50% of marriages winding up in divorce Conklin cites. Technology contributing to the growing sense of disconnect: the loss of the “human touch,” free-for-all breaking norms, wildfire conspiracy theories, our moral compass. Quarantining exacerbated and magnified what’s been happening to how we communicate, affecting so many aspects of our lives. 

Revolving a novel around a fictitious community board app (dozens of real ones, e.g. https://alternativeto.net/feature/message-board/) is a clever, charming, eccentric, and increasingly ominous way to illuminate online life.

Contrasted by the offline, in-person town meetings that also take place in a novel inspired by Conklin’s real hometown in Stockbridge, MA (she’s originally from St. Croix, US Virgin Islands). A 300-year-old New England tradition that “keeps true democracy alive.”

“Hear ye, Hear ye” is the cry of the elected Board of Selectmen gaveling a Town Hall meeting in a small Massachusetts town. It’s also the attention-getting voice of a writer who also assumes the role of social psychologist. Darcy has self-diagnosed her “existential anxiety” and “acute social anxiety,” enabling Conklin to connect those symptoms to the broader context of social distancing and social media in terms of the loss of “emotional intimacy”; how we see ourselves and treat others; loneliness and mental health issues; distrust of others and institutions; and the loss of community. 

Whether you’re a “glass-half-full” type of person or not makes a difference. Darcy’s cup is empty when we meet her. She followed the rules and where did it get her? 

Professionally, her life involved actuarial science, making rational and valid predictions. But when her do-everything-with-husband of eight years springs on her he doesn’t love her anymore and has found another woman, Darcy’s response is irrational except to flee to her childhood “safe house” in the hills of the Berkshire Mountains. Only to get hit over the head again to find it empty. Her devoted, indulgent parents have left for retirement in Arizona. Salvation, her insurance company boss who encouraged her to take six months off for Me Time recovery, her job waiting for her, until he changes his mind. The people she trusted most have betrayed her. 

Darcy turns into a recluse. How many days of “self-imposed isolation and canned food consumption” (think Chef Boyardee stocked in the Clipper’s house since the 1999 Y2K fears) can Darcy take? Does she break free?

Depends on how you define Freedom. Early on, Darcy believes isolating from the “crappiness of other people” sets her free, freedom seen from a broken personal and social perspective. But soon a larger picture emerges about independence, acceptance, resilience, belonging. Freedom has been on Conklin’s mind since her 2013 debut: slavery in The House Girl and unsupervised children running wild in The Last Romantics, 2019.

Consider how many people live alone these days: 37 million in 2021 according to this account. How many are like Darcy, realizing isolation “breeds paranoia”? The longer-you-stay-off-the-horse the harder it gets playing out. For those of us who quarantined for let’s say two years of the pandemic, we know how reentry into the real world felt. Darcy, though, lets those anxious feelings fester to unhealthy extremes.

Ludicrous as they may be, it’s an effective approach to making statements about powerlessness versus empowerment, inclusiveness, risk-taking, and the costs of spreading lies.

To counteract the downbeat, Conklin makes sure she offers the upbeat suggesting ways to reconnect, such as the human-animal bond and an architectural design concept of building bridges, which expands the physical to emotional and sensory. To the importance of play, in childhood and adulthood. To Nature:

Thought-provoking, a lot of questions and issues are raised. Here’s a sample:

1) “How do you know when one time is the last time?” The grabbing opening line.

2) Do you believe “the way the world is structured, it’s the wives who suffer”?

3) When your life is falling apart, do you have friends or a special one who’s there for you? Or, are your friends like Darcy’s who “lacked the desire to understand”?

4) Do you know how to “Be kind to yourself”? Stand up for yourself? “Stand alone”?

5) Do you believe “everyone has the capacity to change”?

7) Is age the key to wisdom, or something else?

8) Do you believe “free play is the antidote to our times”?

9) Do you believe “everything necessary for life can be accomplished on the internet”?

This, then, is a novel about human connectedness in our personal lives; with our community, including activism; and with Nature. Which is introduced early on when we learn about the history of this New England town’s founding – its indigenous peoples, the Mahican tribe better known as the Mohicans, who ate plants that had hallucinogenic properties. In this case, wild mushrooms. Like all the issues tackled, fungi are in the news. Eating fungi that aren’t poisonous can make you happy seems to be the premise of the town’s peaceful establishment. Note the mushrooms on the cover. (The sad expression on Darcy’s image is deflected by the sight of a parrot on her head! As for the fern, who goes by the name of Fred, and the rest of the images, you’ll find out about them in due time.)

The absence of any quotes in the dialogue (hint: Darcy does end up talking to other people) adds to a sense of flow and connectedness.

Most of what Darcy tells us outside of her first-person narrative is revealed in online messages: emails sent and not, and the infamous community bulletin board. Expect anything and everything to pop up! The message Board’s diversity begins with URGENT, FREE, REMINDER, ALERT, WARNING, HELP, WANTED, SUBSTANTIAL REWARD, MISSING, SAVE, ISO (Internet jargon, In Search OF) and FS (For Sure), along with other missives, such as a string of dreamy poetic prose: “When was the last time you smelled 100 tulips”? One of the secrets in this town.

Conklin also shows us she’s a researcher, using old National Geographic magazines to support what Darcy is going through. From the Friedrich Nietzsche February 1981 issue, she tells us he “loved to be alone” to avoid the “mental anguish of caring.” Other magazine issues feature the “solitude, difficulty, isolation, silence” (Pablo Neruda, 1978); the benefits of risk-taking and adventure (Marco polo, 1988) and the dangers (Michael Clark Rockefeller, 1991); and “stepping outside” of ourselves (Chinyingi footbridge, Zambia, 1997).

Does the message board turn out to be a “godsend” like Darcy’s mother claims it is?

Lorraine

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Paying tribute to the Vietnam refugee crisis after the Vietnam War (South-Central Vietnam, South China Sea, Hong Kong and British refugee camps; 1967 to 2023): “Knowledge allows remembering, and remembering is honoring,” says one of the many voices narrating Cecile Pin’s memorable Wandering Souls. They echo her literary mission. 

Stirred by a “visceral need to know” what happened to Pin’s mother’s Vietnamese family when they fled their village in Southeast Vietnam after the Communists took over the entire country, ending the long-lasting Vietnam War. Pin invents a Vietnamese family to reflect her mother’s, part of the 200,000 to 600,000 refugees who were lost in the South China Sea.

By PH2 Phil Eggman
[Public domain]
via Wikimedia Commons

These innocent victims of war came to be known as the “boat people.” A demeaning term that characterizes their only means of escape: overflowing, dilapidated fishing vessels ill-equipped to protect from the perilous seas. The insulting label also signifies the prejudice the Vietnamese refugees encountered.

Pin expects a lot from her slim, 220+ page novel, given the complexity, fog of war, and the enormity of the humanitarian crisis that ensued.

The greatest strength of Wandering Souls is its clarity. Achieved through precision-like, purposeful prose that tells a complicated story by choices made stylistically, mixing genres, and deciding what to tell and what to leave out.

By not relying on a single genre, historical fiction, but using many – narrative non-fiction, memoirist, journalistic, and poetry-in-prose – integrating varied perspectives enables the use of fewer words aimed at providing the scope and haunting of a gruesome war yet to be fully reckoned with. Prose that follows a less-is-more approach, inspired by Joan Didion and Ernest Hemingway.

Brevity allows us to absorb the monumental events and consequences of a highly controversial war fought in jungles, along with a legacy of psychological trauma, prolonged grief, sorrow, shame, and survivor’s guilt. “Why me not them?” the central character Anh asks. Skillful conciseness renders a potency we hadn’t seen coming.

To make sure we understand where Pin is coming from she lays it out: “The truth is, I don’t want to write about death. I want women to live. I want children playing in the fields . . . I want justice and I want peace; I want life and I want delight.” She also wants “magic powers for the armless and harmless,” and a “reckoning.”

Through fifteen-year-old Anh’s survival story, assuming the role of mother and father to two of her younger brothers, Minh (thirteen) and Thanh (ten), after their parents and four other siblings perished at sea, Pin still wants to “focus on moments of joy” rather than the “wretchedness of war.” That’s a lot of forgiveness wrapped up in what she chooses not to dwell on.

Wandering Souls finds the right balance. Literary magic in doing so.

Magical too because magical realism is infused into the narrative through a ghostly voice that wanders between the Beyond and Earth in a poetic format. Brief, three-page chapters based on real-life news accounts also add immeasurably to a broader context on ghostly war propaganda, the ghosts of torture on the high seas, and then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s deceit about wanting to welcome 19,000 refugees in two waves. Like America’s leaders who lied about winning an unwinnable war.

Great human disasters, natural or manmade, put bureaucrats to a test not only as public officials but as human beings,” wrote Richard Holbrooke who served in Vietnam and was instrumental in crafting America’s foreign policy in Vietnam. Lies broke the trust in government we see today. Many argue America was never the same, including Ken Burns in his 18-hour documentary, The Vietnam War. Ending the novel in March 2023 serves to make this fifty-year-old story eerily current in helping us understand America’s struggles to preserve democracy.

Ghostly stories are part of Vietnamese literature. For good reason. Vietnamese culture believes that unless death is respected, memorialized, souls wander like ghosts. Pin choose Dao, Anh’s seven-year-old brother who died at sea as the ghostly voice, rather than her parents, emphasizing the theme of lost youth and innocence. Symbolic of “unsettled” deaths that do haunt, giving rise to the supernatural magic Pin is after.

“I could see the boat from above,

Except now it was sunk beneath the waves,

and bodies were floating all around it.”

It’s not possible to grasp the flight and plight of the two million Vietnamese who fled after the Fall of Saigon. Zooming in on one family and choosing which grim historical events to include or not, Pin whittles down faceless history for us to visualize. The Vietnam War was an extraordinarily agonizing political war that set off a massive, decade-long protest movement in America. Seen up-close and personal, you won’t forget Pin’s story. Her intention.

The global relevancy persists. The UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) estimates 30 million refugees wandering, a featureless statistic skyrocketing with as many as 18 million Ukrainian refugees displaced and separated from their families, including 5 million children. Mind-boggling numbers that don’t include the dislocation of millions of Syrian refugees, and countless others from other countries. We’re numb to these staggering numbers, but not to the suffering and struggles of a few.

Anh, Minh, and Thanh’s sea journey took them to Hong Kong. To two-weeks of quarantine in a guarded, dehumanizing detention center. Then to the Tai Tak Refugee Camp near the Hong Kong airport. “A miniature version of Vietnam,” with 10,000 Vietnamese refugees at the time.

You’ll see why Anh and her brothers never made it to America as envisioned. When the three are finally approved to leave Hong Kong, they’re assigned Hut #23, shared with nine more people, at the Sopley Refugee Camp in Hampshire, England. Living in WWII “brutal and sinister, square barracks made of grey concrete” in another foreign land wasn’t that much better. “Resettlement was a lottery, with winners and losers,” though a Red Cross nurse shines a kindly light and the trio make a few friends. Still, they’re caged up with their fates unknown.

How to rise above the “otherness”? Who among the three does? Who’s so broken they can’t?

Those joyful moments are captured in deliciously appealing Vietnamese cuisine, an important aspect of the country’s regional cultures. Food brings comfort, nostalgic memories of home, and a sense of community with other Vietnamese refugees. Music is also seen as a “refuge.” Joyous too are the efforts made to learn English, and Anh’s persistence in wanting to “settle, not wander.”

The US has yet to realize a National Vietnam Museum. Plans for one are underway in Texas, highlighted in this short video:

 

 

Judging by the 5 million annual visitors who come to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC to pay their respects to the 58,000 Americans who died fighting the Vietnam War, a museum to pay respects to the Vietnamese refugees would fill a void. (The real number of veterans is another 500,000 who bear the psychiatric scars of the war: PTSD, depression, alcoholism, homelessness, suicide.)

“What is the point of opening up the door to her past?” Anh ponders at one point.

The point is the reckoning is not over. “What better way of processing our past, than by rewriting it?” Pin asks and answers.

Lorraine

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