Posted on by Andrea Badgley · 4 Comments

Beware the hype

More than two years ago, I first learned of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, set in Iowa, and heard people rave about it. “One of the best books I ever read!” “OMG you have to read it.” “You’re going to LOVE it!”

Gilead by Marilynne RobinsonWhen I started my project, to read 3 books set in each US state, I thought, Oh goodie! I can read this one when I get to Iowa. When I hit the “I” states — Idaho, Illionois, Indiana — I started getting excited. I was almost there.

A couple of weeks ago, I finished my final Indiana read. The moment I closed the book, I picked up my Nook and purchased Gilead.

I started reading. I puzzled. I kept reading.

I waited for the goodness. I waited for the Iowa.

For me, they never came. The narrative — letters from an aged, ill pastor to his small son — did not engage me. The spiritual questions did not interest me. There were a couple of lovely passages, like this one, but overall, it was a huge letdown.

Often, a hyped book works out for me. The Goldfinch for example, or The Woman Upstairs. I loved those. I devoured them. They were massively exclaimed over: I expected 5 star reads from those, and they delivered. With this one, though, I expected 5 stars and ended up with 2. Maybe I would have given it 3 had I had no expectations.

The good news is that Iowa presented me with four books I really wanted to read, and I wasn’t sure how I was going to pick only three. Gilead eliminated itself and made that choice for me.

A Thousand Acres by Jane SmileyNow I’m onto the next Iowa book I was excited about. I’m trying to temper my enthusiasm so as to not fall into the same trap as with poor Gilead. It was on a pedestal and had a long way to fall.

My excitement this time is based on something much more superficial, though. It’s not based on the hype of professional readers, book bloggers, or literary critics. It is based solely on the cover: it has a hay bale on it!

Posted on by Andrea Badgley · 1 Comment

The Internet failed me! My first Indiana read was a bust.

The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields book cover

I don’t mean to shock you, but it’s true: you can’t trust everything you read on the Internet. The Brooklyn Magazine map of the best books for every state claims that Carol Shield’s The Stone Diaries is the best book of Indiana, but I think the magazine was putting more emphasis on literariness than on sense-of-place when it compiled the list (The Stone Diaries won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction).

I read The Stone Diaries because it was pitched as a novel set in Indiana, but I was disappointed by how little of the novel actually takes place there. The novel is set mainly in Canada, with a few scenes in Indiana and a few more in The Orkneys. More importantly, aside from the scenes in Scotland, setting was mostly irrelevent in this story. It could have taken place anywhere: place was definitely not a third character in the story. I did not walk away from the book feeling like I knew any more about Indiana than I did when I started reading.

That being said, as I begin my second Indiana novel and quarries are mentioned in the opening pages, perhaps I’m not giving The Stone Diaries enough credit for capturing Indiana. In the opening scene of Shield’s novel, we are introduced to Mercy Stone Goodwill, the mother of the novel’s protagonist, Daisy, and I immediately tied Mercy’s maiden name to the book’s title.

Yet the stone of the story is more than the Stone lineage carried through Mercy, and as I read more from Indiana, it seems stone is a part of Indiana as well. Stone is a metaphor used throughout The Stone Diaries, from Daisy’s quarry-man-turned-stone-carver father who builds a replica of a Great Pyramid in his back yard, to her paleobotanist niece who searches for fossils: “Life turned to stone.” Fossils. Like statues. Like the words engraved on a tombstone. Life turned to stone.

Rock runs throughout the book — a fictitious autobiography — in nearly every chapter. The novel, and its structure, seems to be making a point about the impossibility of shoving the whole of one person’s life into finite words, and the difficulties inherent in penning an autobiography. Shields is clever with her narrative choices, sometimes naming the person who’s perspective we are hearing, sometimes telling the story through letters to Daisy, and sometimes narrating through an omnicisient narrator whose identity is unclear, but who seems to be Daisy herself.

The way Shields executes changes in point of view is brilliant because she demonstrates how unattainable it is to share the full story of a life, and to share it accurately. From Daisy’s friends we hear different opinions than we do from her children or former lovers. And Daisy herself — what was her perspective? It’s difficult to know, but Shields certainly gives clues that help you form a theory.

While the book didn’t blow me away, and I’m still thinking about the significance of stone throughout it, there was a genius in the way Sheilds ended the novel, sharing the detritus of Daisy’s life, and how much the mundane odds and ends we leave can tell about us.

I think part of the cleverness of the title, along with the way Shields demonstrates the difficulties of sharing or knowing a person’s true story, is a play on the expression, “written in stone.” When a biography is set on paper, with specific perpectives shared and words carefully chosen, the written, indelible story persists long after the person is gone, like a statue carved of stone.

If you have a favorite book set in Indiana and written by an Indiana author, please let me know in the comments! I’m currently reading The Bright Forever by Lee Martin, and I am getting a good feel for Indiana from it.

Posted on by Andrea Badgley · 2 Comments

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – I need to understand!

The Heart is Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers book cover Set in a small Georgia town, a deaf mute, Mr. Singer, loses his best friend (another deaf-mute) to a mental institution. Soon, when Mr. Singer is alone without his companion, four loners in town begin to befriend him. They, passionate but unable to direct their passion, are drawn to Mr. Singer’s tranquility. He listens. Not with his ears, but to them, with his heart.

These four townspeople — a young girl, Mick, who has an “inside room” in her mind where she retreats to think about music; a wanderer, Jake, spreading the word of I know not what; an African American doctor, Dr. Copeland, who mistrusts all white people but Mr. Singer; and Biff, the cafe owner who seems curious more than anything else — each of them wants. Each of them is hungry. Each of them seeks something from Mr. Singer.

In January she began a certain very wonderful piece called ‘This Thing I Want, I Know Not What.’ It was a beautiful and marvelous song — very slow and soft.

Each loner, except Biff, needs Mr. Singer. They pour their souls out to him, and each feels Mr. Singer gets them, when really he is just a kind man who listens:

He had agreed with each of them in turn, though what it was they wanted him to sanction he did not know. And Mick — her face was urgent and she said a good deal that he did not understand in the least.

In being listened to, these lost passionate people feel what they think is love for Mr. Singer. But can it be? They know nothing of him, and each of them projects onto him their own thoughts and feelings, making him the same as them, because he has no voice to tell them otherwise. And they don’t ask.

Mr. Singer, likewise, has a friend like this — a friend whom he needs, but who doesn’t reciprocate. And all of these needers, they want and desire and have big feelings in them, each has a fire, but they don’t know what to do with it or what it is, and so they lay it all on someone else, thinking that person has the answer. They hunt, always hunt, for companionship, to be listened to, to be understood.

Like the characters in this book, I felt like I was on the edge of something when I finished. The end threw me though. I am this close to understanding what happened at the end, but I need a book buddy to help me hunt it’s meaning.