This review is for Sweetsmoke, a novel by David Fuller, published by Hyperion and available in September of 2008. I obtained an advance copy via LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer program. My appreciation to both Hyperion for its participation in the program and LibraryThing for making it possible. You can also visit Sweetsmoke’s Web site.

David Fuller’s “Sweetsmoke” builds on the familiar tradition of modern novels set in the Civil-War ravaged south: slave narratives and personal epics that, through a mixture of history and emotion, bring contemporary audiences face to face with the massive iniquities of our collective pasts. What Fuller does that’s new, however, is tweak this landscape by adding something new: a murder mystery. No, really.

Cassius, our Shakespeare-monikered protagonist, discovers that Emoline, a freed slave who rescued him from the brink of disaster and nursed him back to health (not to mention taught him to read, from his ABCs to Homer, in three weeks. Apparently.) has been murdered. Emoline’s violent demise is a vehicle for the rest of Fuller’s explorations: the conflicts of slavery, the social crisis of the South, the dreadfulness of the Civil War, and a complete rehash of the battle of Antietam. This is a big steak to chew, and it’s occasionally overcooked.

Fuller is a competent writer. Though “Sweetsmoke” is his first novel, his long experience in screenwriting gives his tone a confidence and cleanliness, if sometimes also a paucity of metaphor. The long scene that unfolds at the big “To-Do”, a multi-plantation summer gathering of slaves for dancing, drinking, fighting and loving, reads almost as an inverse of the ante-bellum Tara hedonism in the film adaptation of “Gone with the Wind.” Likely the most evocative portion of the novel, it is a rare moment when Fuller’s (thorough) historical research transcends the literary gap into meaningful sociological application and nuance–that is, the facts of slavery gain warmth and personality; his dip into inter-slave politics and hostilities felt thoughtful.

It’s not that the descriptions that flesh out the rest of the novel are akward or tedious. They’re coherent and specific, but in the end, they don’t tell us much beyond literal rendition. They don’t reach into that sensuous part of our perception. It’s as if Fuller can’t move away from visual description as something to be translated into literal scenes. WIDE SHOT INTERIOR GENERAL STORE WITH DRY GOODS, SACKS OF GRAIN, TOOLS, ETC. would be in some cases more direct and as accurate as anything Fuller is saying.

In the same screenwriting vein, the dialogue is good, and in some places great, though Fuller’s decision to give free people (black and white alike) quotation marks and strip them from slaves is a trifle heavy-handed.

Fuller has to deal with issues of preposterousness. In an interview about the book, he confesses a concern about a scene in which Cassius confronts and threatens a white slave patroller with violence. Fuller asserts that the incident was based on a real occurrence, but unfortunately, it’s his own carefully-built historical framework that forces us to confront the issue of believability–even in fiction. Fuller’s plantation-era Virginia is so tightly bound in historical themes–oppression, racism, poverty, desperation–that to invite in deviations or extradordinary circumstance is troublesome and strains our credibility. The same goes for the whodunnit aspect in respect to Emoline’s murder, though Fuller does, thankfully, treat this loosely: Cassius isn’t chasing down forensic incidentals so much as he’s chasing intuition.

Fuller’s clear enthusiasm for military history breaks through in the climactic scenes that put Cassius in the middle of Antietam. Those of similar passions might find this fascinating, but for me the entire episode seemed glaringly out of place and much duller than the rest of the story. I know enough about the battle to find that Fuller’s descriptions didn’t add much to my understanding, and the long passages seemed to waste space in an already tight novel.

“Sweetsmoke” is an enjoyable read. It’s carefully considered and driven, if heavily expository (Fuller will tell you exactly what characters are undergoing what existential crisis, every time). Read as a story, it’s taut, with nightmarish suspense leaving characters exposed and in danger, with shame and love and murder. But in the end, it doesn’t bring an epiphany.

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Tags: arc, Books, civil war, early reviewer, fiction, novel, preview, reading, review, slavery, south

Murakami’s complex metaphysical tale of self-reflection, betrayal, connections and synchronicity resonates with the weight of the Japanese psyche and twines over itself with skillful precision, but still leaves a stain of emptiness in its wake.

What we have is a series of elements: a wayward cat, a dull-as-dishwater–and inert–unemployed protagonist, an absconded wife, a brutal politician-economist-power-mad-brother-in-law, and a curious central fulcrum of 1930s Manchuria (or Manchukuo, as the Japanese puppet state was called).

Murakami leaves the connections as yours to plug in to each, though he does offer some occasional exposition. Meaning blinks in and out of characters’ lives, leaving them vacillating between banal nothingness (so effetely expressed as to make the reader want to slit their own wrists) and profound–if inscrutable–psychological journeys in which they make supernatural visits to hotels and witness the mass execution of zoo animals. All as Murakami tightens the laces connecting events seemingly discrete in content, time and geography.

There is something haunting and meaningless in the web of meaning spun in “Wind up Bird”. One is hard-pressed to forget that Toru Okada, the protagonist, is wholly unremarkable. His apathy runs deep and his days are mostly naps. The disappearance of his wife seems to be the central concern of the novel, but Okada never makes you believe in his loss more than as something to motivate the increasingly bizarre underworld he slips into.

The problem with this book is that, in the way that some of its characters lose their meaning, it left me feeling hollow. A kind of quiet madness. A creeping futility. There is such mundanity in Okada’s real world that without the awful, often viscerally violent things that happen to him and his orbiting co-characters, there would be no point in his existence. That is, Okada is saved by the terrible, magical things that happen to him–they’re better than the other, reality-based possibilities.

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Tags: Books, fiction, japan, japanese, reading, review

Both quiet and compelling, Groff’s imperfect but lulling multi-generational tale of a neurotic family in small-town upstate New York is charming if not a masterpiece. And the sea monster is sweet, if not profound (expect some bang-you-over-the-head symbolism).

Despite frequently-updated family tree diagrams throughout the book, keeping the generations of the Temple and Averell and Upton flocks of protagonist Willie’s family sorted out is not a minor feat. It’s easy to get lost in the branches. But for readers who are suckers for multi-generational family affairs (I am looking at myself here), the book is formulaically digestible: emotional secrets, historical ephemera woven in with mythology, madness, sadness and love.

Groff is clearly enamored with her own personal setting and background: she explains in the preface that patriarchal writer Joseph Temple is based on John Fenimore Cooper and goes so far as to bring Cooper’s characters back to life (Natty Bumppo, Chingachgook) and reworking his hometown of Cooperstown into the novel’s eponymous Templeton. This trick is more clever than integral to the novel’s core meaning.

We are introduced into Templeton’s sphere by way of Willie, a late-twenty-something grad student who is simultaneously too precocious to be believed and woefully naive. Her own personal crisis leads her to investigate the realities of her own family, realities that suddenly become more complex. Told in many voices and through many generations, “Templeton” is not without its flaws–slightly unbelievable 19th-century stylizings, a bit too clean and peachy at times, and clearly a first novel–but it is enjoyable and worthwhile. A noble first effort from Groff. Hope to see more.

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Tags: Books, family, fiction, new york, reading, review

1991’s fiction Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

Minor spoiler elements: I mention briefly an event that takes place 1/4 or 1/3 of the way through the story. I do not, however, mention the main shocks/twists or the outcome.
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Do I feel angry or lost or just blasted like the prairie farm landscape after a dry summer storm? There is a grey and tragic pall over whatever it was I just experienced in Jane Smiley’s “A Thousand Acres.” It was as inescapable as a tornado, that book, both fascinating and destructive. At first there was just a hint of a tempest brewing, a stiff breeze and a feeling of having been startled–psychological tension–but then it got windier and windier and darker and finally shocking. And now I’m looking back on the story not knowing which way is up or if it was a tornado or just the hand of a deathless literary god.

Like a scavenger I have returned to the scene of the carnage in my mind to pick apart the corpses of the story and its characters. Smiley roughly formed the plot and its undertones around Shakespeare’s King Lear (I can picture her piecing together this notion physically, like a potter at a wheel), and the frame of this hangs throughout the novel like loose clothes. Not quite hugging all of the curves, but a general fit. This is likely the best of possible circumstances: too much adherence and it would have slid beyond concept into rehash. Much less and it would have lost the plot entirely.

Our Lear is actually called Larry, an unlovable, demanding patriarch of a thousand-acre spread in Iowa. He starts as a one-dimensional curmudgeon antagonistic to change or confrontation. His three daughters, Ginny, Rose and Caroline (that is: Goneril, Regan, Cordelia in the play), orbit him in an apparent swath of appeasements and housekeeping. Our first glimpse of the Cook family is in grim snippets of submission, towing the line, servitude: a motionless destiny. Ginny and Rose’s bland-faced husbands ride the cycle of farming and related demands, squashed under Larry/Lear’s thumb.

In one drunk moment at a neighbor’s party, Larry announces his intention to divide the farm between his daughters. One brief moment of hesitation on Caroline’s part ends in a door slammed in her face and assumed, instant alienation from the rest of the brood. Readers of Shakespeare know how this goes.

For much of the book Larry’s actions seem unmotivated, sprung from his thick head fully-formed, perhaps. He seems a demanding tyrnat. But then the whole book is inside out–it’s Ginny (Goneril) who is our protagonist, who is narrating, who, in King Lear, is one of the conniving, treacherous sisters trying to grub as much possible land and power from her ailing father. Is Ginny winding her story around, dipping past events and motives she doesn’t want us to see in her father and herself? What really did prompt him to give up the farm? Is Ginny evading, lying?

Ginny does have us in her hand. Enough so that the betrayal of her marriage (portrayed by her as blank and duty-bound, mostly) seems not a sin but a liberation she is entitled to. Instead, she would argue, it’s Rose who is the insidious one, Rose who is evil and desperate and hopeless. Ginny is a pushover, sure, but we never get to know the depth of her guile. She has it hidden somewhere.

The first half of the book is intense but survivable. But the storm that unleashes both the symbolism and force of King Lear here also leads to darker days, secrets and unstoppable powers that are not escapable. There is very much a sense of no return, and it’s hard to watch without incanting “oh, no, oh, no, oh no.” We know from its outset it will be tragedy, the question is how far Smiley will take it.

Like a survivor of a storm myself now I feel ghostly and white and shaky. Shaky because the foundations of my understanding of Lear and Larry are tumbled upside-down and furious. Was Lear ever pitiable? Was there ever a suggestion in Shakespeare that he was anything but a vindictive patriarch? Or is Ginny pulling the wool over my eyes with such deftness that I missed the part when she was poisoning me? And whose truth is the real truth? This will require some thinking.

Tags: farming, fiction, iowa, midwest, novel, pulitzer, tragedy

I like Twain as quote-worthy curmudgeon. I like his cynical way of writing. But, alas, I don’t really like Tom Sawyer.

It’s a melodrama that, while purporting to narrate Tom’s story and take Tom’s side, both condescends to its protagonist and never really gives a sense of motivation. Rascally, sure, mischievous, but why? We see hints of Tom’s conscience from time to time, but the grief he puts his elders through seems nothing short of sociopathic at times.

Intriguingly, this story reads like a play. Give this some thought as you read the book. Scenes are clear-cut, action relatively confined in space, and entrances and exits highlighted (over fences, into caves, etc.).

What is appealing to me is the treatment of absolutely non-children’s issues in the novel. Widow Douglas is absolutely threatened with rape. Murder happens. Racism. The children themselves act much more grown up than the preadolescents I know today–able to cook for themselves, boat, sleep in the open, drink and smoke–enough that I spent a lot of the time wondering just how old Tom was supposed to be. At times he seemed seven, at times fifteen.

This early wending into adulthood reminds that this bucolic drama is not entirely innocent: it deals with heavy topics; it takes place in a wilder time. It’s an important document of Americana, just don’t ask me to enjoy it too much.

Tags: 19th century, american, fiction, literature, novel