Writing this piece about Kevin Powers novel The Yellow Birds, I realized that I didn't know the first name of the narrator and center of the book, Private Bartle. I don't think that's because Power necessarily intended Bartle as an everyman. In fact, Private Bartle would be offended by such meaning-making gestures, or attempts at propaganda. Private Bartle's narration is an act of witness, told after the fact, after his time in Iraq. Something has happened, but Bartle needs to...get to that in the right way. Bartle's story isn't intended or presented as a lesson, or to make a point. And, that might be the beginning of a peace.
John Bartle (first mention of that name comes on page 44) almost seems to wander into the war; or, maybe he's wandering when it stalks him. He begins his story by telling of how "the war tried to kill us in the spring. ....While we slept, the war rubbed its thousand ribs against the ground in prayer. When we pressed onward through exhaustion, its eyes were white and open in the dar. While we ate, the war fasted, fed by its own deprivation. It made love and gave birth and spread through fire."
Bartle is a twenty-one year old at the start of his memory. Dominated by the war, all of his memories seems to begin in 2003. At this point, he's been in the army two years and is Fort Dix waiting to be deployed to Iraq. At Dix, he meets Daniel Murphy, an eighteen year old raw recruit whom he adopts. When he meets Murphy, Bartle thinks about what he'll say about himself and finds a disquieting blank. He thinks," I'd been in the army a couple of years. It had been good to me, more or less, a place to disappear. I kept my head down and did as i was told. Nobody expected much of me, and I hadn't asked for much in return." Bartle likes the army because it has conferred a type of freedom upon him. Soon after enlisting, he realizes, "never have to make a decision again."
Of course, this doesn't prove true entirely or how to explain his friendship with Murphy. In his telling, in his memory, Bartle downplays his part in that. He downplays his part in much of what happens. As Bartle recalls, one day at Dix, Murphy simply appeared next to him in formation, says hello and Bartle gets chewed out for talking out of turn. Capping off his account of their first meeting, Bartle summarizes, There is nothing else to be said. Something happened. I meet Murph."
Murphy as infantryman is a bit over-his-head. His and Bartle's seargent, Sterling, basically asks Bartle to keep an eye on him. Without really making a real conscious decision, Bartle agrees. He further cements his bond to the slightly spacey eighteen year old from rural Virginia when he promises his mother, LaDonna Murphy, that he'll look after her son. He tells her, "'Of course,'" while thinking "Sure, sure...Now you reassure me and I'll go back and go to bed." This promiseso casually entered proves to change him dramatically.
Bartle proves incapable of helping Murphy, incapable of figuring out how he was supposed to, and incapable of forgetting Murphy or forgiving himself. Murphy's death forces him to recall the war in an obsessive way and yet he is never able to gain any answers or perspective. By the end, this almost seems an act of memory pursued to destroy the notion of answers and patterns, to mock the idea of certainty as the refuge of people who have never experienced a war, nor seen the worst of man.
Thursday, September 20, 2012
Saturday, September 15, 2012
The Dog Stars by Peter Heller
After a terrible epidemic basically wipes out human-kind in North America, two men, Hig and Bangley, forge a hardscrabble existence at a county airport in the shadow of the Rockies in Peter Heller's first novel, The Dog Stars.
An odd couple drawn together for safety and by circumstance, Hig and Bangley spend most of their days securing their turf, patrolling their perimeter from, as Hig with understatement puts it, "intruders." Hig and Bangley are a team; Hig does most the recon, Bangley does most of the killiing. Hig does his his recon flying a 1956 Cessna 182, which he calls the beast, over about a thirty square mile tract. Bangley does his part using the veritable arsenal of weapons which he came with. When, he showed up out of the blue one day in an old truck.Hig is our narrator, or journaler, and supplies precious little in the way of background on either himself or Bangley. Heller is after a ground-zero situation.
The intruders who come to Hig and Bangley's doorsetp are desperate, fierce and scary people who seem intent on killing and taking. After the contagion, civilization has all but collapsed and mankind has returned to a primitive, every man for himself state. Of course, in all cases, neither the reader nor Hig can be sure of the intruders intentions or whether they are uniformily predatory. When others intrude on the little homestead Hig and Bangley have established, Bangley, ("a mean gun nut" according to Hig) ensures that he and Hig shoot first and never ask any questions later. Although, homestead might be the wrong word. Hig sleeps outside a house, under the stars, claiming not to want to be trapped by a likely target for marauders. Hig has doubts but never lets those get in the way of the killing, in part because he's afraid he might be next if he were to argue for practicing a bit more discrimination.
The marauders who come are equal parts pathetic and frightening. There is "a young girl, a scarecrow" with a pocketknife who tries to ambush him from behind only to be mowed down by Bangley. There are scary bands of primitively armed men, anywhere from six to eight, usually large and fierce. Think pirates. These bands would potentially present problems if any were ever as well-armed as Bangley. This is definitely a book that the NRA will love.
Hig and Bangley's relationship is a strained one. Misanthropic Bangley seems to relish the killing. Its almost as if this bleak, isolated and red-in-tooth and claw world is a dream set-up for him. Hig on the other hand is less well adjusted to his existence and still feels some need to exercise his humanity. Every once in a while, initially unbeknownst to Bangley, he makes calls on a large Mennonite family ten miles south of them. The family is suffering from "the blood," a blood disease that arose in response to the flu that annihilated the vast majority of people.
When Bangley finds out that Hig is doing this, he argues, "you want to get this far and die of the blood?" Beginning to question his survivor's good fortune, Hig thinks "This Far. Bangley and Jasper [Hig's dog] and a low fat diet."
Heller's novel is a philosophical one, begging several questions the question; what makes life worth-living? Can you imagine a case when too much would be taken away? What would be that case? How does one go forward after disasters that seem to strip all worth away?
As the book begins, Hig has been eking it out with Bangley at the airport for almost nine years. His daily routine seems to require a great deal of mental and emotional effort. Memory can't be indulged; for the most part, Hig avoids thinking about his comfortable life before the plague and the wife and child-to-be he lost in it. Occasionally, he goes off with Jasper and hunts and fishes, although much of the game is gone. The beauty he sees in nature now only confuses him in the face of all the senseless disaster he's lived through. He asks Bangley, "if he ever thought there was anything more than this, than just surviving day to day. Recon, fixing the plane, growing the five vegetables, trapping a rabbit. Like what are we waiting for?"
Yet, he persists, going forward powered by a slender hope. At one point, he asks himself, "Would I stand on a train platform and wait for a train that hasn't come for months?" He's assumed a posture of hope in the hopes it will create a bit of magic.
Waiting with hope eventually wears then and he decides a desperate acts is in order. Spurred by a mysterious radio signal he received from Grand Junction three years before, he decides to get in his plane and fly there, despite the fact that he's not sure what he'll find or whether he'll find gas he can use to fly back to Bangley and his "home." He needs more and he's willing to risk all to find it.
Predictably and improbably, he finds a woman, Cima. And, of course, she's not only sane, but sweet, smart and fantastic looking. He also discovers where the call from Grand Junction came from, but what was a source of hope proves to have sprung from something considerably bleaker. But, all this is the rest of the story, and I won't spoil it. Regarding the probability of there being a lovely, sane, smart women wandering out in the wasteland....maybe I just don't recognize the possibilities that lie in even the bleakest situations.
The opening of the book is better than the questing journey outward that dominates it's close. The way the two men craft a life and manufacture a reason for being out of the thinnest air is fascinating. The rest of the story seems contrived. Heller creates a situation that poses some really interesting questions, he puts his characters in a box, but then takes the easy way out and gives them an unrealistic way out. I'll leave it there to spare those who might want to read the book.
It's a page-turner. For the most part, Heller writes in a spare, elliptical style. As a character, Hig is a bit of a mess; he's gone through hell and back but is still, at heart, an all-American dude. He is sensitive, attuned to nature, super-handy, a great outdoorsman. He is also literary: when he makes one final trip to the house he'd shared with Melissa, it's to retrieve a volume of William Stafford poems. He's great company, but sometimes he doesn't convince or add up. He tends to gush at points, and some of his thoughts seem kind of like FB posts, self-involved recitations of likes and dislikes. He seems to sometimes veer suddenly between the macho and the maudlin
Still, the book asks the big questions and begins to answer some of them. What are our reason for being? How resilient are they? And, the book presents a welcome view of nature as an ambivalent force. Hig is clearly enamored by the outdoors, but can he see it quite the same way after nature, in the form of a bug, basically strips him of all he possesses? I wish Heller had delved into this area a bit more. And, if nothing else, the death of Jasper the dog will strike a chord with any animal lover.
An odd couple drawn together for safety and by circumstance, Hig and Bangley spend most of their days securing their turf, patrolling their perimeter from, as Hig with understatement puts it, "intruders." Hig and Bangley are a team; Hig does most the recon, Bangley does most of the killiing. Hig does his his recon flying a 1956 Cessna 182, which he calls the beast, over about a thirty square mile tract. Bangley does his part using the veritable arsenal of weapons which he came with. When, he showed up out of the blue one day in an old truck.Hig is our narrator, or journaler, and supplies precious little in the way of background on either himself or Bangley. Heller is after a ground-zero situation.
The intruders who come to Hig and Bangley's doorsetp are desperate, fierce and scary people who seem intent on killing and taking. After the contagion, civilization has all but collapsed and mankind has returned to a primitive, every man for himself state. Of course, in all cases, neither the reader nor Hig can be sure of the intruders intentions or whether they are uniformily predatory. When others intrude on the little homestead Hig and Bangley have established, Bangley, ("a mean gun nut" according to Hig) ensures that he and Hig shoot first and never ask any questions later. Although, homestead might be the wrong word. Hig sleeps outside a house, under the stars, claiming not to want to be trapped by a likely target for marauders. Hig has doubts but never lets those get in the way of the killing, in part because he's afraid he might be next if he were to argue for practicing a bit more discrimination.
The marauders who come are equal parts pathetic and frightening. There is "a young girl, a scarecrow" with a pocketknife who tries to ambush him from behind only to be mowed down by Bangley. There are scary bands of primitively armed men, anywhere from six to eight, usually large and fierce. Think pirates. These bands would potentially present problems if any were ever as well-armed as Bangley. This is definitely a book that the NRA will love.
Hig and Bangley's relationship is a strained one. Misanthropic Bangley seems to relish the killing. Its almost as if this bleak, isolated and red-in-tooth and claw world is a dream set-up for him. Hig on the other hand is less well adjusted to his existence and still feels some need to exercise his humanity. Every once in a while, initially unbeknownst to Bangley, he makes calls on a large Mennonite family ten miles south of them. The family is suffering from "the blood," a blood disease that arose in response to the flu that annihilated the vast majority of people.
When Bangley finds out that Hig is doing this, he argues, "you want to get this far and die of the blood?" Beginning to question his survivor's good fortune, Hig thinks "This Far. Bangley and Jasper [Hig's dog] and a low fat diet."
Heller's novel is a philosophical one, begging several questions the question; what makes life worth-living? Can you imagine a case when too much would be taken away? What would be that case? How does one go forward after disasters that seem to strip all worth away?
As the book begins, Hig has been eking it out with Bangley at the airport for almost nine years. His daily routine seems to require a great deal of mental and emotional effort. Memory can't be indulged; for the most part, Hig avoids thinking about his comfortable life before the plague and the wife and child-to-be he lost in it. Occasionally, he goes off with Jasper and hunts and fishes, although much of the game is gone. The beauty he sees in nature now only confuses him in the face of all the senseless disaster he's lived through. He asks Bangley, "if he ever thought there was anything more than this, than just surviving day to day. Recon, fixing the plane, growing the five vegetables, trapping a rabbit. Like what are we waiting for?"
Yet, he persists, going forward powered by a slender hope. At one point, he asks himself, "Would I stand on a train platform and wait for a train that hasn't come for months?" He's assumed a posture of hope in the hopes it will create a bit of magic.
Waiting with hope eventually wears then and he decides a desperate acts is in order. Spurred by a mysterious radio signal he received from Grand Junction three years before, he decides to get in his plane and fly there, despite the fact that he's not sure what he'll find or whether he'll find gas he can use to fly back to Bangley and his "home." He needs more and he's willing to risk all to find it.
Predictably and improbably, he finds a woman, Cima. And, of course, she's not only sane, but sweet, smart and fantastic looking. He also discovers where the call from Grand Junction came from, but what was a source of hope proves to have sprung from something considerably bleaker. But, all this is the rest of the story, and I won't spoil it. Regarding the probability of there being a lovely, sane, smart women wandering out in the wasteland....maybe I just don't recognize the possibilities that lie in even the bleakest situations.
The opening of the book is better than the questing journey outward that dominates it's close. The way the two men craft a life and manufacture a reason for being out of the thinnest air is fascinating. The rest of the story seems contrived. Heller creates a situation that poses some really interesting questions, he puts his characters in a box, but then takes the easy way out and gives them an unrealistic way out. I'll leave it there to spare those who might want to read the book.
It's a page-turner. For the most part, Heller writes in a spare, elliptical style. As a character, Hig is a bit of a mess; he's gone through hell and back but is still, at heart, an all-American dude. He is sensitive, attuned to nature, super-handy, a great outdoorsman. He is also literary: when he makes one final trip to the house he'd shared with Melissa, it's to retrieve a volume of William Stafford poems. He's great company, but sometimes he doesn't convince or add up. He tends to gush at points, and some of his thoughts seem kind of like FB posts, self-involved recitations of likes and dislikes. He seems to sometimes veer suddenly between the macho and the maudlin
Still, the book asks the big questions and begins to answer some of them. What are our reason for being? How resilient are they? And, the book presents a welcome view of nature as an ambivalent force. Hig is clearly enamored by the outdoors, but can he see it quite the same way after nature, in the form of a bug, basically strips him of all he possesses? I wish Heller had delved into this area a bit more. And, if nothing else, the death of Jasper the dog will strike a chord with any animal lover.
Tuesday, September 4, 2012
Hanna Pylvainen's We Sinners
Aiming to convince her to leave her church, Tiina Rovaniemi's boyfriend Matthew tells her "You know, the best thing about the church is your family, and the worst thing about our family is the church"(102). While Tiina easily recognizes the truth of Matthew's words, she also realizes it will never be simple for her to separate the two.
The confluence of faith and family is at heart of Hanna Pylvainen's, We Sinners. The eleven short stories in the collection tell of Tiina's family, the Finnish-American Rovaniemi clan, made up of her, her mom and dad and eight siblings. Eleven stories, eleven members, although not every member narrates a story.
The Rovaniemi's are Laestadians, members of the Laestadian church. As rebellious daughter Uppu explains to a boyfriend, "It's a kind of Lutheranism where everyone is much more hung up on being Lutheran than all the other normal Lutherans"(154). It is a strict church in some regards; drinking, dancing, movies, popular movies, TV are all heavilly frowned upon. As is any type of birth-control; the Rovaniemi's are a large family and the married children who remain in the church also launch large families. Yet, according to the head of the clan, Warren Rovaniemi, who ministers at the church on weekends while pulling down a check as an accountant to earn a living, "Once you had the heart of a believer...the restrictions weren't restrictions at all- it was simply what your conscience told you to do and not to do"(158). Beyond this, Laestadianism is a church built upon forgiveness. It recognizes man is a sinner and the core of it's service is to foster forgiveness.
The Rovaniemi's simple faith offers peace and forgiveness, and builds remarkable characters. It cements them as a family. Yet, for all it's strengths and simple beauties, it is a severe faith. It is a faith, and, by it's nature, everyone struggle with it.
It seems especially a challenge for the children growing up in a late 20th century suburb of Detroit. For one, the rules of the church make them lead quite different lives from those of their peers. Nobody they know has such a large family. Nobody they know is forbidden from going to the movies. They all feel an urge to escape both at times. And, doubt creeps into the faith of all.
However, escape is not an easy passage, and although yearned for at times, when it comes to the point, it is hard to make the leap away from faith. When his wife asks what he does all day at work as an accountant, Warren Rovaniemi glibly tells her "I figure out the difference between what things seem to cost and what things really cost"(30). The Rovaniemi children all fear what leaving the church will really cost.
How does one price the gift of forgiveness and love. The family practices an imperfect but sincere and beautiful love founded on a daily, constant, seeking and granting of forgiveness. The mother, Pirjo Rovaniemi, tells one of her seven daughters' suitors, Jonas Chan, that her children "are the best of me...They are the best thing I ever did with my life"(171). And, the children feel the love and practice between themselves seeking and granting forgiveness. The family knits its members into something both maddening and large, alive and vibrant. When the Rovaniemi's leave Jonas Chan's high school graduation party, "they left behind a backyard of quiet that no one could fill again. He felt it again, the largeness of them, at Uppu's graduation, though then the entire churh showed, every room filled, even the stairs, even the porch, forty or fifty little kids running about, a few babies lying on blankets atop the living room rug, waiving their limbs like beetles on their backs"(167).
The situation is not easy. All the members of the family have doubts. When Warren suspects he is going to be chosen to minister to the congregation, he quickly dismisses his suspicions; surely, God knowing him as the particularly wrathful and sinful creature he knows himself, He will never allow such a thing to happen. It does, although Pylvainen never makes us privy to the internal doubts such a series of events must have occasioned. Several of the siblings leave the church, unable to sustain the faith and not willing to fake it, despite the fact that it creates a barrier between themselves and their believing kin. Their honesty speaks to their respect for the faith of their family. Even the most devout member of the siblings, Brita is subject to a particulary dark night in her soul when she nearly dies after delivering her last child. Nobody simply leaves.
Never simply preaching one way or another, Pylvainen has done a superb and nuanced job of capturing the strengths and weaknesses of living a strict, non-mainstream faith. This is far from a screed opposed. If anything, it leaves me, a struggling believer who grew up in a rather normal, small nuclear household, envious of the Rovaniemi children. Their family and faith has offered them a certainty and happiness that is lacking for many. When son Nels experiments with alcohol in college, he eventually has a moment when he pulls back and realizes he is about to lose something if he continues to indulge in such sinful behavior. Nels "sat in the back of the lecture hall and wondered about all the people sitting there, bored, trying to figure out who they had a chance with. He felt bad for them, for the limits of their experiences, for the fragility and infrequency of their happiness. They did not even known, he thought, the kind of happiness they wanted"(74).
The confluence of faith and family is at heart of Hanna Pylvainen's, We Sinners. The eleven short stories in the collection tell of Tiina's family, the Finnish-American Rovaniemi clan, made up of her, her mom and dad and eight siblings. Eleven stories, eleven members, although not every member narrates a story.
The Rovaniemi's are Laestadians, members of the Laestadian church. As rebellious daughter Uppu explains to a boyfriend, "It's a kind of Lutheranism where everyone is much more hung up on being Lutheran than all the other normal Lutherans"(154). It is a strict church in some regards; drinking, dancing, movies, popular movies, TV are all heavilly frowned upon. As is any type of birth-control; the Rovaniemi's are a large family and the married children who remain in the church also launch large families. Yet, according to the head of the clan, Warren Rovaniemi, who ministers at the church on weekends while pulling down a check as an accountant to earn a living, "Once you had the heart of a believer...the restrictions weren't restrictions at all- it was simply what your conscience told you to do and not to do"(158). Beyond this, Laestadianism is a church built upon forgiveness. It recognizes man is a sinner and the core of it's service is to foster forgiveness.
The Rovaniemi's simple faith offers peace and forgiveness, and builds remarkable characters. It cements them as a family. Yet, for all it's strengths and simple beauties, it is a severe faith. It is a faith, and, by it's nature, everyone struggle with it.
It seems especially a challenge for the children growing up in a late 20th century suburb of Detroit. For one, the rules of the church make them lead quite different lives from those of their peers. Nobody they know has such a large family. Nobody they know is forbidden from going to the movies. They all feel an urge to escape both at times. And, doubt creeps into the faith of all.
However, escape is not an easy passage, and although yearned for at times, when it comes to the point, it is hard to make the leap away from faith. When his wife asks what he does all day at work as an accountant, Warren Rovaniemi glibly tells her "I figure out the difference between what things seem to cost and what things really cost"(30). The Rovaniemi children all fear what leaving the church will really cost.
How does one price the gift of forgiveness and love. The family practices an imperfect but sincere and beautiful love founded on a daily, constant, seeking and granting of forgiveness. The mother, Pirjo Rovaniemi, tells one of her seven daughters' suitors, Jonas Chan, that her children "are the best of me...They are the best thing I ever did with my life"(171). And, the children feel the love and practice between themselves seeking and granting forgiveness. The family knits its members into something both maddening and large, alive and vibrant. When the Rovaniemi's leave Jonas Chan's high school graduation party, "they left behind a backyard of quiet that no one could fill again. He felt it again, the largeness of them, at Uppu's graduation, though then the entire churh showed, every room filled, even the stairs, even the porch, forty or fifty little kids running about, a few babies lying on blankets atop the living room rug, waiving their limbs like beetles on their backs"(167).
The situation is not easy. All the members of the family have doubts. When Warren suspects he is going to be chosen to minister to the congregation, he quickly dismisses his suspicions; surely, God knowing him as the particularly wrathful and sinful creature he knows himself, He will never allow such a thing to happen. It does, although Pylvainen never makes us privy to the internal doubts such a series of events must have occasioned. Several of the siblings leave the church, unable to sustain the faith and not willing to fake it, despite the fact that it creates a barrier between themselves and their believing kin. Their honesty speaks to their respect for the faith of their family. Even the most devout member of the siblings, Brita is subject to a particulary dark night in her soul when she nearly dies after delivering her last child. Nobody simply leaves.
Never simply preaching one way or another, Pylvainen has done a superb and nuanced job of capturing the strengths and weaknesses of living a strict, non-mainstream faith. This is far from a screed opposed. If anything, it leaves me, a struggling believer who grew up in a rather normal, small nuclear household, envious of the Rovaniemi children. Their family and faith has offered them a certainty and happiness that is lacking for many. When son Nels experiments with alcohol in college, he eventually has a moment when he pulls back and realizes he is about to lose something if he continues to indulge in such sinful behavior. Nels "sat in the back of the lecture hall and wondered about all the people sitting there, bored, trying to figure out who they had a chance with. He felt bad for them, for the limits of their experiences, for the fragility and infrequency of their happiness. They did not even known, he thought, the kind of happiness they wanted"(74).
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