Categories
Historical Fiction

NEWS OF THE WORLD by Paulette Jiles

I initially passed on NEWS OF THE WORLD, despite rave reviews, because it sounded too much like TRUE GRIT (older man protecting underage girl in the old west) and because the author had neglected to put quotation marks around her dialog. Now that I do most of my reading from the library, I decided to give it a chance, and I quickly saw that I’d been wrong to hold out.

The voice grabbed me immediately, the sentences, at times intricate, full of not only rhythm but melody and color and specificity and wisdom. From the second sentence I was drawn powerfully to the protagonist, Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd: “He had been born in 1798 and the third war of his lifetime had ended five years ago and he hoped never to see another but now the news of the world aged him more than time itself.” A good deal of Hemingway there, certainly, but also a good deal of Captain Kidd himself.

The plot is straightforward. For a number of reasons, Kidd agrees to deliver a girl named Johanna from Wichita Falls in the north of Texas to her surviving relatives in Castroville, near San Antonio. Johanna was captured by the Kiowa when she was six and now, four years later, has lost all touch with the European culture she was raised in.

What ensues is a total immersion in 1870s Texas–the landscape and natural history, the bitter political struggles left over from the Civil War, the criminals taking advantage of the near anarchy, the dust and rain and smoke and danger. As we flit occasionally in and out of Johanna’s viewpoint, we also get sensitive and intricate glimpses of Kiowa life.

Jiles’s details are astonishing and utterly convincing, from the mechanics of the excursion wagon Kidd buys for the trip to the geology of the country he passes through, from the firearms to the cookstove, from the clothes to the architecture. She is equally good with the human heart, as in this passage where Kidd explores a burned-out cabin: “Here were memories, loves, deep heartstring notes like the place where he had been raised in Georgia. Here had been people whose dearest memories were the sound of a dipper dropped in the water bucket after taking a drink and the click of it as it hit bottom. The quiet of evening. The shade of a Devil’s trumpet vine over a window, scattered shadows gently hypnotic…”

In a novel where even the horses have individual personalities, the evolving, nearly wordless relationship that develops between Kidd and Johanna is wonderfully complex and is of course the real engine of suspense. Jiles resolves it beautifully, pulling away in the final pages to show the long result, and ending on one of the best closing lines I can remember.

The book is not perfect. There are a couple of villains who lack depth, and the road trip section is a little episodic. And there are those damned missing quotation marks. Why do writers deliberately yank you out of the story and force you to puzzle over who is saying what? (I’m reminded of Hilary Mantel’s WOLF HALL where it was often impossible to tell who the third person pronouns referred to.)

No big deal. The book completely transported me from a particularly unpleasant time in world history. It educated me and touched my heart. And it gladly waded into big issues like love and hate and the meaning of life. What are a few quotation marks in comparison?

Categories
Theater

ORANGE LIGHT by Howard L. Craft

I’ve always loved didactic fiction, from Steinbek’s THE GRAPES OF WRATH to Norris’s THE OCTOPUS to Sinclair’s THE JUNGLE. Howard Craft’s new play, ORANGE LIGHT, falls squarely in this tradition, and with the support of director Joseph Megel, the music of Rissi Palmer, and an outstanding ensemble cast, it makes for a riveting, wrenchingly emotional evening of theater.

Based on the deadly 1991 fire at the Imperial Foods chicken processing plant in Hamlet, North Carolina, the play is framed as a series of interviews for a video documentary–a modern medium deconstructed into the timeless form of live performance. Craft chose to use women actors exclusively (playing both male and female roles), to emphasize the disproportionate price that woman pay in the merciless world of predatory capitalism. He also chose fictitious names for the company, its owners, the town, and the workers we meet on stage. In an interview with INDY WEEK, Craft said he intended this choice to make the tragedy more universal, but it also allowed him to dig deep into the personal lives of his characters. In the end, that was the real purpose of this play: to drive home the fact that the 25 people who died and the 55 more who were injured–for no other reason than the greed of the owners–were all human beings, with bills and kids and cars that wouldn’t start, who were paid lousy wages and endured miserable working conditions, all for the crime of being born without a lot of choices.

Since his earliest work (including the stunning THE WISE ONES in 2005), Craft has shown an ability to create deeply human characters that command audience sympathy. Joseph Megel is the perfect director for Craft, having staged some of the best and most powerfully compassionate shows in the Triangle, including Potok’s THE CHOSEN (2004), Jim Grimsley’s WHITE PEOPLE (2005), Brecht’s MOTHER COURAGE (2008), and Craft’s CALEB CALYPSO AND THE MIDNIGHT MARAUDERS (2009).

ORANGE LIGHT shines with righteous anger. It is unafraid to place blame or point fingers. But it never loses its head, or its heart.

ORANGE LIGHT runs January 30 – February 16 2020 at the Durham Fruit and Produce Company, https://www.bulldogdurham.org/orange-light

Categories
Historical Fiction

CURIOUS TOYS by Elizabeth Hand

I’m not a big fan of serial killer novels, but some books transcend the genre–Thomas Harris’s RED DRAGON, for example, or BIRDMAN and THE TREATMENT by Mo Hayder. To that list add CURIOUS TOYS by Elizabeth Hand, published late last year (2019).

This is historical fiction of the first water, set in the summer of 1915 at Chicago’s Riverview Amusement Park and brought to life with a heady potion of sensory detail, slang, historical context, and sheer bravado that reminded me of Sarah Waters. The relentless August heat, the constant recorded screams from the Hell Gate ride, the miasma of scorched cotton candy and spilled beer, all twist the reader’s nerves to a painful pitch before the action even gets underway.

This is not the musical STATE FAIR, with apple pies and prize pigs and fun for the entire family. This is more NIGHTMARE ALLEY, with the two-faced She-Male, a gruesome film adaptation of Dante’s INFERNO, illicit sex on the dark rides, hashish cigarettes, French postcards, and a fake fortune teller. The main protagonist, 14-year-old Pin, has been masquerading as a boy all summer, relieved to be free from a gender assignment she’s always hated, but equally afraid of being found out.

Pin is not alone in grappling with forbidden physical desires; other tormented characters include a scenario writer for the booming Chicago movie industry, the serial killer himself, and the diminutive, obsessive Henry Darger. Darger is only one of several historical figures in CURIOUS TOYS, but he is clearly one of Hand’s own obsessions. In real life, Darger would go on to become an outsider artist and writer of international reputation. In the novel he functions as a sort of eccentric detective–emphasis on “eccentric”–in a bravura move that would seem a stretch for another writer, but that Hand pulls off elegantly, even movingly.

As she has proved before, most notably in the brilliant GENERATION LOSS, Hand can write the sort of suspense that takes over your life for the duration of the book, and do it with clean, elegant prose. CURIOUS TOYS ups the ante with the sort of thematic echoes that are the province of literature. Various dolls throughout the book connect with each other, and various beholders confuse them with real women, pointing to a kind of universal darkness in the male psyche. Darger’s obsession with little girls closely mirrors that of the killer, as Pin, at the end, mirrors the killer’s victims. The dovetailing of the movie business with the amusement park carries serious weight, as characters repeatedly choose illusion over reality: the killer in his carefully posed photos, the police in their frequent leaps to false conclusions, even, in a positive spin, Pin’s refusal of the trap of her birth gender.

CURIOUS TOYS is a dark ride that throws long shadows.