Are you rude and well-read? If so, you might like our new literary card game: Papercuts: A Party Game for the Rude and Well Read. So far, we’ve been very greatful for the response to our inaugural venture into the world of gaming. With just one week left on the clock, we’ve already more than 700 backers and more than doubled our Kickstarter goal!
Because of the great response to the game, we’ve also decided to create a stretch goal. If our Kickstarter hits $40,000, we’re going to create a 40-card expansion pack, and we want you to help us decide what it will be about. If you take our online poll you can vote on whether the expansion pack should focus on Fairytales, Shakespeare, 19th Century Literature, Science Fiction, or Mystery and Crime Fiction.
In David Francis’s third novelWedding Bush Road (Counterpoint, 2016), Daniel Rawson leaves his new girlfriend, Isabel, behind in Los Angeles to spend Christmas week with his mother, Ruthie, on their family farm in southeast Australia. When he arrives, Daniel learns that Ruthie’s true motivation for luring him home is to manage the disputes between her ex-husband (and Daniel’s father), Earley, and his ex-lover, Sharen, a strangely sexy farm tenant with an affinity for arson. Sharen and her wild, young son, Reggie, complicate an already fragile family dynamic, especially as Daniel finds himself falling for her.
Francis is the author of The Great Inland Sea and Stray Dog Winter, which was named “Book of the Year” in The Advocate. He is also Vice President of the board of directors of PEN Center USA and works as a lawyer for the Norton Rose Fulbright law firm in Los Angeles. I met Francis soon after our mutual friend and writing mentor, Les Plesko, committed suicide in 2013. Francis invited me to sit at his table as “Les’s guest” at the Literary Awards Festival, and I’ve attended as a member of PEN Center USA each year since.
Over bowls of squash soup at Café Pinot, next to Central Library in Downtown LA, Francis spoke to me about his role at PEN Center USA, the merger between his publisher Counterpoint and Catapult, what it means to write with Les Plesko, and his latest novel Wedding Bush Road.
Andrea Arnold: This is the second book you’ve written about a relationship between a son and his mother. What is it about this bond that keeps you returning to it on the page?
David Francis: In real life I had a profound connection with my mother. I was what you might call a ‘mother-bonded child’ or ‘little husband.’ I had a very powerful, talented, interesting mother. And the mother in Wedding Bush Road, Ruthie, is pretty close to her. My mother and her sisters were on the first women’s polo team in Australia. And they played against the men! In the ‘50s! And they were better than the men. She was an amazing horseperson and a fierce personality, and so I grew up around that. I somehow keep circling that subject, even more while writing this book because she had a stroke and then she died while I was in the midst of writing it. That relationship was powerful enough that it was one of the reasons I moved eight thousand miles away.
My first novel, The Great Inland Sea, was set between the 1880s and 1950s. This new novel is more contemporary. The first was loosely based on the story of my grandmother growing up in outback Australia a long time ago merged with my own story of coming to the U.S. to ride showjumping horses, except set in the 1950’s. When I was at law school, my grandmother had gone blind. She was in her late nineties and I would sit with her and listen to her stories about her Austrian (yes Austrian) opera singer mother who was dragged by her Scottish husband to a cattle ranch of almost 100 square miles in the middle of Australia. There, my grandmother had a really unusual childhood, and I thought one day I would write those stories. Wedding Bush Road was more birthed by my relationship with my own mother and family, and the horse and cattle farm I grew up on (a mere 500 acres), rather than my grandmother’s experience deep in the outback.
AA: To me, the story of this family felt like an Australian August: Osage County. With a vast history. Can you say more about the origin of this fictional family?
DF: That’s an interesting analogy. Especially as Wedding Bush Road is in many ways, a kind of embellished memoir. The mother and the father are pretty close to reality. I have a brother and a sister who (lucky for them) don’t feature into the book. I always seem to write a narrator that is an only child, because it seems easier to deal with or maybe it’s a form of narcissism. The Sharen character is vaguely based on a tenant woman that we had on the farm, while the Reggie and Walker characters are the most manufactured. Recently, I have been realizing that they represent aspects of my own personality — the wild teenage boy and a darker side. I didn’t realize that until after I finished, but I’m talking about that in therapy now. [Laughs] My therapist read this book and she had all these questions! She would say things like, “There aren’t as many references to breasts in this book like in your last one.” She counted the number of references to nipples in Stray Dog Winter. She seemed pleased that there was a more nurturing relationship with breasts in Wedding Bush Road.
AA: Sharen is my favorite character. Probably because she was wrought with conflict. Just when the reader thinks she’s good for Daniel she has a meltdown. Was the real Sharen really that nuts?
DF: Yes. I went back to the farm one Christmas and my father had this woman ensconced in a cottage that had been my grandmother’s house that had been cut into parts and hauled on trucks to the farm. She was a bit crazy and feral. I had a terrible falling out with her because the situation was just so out of hand with her horses and son and my father. I started writing from that experience of anger at what my father had wrought. The book is a conflagration and a conglomeration of family stories and my own experiences and life on that farm which still exists. My sister lives there now, runs the pace, and I’m going back in a few weeks. We have about a hundred horses and a hundred head of cattle. When I was growing up there we had about a hundred and eighty horses. My father was a polo guy. My mother was a pretty famous riding teacher in Australia. We had our jumping horses, and all the rich people from the city would board their ponies and horses there. There’s a great big old homestead and up to thirty kids from the city would be staying with us in the holidays. I stayed in the meat safe and my sister in the bath of a giant unused bathroom where the cook had her bed. The cook who was my mother’s school friend and bridge partner — they were second in the Australia-wide bridge pairs!
AA: The portraits of deceased family members hang on the walls like in any good haunted house. In the writing it was a nice way of showing the generations that came before them. Why was it important to include Daniel’s dead family members in this story?
DF: Well, it’s set in a house that I see very clearly. Our family has been there for fifty years, since we moved from my mother’s family’s farm. The house has a formal dining room with an odd array of portraits from different generations. There’s Aunt Emma Charlotte hanging there and she’s really scary looking. She is my mother’s great aunt or something. In some ways it was easier to access this Australian setting at Tooradin than the Soviet Moscow in my last novel, Stray Dog Winter. I had been in Moscow for a month but it was more of a reach fictionally. Here I knew that dining room where the early scene unfolds, where Daniel arrives from L.A. and sees his mother and the dog hunting a possum around the picture rail. I’ve seen that. Those portraits are there. I wrote what I saw. There was once a possum that was running around that picture rail and it did pee on the paintings. There were pastels of me as a kid looking strangely innocent and wide-eyed, and the possum peed on it. Daniel says, “In the eyes that were never quite mine.” I always felt there was something symbolic in that.
AA: I loved the line: “I come from a line of men for whom fucking around is a form of mourning, a way to forget the dead.” What does it mean in the story?
DF: In the novel the father, Earley Rawson, has a brother who drowned when swimming across a river with a loaded pack on his back, training for the army. My father’s was at boarding school and I think his philandering and sexual “acting out” or ways of using sex and romance to obliterate feelings or lust was his way of coping with loss, disappointment, sadness, and feeling less than his brother who was now dead. Then my handsome father married this very powerful woman that he never matched up to, so he goes and gets his validation elsewhere. Daniel struggles with this in his father and himself in the novel.
AA: Great way of saying it. Daniel hates this aspect of his father but he also acts out. So is Daniel’s cheating generational and something he can’t help, or is he coming to terms with his father by being just like him?
DF: Daniel has moved to America and is in this relationship with this cool woman named Isabel, who is a little bit out of his realm. It’s going pretty well, but he is called back to Australia. You know when you go home and you’re around family you find yourself regressing to your old self? There’s that weird thing where you become who you were before you left. Daniel has struggled a little with infidelity before, but now that he has returned to the farm he feels himself drawn to this Sharen woman, as if he’s becoming his father after all, and that’s one of his struggles. He doesn’t want to be that person but he sees his behavior and his American life with Isabel unraveling. He has traveled 8,000 miles from home to re-invent himself and he has been seduced back by his mother and finds himself reverting. All he has tried to escape is right in his face. We all know that feeling. I think. It’s this precarious relationship with who I am and who I was and where is my true home versus the place I am from.
AA: This might be a stupid question. I’ve never been to Australia. When you were growing up on this farm did you have contact with Aboriginal culture, is it still an apparent aspect of Australian farm life, and how did that part of Australia’s past make its way into the novel?
DF: That’s a good and complicated question. Where I grew up there were not a lot of Aboriginal people around, although there had been. In the generation before me there was an Aboriginal family that lived and worked on the farm. As a kid growing up I had a sense of that Aboriginal presence on the land. There was a place called Foxes Hill where I used to camp out and I always imagined it had Aboriginal significance, it emanated from the land, the trees and gullies. I felt connected to that world somehow. As a boy, I read a book called the Red Chief about an Aboriginal warrior in the old days. In Australia it’s tricky writing about that Aboriginal presence because the misappropriation of indigenous stories is a complex and insidious issue. Reggie is a wild white boy who grew up around Aboriginal families and absorbed some of that culture. He was more into it than the Aboriginal kids because he hung around the elders. It’s not clear in the novel but maybe he has some Aboriginal lineage through his father, Walker. No one knows. I’m not sure. His father Walker is darker, and I realize now he was based on a guy who lived on the farm for awhile. A farrier and drover and racehorse trainer who lived in a camper van there. These things keep appearing now that I’m done. I learn about the themes of a novel during conversations like this. I try not to analyze while I’m writing. I just write.
AA: You chose to tackle several different points of views from Daniel’s to Sharen’s, Isabel’s and Reggie’s. These other characters are causes of Daniel’s inner turmoil. As you were writing, how did the narrative lend itself to each POV?
DF: This started off as a short story that was published in Harvard Review and Best Australian Stories. Then I heard Reggie’s voice. He’s the young wild guy who is Sharen’s son. I heard that voice quite distinctly and started writing in that weird patois. He has a very Australian country way of expressing himself. I started cupping more scenes together by hearing the different voices. In the initial drafts there were more of the other voices, all written in the first person present. In most writing courses they would encourage you not to do that in one voice, let alone numerous, but I liked the immediacy, flow and variety of those points of view in the present. It gave the narrative some urgency and propelled the story forward.
As much as we pretend that these characters we create are separate from ourselves, in reality they are not as distinct as we think.
What’s interesting to me is that I realize all the characters I write, while being based on real people, all carry aspects of my own personality. And to see that manifest in a work without knowing it fascinates me. To realize that Reggie’s voice lives in me. As much as we pretend that these characters we create are separate from ourselves, in reality they are not as distinct as we think. They live inside us. People write to work out what they believe. I think it was Joyce Carol Oates or Joan Didion who said, “I write to work out what I think about things.” I write to work out what I feel about things. Writing, for me, has been an exploration of aspects of myself and different periods of my life.
AA: Were you writing sequentially?
DF: Mostly, yes. But I had no idea where I was going. I write genuinely organically in a Les Plesko kind of way. I would write whatever scene I was seeing. But I did write more sequentially than I had in the past. This novel unfolded in that way.
AA: I know what it means to write in a “Les Plesko way,” but can you speak more to it?
DF: For me it means writing in a manner that is inherent and not contrived or engineered. If I have some great idea of writing from A to B, then I’m always trying to nudge the story toward B, but maybe F or H are likely far more original and interesting. Les talked about writing the scene that is the most resonant now, the one that has to be written, that is calling you. As the writing unfolds sentence by sentence, each informing the next, it reveals itself and takes me on a journey I hunger for. And if I don’t know where it’s going then neither does the reader. You know when you read books and have a sense of what’s going to happen? Well, I like not knowing. It creates an adventure and excitement for me as a writer. I’m very able to stay in the scene I’m working on and not be projecting or setting things up for something that my mind has decided is supposed to happen. I’m more interested in what my unconscious mind is ushering forth, which is why I write a lot long-hand in my half-sleep, trying to milk the dream state.
AA: The chapters are broken up in days of the week. Is that a lawyer’s need for an outline? Or what led to the structure of the novel?
DF: That was imposed afterwards. I added the days once I’d finished the novel for us to more readily keep track of time. The story is at times dreamy and I felt as though it would help to know how time is passing. The chapter breaks tell us where we are. I don’t outline at all, but perhaps I still unconsciously have a vaguely lawyerly, logical part of my psyche that I access more than I realize.
AA: When did you find time to write a third novel while practicing law?
DF: I have a very marginalized situation in a very big law firm. We have over 3,000 lawyers worldwide. I have arranged some flexibility. I get paid considerably less than I should but get billed out at a high-ish rate. It makes sense financially for the firm and I can get two or three months away. I received a writing fellowship in Paris at the Cite International des Arts and returned for a month each year for a number of years, and I go back to the farm and write. When I wake up I scribble longhand and I often write in my office in the evenings. I used to be very compulsive about the work, writing something every day, but I have to admit that more recently I write when I’m compelled to. I used to be very disciplined and now I only write when it’s there, as if I wait for the sentences to fly in to my head from somewhere, and then I run with them. I also find that because I fight for the time to write, when I do there’s usually something to be written. I’m basically crazier than I appear, so I work hard on myself with therapy and meditation and so on, so that I can be in a place where I can serve the story.
AA: What do you do for PEN Center USA? How did you get involved? Why is the organization important to you?
DF: Needless to say, I had always heard of PEN Center USA, mostly in the context of book awards and freedom-to-write advocacy, but had not become involved. A number of years ago, I was button-holed (in a lovely way) by Jamie Wolf at a dinner party. Jamie vigorously encouraged me to become a member. The next thing I knew, I was being seconded onto the board. Soon after, I was elected Vice President alongside Jamie. I go to a lot of the PEN events, including this year’s International Congress in Quebec City as representative of PEN Center USA where I learned a good deal about the “freedom to write” mandate, among writers representing more than sixty countries. Writers all around the world live and write and struggle in a very different reality from ours. In Quebec, the representative from Egypt abstained from voting on an LGBTQ initiative for fear of her safety as a writer. We have no idea what it takes to be a writer in Egypt, Iran, Ethiopia, Eritrea, our unholy ally Saudi Arabia, Myanmar, and sadly, still, Cuba. I’ve also been involved with the Emerging Voices and the Freedom to Write programs. Pen Center USA is a wonderful organization. I’m delighted to be a part of it.
AA: Did the merger between Counterpoint and Catapult affect you and this novel? What’s in store for this new publishing house?
DF: My first novel was bought in the UK by Fourth Estate, and as soon as I signed my contract they were bought by Harper Collins. Harper Collins, of course, is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who grew up on a farm not far from us in Australia! My grandmother and his mother were very good friends. And Murdoch is such an evil creature that I thought, how can I be writing for Murdoch! Then, I was with MacAdam/Cage here in the U.S. and my second novel came out right as they were going belly up! So my second novel was severely under-published; even though it won prizes and was well reviewed, it didn’t sell as it should have. Now, as Wedding Bush Road is coming out, Counterpoint is being bought by Catapult. At first I thought, yikes, but I now realize it’s a good thing! I think it’s a nice synergy. Catapult has a strong new media focus (doing with Electric Literature, Lit Hub, etc.) and is very forward-thinking while Counterpoint is arguably a more traditional environment, and probably the biggest and best of the independent houses. It’s a nice marriage. I think it’ll be great for all involved so I am delighted.
AA: Who were your early influences? Or your favorite authors? When did you know you were a writer?
DF: I always secretly wanted to write. I was doing horse stuff and practicing law, running around like a fart in a bath, running from L.A. to Palm Beach to compete at horse shows, and I was in therapy talking about what I really wanted from my life. I started doing morning pages, writing longhand stream of consciousness stuff in bed when I woke up each day. I had a writer friend, Josh Miller, who said if you want to be a writer you should go to Les Plesko’s class at UCLA, and if he likes you he’ll invite you to his private workshop. That’s what I did and became part of a new world of L.A. writers. I had never written anything and was workshopping with people like Janet Fitch, experienced writers. It was Janet, Sam Dunn, Rita Williams, Mary Rakow, Julianne Ortale — they were the leftovers from the legendary Kate Braverman writing workshop. Now I’m still in a writing group with Janet, Rita and Juliane.
For me it was like coming to religion without any baggage. I was easily able to embrace it. There was something about Les’s work that was spare, beautiful, poignant and unusual. It resonated in a way and I was inspired by it. I learned to edit myself through reading my stuff out loud. I learned to edit other people’s work because I heard it. I loved the whole organic process that was encouraged there. I don’t know if it’s a way to great commercial success, but I know it’s how I love to write and I know it’s what I like to read — and that’s all that matters to me really. To write what I must write, what no one else can, and to be continually intrigued and enthused by the process and the results.
For me it was like coming to religion without any baggage.
I tend to love novels, more than an author’s whole body of work. I was very influenced by Lolita — it’s poetic, wry, confronting, and brilliant. A Sport and a Pastime. Salter is a truly underappreciated writer. Both those novels spend many pages moving through the countryside, Nabokov in America and Salter in France. In their different ways, they are like going on tantalizing literary journey. I also was blown away by early Coetzee. Disgrace, In the Heart of the Country. Hyper-masculine in some ways, but amazing. These days I’m mad at Coetzee for some reason. Maybe I miss the music of Africa that so deeply infused his earlier work. I also loved early Jeanette Winterson. I have been influenced by so many books, I could go on for days.
AA: What are you working on next?
DF: I’m working on a novel that’s set here in LA. It’s contemporary and funny and is based on a story that was published in The Rattling Wall and Australian Love Stories. It’s gay. My second novel, Stray Dog Winter, was also pretty gay. Wedding Bush Road is not and I get a little flak from the gay literary community for being gay and not necessarily writing gay stories. But I also fall madly in love with women at times and that’s just how it goes. I really have little idea what my next novel is about, but when people ask I tell them what I know: a young Los Angelino named Patrick (who affects an accent and pretends he’s from a ranch in Australia when he’s actually from a desperate chicken farm outside Ventura) is ensconced in a relationship in the Hollywood Hills with an investment banker, Arthur Borenstein. When Arthur adopts a child named Marvel from Honduras, Patrick, the one used to garnering the attention, feels betrayed. In an ironic turn of events involving a cat named Moses, Patrick leaves Arthur on a quest to become something on his own, maybe an artist, maybe a man, perhaps something else entirely. If I have to make up a theme I say the novel explores the role and journey of the puer aeternus (the eternal youth) as a theme and an archetype. But in truth, for me, themes reveal themselves in the writing or, as I am experiencing now with Wedding Bush Road, in the aftermath of reviews and interviews and discussions of the finished novel.
Since its debut last week, Zadie Smith’s newest novel Swing Time has become one of the most widely written about books of the year. The highly anticipated publication follows her previous literary successes On Beauty, White Teeth, and NW. While critics are raving about the novel Swing Time, Zadie Smith is already working on turning it into a TV series co-written with her husband Nick Laird.
According to Flavorwire, Smith and Laird will be working with the British production company Baby Cow in order to bring the story to life. Zadie Smith released a statement expressing her excitement:
“I am absolutely delighted at the prospect of working with Baby Cow on an adaptation of Swing Time. Their extraordinary track record in both drama and comedy I have always admired from afar and it’s a thrill for me to get the chance to collaborate with Steve Coogan and Christine Langan.”
Film is a new territory for the author, but if anyone could pull it off, it’s Smith. We have all the faith in her writing capabilities, and look forward to watching the show (after completing the novel of course)!
It is hard to write a review of a novel about brown women, white women, black women, dance, time, loneliness, and love. It is hard, but it is necessary, because if there is one thing that will get many of us through the next four years, it is art: appreciating it, creating it, continuing to give it life.
Swing Time by Zadie Smithis a magnificent, mature novel, but one that reads differently than the others previous books (which have all been incredible, each in its own way). The most noticeable thing about Swing Time, at least for a longtime reader of Smith’s work, is how much of it defies the old writing workshop adage — it tells as often as, if not more than, it shows. Paragraphs can last up to a page in length, the narration is first person, and there is a Jamesian quality to some of the sentences that is unexpected for Smith, who is an excellent wordsmith and always has been but who has tended to give her characters voice through their words more often than through their internal narration. All of which is to say that Swing Time is surprising — not that it is anything less than excellent.
An unnamed narrator is not quite at the heart of the novel — that belongs to her childhood best friend, Tracey — but she is, nevertheless, the vehicle through which we learn about the other characters, the passage of time, and the ideas the book grapples with. She is in her early thirties at the time of her narration and is looking back over the years of her life, going back and forth between her childhood and her recent past. She is mixed-race, her mother Jamaican and Black and her father British and white. Her best friend Tracey is also of mixed-race parents, but in her case, her mother is white and her father Black (and also Jamaican). The two girls recognize something in each other in the dance classes they attend as little girls, and they stick together, though their home lives, the very values they are being taught, seem to be incredibly different. Tracey is poorer — she lives in a worse London estate than the narrator — but her mother spends all her money on pleasing the child, on her dance classes, on her material happiness. The narrator lives in a better estate with an “aspirational” mother — that is, her mother goes back to school, attains a couple degrees, and begins a life of public service as a local politician.
The narrator in her recent past is the personal assistant to Aimee, a superstar who feels like Madonna, Bjork, and Cher rolled into one. She is incredibly rich, powerful, and naïve, and her latest venture has been to open a school for girls in an unnamed West African country (speculating according to the information given, it seems to be the Islamic Republic of The Gambia) that has a President-for-life, female circumcision, and not enough educational opportunities for women.
The plot threads its way through time, staying true to its title and swinging back and forth like a clock that hasn’t been wound, the pendulum’s distance between the narrator’s present and her past getting closer and closer until finally, at the end, the clock stops, the past has caught up, the present is all that remains. On the way, we watch the narrator’s relationship with Tracey dissolve as they grow older and their paths diverge — Tracey to attempt a career in dance, the narrator to become Aimee’s assistant. A lot happens, but it’s told expertly by Smith and her narrator and needn’t be repeated here.
Instead, the novel’s themes bear examination, as they are complex and look at the difficult relationship people have with their skin color, their origins, and the very wide gap that can come between those two things. The narrator is the daughter of a Jamaican woman and a white man, and so is much lighter skinned than the former and darker than the latter. When in college, she is lectured to often by her boyfriend, Rakim:
He had a cool vintage Panthers poster on his wall, in which the big cat looked about to leap out at you, and he spoke often of the violent life of the big American cities, of the sufferings of our people in New York and Chicago, in Baltimore and LA, places I had never visited and could barely imagine. Sometimes I had the impression that this ghetto life — though it was three thousand miles away — was more real to him than the quiet, pleasant [England] seascape in which we actually lived.
Rakim, as it turns out, is full of shit, which the narrator’s tone suggests in its irony (“I thought he was the most beautiful man in the world,” she tells us. “He thought so, too.”). But it doesn’t change the fact that the narrator does take a grain of truth from his speechifying, which is her assumption that because of her skin color, because of her connection to Africa by way of her mother, by way of Jamaica, by way of the slave trade, she will feel at home in the West African country she visits for Aimee’s half-baked attempt at making real change happen.
But once she’s there, the narrator realizes — over time, for very little in this novel is hasty, just as life rarely is — that she doesn’t really belong. She doesn’t get the sense of homecoming that Granger, the gay African-American bodyguard who works for Aimee, feels. She doesn’t feel the righteousness of her mother’s convictions or a sense of “her people” in those around her.
I was not, for example, standing at this moment in a field with my extended tribe, with my fellow black women. Here there was no such category. There were only the Sere women, the Wolof, and the Mandinka, the Serahuli, the Fula and the Jola, the last of whom, I was told once, grudgingly, I resembled, if only in basic facial architecture: same long nose, same cheekbones.
Still, she finds relationships there, though she continues to misunderstand even the woman she is closest to there, Hawa, who is some ten years her junior. When Hawa — who is the daughter of university professors — announces that she will be marrying an ugly man, a tablighi (a member of a Sunni Islamic group that proselytizes a return to true Sunni Islam), the narrator is confused and upset. How can this vibrant young woman who always has the best gossip, who is a teacher at the school for girls, who may, it is whispered, even be uncircumcised, who is the daughter of intellectuals — how could she marry such a man and give up on… on what? That is what the narrator is left to ponder, for after all, not everyone has a better path to take, a range of choices at their disposal. Hawa wants to leave the village where she works hard, both on housework and childcare and in the fields; she doesn’t want to be left there to care for so many others anymore. Instead, it is implied, she will journey with her tablighi husband, have adventures, see more of the world than she expected to.
This difficult relationship with choice and who has them is especially fascinating as time in the novel is treated as a privilege. The narrator spends years catering to Aimee rather than to her own desires and needs, floating through the years of sameness, but in West Africa she is faced with the fact that time works differently for these women who are not her “fellow black women.” They do not waste time, she discovers, but fill it with work, with talk, with a vim and vigor for life that she seems to have left behind in childhood. Which doesn’t mean they’re content with their lot or don’t forge new pathways for themselves, for as Hawa proves, they do.
Tracey, the narrator’s childhood best friend, haunts the novel: to what extent her choices were her own, is her life somehow socioeconomically and racially predestined, inevitable due to mysterious but presumed childhood PTSD, is she just a paranoid fuckup, or all/none of the above. She opens and closes the narration, her presence in the narrator’s life a hint, perhaps, to the road not taken, an alternate timeline. There is a sense that a whole novel could be written about Tracey alone — indeed, each of the characters begs to be explored further — but Smith only gives us the narrow track of one life, the narrator’s, which as this long review shows, is not so narrow at all.
“She’s interested in the life that happens in the pauses.”
Laura Dern was speaking at a New York Film Festival press conference, following the screening of Kelly Reichardt’s new film Certain Women (2016), and describing what she admired about the work of that minimalist indie director. But she could just as easily have been referring to Maile Meloy, the author behind the three short stories from two of her collections, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It and Half in Love, which Reichardt brought to the screen in her Montana-set triptych film adaptation. In a New York Times review of Meloy’s collection the novelist Curtis Sittenfeld noted that what distinguished the work of the Montanan author was her restraint: “She is impressively concise, disciplined in length and scope. And she’s balanced in her approach to character, neither blinded by love for her creations, nor abusive toward them.”
The same holds true of Reichardt. As in her earlier films (all of which she co-wrote with Jonathan Raymond; this is the first she’s done solo), Certain Women is attuned to the smaller moments of life. The trio of narratives studiously observe the women they’re centered on without feeling voyeuristic, and she makes her camera (and by extension, her audience) empathize with the characters without demanding identification. Her frame is intimate yet never intrusive, catching the quietest, most telling details of the people we’re invited to meet.
Among them is Dern, who plays a small-town lawyer named Laura Wells. We meet her at first in a messy bedroom, where she has found refuge in the middle of her work day with a man now putting his clothes back on. Lingering longer than she should she finally gets dressed and heads back to the office, although, in her hurried state she only half-tucks her sweater into her skirt — a detail Reichardt’s framing encourages us to notice but without making it explicit.
Laura Dern in ‘Certain Women’ (2016)
Reichardt’s focus on these interstitial pauses functions as a visual conjuring of Meloy’s free indirect discourse, allowing moments that might otherwise be excised — because they don’t strictly advance a plotted narrative — to linger, stressing the way that our most obvious attempts at introspection happen not when staring out a window or furrowing our brow, but in the most mundane chores of everyday life. When Laura takes her client to hear a second opinion from a lawyer in a neighboring town (who repeats what Laura has already told him: there is no tort claim to file against his former employer, after the accident that’s left him physically and psychologically disabled), we can see the frustration in her face for the way her authority has yet again been undermined. We don’t need Meloy’s words — “I thought, That’s what it’s like to be a man. If I were a man I could explain the law and people would listen and say, ‘Okay.’ It would be so restful” — for Dern embodies it in the world-weary way she carries herself afterwards, as the full brunt of her client’s biased disregard for her opinion washes over her. Reichardt shows Dern driving, her eyes on the road ahead, her preoccupation with what has happened silently mingling with the need to make this turn, to mind that car, to take the next exit. And so, when we finally receive Meloy’s dialogue via a phone conversation, it feels like she is giving voice to thoughts we’ve already seen written on her face.
Later, when we’re introduced to Gina — played by Michelle Williams and based on a character from Meloy’s story “Native Sandstone” — Reichardt again gives preference to a moment of quiet meditation. Looking out of place dressed in chic athletic wear in the middle of the wintry Montana outdoors, Gina is walking back to the campsite where her daughter and husband pack up for the day. She is consumed by the landscape as she puffs on a cigarette, something clearly on her mind. As we learn later, she is intent on moving here and building a house that captures the spirit of the land around it. “Gina wants the house to be authentic,” her husband explains, to an old man whose sandstone they wish to buy — rumored as it is to have been reclaimed from the town’s old schoolhouse. Just as Meloy threads the story of a fraught marriage through her text without it taking over, Reichardt likewise relies on Williams to convey the narrative’s depth of feeling, which many other directors might have chosen to spell out.
Michelle Williams in ‘Certain Women’
In the film’s third and most striking section, adapted from Meloy’s short story “Travis, B.,” Reichardt goes a step further. The central character appears almost exclusively in near-silent scenes that ask us to inhabit her head, all but demanding we intuit for ourselves what she might be thinking. On the page “Travis, B.” follows Chet Moran, who grew up in Logan, Montana where a bout of polio left him with a limp, a physical reminder of his own inability to comfortably exist within his own body. While working at a ranch tending to horses he decides to venture into town one evening, where he stumbles onto a night class at the local high school, taught by a young lawyer. He’s taken with the lawyer, Beth, and clumsily invites her out to eat afterwards, despite the fact that she will need to drive back nine hours to where she lives. During their quick diner date, Meloy gives us access to both Chet and Beth’s inner monologues:
She studied him and seemed to wonder again if she should be afraid. But the room was bright and he tried to look harmless. He was harmless, he was pretty sure. Being with someone helped — he didn’t feel so wound up and restless.
The generous spirit of Meloy’s free indirect discourse is translated intact into Reichardt’s screen adaptation. With unfussy shots of her actors she offers us plenty of time to discern the way they measure each other’s company, before easing into a comforting routine that follows every class. While the dynamic at work is never precisely clear, the shared intimacy between them is palpable, in these late-night moments when Beth’s tiredness is buoyed by the other’s eager company. But the gendered dynamics that Meloy carefully deconstructs — Chet grows attached to Beth and proceeds to drive across state to see her one last time, a gesture as aggressive as it is romantic — are not only upended but altogether reframed in Reichardt’s retelling. Rather than a strapping, if timid, young man, Chet becomes a young woman: Lily Gladstone portrays the rancher who becomes smitten with her younger teacher, played by Kristen Stewart.
Kristen Stewart in ‘Certain Women’
What fascinates about the gender switch is that Reichardt feels little compelled to change much (or anything, really) about the rest of the piece. After offering Beth a ride on one of the horses to the cafe where they’ve met before, the rancher awkwardly stands before her, shifting her weight from foot to foot. In Meloy’s telling this is the moment when Chet “wanted to kiss her but couldn’t see any clear path to that happening.” In Certain Women — and in ways that speak to the semiotic slippage, from certainty to ambiguity, which the title sets up — Gladstone’s rancher appears to ponder those very thoughts, her musings seemingly no different than if she were a man. In turning Meloy’s characters into women who tentatively crave and pursue a same-sex attraction, Reichardt has found a simple and efficient way to deepen the central tension of this coupling. In her hands, “Travis, B.” unearths the quietly radical proposition of a connection between two women that follows and exceeds the confines of the romantic template Meloy arranged in her story. Beth and the Rancher’s hesitant relationship is both simpler and more complicated than on the page, though Certain Women is content with letting audiences fill in those pauses themselves, inciting us to reflection in the face of a straightforward narrative of longing, followed by loss.
Lily Gladstone in ‘Certain Women’
It’s the details that accumulate and remain once the credits roll, even if little has been resolved. A woman wiping her mouth with a napkin still wrapped around diner cutlery, another absentmindedly playing with a sandstone pebble, a man slurping a chocolate milkshake in prison. The images are fleeting but they speak to the unguarded moments Reichardt hones in and pauses on, bringing viewers closer to her characters even as they suggest a more expansive canvas. Reichardt, building on Meloy’s concise prose, finds depth in the elemental brushstroke, a life lived in the pregnant pause.
When I find myself wishing for some vaguely imagined nonexistent book I’d like to read, I’m almost always pining for a novel of the wild outdoors. I love urbane social comedies and absurd novels about office work and many kinds of fiction set mostly indoors and in town. But if I get snowed into a cabin with only one kind of reading at hand, I want a big stack of books that take wilderness and wildness seriously, outdoor novels a bit wild themselves. Novels set in strange forests as surprising and wondrous as real ones. Feral novels that make more of nature than a screen on which to project the emotional lives of human characters.
Lots of outdoor fiction offers straightfaced realism written as if literature hasn’t changed in a century, or the didacticism of characters each standing in for a position on some environmental issue and making sure you know it whenever they open their mouths. But what I want is fiction with a sense of play in its style, bringing into the woods things taken for granted in novels about urban lives for decades but disappointingly rare beyond city limits — unreliable narrators and unexpected narrative structures. Stories that can’t be predicted from the opening pages, and a sense of humor sorely lacking in so much nature writing. In an era of bears surprising both deep forest hikers and suburban strollers engrossed in their phones, coyotes wandering down city streets, and birds in the rafters of home improvement stores, there’s a wild possibility of surprise in modern life. And at the less pleasant extreme there’s the chaos of climate change and other modern problems demanding modern stories about them.
I try to get that wildness into my own fiction, most recently with Scratch, my attempt at a feral, strange forest novel. And I try to find it as often as possible in my reading. There don’t ever seem to be enough of those books to keep me sated, but here are a few of my favorites (though I’ve left off a couple that are better known, for the sake of sharing some overlooked blooms in the scrub).
Wild Life by Molly Gloss
The first time I read Wild Life it blew me away and it does so again each time I return. Presented as the early 1900s diary of a proto-feminist, single mother author of pulp fictions who goes into an Oregon forest in search of a missing girl, only to get lost herself and discover mysterious creatures beyond what her insistent rationalism allows for, Gloss’s novel delves into myths of the “wildman” and myths of gender and does it all with a magnificent narrative voice as wild as the forest around it.
The Hunter by Julia Leigh
M, who goes by the name Martin though it isn’t his, gets hired by a pharmaceutical company to hunt and harvest DNA from the world’s last living Tasmanian tiger, long after the species is thought extinct. Somehow, in a very short novel, Leigh weaves together the shadowy reach of modern business, the tragic colonial and ecological histories of her setting, a classic story of exploration stripped of its celebratory machismo, and a mother and children left behind broken by the blinkered desires of men. Despite the remoteness of this novel’s forest, it is enmeshed in the networks of money and power that entangle us all, wherever we live.
The Wall by Marlen Haushofer, translated by Shaun Whiteside
I have to thank novelist and translator Michelle Bailat-Jones for introducing me to The Wall, because it quickly became one of my favorites. The nameless middle-aged narrator visits friends at their remote mountain hunting lodge, only to be left alone by the inexplicable appearance of an invisible barrier at the edge of the valley it occupies. Left to fend for herself, she breaks restraints built up over years spent sublimating her individual identity into that of a mother and wife, allowing a wilder self to emerge.
Birdbrain by Johanna Sinisalo, translated by David Hackston
I could have picked any one of Sinisalo’s novels to put on this list, because it’s hard to think of a writer consistently doing more exciting things in fiction about the natural world. But Birdbrain is the most “outdoorsy” among her English translations, as it brings us along with a Finnish couple hiking in New Zealand and Australia. Alternating between their accounts of events we’re privy to the relationship’s tensions and strains as the couple are stripped of pretenses and niceties by their time in the wild, but we’re also aware of an eerier presence in the forest around them.
Wild Harbour by Ian Macpherson
This one was published in 1936, but you wouldn’t know from its prescience. It’s an account of a Scottish couple fleeing the city for a wild home in the hills ahead of the imminent threats of perpetual war, disease, and disaster. But what makes it stand out from other stories of escaping modernity “back to nature” is how unavoidably the outside world presses in, and how earnestly Wild Harbour takes on harder questions seldom asked in similar stories about the ethics and impossibilities of hiding out in the back of beyond while the world burns.
The Blue Fox by Sjon, translated by Victoria Cribb
The Blue Fox moves between a hunter, his vulpine quarry, a boy with Down’s syndrome, and other characters in mysterious tandem, woven together as any place is with threads of history and folklore and transformation. Sometimes when I read literature in translation I suspect I’m missing so much that the power of the work is lost to me, but with The Blue Fox that opacity is one of the qualities I most enjoy: I know there are allusions and echoes I’m not attuned to, but that misunderstanding feels like wandering a landscape I only half understand and just makes me want to return.
The Year of the Hare by Arto Paasilinna, translated by Herbert Lomas
I visited friends in Finland quite a few years ago, and The Year of the Hare was the book — so they told me — everyone was talking about at the time. It’s a short, simple novel about a journalist who stops by the roadside to enter the forest in aid of an injured hare. There are plenty of novels offering sentimental accounts of characters giving up their fast city lives at the inspiration of some noble animal; perhaps some of those are imitations of this. But Paasilinna’s has a depth of wit and sadness, and awareness, that for me elevates it above many others.
Into the Forest by Jean Hegland
When the world collapses in ways and for reasons they don’t quite understand, sisters Eva and Nell are left alone at the remote cabin their family retreated to in preparation. Into the Forest is as gripping as any thriller or rural horror, but there’s a thoughtfulness to the novel perfectly balanced with details of the pragmatic, often painful means by which the sisters survive. Like some others on this list it pulls us so fully into its wild bubble that even as we know we should root for rescue or the world’s recovery, we’re torn because of what would be lost.
The Man Who Spoke Snakish by Andrus Kivirähk, translated by Christopher Moseley
Hands down one of the best reading experiences I’ve had in years. The language is wild, the setting is wild, the narrator is absolutely one of a kind, and this whole account of his life as the last speaker of the language of snakes — and one of the last members of his ancient forest culture who hasn’t abandoned the trees for life in town — is full of tragedy, comedy, mystery, absurdity, and everything you could possibly want from a novel. I’ve read that Kivirähk’s novel is so popular in his native Estonia there’s a board game based on it, and I can only hope it, too, is available in English someday so I can play and return to its remarkable world.
The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz by Russell Hoban
Riddley Walker is Hoban’s best-known novel (and maybe his best), and Turtle Diary is the one most recently restored to print and public acclaim, but The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz has to go down as my favorite. I’m a sucker for any story, fictional or otherwise, of animals popping up where they aren’t expected, so this account of a cartographer who abandons his family, his son’s expedition to find him, and a lion stalking the streets of a city long after lions disappeared from the world has gripped my imagination for twenty-some years. It is like nothing else, which is the wildest way to be wild of all.
Timothy, or Notes of an Abject Reptile by Verlyn Klinkenborg
A domesticated English garden hardly seems wild, but Klinkenborg’s novel narrated by the titular Timothy, a female tortoise kept by eighteenth-century naturalist Gilbert White, makes it so. There’s no fast-paced adventure or dangerous action but by slowing the world down in a small space as described by a creature with her own sense of what’s worth looking at, Timothy is a gently disorienting read that gives us no choice but to slow down, pay attention, and see a world where the unexpected might happen — what’s more wild than that?
Power by Linda Hogan
Power is the story of a Taiga teenager pulled into a maelstrom of media and politics after she watches her aunt kill a tribally sacred and legally protected panther. It’s a deceptively straightforward novel, at least in its telling, that sneaks up to unsettle by making us take a fresh look at what may seem familiar. Wild places aren’t usually what I associate with Florida, but Power is a welcome challenge to those assumptions — as are Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach novels, which would be on this list were it longer.
Beastings by Benjamin Myers
This one’s as dark as dark gets, like Southern gothic in northern England, as it follows a teenage girl and a baby fleeing two men on her trail. But what offsets the grim cruelty of Myers’ characters is the implacable, steady presence of his landscape — yes, what’s happening is horrible, but how much does it matter in the longview of stone and hill? That’s a dual-awareness I often long for in fiction, and Myers delivers whether in the realist mode of novels like Beastings or in his novella Snorri & Frosti, a treat of absurdist minimalism about a pair of woodcutters.
Infinite Ground by Martin MacInnes
The newest book on my list, I wondered if it was too soon to count Infinite Ground among the others. But it’s just that good. MacInnes’ debut is a detective novel, following an inspector whose search for a missing man takes him deep into a strange jungle. And it’s also a story about the literal and figurative breakdown of identity, whether as a result of the daily grind of work or of sharing the landscape of our own skins with millions of microorganisms. Or in this case, both. Or possibly neither. It’s hard to pin down, like all wild things.
Up With Kids started as an unofficial offshoot of Up With People, the 1970s show choir now notorious for its ties to an evangelical cult, the Nixon administration and Halliburton. Our director Bonnie’s salad days had been spent touring with the group, which she referred to simply as People. It took a real insider to drop two prepositions. So much projecting over the years had left her vocal chords frayed and full of benign polyps. Now in her forties, an Up With Kids T-shirt plunging from her chest and a wad of nicotine gum in one cheek, she suffered from a permanent case of laryngitis, the kind only characters on Nick at Nite got with any regularity and only then for the better part of an episode.
Looking back, it was probably just the fact that she had been a smoker, but as Bonnie reenacted long-lost Super Bowl halftime shows in the Presbyterian church where we rehearsed, squeezing out notes like the debarked corgi on our block, it was like music itself had worn her out. I couldn’t imagine a better life.
Bonnie reenacted long-lost Super Bowl halftime shows in the Presbyterian church where we rehearsed, squeezing out notes like the debarked corgi on our block.
Every summer my family took a trip with Up With Kids and patiently watched me scream “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” into a microphone on the boardwalk outside Universal Studios or snap and twirl through a Beach Boys medley, a plastic lei flying around my ears. Outside a tank of honking sea lions, we beamed that Sea World (not the more traditional choice, Disneyland) was the happiest place in the U-S-A and at an America Sings Summit in Washington, D.C., my preemie sister Chelsea and I didn’t worry that we weren’t good enough for anyone else to hear we just sang, sang a song, like the Carpenters.
Dragged to all of our cheesy performances, my older brother Danny called Up With Kids the Special Olympics of acting, which was fine with me. Sparkling in a loose-fitting gold lamé shirt while my little sister was trapped in a puckering leotard of the same material, I was the actor among social rejects. Bonnie’s daughter, for one, had Down Syndrome. Most of us Kids were damaged in more minor but no less noticeable ways: chronic pinkeye, deforming acne, facial hair. One girl with the last name Wood insisted we call her Holly Wood even though her real name was something like Sarah. Another boy pushed a walker around stage.
It goes without saying I have mild cerebral palsy, though my family downplayed the condition in my childhood by telling people I had “tight tendons.”
It goes without saying I have mild cerebral palsy, though my family downplayed the condition in my childhood by telling people I had “tight tendons.” In Up With Kids I found not just a fun after-school activity but also a place where dragging my right foot and having my right arm frozen at my side were not necessarily to my detriment. It would be an overstatement to say I used my limp to get plum roles, just that, in retrospect, they all fell into a certain pattern. I sat on thrones or made pronouncements from center stage, blowing kisses and doing small claps. No one could stand quite like I could. Pelvis thrust forward, my right foot dangled off my slender ankle so that my legs, in princely tights, formed a jaunty lowercase k.
By far my best role with Up With Kids was also, fittingly, my last. In the fifth grade, Bonnie cast me as Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. It was my best role, I should say, because I had always loved Oz. This was my excuse, with the help of the hobby shop in the basement of Cottonwood Mall, to essentially live over the rainbow. Before I’d even highlighted my lines, the merch began pouring in: an Emerald City snow globe, an accent pillow of Scarecrow’s face, a Toto stuffed animal. While my brother bought the latest Beckett in the card shop upstairs, tracking the value of his Shaq and Michael Jordan rookie cards like they were blue-chip stocks, I hauled out to the parking lot a life-sized cardboard cutout of Scarecrow, the Wizard and Tin Man and propped it at the foot of my bed to block out the sports wallpaper. Dolls of what I referred to as The Big Four danced on chunks of yellow brick on my windowsill, blotting out the sun.
For a kid with a limp, it was easy to see Dorothy’s plight as orthopedic.
For a kid with a limp, it was easy to see Dorothy’s plight as orthopedic. Skipping as best I could, I’d struck out on the replica of the Yellow Brick Road at MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Waiting in line for The Great Movie Ride in Orlando, I’d saluted Dorothy’s ruby slippers, which shimmered in a glass case, by trying to click my own battered sneakers. Through my toddler years, I’d preferred, like Dorothy, never to take off my shoes, even when I slept. It felt better to keep my feet encased in a little magic. (This magic did not extend to the ankle-foot orthosis shoved into my shoe, but with socks on I could survive the rubbing.) Following surgeries on my tight Achilles tendon and hamstrings in the third grade, I made sure my cast was as close to emerald green as fiberglass could get, like it could have been sticking up from a field of poppies or out from under a house. Even the braces on my teeth at that age were green.
Sure, I knew that if Glinda could have popped onto the pilled carpet of Cottonwood Presbyterian she would have told me, in her airheaded way, I needed look no further than my own two feet. This had never stopped me from daydreaming. Tin Man needed a heart, Cowardly Lion needed some nerve and I needed a new leg, one that wasn’t short and small in circumference around the calf and ankle; one that wasn’t zipped up the back with scars; one that didn’t need to be taught how to skip.
Tin Man needed a heart, Cowardly Lion needed some nerve and I needed a new leg, one that wasn’t short and small in circumference around the calf and ankle.
Whether in a cast or not, I never stopped thinking about my leg. Part of my brain was always sending stray signals to the tips of my toes, making me feel mildly electrocuted. What I loved about the stage was that self-consciousness was a given and it was against the rules to walk and talk at the same time, which I can’t do anyway. It wasn’t a matter of forgetting about how my knee pointed inward or my right heel floated off the ground. It was about all of us feeling awkward together.
Once we did our vocal warm ups and tongue twisters, I’d sink into my role, feeling almost ecclesiastical, a golden angel observing some sacred rite. I couldn’t walk a straight line but ask me to shoot bolts of electricity out my fingertips and my hands would tremble with the effort. At the end of each rehearsal, I’d squash Chelsea’s munchkin costume under her coat as we waited beside the glowing Jesus marquee for Mom to pick us up. Come celebrate His life, it said, or Feeling sad?
As our first show neared, Bonnie crowded the stage with as many farm hands, crows, talking trees, flying monkeys, winkies and munchkins as there were cleared checks. She threw emerald smocks over the denizens of Oz and a gold tiara on the busty blond giant playing Glinda. Our Toto had rheumatoid arthritis and, though she yelped in pain, we only thought to bring her kneepads once we also thought to make her wear a migraine-inducing headband with floppy ears and draw whiskers on her cheeks. Chelsea and the other munchkins wore ruffled sleeves and scrunchies that even I had to admit were pretty cute. Being a munchkin was perfect for my little sister. She leapt around the stage like a replaceable idiot while I carried the show with my natural stage presence.
At the end of each rehearsal, I’d squash Chelsea’s munchkin costume under her coat as we waited beside the glowing Jesus marquee for Mom to pick us up.
The same show business philosophy that led Bonnie to book our summer stock at amusement parks led her to schedule our final Oz performance in a homeless shelter in downtown Salt Lake City, Bonnie’s philosophy being that a captive audience is better than one composed exclusively of parents and relatives. Only those too sick or stoned stayed for the duration, their faces dirty and drawn, a bunch of Aunt Ems and Uncle Henrys doing their best to ignore the spectacle of Bonnie crouched in the center aisle, mouthing along to the action onstage, fleeing an invisible twister.
Sweat rolled down the back of my neck and dripped under my gold lamé as soon as the overture to “If I Only Had a Brain” blasted through the shoddy sound system and I hobbled to my mark, a masking tape X. My leg wouldn’t stop shaking as I swung it around. Nerves were a good thing, Mom said. They meant you gave a shit. I was a natural singer. I sang, naturally, all over the house. Sounding good in front of a crowd was an order of magnitude beyond me. And dancing, how to put this? Dancing was, if not my secret power, my secret joy. I wasn’t silly enough to think I was actually good at it, but it sure did get a rise out of people. I was only a little worried about what my brother would say.
Since I couldn’t hide my chicken leg, no matter how large my quilted poncho from the Costume Closet or how high I pulled my socks, I tried to turn it into part of the act, jerking around like a real-life man of straw, wincing animatedly when my jean shorts rubbed against the incision scar on my tight right hamstring. Seesawing into scenery, my clumsy right foot mashed crows’ feet and sent plastic apples spiraling into the first row mere seconds after bitchy trees lobbed them at us. There were genuine gasps when I fell and genuine applause when I got up again. Stuck for ages with a pole up my back, I was finally free to dance.
There were genuine gasps when I fell and genuine applause when I got up again. Stuck for ages with a pole up my back, I was finally free to dance.
It wasn’t until this last curtain call, when Bonnie presented me, Chelsea and every other cast member with hollow plastic Oscar statues, that she revealed the big surprise: we were going to meet one of the last surviving munchkins from TheWizard of Oz. It must have been a chore to track down Margaret Pellegrini in those dial-up days of the Internet, and I’m not sure how my acting teacher did it. In any case, this chance encounter had the ring of fate as it represented the next logical step in my progression as an actor. I was about to be discovered. Margaret would know agents and producers. All I had to do was sing for her and I’d have it made.
“But I’m a munchkin,” Chelsea said.
“No, you’re a weirdo in a gold leotard,” Danny said. “Just kidding!”
Margaret is on screen a lot if you know what to look for, a flyspecked grain of color lost in some paddy cake choreography — as gape-mouthed and adorable as Chelsea had been in the same role. There she is on a footbridge, a flowerpot tipped on her head, as Judy Garland begins to sing “It Really Was No Miracle.” Later, as the chorus cheeps, “Wake up you sleepy head,” Margaret stretches from an egg in a pink nightgown and bonnet. When I paused the tape we’d rented from Video Vern’s, Chelsea squealed and kissed the screen, flying back when a branch of static shocked her.
“You idiot,” my sister Tiffany said from the couch.
Mom came over from the kitchen, drying her hands. “Look at that little thing rub her eyes. That woman really knows how to wake up.”
She revealed the big surprise: we were going to meet one of the last surviving munchkins from The Wizard of Oz.
Mom wasn’t being sarcastic. She saw genuine talent in the Munchkin Pellegrini. Like the Pope, a munchkin didn’t have to do anything special to win Mom’s affection. She just had to be. “I bet she taught Judy a thing or two.”
“Look at what she’s wearing,” Tiffany objected. “A pink nightgown? In the afternoon? And she doesn’t even know the steps.”
Protest as my siblings might, when the time came we all piled into the Suburban to meet Margaret’s plane. Danny sang his version of “The Lollipop Guild,” a finger thrumming his small Adam’s apple, and Mom kept cackling, “I’ll get you my pretty” as I mugged in the mirror up front, practicing my toniest smile for little Margaret. “Brains? I don’t have any brains.”
“BRAINS?” Mom repeated, emoting to the nth degree. “I DON’T HAVE ANY BRAINS. ONLY STRAW.”
“ONLY STRAW,” I screamed back.
“This better be the smile I see at the airport,” Mom said, leveling a finger at me. “I’m telling you. I want you to be this obnoxious. Ham it up for her, Greg. Ham it up!”
Airport security was considerably more lax in those days and children’s musical theater companies could storm the terminal, shouting renditions of “The Munchkinland Song.” As I glided along the moving walkway, too tense to bend my spastic knee, Tiffany speed walked beside me. Even in her baggy pants she moved better than I did. “Don’t worry, Googers. You’re going to do great.”
If I was anxious about our melodic assault, trying not to scratch at the straw stuffed into my jeans, Munchkin Chelsea was downright gleeful, dancing around the terminal with a Tinker Bell wand balled in her fist. Not unlike Bonnie, she had the habit of saying the move she was doing. Leaping and then sashaying over to the gate, she sang, “Leap. Sashay.” Once there, she screeched at every stout woman lugging a suitcase. “Is that the munchkin? Is that the munchkin?” There’s nothing inherently wrong with the term “munchkin,” but like midget and dwarf, it’s the kind of word you don’t want to say too loudly in an airport.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with the term “munchkin,” but like midget and dwarf, it’s the kind of word you don’t want to say too loudly in an airport.
More than fifty years after the release of the film, a munchkin’s visit was still a big enough deal to attract local news crews and a reporter or two. Passengers began wearily filing out, picking their noses and searching for signs to baggage claim. My mom pulled Chelsea and me to the front of the crowd, beeping, “Scarecrow, coming through,” and gave me an encouraging swat on the ass. “You can out-sing these spazzes. Make her think you’re the only one in the room.”
When Margaret stepped off the plane, our ensemble devolved into a rancid cult of celebrity. “The munchkin!” Chelsea cried. “Munchkin lady!”
We gave Margaret the kind of at-the-gate welcome usually reserved for boys returning from Mormon missions. Kids shook autograph books, snapped pictures and shook cutesy posters. i don’t think you’re in kansas anymore!!! In their minds, Margaret hadn’t flown coach; she’d fallen from a star. Bonnie’s hands flew into motion and we began dinging and donging, singing high and singing low to let Margaret know the Wicked Witch was dead.
Even before our song petered out, I noticed how strange Margaret looked, like she really had come from Munchkinland. Her hands were spotted like Tostitos. Her dress was trimmed with feathers where it shouldn’t have been and so long she couldn’t walk without tripping on it. She’d given up on the war with peach fuzz and the hair on her head looked like it had been dyed with whatever they use to turn cotton candy pink. Parted in the middle, it sat in two fluffy mounds on either side of a very small hat.
“Is she wearing a costume?” I asked as we followed Margaret to the escalator.
“She probably can’t find stuff that fits,” Tiffany said.
“Not that you can, either, skater girl,” Danny said.
“Honestly, you kids,” Mom said. “I couldn’t even hear you back there and now you won’t shut up.”
At the luggage carousel, Chelsea weaseled her way to the front of the seething crowd of gold lamé and handed Margaret her Tinker Bell wand. Instead of calling security, Margaret began casting spells. The whole time we pressed around her, and at the talk she gave at a local high school later that day, striding around the apron of the auditorium stage, the microphone Paul Bunyan-sized in her spotted hands, Margaret humored requests to rub her eyes and sing “Wake up you sleepy head.” She posed for photos, signed people’s crap and told every child she was beautiful. The word star was used liberally. “Maybe you’ll be a big star one day, or a little one like me.”
She posed for photos, signed people’s crap and told every child she was beautiful.
It’s hard to say exactly when it occurred to me, like the first twinge of a developing cavity, that all this was a little sad. It could have been when Margaret told the auditorium crowd, to an uproar of delight, that Toto made twice as much as she did because the dog had a better agent. It could have been when she projected the promotional poster onstage of Henry Kramer’s Hollywood Midgets, the acting company that had given her her big break, or when my mom elbowed me in the middle of Margaret’s talk to say she sounded just like a kazoo. “Isn’t her little voice just precious?”
Most likely, though, the revelation that Margaret was being exploited for her short stature came months later, on one of those death-by-senseless-errand summer afternoons, when Bonnie called my mom to offer me the star role in the new Up With Kids musical. They were doing The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I remember pressing the phone hard into my ear, my smile stuck in place as Mom piloted the Suburban into a parking lot and slapped me high five. Chelsea, who slept whenever we drove anywhere, yawned awake from the back seat. “What’s going on?”
“Greg’s going to be the star,” Mom said.
“You don’t have to decide right now,” Bonnie growled softly. I thought I could hear her take what must have been two tasteless chomps of her nicotine gum, trying to keep things light, perhaps sensing she’d erred. “Just think about it, OK? Like I said, no one could play it like you. You were born for this.”
I didn’t want to be hired because of my disability, like Margaret had been.
I went to bed that night with a stomachache, the life-sized cardboard cutout of Scarecrow, the Wizard and Tin Man a monstrous silhouette at the foot of my bed. I didn’t want to be hired because of my disability, like Margaret had been. Duct tape a pillow to my shoulders and add a bell tower and the musical was pretty much my daily life. I wanted to be a star, not a groveling Hollywood hunchback. “They’ll find another kid to play Quasimodo it in two seconds,” Mom sighed the next morning. “But if you don’t want to have fun anymore, you don’t want to have fun anymore.”
Officially retired from Up With Kids, I got my acting kicks in school plays. I was the only seventh grader with a speaking part in Guys and Dolls. Honing my gangster accent, I played Joey Biltmore, tossing off lines like, “She ain’t a horse. She’s a doll!” The next year, my acting career once again became extracurricular as I got a callback to play a dwarf in City Rep’s production of Snow White. I didn’t get the part. After reprimanding me for having my hands in my pockets, my secret way of appearing nonchalant, the red-haired director tried to wrench my back straight and excused me as soon as she saw me struggle across the stage, saying I just wouldn’t fit into the show.
A chance for redemption came in the ninth grade, when my drama teacher announced we would be putting on The Wizard of Oz. I promptly threw my hand into the air and volunteered the use of my replica 1939 shooting script. I’d sprouted to a gangly five-ten and badly needed my hamstrings surgically lengthened once again, this time on both sides. My walk was a crouch and a persistent hammertoe on my left foot bloodied my sock, but I demanded to hold off on the operations until after the play. My school needed me.
A chance for redemption came in the ninth grade, when my drama teacher announced we would be putting on The Wizard of Oz.
At the audition, while my competitors struggled through tepid R&B songs and climbed on chairs a la Britney Spears, I crooned “If I Only Had a Brain” and trilled the scales. Leaving the auditorium that night, a goth kid in the back row slapped me high five. “Dude, you’re totally going to get it.”
I arrived late for the dancing portion of the audition the next day. A couple of girls walked me through the routine in the aisle and soon I was shambling up on stage to the tune of “Merry Old Land of OZ.” With a ha ha ha, ho ho ho and a couple of tra la la’s, I was skipping my way to the lead.
The middle-aged choreographer pulled me aside as I came off stage. This woman was not a teacher but one of the industry people my drama teacher had brought in to help with the production. I expected her to tell me I was a shoo-in for Scarecrow but instead she said, “What’s wrong with your leg? It looked like you weren’t rotating from the hip.” She clutched one of her sharp shoulders, wheeling it around to illustrate her point, as if just watching me made her sore.
“Are you talking about my shoulder?” I asked, hopeful.
“No, your leg,” she clarified.
I should have been flattered. She thought I was injured.
I expected her to tell me I was a shoo-in for Scarecrow but instead she said, “What’s wrong with your leg? It looked like you weren’t rotating from the hip.”
Ordinarily, I had an arsenal of excuses about my limp. Sometimes I told people it was knee pain from growing so fast, the kind that left Tiffany sobbing on the floor of my parents’ room, moaning about the end of her snowboarding career. Sometimes I said my legs were simply different lengths. I’d recently told a substitute tennis instructor at the country club that, yes, my tendons had been operated on but my orthopedic surgeon had screwed up and now it was a big mess. Who can say why the truth — at least the truth as I understood it — popped out of my mouth when a lie about tripping on plastic apples would have suited me better?
“I have tight tendons,” I said.
“Oh,” the choreographer said, not missing a beat. “Because it looked like your hip wasn’t working right.” Here again she worked her shoulder. The woman was as lean and elegant as a candlestick with her chignon and ballet flats, her cheekbones set at handsome angles. “Will it be getting better in time for the show?”
“No,” I admitted. “It won’t.”
The woman offered a serenely understanding smile, as if I were a golden retriever, all blond hair and bad hips. “Well, you did really great.”
Children are sad creatures, so full of hope and light and judgment. So sure of their place in the world. My first thoughts, as I waited for Mom to pick me up, were ones of anger. Who was this haughty witch to tell me what I could do? If she was so special, why was she volunteering at a junior high instead of choreographing on Broadway?
Who was this haughty witch to tell me what I could do? If she was so special, why was she volunteering at a junior high instead of choreographing on Broadway?
Of course, such thoughts denigrated the whole enterprise — the school, the play, my meager acting ability. Part of me wanted to tell her how believable I could be as Scarecrow. When I fell, the audience would gasp, and when I got up again they would cheer. It wouldn’t have mattered. I wasn’t in Up With Kids anymore. A kid with a limp didn’t have a chance at what my drama teacher had told us to call a “principal.”
In the choreographer’s gentle rejection lay a deeper truth: I would never be a professional actor. The fantasy was over. Later, I’d call this my munchkin moment: the moment I realized I was window dressing along the Yellow Brick Road, not the one skipping down it. I was one of the little people some other, more charismatic teenager would pledge not to forget. That night, I took down the glittery star that had hung on my door for years and fondled Margaret’s autograph in my replica Oz script as if she were a real celebrity. She’d signed it “Munchkin Love.”
My drama teacher was clever. Outright shafting the kid with the limp would have been poor form and so, instead, she gave me the title role. It was not lost on me that Professor Marvel prognosticated from a sitting position on a wooden crate and that the Wizard didn’t sing or dance and bellowed most of his lines in the wings, behind a curtain. Being upstaged by a dog was one thing. It took a special actor to be upstaged by a plywood head and a member of stage crew wagging the chin for comedic effect. Great and powerful I was not. Given so little to do, I overacted every scene I was in, shouting so loud the mic cut out, unleashing a low electrical drone as the house lights strobed.
It was not lost on me that Professor Marvel prognosticated from a sitting position on a wooden crate and that the Wizard didn’t sing or dance and bellowed most of his lines in the wings, behind a curtain.
If I came across as apoplectic, if my fingers flew in the face of anyone who came too close, I have my hand-dancing days at Up With Kids to thank. Because my gray tuxedo jacket was much too short, the sleeves rode up my wrists, leaving my cuffs to billow. With every herky-jerky hand motion, threads popped. I was a good man and a bad wizard, handing a diploma to Scarecrow, a medal to Cowardly Lion, and a ceramic heart to Tin Man. Like Dorothy, I knew there wasn’t anything in that leather-fringed purse for me. I wouldn’t be getting a new leg. I was stuck with the one I had.
During the curtain call of our final performance, I took my bow and retired to a wobbly rainbow platform at the back of the stage. A moment later, the chorus parted and Scarecrow, Tin Man and Lion skipped in to a standing ovation. There wasn’t enough space on the rainbow platform to do anything more than sway to the music, to bob my head and arch my eyebrows to keep the spidery tears of self-pity from crawling down my cheeks. To someone in the audience, it might have looked like nothing at all: a kid worn out with happiness after a fulfilling run, and then, confused, making a premature exit stage left as Scarecrow and Dorothy presented my drama teacher with flowers.
I wouldn’t be getting a new leg. I was stuck with the one I had.
It took a while to compose myself in the dressing room and turn in my costume. No matter how encouraging the rest of my family would be, my smart ass brother was sure to put me down for running off stage in tears. When I made it back to the auditorium, covered in flop sweat and runny makeup, they were waiting for me like always, scattered over a few otherwise empty rows. The Wizard of Oz head scowled down at us from the stage, his chin now wagging open like he’d suffered a stroke.
“You’re right. It was a nothing role. What can I say? You got totally, completely screwed,” Mom said, swinging her gold purse on her shoulder.
“I’m proud of you for toughing it out, Greggo,” Dad said.
“You certainly made the most of it,” Mom went on. “Ask anybody. You were the only one I could hear.”
I gave Tiffany a hug and tried to keep a neutral expression on my face as my brother shuffled toward me down the aisle, popping a pretzel into his mouth. To my surprise, he offered the only thing I’d ever really wanted from him: a positive review. “It was way less shitty than Up With Kids,” he said, chewing. “You had a real dog play Toto this time and Dorothy was pretty hot.” Putting a hand on my soaked head in an odd display of brotherly affection, his eyes lost that joking sparkle. “Seriously, Gregor. You were the best thing in the show.”
This, it turned out, was my final bow.
Leg surgeries the next Christmas kept me from auditioning for my high school drama department’s one-act play. I can’t remember what the play was called, but the gist of the plot was that a monstrously deformed writer was being held prisoner in a closet. As I was spread-eagle in a wheelchair at the time, encased in Ace bandages and knee immobilizers that went from my butt cheeks to my ankles, Crippled: The Greg Marshall Story would’ve been a fitting title. It’s not that I couldn’t have tried out. It’s that I didn’t have the balls.
It’s not that I couldn’t have tried out. It’s that I didn’t have the balls.
There were other things to fail at in high school: making the tennis team and convincing my friends I was straight. None of them were as fun as belting out “If I Only Had a Brain” to the homeless. Little home-video footage remains from my brief dramatic career. I suppose this is for the best as it allows me to remember my histrionics as scene stealing, my voice as blunt and captivating. If I didn’t limp, I tell myself, I might really have made it.
For the next few weeks of that semester, as I graduated from wheelchair to walker, my teachers let me out five minutes early so I wouldn’t be trampled. I think it was tipping through those empty halls that I gained a begrudging respect for Margaret Pellegrini. If the opposite of being typecast for having a disability is not being cast at all, being a Hollywood Midget didn’t sound so bad. At a time when nearly everyone who had worked on The Wizard of Oz was dead, she was still signing autographs, rubbing sleep from her eyes. Mom was right: the woman knew how to wake up. Every Oz anniversary landed Margaret a spot on the local news, where she repeated her famous line (at least it was famous to me) about Toto having a better agent.
History isn’t told by the winners. It’s told by the living. When you’re a kid, you’re taught success depends on embracing who you are. It’s actually much simpler than that: to succeed, you have to stick around. By marching around in a replica costume like the veteran of some whimsical war, Margaret recast herself as an indelible part of the story. Outlive the Coroner and you become the grand marshal of all things Over the Rainbow. Sometimes surviving is its own form of stardom.
Talk of the great American novel is an anachronistic waste of time nowadays, but for those insisting on perpetuating that discussion, Donald Ray Pollock’s The Heavenly Table should be a top contender. A brutal tale full of violence, lust, and broken lives, The Heavenly Table belongs to the darkest strain of ghostless American Gothic literature but has been filtered through the nonchalant callousness and deadpan humor of the best Westerns in a way that makes the narrative share DNA with authors as diverse as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Joe Lansdale. Ambitious and sprawling, this novel proves that Pollock is among the best novelists working today.
“Pollock is among the best novelists working today.”
The Heavenly Table takes place in 1917 and mainly revolves around the three Jewett brothers. After the death of their father due to a parasitic worm acquired by eating the flesh of a diseased hog, the three brothers decide to leave their miserable life of poverty and subordination behind and go on a crime spree with plans of robbing a bank and disappearing into Canada with the bounty. However, more than criminals, the Jewett brothers are country boys whose life experiences are mostly limited to backbreaking work done for almost nothing and listening to their father speak of the afterlife. Cane, the eldest, is their intellectual leader and the only literate brother. The middle brother, Cob, is a childish ignoramus who spends most of his time thinking about food. Lastly, Chimney, the youngest, is impulsive, cruel, and lacks Cane’s moral compass. The trio set out with a plan, and what happens to them as they try to accomplish their goal makes from a very entertaining novel that occupies the interstitial space between a ruthless Western with a healthy dose of scatological humor and the kind of literary fiction that delves into the lives of the broken, poor, and deracinated.
While the Jewett brothers are the main characters, The Heavenly Table also follows the narratives of Ellsworth Fiddler, a farmer from southern Ohio who lost his life savings to a scam artist who offered him some cheap cattle; a young classics scholar who struggles with his homosexuality at an Army camp in Meade, Ohio; a pimp running his business and the women who work for him; a hard-drinking African-American womanizing drifter trying to get back home and back on his feet; and a serial-killing bartender, among others.
“The Heavenly Table is a massive narrative in terms of scope, depth, number of characters, descriptions, and back stories.”
The multiple narratives eventually merge, or at least momentarily cross paths, but not before Pollock has given each one enough space that, if published separately, they could be considered novellas. This is one of the novel’s strengths and also its only major flaw. Pollock does too much here, following side narratives and giving every single character a rich back story even when they don’t deserve the time and attention.
Despite the length and plethora of storylines, The Heavenly Table is a quick read. Crackling dialogue and nonstop action propel the narrative forward and the relatively short, alternating chapters manage to sustain the reader’s interest. Another element that makes a statement about Pollock’s talent is the variety and richness of his characters. The Jewett brothers carry most of the novel on their shoulders, and their distinctive personalities and harsh past makes them likeable despite their decisions. Furthermore, their idea of robbing a bank and moving to Canada is the best incarnation of the Quixotic quest in contemporary dark fiction. These three individuals change the course of their lives because of something one of them repeatedly read out loud, and there’s an innate and unreasonable beauty in that:
“Inspired, at least in part, by The Life and Times of Bloody Bill, Chimney and Cob started dressing in cowboy garb, ten-gallon hats and dungarees and hand-tooled pointy-toed boots, while Cane, with the black frock coat and new white shirt, his hair greased back with pomade, took on the same look of shady refinement favored by riverboat gamblers and dissipated men of the cloth.”
The brothers also allow Pollock to explore media in the early 1900s. What the Jewett brothers do and what they get blamed for coalesce into a perennially expanding legend. Pollock uses this legend to show how media works and how narratives develop organically.
“Thus, on the same day that a Socialist weekly in Boston ran an editorial stating that the brothers were just a humble, illiterate sharecroppers who had killed their tyrannical overseer after he refused to allow them time off to bury their dead father, a staunchly right-wing daily out of New York City compare the outlaws to a band of ungodly savages who are possibly even worse than the Huns, going so far as to claim that they had robbed and left for dead a half-dozen good Christians along the highway in Arkansas who were on their way to a revival.”
Ultimately, the greatest accomplishment of The Heavenly Table is the way it mixes tragedy and violence with tenderness and humor. Pollock writes knowing that action, laughter, and brutality will keep the story flowing, but he also demonstrates he is one of the keenest observers of the human condition. This is a novel that could be called a noir in the sense that it deals with bad things happening to both good and bad people, but it is also a very smart narrative about the passage of time, about the “years passing by one after the other, the struggle to make ends meet, the burden of a passel of brats to feed and clothe, the inevitable decline.” That Pollock can dig into the deepest darkness of that reality and offer it to readers in a way that is pleasurable to read is a proof that he is one of our most talented storytellers.
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