The Round House

Louise Erdrich has been an important American writer for twenty-five years, yet it took most people by surprise when her latest novel, The Round House, won the National Book Award for fiction.  Perhaps it's because, while no one doubts her tremendous talent, she has insisted on writing in a distinctly Native American way rather than conforming to the smart, edgy style of her nonindian contemporaries.  By Native American way I mean an elliptical nonchronological style based on family, clan, and tribe, instead of the urban/rural setting with linear time flow construct used by most of us. However, in The Round House, (Harper, 2012) Erdrich earns her place in the mainstream by meeting three difficult challenges that defeat most writers .

The narrator of this novel is Joe, a thirteen year old boy who is growing up on a reservation in the Dakotas.  How many novels have you read whose children think, act, and speak like adults, at least part of the time?  Joe's thoughts, emotions, and behavior are perfectly believable, all the time.  I haven't encountered a more real child voice since To Kill A Mockingbird.  Both books explore a child's response to injustice, In Mockingbird it's racism, while Round House deals with rape.  Both books deal with crimes that society has made complex, but a child sees as the simple atrocity that it is.  The choice of a child to tell the story, and the skill Erdrich uses to make that child's voice real accomplish her first task.

The second is to artfully present a political argument without scaring away the reader with her passion.  Her focus is the injustice of the American legal system. US law prevents Native American tribes from using their own system of law and courts to prosecute crimes against their people by nonindians off the reservation.  Writers who make political points with their work frequently produce heavy handed polemic that drives readers who just want a good story away.  Erdrich handles this problem skillfully by making Joe's father a tribal court judge.  Antone Coutts, the husband, is ready to kill to avenge the rape of his wife.  Antone Coutts, the Indian judge, is perfectly powerless to do much except appeal to white friends in seeking justice.  Erdrich simply lays out the jurisdiction problems and leaves Antone standing helpless as his wife's rapist strolls about the reservation, safe behind a wall of white privilege.  The character and the story make the political point naturally and without the obvious hand of the author.

Finally, Louise Erdrich tells a story about the effect of rape that goes beyond the victim herself and shows the corrosive result in the lives of those close to her.  Both her husband and son are changed irrevocably by the crime.  They become different people.  People you may not like as much as you did when the book starts.  You may not like them, but you understand. 

The Round House takes us from particular lives of Native Americans to the universal lives of human beings.  That makes her mainstream.  And the way she does it makes the author and her work worthy of the National Book Award.

The Glass Palace

Amitav Gosh's The Glass Palace (published in the U.S. by Random House, 2001) is historical fiction at its best:  entertaining, informative and compelling.  For those who like to immerse themselves in in a weighty multi-generational saga that not only concerns itself with family but with the fate of nations, its a perfect read. 

The novel revolves around the life and loves of Rajkumar, who starts the story as an eleven year old Indian orphan in the Burma of the 1890's.  He is in perfect position to witness the defeat of Burma's last king, and his deportation to exile in India.  Rajkumar, a very advanced eleven year old, finds his life long love in one of the queen's child attendants.  Their story anchors a book that explores the politics of independence and the economics of colonialism through the end of WWII and beyond. 

The Glass Palace surprised me by giving me a quick course in the process of harvesting teak in the depths of a rain forest and bringing it to market across the world.  It introduced me to the Indian National Army, with its doomed 25,000 Indians who joined Japan in the hopes of expelling the British from India after the war.  As the book ends the reader is given a peek into the bewilderingly crazy society of the military dictatorship in Myanmar.  These things are not part of the usual knowledge of Americans, even those who like history. 

Amitav Gosh invites the reader to put aside the frustrations of our modern high-tech life and join him in exploring the past of a land most of us can hardly imagine.  You'd do yourself a favor in accepting his invitation. 

The Elusive Wow: Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

Anyone interested in the possibility of intelligent life on other worlds would do well to read Robert Gray's well written The Elusive Wow: Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Palmer Square Press, 2012).  This intriguing explanation of the use of radio astronomy to look for life outside our solar system begins with the 1977 discovery of a strong non-natural signal with an antenna operated by Ohio State University.  This is called the "Wow!" because that's the comment written in the margin of the printout of the signal by astronomer Jerry Ehman.  Gray patiently explains the system used to find this signal, the reasons it could not have been natural, and describes the puzzlement of scientists when the brief burst of radio power wasn't repeated.  He then proceeds to carefully describe the history of SETI (Search for ExTraterrestrial Intelligence) from that moment up until his book went to press in 2011.  The effort is now expanding to frequencies other than radio, and scientists are widening their net to catch signals more subtle than the  powerful  radio pulses encountered in the Wow! incident.  Although Robert Gray is an engineer by training, he is an amateur astronomer with competence and knowledge impressive enough to cause the managers of the world's largest radio telescope, the Very Large Array in New Mexico, to extend him blocks of time to search for radio signals from extrasolar civilizations--twice.  This volume also contains a valuable bibliography of books and articles, plus an extensive list of links to web sites dealing with the subject.       

This is a good book to start with if you are becoming interested in SETI.  If you are, you'd be in good company.  One fact that surprised me in Gray's book was that some really heavy hitters, including Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and and former Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Nathan Myhrvold have donated millions to looking for ET.  The little green men should guard their browser secrets well--free enterprise is on the way.  

Writing About Amelia Earhart-Part III

After all these years, and all those books, mystery still surrounds the person of Amelia Earhart.  Who was this woman who dared so much so often?  What drove her to take such risks, to give up so much of herself to flying?  That the questions are still asked tells us something about her desire to keep a part of her life away from the public's view.  She wasn't so much shy as reserved.  As time went by she realized both the rewards and drawbacks of a very public life.  The rewards were obvious.  She was a top earner on the lecture circuit.  Her books sold well.  She met and befriended some of the most interesting personalities of the period, everyone from Will Rogers to Eleanor Roosevelt.  The drawbacks were less obvious, but burdensome.  The type of record setting flying she did was very expensive, and as she made longer and more difficult flights the costs ate up her speaking income quickly.  She was one of the most recognizable women in America, so there was no such thing as feeling alone in a crowd.  And the crowds!  She truly hated and feared the mobs of people who wanted to touch her, even snatch at a scarf or hat as she moved through them at the end of a flight.  But what she did was by its nature public; the animalistic mindlessness of the throngs who pressed around her was unavoidable. 

That reserve, born of an awareness she was always being watched by people she didn't know, but who knew her, has left its own questions.  In 1992, researching what became The Truth Of It: Amelia Earhart's Private Journal I was privileged to speak to a number of women who were active in aviation at the same time as Amelia.  Even after forty-five years some of them were still bitter that she had been privileged to accomplish what they hadn't.  They attributed her success to her upper middle class background and posh social connections.  A couple of them told me she was "known" to be promiscuous.  The facts just don't support any of that.  Her dad was a talented lawyer who couldn't make a living because of his alcoholism.  She was raised by grandparents in Atchison, Kansas, hardly a social Mecca. 

Probably the promiscuousness is an after-the-fact result of publication of her famous letter to George Putnam, given him on the morning of their wedding.  She had grave doubts about the viability of mixing married life with an aviation career, and announced she might need to establish a separate residence where she could sometimes go to be alone.  She also told him she wouldn't hold him to any "medieval code of faithfulness to me, nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly."  She demanded the right to end the marriage in a year if she wasn't happy.  You have to realize Amelia was raised in what we nowadays call a "dysfunctional" family.  Her experience of marriage wasn't a joyful one.  The biggest objection to the "promiscuous" Amelia, however, is the fact that she was watched wherever she went, and knew it.  Numerous biographers have been unable to turn up any evidence of extramarital affairs in her life.  And they've looked.  Lacking evidence, I have to agree with them.  The Amelia you read about in history is probably the Amelia that was. 
This novel available at #AmazonKindle .

Writing About Amelia Earhart - Part II

How do you write about someone like Amelia Earhart?  She led a life like few have before or since.  She was at once a very public and a very private person.  This has given us a somewhat uneven picture of her.  We have minute by minute accounts of Amelia's record flights, but have only a general idea of the details of her domestic existence.  I took my lead from a statement by her husband, George Putnam.  In his autobiography, Wide Margins, he wrote:   "There is, perhaps, another story to be written, if one could catch the spirit of the Amelia Earhart that was, and in a book that should be a novel tell a grand true tale of a modern American pioneer who was a woman."

Putnam's statement suggested to me that Earhart's story was really too big to be presented as straight biography.  A faithful biography would have given facts precedence over the spirit of adventure that enlivened Amelia.  It also hinted how she saw herself.  First, a pioneer of the air, but also a woman living in what was still a man's world.  And challenging that world.  Only the fictional method could catch the grand purpose driven life that set all those records, and upset all those men.

The first person journal seemed obvious to me.  Amelia Earhart's story was inconceivable unless she told it in a voice that was believable.  Finding that voice was the trick.  Luckily, I'd always felt drawn to Amelia, to her independent, self-sufficient, but playful approach to life.  And she left a clear record of that approach in her own published books, 20 hrs. 40 min.:  Our Flight In The Friendship, and The Fun Of It. Reading them, and some of her private letters, gave me a feeling for how she expressed herself.  When I sat down to write it seemed to flow, an indication to the writer that he's found the right voice. 

Of course, there are hazards in the first person voice.  Some may find the voice differs from what they expect.  Others, after a few thousand words, may begin to tire of it.  The only solution for these problems is a story that provides excitement on every page, with unexpected twists and turns.  If you don't like my Amelia I apologize and wish you better luck on your next read.  I won't apologize for the excitement or the twists and turns.  They're hers.      

Writing About Amelia Earhart - Part I

I'm glad to announce the publication of my new novel,  The Truth Of It: Amelia Earhart's Private Journal (Quiver Books, $4.99, 2012). This novel is available as an ebook at most of the major retailers on the Internet.  The first twenty percent of it is free as a sample download.

My fascination with Amelia began as a young boy when I read library books detailing her short but eventful life.  It seemed her worldview was similar to mine.  She believed in exploring the limits of technology in search of new ways to better the human condition.  She thought all of us, male and female, should contribute in any field they chose, limited only be their capabilities, not others prejudices. 

She had a spirit of daring and willingness to risk all that I must confess I lack.  However, she took the time and effort to train and prepare herself to insure success was not simply a matter of luck, but a probability.  Her planning was immaculate.  That she seemed to be willing to rush into her final flight without the necessary crew and equipment mystified me-and led to a lifelong interest in new books about her.

It was in one of these, Mary Lovell's 1989 biography The Sound of Wings, I read a sentence that gave me the idea for my story.  Amelia's young photographer, Al Bresnik, was quoted as saying "I can't remember her exact words, but she told me she thought there was a possibility she was pregnant and that when she came back (from the final flight) she was going to be 'just a woman.'"

Could that be the reason for her changed behavior in the last few months of her life?  In 2012 flying around the world while three or four months pregnant wouldn't be a big deal.  In 1937 the idea would be shocking to a society that thought pregnancy required a withdrawal from active life.  She knew having a child would bring demands that she end her life of record setting flying; not just from the public, but from her family as well.  Did she want one last adventure, one final achievement for the history books?  If she did want that final aviation first, her story would be something like what I've written.

Of course, this novel is about the last ten years of her life, not just the tragedy that ended it.  But if you want to know more about Amelia's final chapter, download the first chapter of my book free at any of the big online book stores.  And check back here for more on her fascinating story in later blog posts.

Darwin's Ghosts

Darwin's Ghosts: The Secret History of Evolution, by Rebecca Stott ( Spiegel & Grau, 2012) is an appealingly written history of Charles Darwin's intellectual predecessors.  The secret of its appeal lies in Stott's cv.  She's a professor of literature and creative writing with two novels and a previous non-fiction work about Darwin to her credit.  Only a novelist could make you want to walk the 4th century BC beaches of Lesbos with Aristotle and his students; or make the scientific issues of 1790's Paris seem to rival in drama the political ones.  And only someone with a life-long fascination with Darwin and his times could piece out the important intellectual developments from the cluttered mosaic of mid-nineteenth century publishing.  If Stott has a fault it is in not insisting her readers note the driving curiosity of those on both sides of the evolution divide (or to use the early 1800's terms "species transformation" or "descent with modification" controversy).  These were people who deeply cared about and respected data.  Interpretation of that data is what they disagreed over.

 

Respecting facts as they did, the French and English naturalists of the period (most of whom were also clergy) were in accord with what was needed to decide the issue of whether species arose whole and then became extinct when God willed their demise, or whether they changed over time as their environment changed.  They needed a provable mechanism that would cause change--a reason.  Otherwise divine whim would seem as good an explanation for the fossil record as any other.

 

By the time Charles Darwin tallied up the numbers, the curiosity of over thirty men had contributed to the process of the scientific discovery of evolution.  And, this book shows clearly, it was a process as much as evolution itself was a process.  Beginning with the fascination of of Aristotle and al-jahiz with the seemingly infinite panorama of nature that caused them to ask what animals surrounded them, the inquiry took the form of when had all these species come to life, where they originated, and finally, why so many of them had ceased to exist.   

 

Both Aristotle and the great Arab scholar al-jahiz were interested in cataloguing the rich living world around them.  The Greek didn't believe in a creator god, and the Arab had no doubt but that Allah brought the world into existence.  It was enough for both of them to organize the dazzling universe they saw into an understandable functioning system.  Even the great Leonardo da Vinci didn't concern himself with the question of species evolution, he was more interested in the fact that sea beds had over eons sometimes risen to become mountain peaks.  It wasn't until Benoit de Maillet, at the start of the eighteenth century that anyone set forward the idea of species mutation over long periods of time.  Denis Diderot in the mid 1700's, and a remarkable group of naturalists working during the upheaval surrounding the French Revolution, Lamarck, Cuvier, and Saint-Hilaire, brought evolutionary science to the very brink of acceptability.

 

As the European continent descended into war, A series of Englishmen, including Charles Darwin's grandfather Erasmus, brought into focus the essential question:  So, if God doesn't cause species change, what does?  Like their French colleagues they had to tread carefully.  Both the Catholic and Protestant churches thought divine causation was essential to their dogma.  And both sects were willing to destroy the career and livelihood of anyone that threatened that dogma. 

 

Darwin, who had eleven children to raise, worked out a proof of species evolution by natural selection some twenty years before he published it.  His fear of the Church made him wait.  It wasn't till Alfred Russel Wallace put the pieces together in a flash of inspiration experienced while suffering from a high fever, and sent Darwin a letter asking him to comment, that Darwin rushed to publication.  That rush caused him to omit the introduction in which he had planned to credit the work of his predecessors.  That omission caused him to suffer not only the accusation of heresy, but that of plagiarising the work of others.  It wasn't till the third and fourth editions of his Origins that he put these "ghosts" to rest with a proper acknowledgement of their efforts.  Stott's book is engrossing, not only for its scientific story, but also for its lively description of the men who brought us the theory of species evolution, and the colorful times they worked in.

 

Note:  I downloaded this book from my local library's ebook catalogue provided by Overdrive, Inc.  If, by any chance, you want to purchase Darwin's Ghosts, be aware that the electronic edition has a number of formatting flaws, chief of which is poorly marked or lacking links between footnotes and chapter notes and the text.  Because of this, the print edition would be a better choice if you want to own a copy.