Novels with a Sense of Place

I have recently two books that offer a wonderful sense of place. Vacationland by Sarah Stonich is set in the far north of Minnesota, along Lake Superior. Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens is set in the North Carolina marshes. 

Vacationland with quilt Michigan Autumn by Nancy A. Bekofske

Reading Laurentian Divide through Bookish I fell in love with Hatchet Inlet and the people of Naledi lodge. I learned that the novel is based on Sarah Stonich's set of interconnected short stories Vacationland and found a copy through my local library.

If anything, I would say that Vacationland is even better than the novel. And that's saying a lot, folks. I feel like I know so much more about these characters and their experience. Hatchet Inlet becomes more "real" and vivid in these stories. The depth of human experience in all its varieties that Stonich elicits from a small group of people is profound. The stories left me heart sore and some will stay vivid in my mind for a very long time.

The sense of place comes alive through the character's love of this far north land where Chicagoans come to summer but few have the stamina to stay year round. And in descriptions that leave a visual image.

Much of the resort is pocked with neglect: a sack of mortar left leaning near a wall has hardened to its own shape, with tatters of sack flapping; a tipped wheelbarrow has a maple sapling sprung through its rusted hole. Flat stones form a run of stairs have eroded to a jumble below, and high on the plateau old cabins lean like a trio of gossips, their eaves and sills lushly bumpered with moss...Bunchberry has berried and the sumac has gone bright. A fork in the path leads to a bog, where each footprint fills with water and spindly tamarack drop yellow needles. At her feet are colorful pitcher plants looking tropical and misplaced amid the hair-cap and hornwort...Water hyacinths, leatherleaf, bog rosemary--soft and woody plants in various stages of growth and bloom and rot make for a heady decay. from short story Hesitation in Vacationland by Sarah Stonich 

Bunchberries in bloom, Upper Peninsula of Michigan near Lake Superior. Photo by Gary L. Bekofske

stones near the Lake Superior shore in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Photo by Gary L. Bekofske

I heard so much about Delia Owen's first novel Where the Crawdads Sing. I had high expectations, based on reviews by Goodreads friends. 

I found it to be a good page-turner read, with a vivid sense of place. The author's love of the North Carolina marshland shines in lovely descriptive passages. I enjoyed this aspect of the novel.

The further I read into the book, the less satisfied I was with the plot which stretched my credulity. And the supporting characters were standard stereotypes: good boy, bad boy, drunk father, a mother who has run off, the victim of societal prejudice.

It is the story of an abandoned child who shuns society and manages to survive with the help of a kindly African American family who offers her covert charity. There is a boy who loves her too much (and teaches Kya to read) but leaves her, and a boy who loves himself more and leaves her. The girl grows up to become an expert on marsh flora and fauna, illustrating and writing scientific books about the marsh. There is a suspicious death, a trial, and an unexpected reveal.

I am in the minority in rating this as an average read. Entertaining enough. The marsh is memorable and the best-drawn 'character' in the novel. But it is hard to believe that a small child would be left alone to raise herself, ignored by society, survive without incident, and grow up to become a self-educated scholar and science writer. There was foreshadowing but no real lead up for the twisted ending.

I recalled the quote from Alice in Wonderland:

“There's no use trying,” she said: “one can't believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven't had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

If you are willing to believe the impossible, Kya's story will tug your heartstrings.

The novel is filled with wonderful observations of the flora and fauna of the marsh. Kya is so connected to the land, her boyfriend knows she could not survive penned up into "civilization" and the teeming human life of the city. It is this wild world that feeds her soul.

Sandhill Crane in the Seney National Wildlife Preserve marsh, Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Photo by Gary L. Bekofske
This is the setting for The March King's Daughter by Karen Dionne

Other novels I have read this year with a sense of place include:

The March King's Daughter by Karen Dionne, set in Michigan's Upper Peninsula near Seney Wildlife Preserve

Virgil Wander by Leif Enger, set in Minnesota along Lake Superior

Marlena by Julie Buntin set in Northern Michigan near Lake Superior

Once Upon a River by Bonnie Jo Campbell set on and near the Kalamazoo River in Michigan

Hard Cider  by Barbara Stark-Nemon set in the Leelanau Peninsula in Michigan

A Collar for Cerberus by Matt Stanley set in Greece

Historical fiction

Burial Rites by Hannah Kent

Our Homesick Songs by Emma Hooper set in Newfoundland

The River by Starlight by Ellen Notbohm set in Montana

The Winter Station by Jody Shields set in Manchuria

The Winter Soldier by Daniel Mason set on the Eastern Front of WWI

The Last Ballad by Wiley Cash

My first Wiley Cash novel will not be my last. Cash is a wonderful storyteller, entertaining while enlarging our knowledge. The story is compelling, the characters wonderfully drawn and real, the theme relevant.

The Last Ballad is the fictionalized story of the 1929 labor movement to unionize the mills of North Carolina. Ella May Wiggins struggles to provide for her family, working 12 hours a night, six days a week, for $9 a week. She lives in Stumptown, the black part of town, and her neighbor Violet is her friend and support.

Ella is drawn to the Union for the dream of a living wage, the ability to feed and clothe her children. The Northern organizers decide that Ella is the perfect 'face' for the local movement. Discovering that she sings and has written a ballad called The Mill Mother's Lament*, the organizers put Ella on the payroll.

Ella finds courage and discovers leadership skills. Her ballad brings her fame, and she goes on to write protest songs for the Union movement.

The mill workers go on strike. Joining the Union and going on strike is a hardship, and as known members of the community they are easily targeted. In 1929, unions were considered 'Red', socialist, communist, and most of all, anti-American. Ella complicates things--she wants to organize the African American mill workers into the movement. The Council attacks the platform of equality and laws against lynching, warning that the Union will destroy the Constitution, the church, and the justice system.

"We ask every man and woman in Gaston County to answer the following question: Will I allow these communists to gain control of Gaston County...? The time is at hand for every American to do his duty." Gaston Transom-Times, Thursday, April 4, 1929. From The Last Ballad

The union organizers are Northerners. Although their lives are threatened, they also can leave town when things get hot. Hampton, an African American Pullman porter, member of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and a Socialist, arrives to assist organizing the black workers. He is not trusted by the black community and is considered another 'outside agitator' by the  Council, a coalition of community leaders and police determined to squash the union. He is shocked to see the white mill workers living in dire poverty.

Ella works for the Loray Mill, whose owner is not an unjust man, although a clueless man who has never taken the time to question how things are. He thinks he does well by his mill workers and considers himself progressive. He is pressured to contribute funds to the Council. His wife, however, is compelled to understand. She befriends Ella without revealing her identity.

The Confederate Solders Reunion celebration in Charlotte on June 7, 1929 stirred the emotions of Albert Roach. Too young to have fought in WWI, he longs for valor and a chance to be important. He sees his chance to fight communism at home-- the Loray mill strikers. In a drunken rage, he violently lashes out in the crowd, which mostly consists of women, all become the enemy in his drunken and disordered mind.

The novel leads up to a thrilling and horrifying climax.

Cash brings us inside all the characters and sides of the story, so we understand how these characters came together on June 7 and its devastating events. I am grateful to have received a free book through Bookperk Page Turners.

*The Mill Mother's Lament

We leave our homes in the morning,
We kiss our children good-bye,
While we slave for the bosses,
Our children scream and cry.
And when we draw our money,
Our grocery bills to pay,
Not a cent to spend for clothing,
Not a cent to lay away.
And on that very evening
Our little son will say:
“I need some shoes, Mother,
And so does Sister May.”
How it grieves the heart of a mother,
You everyone must know.
But we can’t buy for our children,
Our wages are too low.
It is for our little children,
That seems to us so dear,
But for us nor them, dear workers,
The bosses do not care.
But understand, all workers,
Our union they do fear.
Let’s stand together, workers,
And have a union here.

A Talk with Philllip Lewis, Author of Debut Novel "The Barrowfields"

I was pleased on January 5, 2017 to talk to Phillip Lewis about his first book The Barrowfields.

The Barrowfields propagandist Henry escapes an unhappy home life with a distant, alcoholic father with failed literary aspirations. But Henry discovers that to be free of the past one much confront it.

The book is full of the presence of author and North Carolina native Thomas Wolfe, the father's idol.

Lewis grew up in Northwestern North Carolina, close to Virginia and Tennessee, but only a few hours away from Wolfe's hometown of Asheville. "I've spent a lot of time on Mr. Wolfe's porch, I can tell you," Lewis admitted.

We talked about Wolfe's fall from off the radar; the writer who influenced such diverse writers as Ray Bradbury, Maya Angelou, Pat Conroy, Betty Smith, Philip Roth, John Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson (who lifted 'fear and loathing' from Wolfe) is rarely read today.

"I think Wolfe is difficult for a lot of people to read compared to most commercial fiction these days," Lewis commented, adding "I find that so often, but not always, the books I truly enjoy and want to return to are the more difficult, are challenging books. For example, Blood Meridian [by Cormac McCarthy] is a book that I am proud to have read and finished partly because it was so challenging to me...You really have to concentrate on what he's saying or you can miss so much. But you feel like you've grown somehow by the end of it. It's really and extraordinary book, but it's not an easy book."

I told Lewis that I had read that Wolfe commented that his books all were about the search for the father [http://ow.ly/QB6i307PQ6W] and I saw that theme in The Barrowfields.

Lewis: "That was definitely an important theme for me," he replied. "I had a very complicated relationship with my father, and still do. This was the genesis of much of the material in The Barrowfields. He has suffered from a combination of alcoholism and depression for a number of years. He is also quite a literary fellow himself...I think he is a true writer but his struggles with other things have made it difficult for him to do much with it (other than inspiring his children, perhaps.)"

Nancy: "This explains why Henry the father is such a vividly drawn character."

Lewis: "For me the goal was to address or exorcise certain demons and to do so in an emotionally honest way--without writing an autobiographical account. In other words, you take an experience or amalgamation of experiences and examine the emotional toll, and then try to articulate that in some way with the written word that accurately depicts the emotional toll but does not reflect actual experiences.

"So everything in the book comes from a very emotionally honest place, and it was extraordinarily difficult and often painful to write for that reason.

"It's always impossible to know how all of that is going to translate to readers--because I think it is easy to assume that you're reading a book that's just been written for commercial enjoyment. But so far I've seen a few reviews by people who seemed to find aspects of it resonant with their own emotions."

Nancy: "That's when a book really gets to you when the author says things you cannot put into words yourself. I'm pretty blown away right now. The courage, as a writer, to struggle with demons!"

Lewis: "It truly was a very difficult process for me. And of course, it is a very lonely process, too. You spend a hell of a lot of time sitting somewhere trying to write what it is that's inside of you, and all the while not having any idea whether anyone other than you is ever going to read what you've written!"

Nancy: "In your book the son escapes the past but realizes he must return and confront his past. Is that what your book is--confronting the past?"

Lewis: I think that is an accurate description. Henry, our narrator, is in large part coming to terms with all that has transpired. He's somewhat of an expert at repressing past events, I think.

Nancy: "Yes, even abandoning Threnody." [Henry's sister].

Lewis: "Exactly."

Nancy: "I was thinking about Poe being another of the father's favorite [authors]. I just read in Mary Oliver's Upstream her essay on Poe. She says "life grief was his earliest and deepest life experience" and it made me think about Henry's father and what ghosts he was struggling with."

Lewis: "I have the sense that certain people experience anguish and tragedy in a different way than perhaps others do."

Nancy: "I wanted to say that two scenes from The Barrowfields that stay with me are the book burning and Henry and Story and the horses at night."

Lewis: "Thank you. I think those were probably the scenes that took the longest to write, and required the most effort.

"In regard to the horse scene, we had horses growing up and we were fortunate enough to have a good-sized field for the horses to enjoy. And one of my favorite things was when all the horses would take off running through the field and thunder away and then come charging back up the hill. And so I had memories of that, and that is what I drew on to describe that scene."

Nancy: "So, putting a memory into words, getting it just right--it's a lot of pressure."

Lewis: "It really is. And imagine this: my mother had horses from the time she was a child, and still does. I was writing those scenes with the horses knowing that she would be reading it, and knowing that it had to be just exactly right.

"I think authenticity is so incredibly important when you are writing fiction. And above everything else, I wanted The Barrowfields to be authentic. I wanted the characters and the scenes and the events to be authentic and deeply real. The horse scene late in the book, in addition to the horses, was also partly for the purpose of describing that part of the country at night--which I believed was important, or even critical, for that sense of authenticity."

Nancy: "There is a strong sense of place in your book, whether the mansion on the hill, so Gothic and dark, or Henry's university days, where it felt so contemporary and modern."

Lewis: Sense of place has always been important to me as a reader. Have you ever read a book, and in the book is a scene, and you're reading along and you realize that you have no idea where the charterers are, or what it looks like?"

We chatted about books we had read or were planning to read. Lewis' TBR shelf includes The Nix by Nathan Hill, Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles, and Everyone Brave is Forgiven by Chris Cleeve. Books he recommended to me include The Tinkers by Paul Harding, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and James Salter, "who has his own writing style." He also enjoys J. R. R. Tolkien and fantasy novels.

Lewis is a working dad who spent five years working on The Barrowfields which is coming out in March 2017.

Read more about Lewis at his website http://www.philliplewisauthor.com/

from the publisher:

The Barrowfields is a richly textured, deeply transporting novel that traces the fates and ambitions of a father and son across the decades, centered in the small Appalachian town that simultaneously defines them and drives then both away.

Just before Henry Aster's birth, his father--outsized literary ambition and pregnant wife in tow--reluctantly returns to the remote North Carolina town in which he was raised and installs his young family in an immense house of iron and glass perched high on the side of a mountain. There, Henry and his younger sister grow up in thrall to their fiercely brilliant, obsessive father, who spends his days as a lawyer in town and his nights writing in his library. But when tragedy tips his father toward a fearsome unraveling, Henry's youthful reverence is poisoned and he flees, resolving never to return.

During his time away at college and then law school, Henry meets a young woman whose family past is shrouded in mystery and who helps him grapple with his father's haunting legacy. He begins to realize that, try as he might, he, too, must go home again.

Mythic in its sweep and mesmeric in its prose, The Barrowfields is a breathtaking novel that explores the darker side of devotion, the limits of forgiveness, and the reparation power of shared pasts.

You Must Go Home Again: The Barrowfields by Phillip Lewis

"O brothers, like our fathers in their time, we are burning, burning burning in the night." --Thomas Wolfe

Phillip Lewis's debut novel The Barrowfields is a remarkable story, beautifully written and wise. Henry's journey resonates with self-recognition and affirms that going home can open the path to the future.

The language is lush with a penchant for rarefied words, a nod to Thomas Wolfe's poetic and verbose style, and the novel is imbued with vivid descriptions and cinematic scenes.

The protagonist Henry Aster narrates the story of his family, beginning with the first settlers in Old Buckham. Settled deep in 'the belly' of the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, "a town of ghosts and superstitions," and populated by under a thousand people, 'everyone else lived in the hills beyond.' His grandparents survived on little but were content.

Henry's father was considered "awful queer," a bookish boy who idolized Thomas Wolf. University provided an escape and brought him a love of Poe and Faulkner. After graduation he teaches while writing, winning early acclaim before faltering. He wants to write the great American novel--to prove his worth. Then he is called back home to care for his failing mother. The family moves into an abandoned mansion on a hill, a 'macabre' house with dark corners, haunted by ghosts. A lawyer by day, at night he retreats into a cubbyhole room to struggle with his unmanageable novel and his growing alcoholism.

"Aster's work, for all its brilliance, is impenetrable."

Henry had idolized his dad; they shared a love of books and music. But he and his sister Threnody watch their father retreat from the world until he is a 'ghost.' They pledged to always be there for the other. After the tragic death of a new sibling, their father succumbs to despair and deserts his family.

Henry leaves Old Buckram for university and law school. He falls in love with Story, a conflicted girl with her own father issues and a fear of intimacy. As he supports Story in her search for her father, returning to her home town of Lot's Folly, Henry realizes that he also must go home again and confront his past, and face the sister he abandoned.

" I suppose that one can never leave a place completely."

Wolfe's influence pervades the novel, from the setting and theme of the search for the father to the influence of  Wolfe on Henry and his father: just before Henry graduates from Chapel Hill he reads Look Homeward, Angel and You Can't Go Home Again and "never got over them entirely."

The role of books is hugely important. The Barrowfields is a 'wasteland of nothingness," a desolate opening in the woods outside of Old Buckham. When the town gathers there to burn Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Henry implores his father to stop the book burning. In a frighting scene, his father stands up to the crowd to defend and protect the volume from the fire.

Our past leaves its scars and questions, and painful as it is, we become free by confronting it. Lewis has written a story that hearkens back to the great literature of the past while offering insight into the universal human condition.

You can learn more about Lewis and his debut novel in my interview with the author in my blog post on February 26, 2017.

Phillip Lewis

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

"Mythic in its sweep and mesmeric in its prose, The Barrowfields is a breathtaking debut about the darker side of devotion, the limits of forgiveness, and the reparation power of shared pasts." from the publisher's website

The Barrowfields
Phillip Lewis
Hogarth
Publication Date March 7, 2017
$26 hard cover
ISBN:9780451495648