Rhythm and Books

Rebellious Summer

These days in Mississippi, the Civil War-era story of the Jones County rebellion is but a vague myth.  The young aren't taught it, and many old-timers still speak of it with mild disparagement.  In The State of Jones, our latest summer reading pick, journalist Sally Jenkins and historian John Stauffer resurrect this fascinating story, which has been distorted, disclaimed and covered up by generations of proud and defeated Southerners.  This popular treatment will thrill and surprise and possibly frustrate some modern readers with its depiction of a Mississippi that was anything but unified behind the Confederate cause.

The book really got us thinking about that certain type of Southerner, predominantly older, who isn't afraid to admit their tired, lingering sympathy to the Confederate cause, as if it were some idyll never achieved.  But could there be a losing cause less worthy of a century's old devotion, even for today's most petulant racist?  Do any old Germans still give a damn about the Nazis?

Reading The State of Jones brings home what the Civil War was all about, not states rights or any other blustery excuse brought up by Confederate apologists.  It was slavery, plain and simple, which if not the only cause of the War was certainly the driving symbol for a host of grievances. 

The hero of this saga is Newton Knight, a yeoman farmer from Jones County, Mississippi, who despised the incompetent Confederate leadership and, according to Jenkins and Stauffer, was deeply averse to slavery and secession. (This is the central point in a hotly contested and current debateamong amateur and professional Jones County historians.)  He fought under the Confederacy before ultimately turning against them, leading a guerrilla war in the forests, villages and swamps of his home in the Piney Woods region of lower Mississippi.  A true radical of the time, Knight's extended family included mixed-race children he proudly fathered with a former slave.

The authors take us through the horrors of battle at Corinth and Vicksburg, illustrating the excruciating conditions and incompetent leadership that led to the Confederacy's great retention problem.  In droves, the poor, exhausted soldiers laid down their arms and walked away from the rich planters' war, only to return to their modest farms back home which had been raided and exploited by their own army.  Knight was among those deserters, and with the help of kinsfolk and fellow Unionists, established the "Free State of Jones."  At its height, the movement made southeast Mississippi hostile territory for Confederate bands and earned the regard of Union generals.

The scope of this anti-Confederate movement upsets popular notions about the war and will likely divide history buffs.  But it's just this sort of ideological quarrel that provides as much drama as the brisk narrative with its memorable set pieces and host of colorful personalities, from incompetent generals and rogue militants to tough women and local everymen drawn into and made exceptional by the high drama of the time.  The authors have broadened the story with rich context, and casual readers of history may find this broad-scale treatment in line with such favorites as Rising Tide and 1776.

Ultimately, of course, even Knight's fiery campaign against the Confederates withers in the face of Mississippi's Reconstruction-era horrors.  It will be hard but necessary for many fair-hearted Southerners to revisit these atrocities, which we've tried to live down (or stubbornly ignore and sometimes refute) our whole lives.  The reprehensible treatment of black Americans by the white establishment in Mississippi, along with the silent complicity of otherwise good folks, is a hard enough history to swallow without the occasional fool still waving his disgraced Confederate banner and braying that the South will rise again. 

Whether readers find The State of Jones to be convincing new history or Yankee propaganda, the sentiments ring true, the story is thrilling, and the depiction of this dark and troubled time leaves the reader relieved to know that, though times here may be tough, there's every reason to be grateful that we weren't living in Mississippi during and immediately following the War.

Magic Summer Groove

For those of us who slog away our summer days indoors, the Turnrow jukebox is a crucial mix of eclectic songs.  The acoustics are good in the store, and sometimes we just love to turn up the stereo and let it wail.  Our aim has always been to treat visitors to good music they may have never heard, or good music they don't hear nearly enough.  (Song most requested to turn off:  "Goodnight Irene" by Tom Waits.)

Always weighing the balance of styles and moods, we recently decided we needed a bit more blues.  We play a lot of blues, being in the cradle of popular American music, but the summer mix was getting top-heavy with obscure R&B and Latin jazz, so we asked our resident blues expert DJ Benedict to float us something we'd never heard.  He reliably came through with someone we should have heard but somehow never had:  Magic Sam.

It was like hearing B.B. King for the first time.  How could we have missed this?  And he was born just down the road in Grenada.  We'll let the expert explain:

Samuel “Magic Sam” Gene Maghett (1937-1969) was one of the most influential and under appreciated bluesmen of the 20th century.  Growing up, Sam learned to play the blues by listening to Muddy Waters records.  At 19, he moved to the West Side of Chicago where musicians like Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, Otis Rush, Willie Dixon and others had electrified the blues.  The end result of this pioneering achievement was termed “Chicago” blues and represents the style of most blues performed today.  Sam's distinct style of guitar style was a direct result of this musical phenomenon and became one of the defining voices of Chicago blues.

In 1967, Sam released West Side Soul, which is his shining moment and considered by many to be the greatest example of electrified blues ever created.  There are several musical characteristics which make this record unique; the first is Sam's incredible guitar performance.  Utilizing a technique previously not heard in electrified blues, Sam forcefully plucked the strings with his fingers and thumb creating a staccato treble-heavy guitar timber.  He accentuated this technique by plugging into a Fender amp with the reverb turned on full.  This guitar sound, combined with his Otis Redding-style vocals, made for matchless sound which would later be imitated by countless blues performers.

Although the guitar innovations are important, what really makes this record extraordinary is the groove.  Each track has as much, if not more, groove than any soul record you have in your collection.  In fact, the grooves found on this album can be found in much of the blues music recorded since this record was released.  An example of this is demonstrated in Sam’s cover of the Robert Johnson standard "Sweet Home Chicago." (Hear it below)  This is one of the most performed blues songs ever written, and I would guess that 90 percent of the time the song is played, it is a rehash of the Magic Sam version and not the Robert Johnson version. 

Ultimately, this record is important because we do not know how much further Magic Sam could have expanded his influence on music.  Shortly after recording this and a subsequent record, Sam died of a heart attack at the age of 32.  He left a legacy of great blues music with West Side Soul as his masterpiece.  Pick up a copy and get some magic for yourself.   

Beach Reading

After promising a new summer reading recommendation every week, we conveniently left the laptop at home when we slipped away for a mid-summer vacation to the shore.  We'll try to make up for it this week with three(!) recommendations.

Our excursion got us thinking about what exactly constitutes a "beach book."  The term is often synonymous with trashy romance, formulaic thrillers from the grocery-store checkout line, and any other proud and mindless drivel.  But perhaps that's unfair to the beach.

As discriminating readers, we seek a higher caliber of beach reading.  The beach books we sampled over vacation fulfilled the tenants of good beach reading — fun, fast plots that allow you to easily pick up the storyline after the inevitable distractions from kids, traffic and scantily clad sunbathers, and also short enough to finish either on the beach or the car ride home — but also left an indelible mark in our imaginations that will always help define this particular vacation.  (For instance, when we look at pictures of that trip to Florida several years ago, we still fondly recall the lewd parlor trick performed by the Victorian-era prostitute in Michel Faber's decidedly unbeachy, 800-page-plus opus The Crimson Petal and the White.)

 First, we completed The Devil's Punchbowl by Greg Iles (pictured above), a book we'd begun on the mainland before his visit to Turnrow last week. Iles' novels are fast-paced best-sellers — he just debuted at #4 on the New York Times list — typical beach fare but for the fact that they're not your standard whodunnit or police procedural.  In Iles' fiction, you'll find an upstanding character who is thrust into an ugly situation while the reader roots for him or her to get out.  During his talk last week at Turnrow, he said he was fascinated in the capacity for evil that lurks in average people.  He doesn't shy away from the uglier aspects of life, which tends to conflict some of his readers ("His head ain't right," one fan recently proclaimed) but always keeps them coming back for more.

In The Devil's Punchbowl, the upstanding character in question is Penn Cage, a former attorney and novelist who has turned up in few of Iles' previous books.  Cage, now the disillusioned mayor of Natchez, becomes privy to some disturbing information about the practice of prostitution and dog-fighting within the town's burgeoning casino industry.  When the casino heavies put the squeeze on Cage, the plot ratchets up.

There are plenty of thrills, disturbing situations, and page-turning action scenes, but readers have come to Iles in increasing numbers because his sensational plots are believable, he is a thoughtful storyteller, and his inspired heroes warrant dogged devotion.  We were as intrigued by Penn Cage's journey as we were by the well-crafted suspense.  And while Iles' audience grows with every book, local readers may be especially loyal because he has a unique gift for expressing a fondness for Mississippi, not through saccharine plot devices and familiar tropes, but by glaring through the lens of our real-life social problems and finding the underlying goodness.  Order a signed copy here.

There are an equally twisted cast of characters in Rain Gods, the new novel by James Lee Burke.  Actually, we must admit that, prior to this, we'd never read Burke, even though we've sold untold copies of his books and recommended him to customers based on widespread admiration for his work.  In addition to the novel's intriguing plot, we chose the new book as our entry point to Burke because it strays outside his famous Dave Robicheaux series ... and because we just received a batch of signed first editions.

The hero is Hackberry Holland, an aging sheriff in a Texas border town, haunted by his past in a POW camp in Korea and given to sage pondering.  He's seen it all and has little fear, which comes in handy when he must confront Jack Collins, a.k.a. the Preacher.  Here we have two sides of the same coin, both men wise and disturbed in their own unique ways.  Between the two poles of this story are a mass grave of machine-gunned Asian prostitutes, feuding strip club magnates, a double-crossing hitman, a fugitive Iraqi war veteran and his tough folk singer girlfriend, grim G-men, and a sexy deputy who wants a piece of her troubled superior, who is old enough to be her father. 

We quickly learned what makes Burke such a perennial favorite.  He's a craftsman and stylist from the old school who can set a scene and draw a vivid character with few words.  He blesses his characters with fresh, punchy dialogue and doesn't mind letting them stray from the action to carry on a conversation over dinner or ruminate at the end of the day, and none of it trifling observation or wheel-spinning.  There is a laid-back pace to this suspense that is perfectly suited for the desert setting.

Finally, we caught up with one of last summer's national favorites, now in paperback, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  Scandinavian suspense is becoming quite popular these days, but this novel by Stieg Larsson is perhaps the most famous of recent imports.

Journalist Mikael Blomkvist is struggling to keep his life and career upright after a devastating libel case, which came with the likelihood of imprisonment.  Left with few options, he plummets into a family mystery at the appointment of the head of one of Sweden's wealthiest scions.  Blomkvist's search leads him through the underbelly of Swedish industrialism, accompanied by an unlikely ally, a young pierced and tattooed genius hacker named Lisbeth Slander.  Together, the two delve into a remarkable mystery, with sophisticated and dangerous depths.

If the plot sounds familiar, rest assured this is not your average mystery.  The craftsmanship is impeccable.  Larsson is careful with his characters.  Each is believable, intriguing and pertinent to the authentic story, which simmered in the beginning, enticing us into the investigation, then engulfed us before we knew it.  There was no putting this one down until its thrilling conclusion.

Unfortunately, the author Larsson died after submitting this and two subsequent manuscripts, thus never having the opportunity to see his work reach its potential.  Fortunately, American audiences will be treated to his second book, The Girl who Played with Fire, later this month.  It may just be the perfect excuse for a return to the beach.  

New Valley or Literary No Man's Land?:In Defense of the Novella

Just when we thought it was tough to sell a book of short stories, along comes Josh Weil and his debut collection of novellas.  But maybe, just maybe, if busy Americans don't have time enough to consume a full novel and can't invest in the quick thrill of a short story, this elusive literary form could provide the perfect middle ground.

This topic was the center of an intriguing discussion among book lovers last week when Virginia native Weil stopped by Turnrow to sign and read from his impressive debut, The New Valley, a triptych of  long tales that depict a brand of isolation and longing particular to the rural Virginia highlands.  The stories reminded us of Kent Haruf and Larry Brown in a way, with their plain-spoken, rough-hewn characters, their humor and dogged individualism.

First, the discussion focused on the curious form of novellas — longer than a short story, yet shorter than a novel.  Actually, some of the most famous works of 20th century literature are considered novellas:  Heart of Darkness, The Old Man and the Sea, The Stranger, The Metamorphosis, Animal Farm, Of Mice and Men, and Faulkner's The Bear.

But the novella is slippery in that it cannot always be pegged by page length or word count.  "The important thing is how that length allows it to work in a way neither a story or a novel does," Josh explained.  "I think a novella compresses the world with the focus of a short story, but it explores that smaller space with a novel’s generosity and care.  I find it to be a beautiful and rich combination that allows the intensity of a story with room to breathe."

It's safe to say a young writer like Josh does not set out to become a novella writer.  It just happened when he sat down and cranked out the book's opening tale, "Ridge Weather," from which he read a portion at our event, a portion that would spark controversy later in the evening.  After some reluctance and head-scratching among publishing professionals, Josh found an agent willing to package this 80-page story with two more of similar length and found a daring publisher, Grove-Atlantic, known for going against the grain and publishing plenty of novellas, perhaps most famously those of Jim Harrison, whose Legends of the Fall is one of our favorite novella collections.

Josh too is very fond of Harrison's collection, which produced two films, and it should be said that Josh studied film in college.  He wrote and directed his own scripts and it's clear filmmaking is in his blood. "I'd say that film has influenced me a lot when it comes to the novella, because I think the arc of a film — what can be accomplished in two hours of cinema, in a screenplay — is very similar to what can be accomplished with a novella," he said, adding names like Scorsese, Coppola, Terrence Malick, and Bob Rafelson to the list of authors who inspired him to write in the novella form, from Faulkner and Hemingway to Proulx and Ondaatje.

But how has this form proved useful to Josh? 

"For me, since I'm often most interested in exploring character and the way that it is formed/hardened/broken by the events of a story, I am drawn to the space that the novella allows me to dig around in that territory," he explained.  "It's certainly possible with a short story, but I think I feel limited to exploring one specific aspect of a character in a short story, whereas a novella allows me to wrap my arms around the person in a more complete way."

Take, for instance, the main character in "Ridge Weather," a young cattle hand who has just lost his father.  Weil follows him through the days after the funeral as the young man adjusts to a life even more solitary than we initially believed.  Most poignant are his grasping social interactions, which tend to resume awkwardly.  One incident, depicted in Josh's reading at the bookstore, earned him a playful slap from a nearby audience member caught off guard by the character's uncomfortable and completely believable gesture.

It was all in good fun, but the implications of this pivotal dramatic moment returned later, over dinner at Delta Bistro.   A heated deconstruction over the scene flared up again and divided the sexes as the author modestly enjoyed his blackened pork tenderloin.  It's not every dinner conversation, parsing the ins and outs of literature, that you can defer to the author, but this was such a case.  Rousted from his swine, Josh defended the action of his character in the context of the story and, despite the interruption, was obviously flattered to have inspired such fervor.  Surely one of the writer's great satisfactions must be in confirming, through interaction with his readers, that he has made art by honestly conveying the ambiguities of true character.

As Tony Doerr, another young writer we admire, wrote in his rave New York Times Sunday Book Review, "Keep writing novellas, Josh Weil, because you write very good ones."

Las Chicas del Verano

As we've said, a good road novel is essential to complete your summer reading.  One we've enjoyed recommending this summer is Into the Beautiful North by the brilliant Mexican-American writer Luis Alberto Urrea.  We chose it on the strength of Urrea's last novel, The Hummingbird's Daughter, a dense and beautiful Latin American saga that recalls the epic histories of Garcia Marquez.  Picking up the new novel, we were prepared for a heavy, lyrical journey through decades of historical lore and the twisted limbs of a family tree.  Instead we were surprised to find something much lighter, jauntier, and, dare we say, beachy — a robust beachy, let it be known.  This is a spirited road novel with loads of humor, suspense, danger and passion.  It provided one of those rare and wonderful experiences that all readers seek, a novel that catches you unaware, consumes you and refuses to release you until the story is gobbled up in a fit of flashing pages, neglected duties, ignored loved ones — the kind of book you insist everyone read behind you.

The action begins in the sleepy Mexican village of Tres Camarones on the Pacific coast.  In this village, perhaps typical of rural Mexico, the men have all gone north to seek work in the U.S.  Some write home and send money, while others simply disappear.  Nineteen-year-old Nayeli has not heard from her father since his last postcard from the Midwestern U.S. many years ago.  Meanwhile, menacing narco thugs are turning up in the village, hanging out at the taco stand where she works and plotting their nefarious schemes.

As things grow more dire in the village, Nayeli and some compadres, including several girlfriends and the flamboyant owner of the taco stand (La Mano Caida, or the Fallen Hand), head north to recruit a posse of men to come back and defend the village, in a scheme inspired by The Magnificent Seven, their favorite movie at the local cinema.  With the help of a mysterious garbage dump-dwelling samurai, they embark on a dangerous border crossing at Tijuana with the hopes of finding the handsome young surfer missionary who once passed through their village, now reported to be in San Diego, and just maybe find Nayeli's father.

Into the Beautiful North is a completely entertaining tale, buoyant with vivid prose and dialogue, a brisk plot, and a unique take on the immigrant experience. But most impressive here are the characters, who are so lovable you'd attempt a treacherous border crossing with them, and possibly even take up with their posse out of wistful devotion.

Readers of one tongue may be put off by the Spanglish, but Urrea does a sly job of translating the playful phrasing, which gives the prose its multi-hued flair.  The plot is so light and swift it won't matter.  Just lie in the sun and let it whisk you away to a different place.

In the meantime, enjoy this clip from the author's website: