One Little, Two Little, Three Little Indians

thirteen moons: A Novel
Charles Frazier
Random House
Hardcover
October 2006

I have to admit I didn’t know this was a new book when it was given to me. The cover doesn’t have the sleek highly composed over wrought design other novels trend to and it feels worn. You usually don’t put the feel of the cover in a book review but I’m apologizing here: this is the Old Book review not the Just frikkin Published review and I’m sorry. I honestly didn’t know.

It took me a while to buy into this book. I tend stay away from westerns and civil wart trope. I didn’t even like Tishamingo Blues because the Civil Wart re-enactment stuff just turns me off. For the record no Civil Wart re-enactment scenes occur in thirteen moons. It’s about Indians.

Specifically one Indian, Will Cooper, who isn’t actually an Indian. Cooper is a ‘bound boy’ which amounts to a white slave in the southern frontier country in the years well before the Civil Wart. You don’t read much about this in history books in school or anywhere else. Given the sheer tonnage of books I’ve consumed, I figure I would’ve skimmed over it at least once but Frazier surprised me with some history. I didn’t know people sold their adolescent and even pre adolescent boys into a kind of indentured servitude as shop keepers for trading posts in the far reaches of settled territory. Cooper winds up inside the Cherokee nation in the hills of Tennessee. He is befriended by a Chief, Bear, who’s tribal identity is indistinct except to say that his tribe is his tribe and that’s about as far as it goes.

Frazier, a man who carefully chooses detail, wisely stays away from the literary black-hole of Indian tribal identity. He obviously has done a master’s degree worth of research into the history of Indians in America but he sprinkles the details and the knowledge carefully so that it enhances the story and intrigues the reader instead of attempting to educate them on every maddening point.

Cooper is adopted by Bear and grows up as a member of the tribe, eventually traveling to Washington on their behalf, and securing vast holdings of property and land and a monetary entitlement that guarantees their future to a degree.

13 Moons rambles. Frazier capably writes a if he’s an old man in 1871 writing in long loopy cursive with a quill tip pen on the front porch of his antebellum home. The story rolls through the landscape of the Tennessee hills and valley like a creek and he paints a vivid, glowing picture of the land before it was dammed and paved. His depiction of Indians may surprise some people—unless they’re Indians. First, his use of the word Indian in place of Native American. I am great friends with members of the Alabamu-Couschatta tribe and I can tell you, they call themselves Indians. I have performed the most minor research on the Alabamu and have studied their Smithsonian records and history. They are a singular and tiny tribe, bouncing back and forth between their ancestral lands along the Coosa river in . . . see how easy it is? You start talking about Indian history and pretty soon you have literary diarrhea. Frazier avoids that.

The Indians in 13 Moons are real. They aren’t always noble and they aren’t always distinct from the settlers. They build mansions and own slaves and drink fine French wine. They also hunt bear with a hatchet and gleefully overhunt their game for money. The whites fare no better—though Frazier has a soft spot fir the Scottish Highlanders that settled Tennessee and mentions them in terms that come close to mythic more than once. I suspect Frazier has an erudite and passionate love of small batch whiskeys.

Still, I had a hard time getting into the book. Part of it, in fairness, can be attributed to my typical dislike of Southern History, Civil Wart bullshit, and trapper dialogues in general. All I have to see is buckskin fringe and I write it off. The problem is that a lot of buckskin hacks write their very best version of a made for TV movie which rewards the attentive reader with a solid ‘thunk’ when it hits the bottom of the garbage pail and not much more. Frazier, genius that he is, finds the original, or forgotten, in this old trope and makes a great story out of it.

Most of Frazier’s language is undecorated and free from affectation. Where it isn’t, when Cooper deviates into a kind of gently ornamented frontier twang or when he sounds a little like Mark Twain’s version of a backwoods scholar, it mostly works.

While Cooper is by turns funny, bawdy, grim, and wistful, he is also kind of light on his feet. Everything that happens to him generally kind of works out and even the parts that ought to be terrifying and cruel are observed from horseback from a distance. This is partly due to Frazier writing a memoir. It has to be written in past tense and loses some urgency there.

Cooper spends a considerable portion of the book on the back of a horse, going up and down the trails of his homeland, never getting a scratch on him and the reader begins to tire of it a little. The character recedes and recedes. Like the book, Cooper is like a beautiful painting that fades the longer you look at it.

.:[G]:.

Mama's Got a Squeezebox

"Accordion Crimes"
by Annie Proulx
Scribner
June, 1996

Again, I'm starting in the middle. Annie Proulx (pronounced Proo, in case you were wondering) wrote "The Shipping News," in 94 and was suddenly the most important writer in the godgiven world. She also wrote the story, "Brokeback Mountain," which became the controversial film of the same name. This means she also wrote the catchphrase that won't quit: I wish I could quit you. I guess. I don't know becuase I didn't read that one or the News. I've decided, against all odds, to discover Ms. Proulx by reading a book from the middle of her arc: "Accordion Crimes".

So I don't have anything to compare her to--from her own pile, I mean. I can't say how this book signals the beginning of a stellar career, or this book, coming on the heels of her stellar novel, blah blah blah. I never get it easy.

I had a hard time putting this book down which created a problem because I really needed to put it down. Not only was the laundry piling up and the dog pressed against the door with an uncomfortable grimace on his snout, I had to put it down because it was just too much. Who writes like this!? The woman puts more story on one page than most artists can wring out of their pen in a year of labor. The story is---to say it is dense is too simple and not entirely correct. Precision is important because I adore this story and I want to describe it with the perfect word, I want to get it exactly right because that is what the author spent so much time doing this for me. It would be impolite not to return the favor. Her writing is, the story is, a complex divination. It does not evoke the period and times she writes about. It doesn't wrestle the people out of the paper like some books. Its much more hallucinogenic, more like a drug. You start reading and there is a weight to the story that gains momentum and suddenly you're in it, you're walking next to these people, running with them, running downhill.

Proulx's book is an excellent lesson for readers. For writers as well, but only if they read it for the sake of reading, first. Because this is a book that rewards committed readers, the kind of people who take the phone off the hook and cancel appointments, miss work, church, meals, anything for a great story.

Reading, the other side of writing, is one of the lasst great acts of magic left. But so many people have written books based on how they are taught a book should be written that they've sucked the fun out of it. I pick up a book and it lays itself out for me by the second page. The authors are told how to plan their story, how to plot it, how to create characters, how to structure for effect. It's all bullshit and it reads like a manual instead of a novel. What these poor bastards are not taught is why they should write. How they should write. They all ought to read Proulx because she's one of the first North American writers to really know what she' doing--what every writer ought to be doing.

Discovering. Searching. Following.

The perfect writer is an explorer, one of those 19th century guys with sherpas going up K12 for the first time, discovering a new species of mango wasp, submitting to an initiation ritual. Every new story is undiscovered country filled with people who've never existed till the moment the author lays eyes on them. The author's job is to get out of the way and let it happen, to follow the track of the story to it's end.

Only when the author doesn't know where she's going can her reader really have the kind of startling experience a great book supplies.

Of course, I don't know how Annie Proulx writes. She might work with a predetermined number of verbs. She might have a 12 foot high corkboard wall covered with 3x5 colored cards. I don't have any idea. All I know is she lives in Wyoming.

The book follows the life of a hand made Italian button accordion from its birth in a poor man's shop through the birth of modern America. That's a gimmick. No doubt, a literary device. But it doesn't matter. It's a damn good gimmick.

In some of the stories, you barely see the instrument. In some, it begins the story then the whole thing, the whole bloody, disjointed family history spills out of its bellows and you forget about the instrument until teh very end when it shows up and you think Oh yeah, the accordion, and you realize it's not a gimmick for the story, it's a trick, a maneuver, a discipline for the writer.

Because before you and I follow this accordion from family to family Annie Proulx did and I think she's as suprised as the rest of us by where the squeezebox ends up.

It's a good book, a chunky read. Toothsome. And take the phone off the hook. Cancel your weekend.

A Brilliant Fable is Never a Foible

"The Tale of the Unknown Island"
Jose Saramago
Harcourt Brace
1998 (English ed. 1999)
Translated from Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa 

This tiny book, just 51 pages, many of them one-sided, is a quick read. I picked it up at the library, started reading it while I was waiting on my kids to get out of school, and was done before the teenager finally slid into the backseat. Even factoring in the irritating retrograde of 'teen time,' that's not very long. You could finish this book on the train on your way to work. You could finish it in the tub.

I think it's important to talk about the length of the book because a lot of people might dismiss something so small thinking it can't possibly tell enough story--which is silly. And of course you and I would never be so pedantic that we'd dismiss a book because we could easily mistake it for a deck of cards. Only pathetic snobs do that. We're elite snobs.

Jose Saramago is new for me. I've never read his famous books, such as, "The Stone Raft," or "Blindness," so perhaps I am at a disadvantage in reading "Unknown Island" without having sampled his literary corpus. So if I say something any first year literary major ought to be able to rattle off in his sleep regarding our wordy Portuguean, please feel free to fire off a poisonous DUH.

First of all, it's really a short story published as a hardback. As a short story, it strays off the well-worn road and nearly crashes headlong into G.G. Marquez’s delicious fable about a storm wounded angel, "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings." Saramago's story, like Marquez's, is a fable, a fairy tale for grown ups.

Saramago's story reads as if it is being told, not being written, and as much as trigger happy literary labelists will stamp it ALLEGORY, I don't buy it. Nowhere in the book does Saramago employ rhetoric. His tale is exactly that: a tale. His King is a glyph of royalty. He is a living breathing character, sure, but he’s stock. He doesn’t preach or persecute. He just says his lines. They’re interesting lines but they serve the politics of the story.

This is not author as teacher; it is author as vessel, which is softer and more fun. But, even as a fable, "Island" runs up against allegory and I'm sure somewhere in some university some august gentleman with more harrumphs in his diction than a spastic British librarian is passionately debating this very point, but that's about as far as I'm willing to take it. I calls 'em like I sees 'em and it's a folksy, whimsical story with more meaning than the words, by themselves, convey.

Mr. Saramago employs a device I haven't seen in a long time and I think this, again, is what gives the book such a storyteller's mouth. Instead of separating dialogue with quotation marks he puts it all into the same sentence. It's breathless and quick, like a nine-year-old kid. It brightens the pace and gives the story a sudden sparkle I wasn't expecting. The story is certainly crisp enough and if there's a word wasted it isn't in the text. Maybe the title page is a little verbose, I don't know. That whole paragraph about "translated from Portuguese by M. J. Costa," seemed to run on.

I suspect Saramago's comes through in this book. I say that never having heard the man speak. I assume, from the writing, that he's a thousand years old and speaks Portuguese with a 3rd century Latin accent, but I might be wrong. I could pause right now and Google it but honestly, facts don't matter in this matter: in “Island,” the narrator's voice is a grandfather's voice, burnished soft brown, like an old leather chair, as crackly as a low fire. I imagine it's a voice pregnant with horse sense and history, the kind Hollywood ad execs would pay ten gazillion dollars an hour to read their copy because no one can resist it. The man could sell you your own dog if he felt like it. The voice pokes out of the page when you're not paying attention and you can almost hear him telling you the story and there, right there when that happens, when Granddaddy Saramago's hearth fire voice starts reading the story in your head and your own voice disappears way in the back to have a Scotch, this is where you realize you are hopelessly enchanted by a master storyteller. Saramago has achieved what every writer would sell his mother’s soul for: the ability to stand in the mind of the reader, alive and in control.

I'm deciding not to tell the story’s story. The book takes 22 minutes to read. Suffer the wait. I will tell you this much. It starts with these words:
"A man went to knock at the King's door and said, give me a boat."

I will also reveal, with a flippant flop of my snobbish hand, that this is a love story. I repeat: THIS IS A LOVE STORY. Because you won't believe me until the end and then you will and even after having read this, Saramago's spectral presence in your head will have erased the idea from your mind and you'll have the same sudden grin on your face I did when I realized just what a magician Saramago really is.

Finally, Saramago's book really smacks other authors in their page counting asses. Here is the other ultimate work of the writer masterfully revealed. "Island" is told with a ferocious economy of words, with the manic Zen precision of a watchmaker. Even the punctuation is reduced to its bones. It’s a Minum Opus. Yet, instead of a brittle, fey, 'modern' story, which is difficult to read and beautiful only because it says so, Saramago's brilliant reduction is like a delicious soup stock--he let it simmer all day and you take one sip and something happens in your mouth you can't explain and all the tastes of all the component parts seem at once perfectly clear and distinct yet all they're melted together and they just . . . taste . . . perfect.
.:[G]:.