Ed Abbey Rides Again

Edward Abbey died in 1989, but the writer’s recently resurrected in a couple of compelling new books. His contrarian, combative manner championing solitude by way of the American West in particular is enjoying new appreciation, thanks to David Gessner and John A. Murray. In "All The Wild That Remains,” Gessner places Abbey beside Wallace Stegner, his bombast and brilliance illuminated by Stegner’s stoic determination. The West shaped both men and in turn, both writers shaped the way we read The West. Abbey seized early on his major theme, after his first glimpse of the Grand Canyon, where, “It was love at first sight.” Thereafter his refrain became about “falling in love with the place and the fight to protect the threatened loved one.” More to the point, says Gesnner, “there was something that felt new and direct, almost primal, about the way Abbey wrote about nature.” Like the stoic Stegner, Abbey struggled with fiction, finding instead the “clean intensity he was looking for” in non-fiction, though still able “to retain some of the remnant romanticism” he longed to achieve. Gessner’s Abbey is personal first, prophetic from a wider angle. In “Abbey in America: A Philosopher's Legacy in a New Century,” Editor John A. Murray collects multiple angles to focus the telling. Murray invokes Montaigne, the Psalms, and Basho, among others, in his introduction, explaining Abbey’s nature was “to examine a subject in a clinical light, acknowledging only established facts, and then draw rational conclusions that would, to his delight, cast popular dogma asunder,” suggesting this simple but direct approach is perhaps no longer fashionable. Edward Hoagland, longtime Abbey correspondent, explains, in “Abbey’s Road” his friend’s nature “was a labyrinth of anger and generosity, shy but arresting because of his mixture of hillbilly with cowboy qualities,” something serious readers have long parsed. Hoagland describes the two sitting at coffee “in silence in restaurants as our twinned melancholy groped for expression,” but stops short of sentiment, believing his friend “spilled too much energy into feuds with his allies and friends.” Journalist Charles Bowden feels the primal in Abbey’s influence, as he whirls in the vortex of the immigration dilemma. Bowden walks the border between his Arizona home and Mexico, invoking Abbey as he finds, “some cast-off clothing circling a small, spent fire, empty cans, a worn shoe left behind.” Abbey delicately, comically suggests, “’In the American Southwest, where I happen to live…the subject of illegal aliens is a touchy one,’” though he refuses to bow to euphemistic correctness. Before he concludes, Bowden wishes to “live long enough so that no one read Edward Abbey because we had ended our murderous ways,” but recognizes instead, “Everything I need and love is now an outlaw.” Abbey the outlaw is alive and well in “All The Wild That Remains” and “Abbey In America.” Good Reading

Kitchen tale tantalizes with tasty narrative

J. Ryan Stradal has never been to northern Michigan. Nonetheless, this did not stop him from moving one of his pivotal characters to “a small house in Petoskey, outside the town of Charlevoix,” near the apex of his new novel. “Kitchens of the Great Midwest” is Stradal’s first novel, and as the unconventional love story wends toward its conclusion, Cindy, an aging sommelier at the heart of a mother-daughter divide, lands in the north to salve her wounds. “I wrote about it hoping I’d be able to come,” Stradal says with a laugh about his decision to move Cindy to northern Michigan. As the story unfolds, Eva Thorvald comes of age in Minnesota heartland country before her rise to international culinary phenom, a chef who, as the story concludes, is able to tell her life story “’through the ingredients in this meal.’” Daughter of Lars and Cynthia, Eva traverses the culinary landscape of the Midwest, angling through chapters developed around such traditional foods and recipes as lutefisk, sweet pepper jelly, and venison. Each division concerns the point of view of one or another of the contributing characters, before the story lands at “The Dinner,” where Stradal reunites several of the characters who have drifted in and out of Eva’s sometimes tumultuous but always tasty life. “When I first sat down to write I knew what the ending was,” Stradal says. “I wanted to tell the story of a dinner party through the guests and work backwards.” At that final dinner party, Eva feeds several of those pivotal characters she encounters on her trip from toddler to chef, including Will Prager, Eva’s teenage crush. In high school, Will thought Eva “a woman whose hand he could take and stride into the darkness with.” He thought, “They could fix each other without even trying,” though as with many of the characters that Eva encounters, the fix won’t work. Eva's story unfolds chiefly through the points of view of the other characters. “I decided to put her at a distant point,” Stradal says of his decision to limit Eva’s perspective. Some of these other characters, like Octavia Kincade, do not make the final sit down, but nonetheless contribute important perspective to the developing narrative. Octavia, with a soul “broken like old bread and scattered in the snow for the birds,” fails to see the promise in Eva, though after some time away, when the two meet again, Octavia realizes Eva “hadn’t grown into being a woman, she had become a woman with an exclamation mark.” “I like to write into a story and let the characters tell me what the story is,” Stradal says. Food is central to the story, as it holds the narrative in place while the characters careen through tough times and flush times. The recipes in the book are from a cookbook that belonged to Stradal’s great-grandmother. “I wanted to use old family recipes as much as possible,” he says. Recipes include pan-seared walleye, grilled venison, and dessert bars among others. Less overt but no less important to the story is Stradal’s motif of music. From small Minnesota indie bands to the recognizable strains of Radiohead, Cake, and others, the sounds add a dimension of verisimilitude that enriches the story. “Other than food I think music is the great mnemonic of our lives,” Stradal says. Will Prager’s high school bandmates in the Lonesome Cowboys even believe, “’You might just get a whole album of lyrics from just yesterday alone,’” after Eva presents him with a simple hug after a forgettable date spent walleye fishing. More than a testament on food or music, however, the story is a look at enduring ideas about family. Cindy early on realizes she’s not cut out to be a mother, though she later worries that Lars might have spent “Eva’s entire life convincing her that somewhere, her cruel birth mother still existed as distant and unremarkable as a soldier in a foreign port.” Of course, Cindy could not be more wrong, and that is to Stradal’s credit. His wide-angle blend of character and place illustrate in layers the influences that move Eva from gothic teenage kitchen helper to mysterious, but successful, culinary innovator. In the end, Eva continues to woo diners around the world, while Cindy accepts she must “just live in the world she had created.” Together, this mother-daughter duo provides a wonderful read in “Kitchens of the Great Midwest.”

Uncle Walt Keeps Yawping

Wherever I turn these days, I bump into Walt Whitman. He lent me a line for a poetry anthology I edited, where I invoked his lilac metaphor, concluding, “Every leaf a miracle.” My son, on the hunt for a classic, asked for a copy of “Leaves of Grass,” Whitman’s slender opus of purely American Romanticism. Now John Marsh suggests Whitman can also save me from what ails me. In fact, Marsh believes Whitman might save us all. "In Walt We Trust,” Marsh trades on many of Whitman’s poems to explain, “how a queer socialist poet can save America from itself.” While the subtitle might strike some readers as hyperbole, in four slim chapters, with a couple brief interludes, Marsh details how Whitman and his poetry provide insight for rethinking death, debt, the decline of democracy, and more. “The result is a mix of biography, literary criticism, manifesto, and…self-help,” Marsh says in his introduction. Associate professor of English at Penn State, Marsh admits his treatise springs from “relentless, disabling headaches” that first afflicted him in his late twenties, indicating “fully-grown doubts, not just growing doubts, about the meaning of life and the purpose of our country.” While others “may quit their jobs, have an affair, or medicate,” at the onset of pain, Marsh instead drove to Camden, New Jersey, because he became convinced that Whitman, “the greatest poet America ever had…is the cure for what ails us.” On the existential worry of death, Marsh explains, “Few remember (Whitman) as a poet of death.” For Marsh, however, “death is (Whitman’s) great theme, though he treats it unlike any poet then or since.” Using “Leaves of Grass,” first issued in 1855, and other poems, Marsh explains how rather than nosedive into despair at the eventuality, “Whitman suggests that if you could see what he sees and experiences, these shared visions and experiences would reveal the hidden scheme of the universe.” In “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” from 1856, Whitman explains he is a part of the “’simple, compact, well-joined scheme,’” but more importantly, Marsh contends, asserts we are all part of this universal scheme, as we too “’shall cross from shore to shore years hence.’” On wealth and democracy, Whitman is equally worthy of our attention. In “A Song for Occupations,” the poet explains “the role of economics in our lives,” wondering, “’Were I to you as the boss employing and paying you, would/that satisfy you?’” His point of course is “money and property…are a dead end.” Democracy, however, is not a dead end, as Whitman explains we must move “toward affection, toward friendship, toward a nation founded on care.” Simple solutions cannot eradicate existential crises. But “In Walt We Trust,” John Marsh offers a clever examination of how America’s most notable poet might offer solace. Good Reading. www.monthlyreview.org

Barry Strauss on Julius Caesar

After more than 2000 years, what more can be said? Turns out plenty if the story the assassination of Julius Caesar. In “The Death of Caesar,” Barry Strauss, a history and classics professor from Cornell, recounts what has long been known but little understood by including up close assessments of those closest to Caesar, such as his young wife Calpurnia. More importantly, Strauss examines those, who while close to Caesar, are less well understood, like Decimus. There is no doubting that Gaius Julius Caesar was assassinated on March 15, 44 B.C. or that the assassination grew from collective frustration over Caesar’s aspirations to control more and more of the decision-making in ancient Rome. There is no doubt, either, about who participated in the assassination. Or about who used the chaos of the aftermath to advantage. What makes the story compelling then is the new angle from which to see what precipitated the famous murder. Brutus and Cassius, the two conspirators made famous in Shakespeare’s version, certainly planned the attempt. Mark Antony and Octavian, Caesar’s adopted son, as certainly turned the confusion and commotion to advantage. This is all well documented. What Strauss gives in addition to the documented history is an analysis of the deep-seated animosities and anxieties each conspirator felt personally and collectively. For example, Caesar consorted with Servilia, Brutus’s mother, leading some to speculate that the bad blood between the two men might have started as filial blood. It’s unclear what Brutus thought on this account. There are divisions that are clear here, however. “Not easily cowed, Brutus was “not one of Caesar’s longtime supporters but a rehabilitated enemy.” Early in the Roman civil war, Brutus opposed Caesar’s objectives, but “Caesar showed his confidence” by making Brutus governor of Italian Gaul. What Caesar viewed as calculating, though, may have proved his undoing, as Brutus grew more and more disillusioned, leaning more and more toward those who would unseat his mother’s lover. Misrepresented by Shakespeare’s as Decius, Caesar’s ally Decimus was “(a) noble of impeccable pedigree,” who may have been the most important conspirator. He brought an allegiance that even the others did not have. “He had Caesar’s confidence and he had a band of gladiators,” both useful to the larger plot. In his letters, Decimus, “ambitious, competitive, proud, and violent,” reveals he may have desired some of Caesar’s power, but he feared Caesar’s adoptive son Octavian, caught then between allegiance and ambition. Once fixed on their objective, the group sought to bring aboard others of the right bent to carry out the plan. Before long, they were able to leverage enough of Caesar’s former allies and his current enemies to carry out the assassination. After more than 2,000 years, some stories grow stale. Not so with “The Death of Caesar.” Good Reading.

Tom McGuane Traverses Family Fault Line is Crow Fair

At the conclusion of his title story “Crow Fair,” Tom McGuane’s narrator understands he’s “getting to be…an old timer.” McGuane, Michigan born and raised, is himself an old timer, but his new collection of short stories illustrates he still commands the form. Like his running buddy Jim Harrison, McGuane now calls Montana home, so most of these stories are set in Big Sky Country, where his characters, old timers and some younger, lean into the troubles that accompany a range of ailments, real and imagined, but always family-themed. These stories hover over fault lines. In “Weight Watchers,” the narrator’s father moves in because, “My mother had thrown him out again, this time for his weight.” His father, it seems, is “insufficiently committed to his weight-loss journey.” Over the next week, the two men, father—at more than 250 pounds, and son--a small town contractor who lives alone--shadow box through memories of earlier times. “My father believed that anything done for pleasure was escapism,” our narrator explains, illustrating the old man’s attitudes. In a few short pages melancholy memories of how the narrator, who cannot “imagine letting anyone new stay in (his) house for more than a night,” navigates his largely unremarkable Midwestern upbringing. In “Hubcaps,” McGuane heads back to Michigan to find Owen, whose parents, by midafternoon, “were usually having their first cocktails.” The boy escapes to the neighbors and the “baseball diamond that the three Kershaw boys and their father had built in the pasture across from their house.” “Happy with his George Kell spot at third base,” Owen tries to avoid the unraveling of his parents’ marriage by accompanying Mr. Kershaw on arrowhead scavenging treks. When more and more of his life delaminates, however, Owen tries to patch it together by adding to his hubcap collection, even wandering “the darkened parking lot” to do so, replacing the cohesion of a predictable family structure with the lonely pursuit of simple law breaking. In the title story, Earl, a loan officer, and his brother Kurt, an orthodontist, move their mother to a rest home. Though their father “was a mouse” who “looked like a corkscrew” the last few years of his life, their mother “was a queen.” Now in the throes of dementia, however, she recollects her old lover “Wowser,”as the middle-aged brothers try to reconstruct their youth to find some sense in her senseless ranting. Ultimately, Earl invents “a gentler interpretation of (their) mother and the choices she made.” In “Crow Fair,” McGuane, author of more than a dozen other books, returns to familiar ground, whether the Midwest or the Big Sky, to examine the fault lines, real or imagined, of family.