Washington Post Book Reviews
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Friday November 12, 2010
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DRIVING ON THE RIM
Thomas McGuane
Knopf
ISBN 978-1400041558
306 pages
$26.95
Reviewed by Michael Lindgren, a writer and musician who lives in Manhattan
Berl Pickett, the feckless doctor, fisherman, lover and accused murderer who narrates Thomas McGuane's "Driving on the Rim," is a splendid addition to the gallery of semi-cracked eccentrics who populate the literature of the American West. Pickett is like a cowboy Candide, a man whose "great good fortune it was to spend the first part of my life as a nitwit." His ineptitude is integral to his appeal, and as a result he seems to attract women and trouble in equal measure. That McGuane is able to build a hugely amusing and even moving novel around such a resounding antihero is testament to the enduring charms of one of the odder careers in American letters.
The novel, McGuane's 10th, starts out with a pair of deaths: that of Tessa, an old flame of Pickett's who has fallen on hard times, and Cody, a wife-beating burnout. Pickett is at the scene of both deaths, and the shock waves from these paired demises drive the narrative in cunning and often unexpected ways. The other people who dominate Pickett's musings -- he has a flair for metaphysical introspection -- are his parents: His mother is a fanatically devout Holy Roller; his father is a World War II veteran whose civilian life exists in the shadow of his reveries on the mayhem of battle. To top it off, Pickett becomes entangled in a tempestuous sexual relationship with a glamorous bush pilot.
If this all sounds far-fetched and scattered, it is, but McGuane has a way of turning the improbabilities of his unlikely pilgrim's progress into strengths. With effortless accuracy he captures the peccadilloes of small-town life, wherein everyone knows too well everyone else's business. He sketches the supporting cast of often lunatic denizens with ribald humor and affection. The outdoor scenes are lyrical -- a fish becomes "a hard cold bar of silver, gasping on the stones" -- and the book's denouement, where Pickett makes peace with the phantoms who have shadowed him, achieves something close to hard-won grandeur.
A writer this shambling and episodic runs the risk of being dismissed as nothing more than a tall tale-teller yoked to a set of verbal tics, but McGuane's literary effects are much trickier to achieve than they seem. Long gone are the pyrotechnical and somewhat off-putting verbal displays that marked his kid-prodigy novels of the early '70s. Woozy countercultural philosophizing has been replaced by an old-timer's sense of fatalistic resignation. He can still uncork sentences full of cowboy poetry and beguiling rhythms, but beneath the jaunty tone and skewed plotting now runs a strong streak of melancholy and an offhand yet persistent moral fervor.
"Driving on the Rim" is, in the end, a book about death and redemption. Pickett observes that "in suspending the rules of humanity for the convenience of emotion we gave way to wickedness." Despite having the agnosticism typical of physicians, he repeatedly comes up with such sin-haunted formulations. McGuane is not, of course, the first American male writer to frame his spirituality in terms of the beauty of the wilderness -- Pickett acknowledges that his "association of church and fishing (is) admittedly unoriginal" -- but there is something calm and unabashed about the expressions of serenity that gradually come to suffuse the book. At one point, Pickett observes that "of all the mysteries of life, nothing was more mysterious than the return of happiness. I was willing to wait." That he is, and by the end of "Driving on the Rim" it feels like the sweetest of benedictions.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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LIFE
Keith Richards
Little, Brown
ISBN 978 0 316 03438 8
564 pages
$29.99
Reviewed by Lou Bayard, a novelist who lives in Washington, D.C.
Mick Jagger has always looked -- will always look -- like Mick Jagger. But try to connect the glum schoolboy-guitarist of early '60s black-and-white pics with the Keith Richards of today. A heap of living and occasional bouts of near-dying have gone into that flayed, weathered, kohl-eyed visage, whose topography suggests a moonscape irrigated with Jack Daniel's. After half a century on the road, Richards has the face he deserves -- but not, it appears, the brain. Against all pharmaceutical odds, he has held on to a substantial portion of his own history and has turned it into the most scabrously honest and essential rock memoir in a long time.
Then again, where's the competition? The gods of rock 'n' roll tend to falter on the printed page. (Even Bob Dylan disappoints.) Maybe that's what comes from being a frontman: Gazing night after night into fame's corona blinds you to everything else. It's the guys prowling around behind you, the Harrisons and the Townshends, who take the fullest measure. How else to explain why Richards' "Life" is almost as densely packed as his life? Seemingly everything is here: the shabby origins in an East London suburb ("Everyone from Dartford is a thief. It runs in the blood"); the brief career as, yes, a boy soprano; the first guitar at 15; the astonishingly rapid rise to fame; the groupies and birds and dealers and sidemen; the booms, the busts, the loves lost and won; the hard-won and faintly miraculous old age.
In some cases, Richards' memories are supplemented by others; on every page, they are shaped by co-writer James Fox. But the voice that emerges is unmistakably the dark lord's: growly and profane and black with comedy. And, for all that, surprisingly charming, particularly in limning the Rolling Stones' origins, which can be traced, mundanely enough, to a fateful encounter in a train station.
Here is how the young Keith described it at the time in a letter to his aunt: "You know I was keen on Chuck Berry and I thought I was the only fan for miles but one mornin' on Dartford Stn. (that's so I don't have to write a long word like station) I was holding one of Chuck's records when a guy I knew at primary school 7-11 yrs y'know came up to me. He's got every record Chuck Berry ever made and all his mates have too. ... Anyways the guy on the station, he is called Mick Jagger ... the greatest R&B singer this side of the Atlantic and I don't mean maybe."
Still teenagers, Mick and Keith were soon recruiting other musicians to their cause -- a guitarist named Brian Jones, a drummer named Charlie Watts -- and spending every hour of every day listening to American blues players, trying to divine the music's secret language. They borrowed their band's name from a Muddy Waters tune, nabbed their first regular gig at a joint called the Crawdaddy Club, and within six weeks they were famous.
Take that, Lennon and McCartney! Small wonder that the Stones were marketed from the very start as "the anti-Beatles," the boys you must never let your daughters marry (and who will, on occasion, resemble your daughters). And through a combination of provocative behavior and equally provocative songs like "Sympathy for the Devil" and "Paint It Black," they got themselves promoted to "most dangerous rock 'n' roll band in the world," a reputation sealed by the violent 1969 concert at California's Altamont Speedway.
Infamy like this doesn't seem to have bothered Richards too much. And if he's less enthused by fame, he's never shied away from its perks. As a pop star, everything was vouchsafed to him: other people's clothes; other people's women; a battery of lawyers to bail him out every time he was arrested; a posse of enablers, leaving him free to do what he did best, which was to make music and get high. He undertook getting high with particular gusto: first weed and hash, then coke ("pure, pure Merck") and, for a ruinous decade, heroin. Even by rock standards, his consumption levels were Olympian. For a decade, he topped a magazine's list of "rock stars most likely to die."
And yet here he is, defiantly alive, and defiant in every other respect, too, his language just as politically incorrect, his judgments every bit as summary. The late Brian Jones: a whiner. Hugh Hefner: "What a nut." Bianca Jagger: "If she'd had a sense of humor, I'd have married her!" John Lennon: "a silly sod" who never left Richards' house "except horizontally." As for Anita Pallenberg, the model/actress/addict who bore three of Richards' children, family-newspaper decorum prevents me from repeating the author's opinions (even the nice ones).
By far the most complex and threshed-out relationship is the one between those two kids at the Dartford train station. They found early on that they were perfectly matched as songwriters -- Richards provided the riffs and chords, Jagger the lyrics -- but ill-matched as people. "Do you know Mick Jagger?" Richards snarls. "Yeah, which one? He's a nice bunch of guys." "Life" is larded with anecdotes of Jagger's egotism and vanity, not to mention aspersions against his manhood, and the hostility piles so high you may be pulled up short when Richards at last writes, with something of a defeated sigh, "I love the man dearly; I'm still his mate."
The word "mate" is well chosen, for this is a portrait of a marriage: an impossible union impossible to dissolve. Nearly 50 years on, Jagger and Richards are still (in a fashion) together, still (in a small way) making music. And it's one of the book's triumphs that it never completely loses sight of that music. Richards offers revealing looks into the genesis of individual songs (the breakup that inspired "Ruby Tuesday," for instance) and the complex open tuning that gave records like "Start Me Up" and "Honky Tonk Women" a reverb like no other. By book's end, one thing at least is clear: The work has mattered as much to Richards as the life; at some level, his work has been his life. "I could kick smack," he writes. "I couldn't kick music. One note leads to another, and you never know quite what's going to come next, and you don't want to."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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NATIVE AMERICAN SON: The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe
Kate Buford
Knopf
ISBN 978-0375413247
479 pages
$35
Reviewed by Steven V. Roberts
Jim Thorpe and Kobe Bryant both won Olympic gold medals (Thorpe for the pentathlon and decathlon in 1912, Bryant for basketball in 2008). Both got paid for playing sports before competing in the Olympics (Bryant earned millions with the Los Angeles Lakers, Thorpe made $25 a week playing baseball for the Rocky Mount Railroaders). But Bryant's name is in the Olympic record books.
Thorpe's is not.
After news accounts revealed that Thorpe had committed the unpardonable sin of playing baseball for money, Olympic officials summarily stripped him of his medals and expunged him from the record books. In 1982, 29 years after Thorpe's death, the International Olympic Committee tried to rectify that injustice by restoring his amateur status and minting new medals for his family. But the committee refused to repair the official record, a towering act of timidity. As Kate Buford writes in her new biography of Thorpe: "Without the public records, what did reinstatement mean? There was a whiff of frontier noblesse oblige: give the Indians the shiny trinkets but honor the dominant tradition and maintain the false but official record." (Just a few years later the Olympic committee allowed pros like Bryant to compete, but money still vexes college sports.)
Buford's first book was a biography of actor Burt Lancaster (who played Thorpe in the movies), so she knows about mythic heroes and draws a complex portrait: from his superhuman athletic talent to his all-too-human personal flaws. A member of the Sac and Fox tribe, Thorpe was raised in rural Oklahoma, where the tests of manhood started early. When the boy was 3, his father dropped him into a raging river and made him struggle to safety. He built up his stamina chasing and breaking wild horses. In Buford's telling, Oklahoma sounds like ancient Crete, and the animals could have been minotaurs.
Thorpe was sent off to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, where he started playing football, a game that perfectly utilized his superb combination of strength and speed (interestingly he lacked the "elastic freedom" of a natural baseball player and never succeeded at that sport). Carlisle played the top Ivy schools, and during the 1907 season the privileged preppies from Harvard were no match for a team that had both muscle and memory on their side. Wounded Knee, the last great battle of the Indian wars, had happened only 17 years before, and as Carlisle's famous coach, Pop Warner, put it: "The Indians ... (had) a real race pride and a fierce determination. They believed the armed contests between red man and white had never been waged on equal terms." On the gridiron, the terms were equal, and the braves finally won.
Thorpe helped create professional football and was eventually named the greatest male athlete of the first half of the 20th century. But great saxophonists and teachers and cooks can keep working into old age. Not athletes. Their bodies fail, and the cheering fades. Many have trouble adjusting to this decline, and so did Thorpe. He was reduced to organizing vagabond football teams that paid players $13.30 a game. He was never comfortable with his celebrity ("to be famous, for Jim, was to feel alone in the middle of a mob") and always felt "like an exile" in the "harshly competitive white world." His habitual drinking grew worse. He moved to Hollywood and worked in the movies, but on film -- as opposed to football -- the Indians always lost.
Buford can be a tedious writer, and I would tell her what I tell my writing students: Edit carefully, less is more. We do not need to know every movie Thorpe ever made. But the story is too compelling to be ruined. As a final humiliation, Thorpe's third wife convinced two towns in Pennsylvania to bury his body there and take the name Jim Thorpe. He would be a great tourist attraction, she promised. But it never happened. "By the mid-1960s, the citizens of Jim Thorpe felt like suckers," writes Buford, and one official complained about the deal: "All we got was a dead Indian."
Today Thorpe's surviving children want to return his remains to Oklahoma, and they continue "to insist that without a complete Indian burial ceremony, their father's spirit is a restless traveler from one dimension to another, at home in none of them."
But that was Jim Thorpe in life, too. Always restless, never at home. That's what happens when you grow up in Crete taming minotaurs.
Steven V. Roberts teaches writing and politics at George Washington University; his latest book, "From Every End of This Earth," is out in paperback this fall.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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