Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Tuesday January 4, 2011
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OLD BORDER ROAD
Susan Froderberg
Little, Brown
ISBN 978-0316098779
292 pages
$23.99
Reviewed by Ron Charles, The Washington Post's fiction editor. You can follow him on Twitter (at symbol)RonCharles.
When people talk about genre fiction, their list peters out somewhere after romance and sci-fi -- long before they get down to westerns, those once-mighty best-sellers that now seem as quaint as leather fringe. (Quick: Who won this year's Spur Award?) You don't have to be all that old to remember an era when the sun rose every day on novels about cowboys and horses, but two decades after Louis L'Amour took his boots off, Bantam is publishing his books in "Legacy Editions," a sclerotic label if there ever was one. Cormac McCarthy has left horses for the apocalypse. And reviewing a Larry McMurtry novel last year, our reviewer said, "The prose seems summary in nature, imparting a 'let's get this over with' quality."
Them would be fightin' words if anybody still cared.
So I'm doubly curious to see a talented new writer publish her first novel about the tribulations of a ranch family in southern Arizona. Admittedly, "Old Border Road" isn't a western by any formal definition of the term, but Susan Froderberg builds on those old tropes to tell a mournful story of men and women scraping by on America's arid frontier. These people use trucks and electricity and telephones, but they still depend on the land and their horses and especially the weather, and the big event in their future is the regional rodeo. In many ways, it's a world that seems closer to the 19th century than the 21st, and like Karen Fisher's "A Sudden Country" and Molly Gloss' "The Hearts of Horses," this is a Western transformed by its focus on a young woman.
The story itself is fairly thin, but Froderberg's narrator, 17-year-old Katherine, has a raw poetic voice that makes the tale an arresting incantation of longing and regret. Katherine's plans of one day becoming a scientist are brushed aside when she drops out of high school to marry a cocky young cowboy named Son. (He introduces himself by unclasping her halter top; he's classy like that.) After a wedding marked by enough omens to give Oedipus second thoughts, she says, "I am so much in love these days, I take pity on anyone who isn't us. ... Yes, we are yet the happy pair, we are, with not a thing to mar any day of all the days on the road for us." That rueful allusion to "Paradise Lost" -- "Live while ye may, yet happy pair" -- recurs throughout the novel, gathering beneath it Katherine's disappointed hopes.
Amply alerted by these foreboding lines, no one should be surprised that Son makes a pretty wretched spouse, but Froderberg, who has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia University, has written a story thick with atmosphere, not suspense. When Katherine moves in with Son's parents, she falls under the care of two rather odd people. Her mother-in-law, Rose, teaches her how to be a good farm wife, which mostly involves ignoring a husband's philandering. And her father-in-law, creepily nicknamed Rose's Daddy, sits around delivering blessings and jeremiads in King James Version English: "Henceforth, the world entered upon modern times and man came to believe in the power of himself, rather than believing in that of which he was made and of what made him," he proclaims in a typically grandiose riff. "They groped in the noonday as in the nighttime. And within the blackness of the days, humankind was terrified."
Katherine takes in a lot of Rose's Daddy's mythology -- it is, to be honest, weirdly enthralling -- but she retains a kernel of her natural teenage skepticism, too, and what we see during the months that follow is a series of emotionally intense, impressionistic scenes that seem fraught with doom. Froderberg gives over a lot of control to her young, unschooled narrator, allowing the story to follow Katherine's interests without much concern for context or elaboration or, sometimes, chronology. Water rights, local and international politics and ancestral real estate claims hover on the edges of Katherine's consciousness and around the margins of these pages. Alluring characters fade in and out of the foreground, and we learn about them only erratically, always aware that we don't really know much about them at all. A seductive minister dressed in white preaches a flatulent New Age doctrine of self-actualization that seems comically irrelevant to these parched ranchers. A wealthy beauty named Pearl Hart seems as ready to crush Katherine as help her.
Almost the entire story takes place during a drought that slowly bakes everything for hundreds of square miles around. It's a conflagration in slow motion -- a "calamity of the heat and the dust" -- and Froderberg displays a limitless capacity for describing its effects: "The sere drives desert rodents and millipedes to hole in the earth, it singes wings of monarchs, silences chickadees, sends cacti into dormancy, has every animal panting." The drought also drives human beings to extremes, even while it destroys the local economy, plays havoc with water rights and inspires Rose's Daddy to make even more dire proclamations about the folly of man.
This is a novel that teaches you how to read it, and you either join in or get outta town. The effect is often moving and evocative, if at times irritatingly vague -- an Old West version of Toni Morrison. It's good to be reminded again that this classic American form is no one-trick pony; it's still evolving, still turning those sepia myths into challenging new fiction.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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A SECRET GIFT: How One Man's Kindness -- and a Trove of Letters -- Revealed the Hidden History of the Great Depression
Ted Gup
Penguin Press
ISBN 978-1594202704
365 pages
$25.95
Reviewed by Robert S. McElvaine, who teaches history at Millsaps College. His most recent book is a 25th anniversary edition of "The Great Depression: America, 1929-1941."
One day in June 2008, Ted Gup's mother gave him an old suitcase that contained a large envelope on which his grandfather had written, "PERTAINING TO XMAS GIFT DISTRIBUTION." Inside were 150 letters written by residents of Canton, Ohio, in December 1933 to someone named "B. Virdot," responding to his offer to give $10 each to 75 people who wrote to him describing their need. Gup soon realized that this mysterious B. Virdot was, in fact, his grandfather Sam Stone, and he began to investigate the story behind the offer.
In exploring a mystery of his own family, Gup, a former reporter for The Washington Post, simultaneously explores America's past, taking us into the depths of an era that was both similar to and very different from where we are today. He captures one of the main differences when he pointedly notes that it was "a time when consumption meant TB, not a shopping spree. ... Their creed was self-discipline, not self-indulgence."
"Reading the letters put things in perspective," the author says, and reading his book should do the same for others. "They reminded me of the difference between discomfort and misery, between the complaints of consumers forced to rein in their spending and the keening of parents whose children went hungry night after night."
As I read this book, it brought back not only the hard times of eight decades ago, about which I have written extensively, but also my own experience. Gup's reaction when reading the letters sent to his grandfather duplicated mine when I began reading letters written to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt that became my first book, "Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the 'Forgotten Man.'" Gup says the Depression had had no "immediacy" for him, but the letters made it come alive by providing an "unvarnished and compelling" account of the era.
He writes that he felt as if he were "eavesdropping on others' prayers." The letters in "A Secret Gift" were written in one city at one moment during the Depression and largely by one class of people, yet the conditions they portray were similar across the country. "I worked all my life and would work at any honest work if I could get it," one letter writer said, speaking for much of the nation. Another pointed out that those who were "lucky enough to have no worry where the next meal is coming from don't realize how it is to be like we are."
While there are significant parallels between the 1930s and today, the differences are striking. The Great Depression tended to unite the United States; the so-called Great Recession has tended to divide us. Americans during the Depression were much more familiar with hardship, more reticent about their personal problems, less greedy and more compassionate than we are today. And, terrible as conditions are now for many of our citizens, they were far worse in 1933. This book reminds us that the main reason people are not as bad off in the wake of the 2008 collapse as they were after that of 1929 is precisely because of government intervention in the economy that Republicans have just won an election by deriding.
Gup points out that his grandfather's experiences had "chastened him to remember that the line between the down-and-out and himself was not drawn in indelible ink." That is a realization that all too many of us no longer have. Gup describes his grandfather as "a one-time socialist-turned-capitalist" who had "seen the faults in both and was a true believer in neither." Sam Stone had a checkered past, which he frequently altered to suit his current needs. In 1933, he owned a chain of clothing stores and thought he was in a position to assist others who had fallen on hard times, as he had in the past.
"Enough," Gup rightly notes, "was a byword of the Depression." It is a word that nearly vanished from the American lexicon in recent decades, as the national anthem could appropriately have been changed to "I Can't Get No Satisfaction." "A Secret Gift" speaks to us eloquently of how similar are the consequences of economic folly in both times and how sobering are the differences between us as people today from what we were eight decades ago.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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