Victorian stock characters get attacked by carnivorous plants and animals. The drawings have a simplicity matched by the rhyming couplets that explain the terrors illustrated for our enjoyment. The poetry conjures up nursery rhymes and like nursery rhymes, they veil the fangs and claws of Nature. Gorey’s slim volume is reminscent of the playful chaos of “Alice in Wonderland” and has a curdled humor like Max Cannon’s “Red Meat.”
Posted in book reviews, books, nature
Tagged Alice in Wonderland, book reviews, books, chaos, culture, fantasy, fiction, Gorey, Max Cannon, poetry, pop culture, Red Meat, Victorian
On a mid-March afternoon in Denver, Ed O’Fallon and a DPD SWAT Team enter a run-down building on a no-knock warrant. He comes upon a sleepy Mexican man who doesn’t respond to his commands. A gun is drawn (or not?) and Ed fires. The man is killed. Ed later finds out that the no-knock warrant had the wrong address and the man had a name, Salvador Santillano.
The Ringer by Jenny Shank chronicles the repercussions in Denver’s Latino and law enforcement communities. While the engine that propels the narrative forward revolves around Santillano’s death, Shank begins the novel with Ed and the Pink Unicorns. Ed’s hot temper caused his ouster from coaching his sons’ baseball league. Instead, he coaches the Purple Unicorns, the tee-ball team of his young daughter Molly. The girls could pick the name of their teams, hence the sugary cuteness of the names. “We need to work hard today, Unicorns, because our first game is in two weeks. … It’s against the Southeast Denver Baby Kittens.” Following the team practice, we are thrust into the world of the SWAT team, where life-and-death decisions and following orders become serious matters.
The novel follows the lives of Ed O’Fallon and Patricia Maestas de Santillano in alternating chapters. While coming from separate worlds, their situations mirror each other. Both have young children, both must deal with the consequences of Salvador’s death, and both are nominally Catholic. During Salvador’s funeral service, Patricia can’t get beyond the empty spectacle, reeking of incense and stilted choreography. Similarly, Ed goes to his church to confess his sin. During his confession, the priest acts like a distracted middle manager, casually dismissing Ed’s troubles with a mixture of contempt, annoyance, and Thomistic hair-splitting. Since Ed acted in self-defense, the death of Salvador by his hand is not considered a sin. This infuriates Ed, since his childhood involved penitent prayer when he had “lustful thoughts.” It is one of the most damning portrayals of clergy outside of a Gothic novel.
The one hardest hit by the tragedy is Patricia’s son Ray, a pitcher of extraordinary talent who is recruited into the Pirates, a team in a more competitive league. The stakes are high, since Salvador’s death has pushed Ray into the orbit of local Latino banger named Miguel. Baseball provides an arena that offer’s Ray safety and distraction. Since Patricia is now a single parent, watching over Ray has become that much harder.
The novel then broadens its scope beyond the domestic and into the realm of the public and the political. Patricia’s mother Lupe arrives from Arizona to aid her daughter. Lupe was a Latina activist in the Sixties, ready to fill Patricia’s addled head with stories of protest marches and boycotts. An advocacy group is quickly organized, seeking to give Patricia the justice she deserves. Like any mass movement, it develops its own momentum and adopts a wide mandate. Ed and his police comrades do not want more public resentment and backlash.
Shank deftly navigates the dangerous currents of contemporary community politics. On the one hand, the community wants justice to be served. As the saying goes, “Who will watch the watchmen?” No law enforcement body, regardless of its track record, should be above public scrutiny. On the other hand, Ed tears himself apart. He wants to apologize for his mistake, yet unemployment would be personally and financially devastating.
In the end, the paths of Patricia, Ray, and Ed collide. It is a credit to Shank’s talent as a novelist that this collision does not appear contrived. The novel excels in its depiction of everyday people dealing with extraordinary events. Unlike thrillers and police procedurals, there are no good guys and no bad guys. With police clannishness and activist passions, it is convenient to paint the opponent as the bad guys. That’s not to say one shouldn’t make judgments about fatal accidents. Shank lets the reader make up his or her mind regarding Ed’s culpability.
The Ringer is many novels in one. It is a great Baseball Novel, Police Novel, and Community Novel. Her Denver, with all its rivalries, passions, and physical beauty, is reminiscent of Balzac’s Paris. She can switch from the macro to the micro with precision and grace. This is a big novel filled with tiny literary flourishes. These flourishes come together with her compelling believable characters, characters one would meet at the supermarket or at some random school or community event. With passions running high across the globe, it is refreshing to read a novel that shines a light on contemporary problems, yet examines these same problems with ordinary people.
Posted in book reviews, books, Permanent Press
Tagged baseball, book reviews, books, catholic, catholicism, culture, Denver, fiction, Latina, Latino, police, sports
Strange and short, straddling realism and fable, Standing at the Crossroads by Charles Davis tells the tale of Ishmael, his encounters, his adventures, and, above all, his love for literature. Employed as “The Walking Librarian,” he cuts a muscular figure from the heavy books he carries from village to village. For now, his books lay buried in a dry well and he finds himself on a journey with a strident woman named Kate.
Ishmael grew up in the harsh land of an unnamed African nation, now a failed state filled with militias sporting anemic acronyms and engaging in atrocities. One of the most fearsome militias is the Warriors of God. They use horses, trucks, and helicopters to commit their crimes against humanity. In the end, that is what Ishmael seeks to protect with his books, his stories, and his ethos: humanity. He sees the foibles of Fr. Gianni, a missionary who taught both him and his friend, Jemal. Ishmael makes short order of Fr. Gianni’s hectoring and Jemal’s eventual slide into Islamic fundamentalism. “Jemal and I had barely spoken since the business about paradise’s sanitary arrangements for his private parts, but I would have liked to say goodbye. When we next met, he was a Warrior of God and I was the Story Man.” Ishmael’s naïve, literalist interpretation of Jemal’s wishes for Paradise hides a rapier wit intent on deflating the pomposities and absurdities that surround him. This isn’t the usual snark that permeates us today, but a means of survival. In an earlier scene, Ishmael recites Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” to some Warriors of God sitting in a small group. They don’t know how to respond, since the poem is gibberish, a made-up nonsense language. It holds in stark relief their perversion of religion into rote memorization of a sacred text and using it to attack “the lips and lips below,” Ishmael’s description of their sexual atrocities.
The Warriors of God are not the only targets of Ishmael’s wit. During his journey with Kate, a student activist, he slowly falls in love with her. But he cannot reconcile himself with her strident belief that exposing the atrocities to the world will make this unnamed country a better place. Africa has been a familiar battleground for missionaries, merchants, and conquerors. Each has sought to exploit the continent in their own way, sometimes in concert with each other. Ishmael’s skepticism and cynicism belong to one who has seen well-intentioned forces come and go, rise and fall, and ebb and flow. In the parlance of our time, “Been there. Done that.”
The pair becomes a trio when they inadvertently adopt a child named Mara, orphaned by the Warriors of God. Ishmael, Kate, and Mara could resemble some modern sociopolitical version of the Holy Family. This is where Davis excels. Instead of turning the three into a makeshift imitation of an obvious trope, they inhabit an ambiguous space between the eternal and the quotidian. The narrative approaches both the mythical and the realistic without settling in either. Landscapes get described with realistic sensual details while Ishmael exhibits characteristics of an Everyman and a ripped-from-the-headlines true-life individual, straight out of some Nicholas Kristof editorial one reads with their Sunday coffee.
This novel also tells a tale of booklust. Throughout this brief story, under two hundred pages, it buckles under the weight of Western Literature. It is rare that a book feels longer than it really is … and in a good way. The only other book that gave me such a reaction, another tale of booklust, was Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess. It is this booklust, this promiscuous desire to read, to know, to consume, that gives this book shards of hope and comedy amidst the war, carnage, atrocity, and hate. While Ishmael would recuse himself from the status as the book’s hero, the real hero of these pages is literature itself. Stories, books, characters, and adventures we tell ourselves. It is a means to preserve our humanity, our sanity, and ourselves, a bulwark against barbarism, literalism, and the narrow mind.
Posted in book reviews, books, Permanent Press
Tagged africa, book reviews, books, culture, fiction, genocide, war
