Sunday Book Notes--Pillars of the Earth

I've always known Ken Follett as the author of suspense thrillers -- not my favorite genre -- so when I was casting about for a comfortable read, I was dubious when a friend recommended Pillars of the Earth. But, I was looking for a good yarn to while away a wintry weekend by the fire, so I decided to give it a try.

The setting intrigued me. The novel spans several decades in 12th century England. It follows the stories of peasants, monks, masons, knights, bishops and kings whose lives intersect in one way or another as a great cathedral is built in the fictional village of Kingsbridge.

The novel draws a rich, detailed portrait of a time when life was nasty, brutish, and short. Powerful men rape, massacre and plunder with impunity; starving children are left in the forest to die by parents who cannot feed them; and grossly disfigured outlaws kill for a pair of leather boots or a bag of turnips.

Spoiler alert: Below there be plot points!

The first half centers on Tom Builder, a down-on-his-luck stone mason struggling to feed his starving family. In the forest, he meets three people who will shape his life: Ellen, the bewitching and fierce woman of the forest; Philip, the new Prior of Kingsbridge who will one day hire Tom as the Master Builder of the new cathedral; and William Hamleigh, who will become Earl, terrorizing all who are unfortunate enough to find themselves in his path.

We meet Tom and his family on the road, as they tramp from town to town, seeking work and bread. This stolid but intelligent man is a compelling character, especially after he meets Ellen, a rumored witch who lives in a cave and becomes Tom's common-law wife after his first wife dies in childbirth. Tom works his way, literally, into the job of building the cathedral, impressing Father Philip with his knowledge of stone and his patient, unflappable manner.

Philip is the core of the novel, touching the lives of everyone, even Thomas Becket, whose murder he witnesses in the final chapters of the book. Philip is pious and proud, ambitious and humble. His compassion and intelligence enable him to expand Kingsbridge from a village to a thriving city, and along the way, to help other characters achieve their destinies.

When the story centers on the lives of ordinary people -- even ordinary people who go on to do extraordinary things -- it is at its best. But hovering on the periphery are tales of royal intrigue, which at times threaten to take over the book. In these episodes, I found my attention waning. I preferred the company of Tom and Ellen, struggling to hold their odd family together, or of Philip as he frets about how to fend off the machinations of the slimy Bishop Waleran. I like characters who jump off the page and become alive in my mind. When the book diverged from their stories, especially in the end, with the murder of Beckett, I found myself skipping pages -- something I very rarely do.

I was also less enthralled by the story of Aliena and Richard, a brother and sister who are forced from their castle by the evil, sadistic William Hamleigh. William glories in rape and pillage. The first such scene, when William rapes 14-year-old Aliena in front of her brother, is graphic but probably necessarily so. This scene establishes William's character and Aliena's motives for becoming so fiercely independent. But by the second, third, or fourth graphic rape scene, in which one tunic after another is ripped, revealing yet another pair of large, heaving, usually teenaged breasts, and after we're told over and over that William can't get it up without the thrill of violence, it all starts to get tiresome and exploitative.

I also found my attention waning in the latter half of the book, which focuses more on Aliena and Jack, Tom Builder's son. Their romance is interesting enough at first, but it soon becomes repetitive. So too do the pages and pages explaining medieval construction techniques.

Clearly, Follett did a great deal of research about how cathedrals were built -- including the transition from the romanesque half-circle arches to the pointed, gothic ones, and the development of flying buttresses, which Jack virtually invents. There's little I love more than visiting medieval cathedrals, standing in their cool, vast interiors, marveling at their size and grandeur, wondering how they could have been built all those centuries ago. So, while reading this book, I enjoyed learning more about how it was done. To a point. But the book would be stronger if some of the scenes describing the building process had been edited out.

In the end, Pillars of the Earth is longer than it needs to be. The novel impressively manages a long span of time, and a wide range of characters and points of view. But I wonder if its wide scope saps some of its emotional strength. When Tom died, I was surprised at how little I felt the loss. As I thought about it, I realized that we had long since left his story behind. While at first felt his emotions as he lived through travails and triumphs, later it seemed like we were being TOLD about his experiences rather than living them along with him. One truism we hold as writers is "Show Don't Tell." I wonder if the wide scope of a book like this makes that goal more difficult?

At any rate, I did get my pleasant weekend of reading in, and while these characters don't live for me as some of my favorites do (such as Gus in Lonesome Dove), I'm looking forward to the mini-series, which has apparently just finished filming and will be released later this year.

After reading the book, I did a little research. It seems that Salisbury Cathedral was one of Follett's inspirations. So, I award Pillars of the Earth 3.5 (out of 5) Salisbury Cathedrals


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More on Mrs. Dr. Seuss

After I discovered who the author of one of my favorite children's books was, I did a little research on her.

Here's her Wikipedia entry "Helen Palmer Geisel was born in 1899 and died in 1967, 24 years before her husband died." They met at Oxford, and apparently she persuaded him not to become a professor, but to be an artist instead.
She published several other books in addition to A Fish Out of Water, and worked as an actress. And, she committed suicide. Wikipedia attributes her suicide to “a series of illnesses (including cancer) spanning 13 years.”

But a story in The New York Times offers a different, somewhat seedier version. Geisel, it seems, remarried. His second wife was a woman named Audrey Diamond.

To let the Times pick up the tale:

Were you thinking the widow of the country's most beloved children's writer must have been a sentimental and devoted mom, admitting only the most traditional family values?

Sorry.

Audrey Dimond was married with two children when she fell in love with Ted Geisel. Mr. Geisel, 18 years her senior, was also married. In the wake of their affair, Mr. Geisel's wife, Helen, committed suicide, causing, as Mrs. Geisel puts it, ''a rather large ripple in the community of La Jolla.'' Mrs. Dimond divorced her husband to marry Mr. Geisel, 64, and when she did, her daughters, 9 and 14, were sent away to school.

''They wouldn't have been happy with Ted, and Ted wouldn't have been happy with them. He's the man who said of children, 'You have 'em and I'll entertain 'em.' ''

''Ted's a hard man to break down, but this is who he was. He lived his whole life without children and he was very happy without children. I've never been very maternal. There were too many other things I wanted to do. My life with him was what I wanted my life to be.'' ….

Oh, ok.

Might be nice to have some of Helen Palmer's words as well. Here's the first Mrs. Geisel's suicide note to her husband:

As one Dear Ted, What has happened to us? I don't know. I feel myself in a spiral, going down down down, into a black hole from which there is no escape, no brightness. And loud in my ears from every side I hear, 'failure, failure, failure... I love you so much ... I am too old and enmeshed in everything you do and are, that I cannot conceive of life without you ... My going will leave quite a rumor but you can say I was overworked and overwrought. Your reputation with your friends and fans will not be harmed ... Sometimes think of the fun we had all thru the years ..." Source: Judith and Neil Morgan. Dr. Seuss & Mr. Geisel: A Biography. pg. 195.

I wonder if I will ever be able to look at that picture book -- or any book by Dr. Seuss -- the same way?

I suppose that's a straw man of a question, though. Can we ever look at things we knew as children in the same way, once we've grown up and our innocence is lost? Adult lives are complicated and often messy. It appears that Seuss's life was just messier than average.

It is possible to be both charmed by the work and disturbed by the life. No different from Tiger Woods, really. Have to love the man's inimitable ability as an athlete. His personal life, not so much.

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A Fish Out of Water -- A Beloved Children's Book

One of my favorite books when I was a child was “A Fish Out of Water.” It’s one of the few books I kept, and it’s obvious from looking at the tattered spine that it was much read. (The photo is of a nice new copy.) It was published in 1961, when I was 4 or 5.

I loved everything about the book: The shiny hard cover, the size, the illustrations, and the story itself.

It tells the tale of a little boy who gets a new goldfish. Mr. Carp, the pet store owner, cautions him not to feed the fish too much:

When you feed a fish, never feed him a lot.
So much and no more! Never more than a spot,
or something may happen. You never know what.

Of course, the boy disobeys these instructions, and his tiny fish, named Otto, begins to grow and grow. He grows so large that the boy has to put him in a vase. But Otto soon outgrows the vase, too! The boy rushes around putting Otto in a series of larger and larger pans, the bathtub, and finally the neighborhood swimming pool.

My younger self found this endlessly amusing, and the many times that I have culled my books over the years, I simply haven’t been able to get rid of this battered old book. I ran across it the other day, and for some reason I got curious about the author, Helen Palmer, whose name I had really never noticed before. (Isn’t that the way of children? They can read a book a hundred times, but not even consider the idea that the book had a real live author, and an illustrator to boot!)

So, I looked her up on online. I was floored by what I learned. First, it turns out that Helen Palmer was married to Theodor Geisel, otherwise known as Dr. Seuss.

What’s more, she was not the original author. She revised and adapted the story from one Dr. Seuss had published in Redbook in 1950. In fact, it was his first poem published in Redbook.


I learned this on Collecting Children’s Picturebooks which shows the two stories side-by-side. Here’s a sample:



I like the Seuss drawings even better than the ones in my book. The fish and boy both have that wild, wacky, messy-hair look Seuss was so good at. And even though he’s wearing a tie, the little boy looks a bit demented. In the Palmer version, they both have a more sanitized, we-live-in-a-tract-home,1950’s Dick and Jane appearance. The Seuss version is also better at conveying the frenzied pace as the boy races around trying to keep his growing fish in water.

Collecting Children’s Picturebooks goes into some detail about how the new version came about: “There is little question that Helen Palmer wrote A Fish Out Of Water. In 1950, it is very likely she helped Geisel with the story and composition of Gustav The Goldfish, just as she helped him with many of his stories....Palmer was more an advisor, reviewer, or contributor than a collaborator.”


For some reason, he gave her permission to revise the poem for a new easy reader book, designed for readers just like me. Here's the jacket copy:

“Like all BEGINNER BOOKS, this one will prove helpful in developing reading skill. It is written with ONLY 175 DIFFERENT WORDS – the majority of which a child learns in first grade. The theme is skillfully evolved to ensure the word repetition necessary in building a “sight” vocabulary. Yet these word repetitions never become drills – they are basic to the plot so that a child will feel he is reading only for fun."

Well, that certainly worked for me!

The Picturebook website quotes from the dustjacket: “Helen Palmer, graduate of Wellesley College and Oxford University, was a teacher of English before she became involved in the creation of books for children. She has since edited literally dozens of successful juveniles and written an even dozen of her own. Married to an eccentric writer, Theo LeSeig (himself a Beginner Book author), Miss Palmer lives in California […].”

"The 'eccentric writer' LeSeig, Geisel spelled backwards, of course is Dr. Seuss. A bit odd, this concerted effort to distance Palmer’s connection to the leading best selling author/illustrator of children’s books....The result, for some forty years, is the public’s perception that A Fish Out Of Water was an original story authored solely by Helen Palmer. The cleverness of the story, the ‘preposterous-ness’, obviously, is due to Dr. Seuss." (Collecting Children's Picturebooks)

Well! The things you learn when you start to do a little research. I decided to delve into the story a bit more. Alas, what I found was a lot more disturbing.

Tune in this weekend for more… Read more!

Sunday Book Notes -- The Sinister Pig, by Tony Hillerman

The desert southwest is a primary character in many of Tony Hillerman's mysteries, which is one reason I generally enjoy them. I grew up on the Western slope of Colorado, where the red soil is dotted with scrubby green trees, and snow peaks tower all around. It was truly a paradise. And yet the country that speaks to my soul is a little further west and south: Canyon country, the area around the Navajo and Hopi reservations, and south, on into the Sonoran desert. This area, the Four Corners region, where Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico meet, is the locale for most of Hillerman's novels, including The Sinister Pig.

Like Hillerman's other mysteries, this novel features Navajo Tribal Police detective Jim Chee and his now retired boss, Joe Leaphorn. The plot involves old, abandoned oil and gas lines in the New Mexico desert, which are being used for sinister purposes. The story also continues the developing relationship between Chee and Border Patrol agent Bernie Manuelito.

This was one of my least favorite Hillerman mysteries. I'm not going to give away the plot here, even though it is quite obvious from the beginning who the bad guys are and what their game is. Revealing the evil characters early is a deliberate tactic on Hillerman's part, but it makes the plot seem a little too rote and obvious as the events play out.

But that isn't the biggest problem with the book. Hillerman seems to have an ax to grind, which gets in the way of the novel. As he writes on the acknowledgments page, billions of dollars owed to the Tribal Trust Funds are unaccounted for. Chee, Leaphorn, and half a dozen other characters dutifully recite the fact that this money has been mismanaged or stolen by the Federal government. And yet, despite Hillerman's efforts to make this part of the story, the missing funds do not really play a role in the novel. Thus, all the references to the missing money seem more like a diatribe than an intrinsic and fluid part of a novel. More effective are Hillerman's underlying arguments about the futility and injustice of a drug war that targets small -time drug users rather than the big money smugglers, and his characterization of illegal aliens as hard-working people simply searching for a better life.

Even the landscape failed to move me as much as it usually does in a Chee/Leaphorn novel. Although Chee's travels take him from Window Rock to Gallup, Lordsburg, Deming and on down to the Mexican border -- drives I've made many times myself -- I suspect that I visualized the shimmering landscape more from my own experience than from the power of his description.

I also wasn't terribly thrilled that the female characters in the book are so darned stupid. Bernie the Border Patrol agent seems naive and incapable, blundering around like the girl who goes in the closet in the stereotypical horror movie. A woman like this wouldn't last a month on the border. And she is one of two young women who need rescuing in the book.

For me, the most successful part of The Sinister Pig was Hillerman's handling of multiple viewpoints. The most memorable and chilling scenes involve the murder of a young woman that takes place early in the book, seen first through the eyes of the assassin and then by the man who ordered her death. Unfortunately, the rest of the book doesn't live up to those chapters.

I'm the first to admit that I'm not a die-hard Hillerman fan. This is the sixteenth book in this series, and I've probably read only four or five of them. Someone who has followed the series from the beginning and has grown accustomed to the characters, landscape, and Navajo customs may be more enamored of this book than I was.

It was a quick, generally enjoyable read, great for the beach or poolside, but not my favorite Hillerman work.

Rating: 2 Kachinas. Read more!

Sunday Book Notes -- Beowulf, trans. Seamus Heaney

Note to my readers (if you are still there!): I have not blogged in a while. I've been sick with an infection that sapped all my energy. Then we took two short trips, which I'll blog on this week. But first, a day late, is an entry in my new "Sunday Book Notes" feature.

As the oldest poem in English, and as a ripping good yarn, Beowulf has been translated dozens of times. My favorite by far is Seamus Heaney's translation. Although some literature snobs complain that he sacrifices accuracy in the service of poetry, I love his version. It is lyrical, exotic, and gripping.

I first read Beowulf in high school, and again as an English major in college. I enjoyed it but didn't fully appreciate it until I was much older. Or maybe I just appreciated it on different levels than before. (I've certainly lived the truth of that old saying that you never read the same book twice.)

I rediscovered the poem when I was traveling in Scandinavia. The Viking ships and treasure hoards I saw in museums sparked my curiosity about the cultures depicted in Norse sagas. Then I went to Iceland, where I visited the actual sites of some of the sagas, standing on the very ground where Burnt Njal was set on fire and touring other sites that have remained virtually unchanged since the year 1200. These journeys, in turn, led me back to the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, which I had devoured in high school and college. I didn't know then that Tolkien was a scholar of Anglo-Saxon literature, or that he was profoundly influenced by the sagas and Beowulf in creating his mythology. And thus, my circuitous reading saga led me back to Beowulf.

One of Tolkien's most influential essays, "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," argued that Beowulf is too often dismissed as "serious" literature because of its monsters and dragons. Tolkien argued that it is a profoundly significant work, not in spite of its monsters, but because of them. They speak to something deep, even cthonic, that springs from the ground into the very marrow of human experience. He also lamented that the poem was seen only as a repository to be mined for historic facts about 6th century Scandinavia, where it is set, or about the 8th to 11th century period in which it was first written down. (On reflection, I guess there's a bit of irony in my coming back to the book through artifacts and burial mounds.)

Tolkien drew heavily on Beowulf in creating his tales. For me, part of the fun in reading the poem is finding the correspondences to Tolkien's work -- the Riders of Rohan, Sam killing the spider Shelob, the kin-slayer Gollum, Bilbo's theft of the golden cup from Smaug's hoard, the sword that was broken -- all have origins in Beowulf.

But of course, even if you're not a Tolkien fan, Beowulf is a stunning work, a peek into a world of blood oaths and violence, of heroism and faltering humanity.

The action takes place in a Christian world still heavily influenced by Pagan belief and ritual. The poem begins with the aging king Hrothgar, impotent in the face of the murderous Grendel, who night after bloody night wreaks havoc, killing Hrothgar's men. The dashing and boastful Geat prince, Beowulf, comes to the rescue, killing first Grendel and then his distraught and vengeful mother. In seeking vengeance, Grendel's mother is in fact participating in the same moral code that defines the human society. The poem seems almost modern in its shifts in perspective, in its erasure at times of the line between "man" and "monster." We are allowed to feel the mother's loss of her son from her perspective. We sympathize with her for a moment, much as Tolkien encourages our empathy for warped and pitiful Gollum. Later, we see the world through the eyes of the dragon that ultimately kills Beowulf, just as we see through the eyes of the spider Shelob in LOTR.

The battle scenes are what get stressed in the various movie versions of Beowulf. (Probably the most laughable film is the one featuring a nude CGI avatar of Angelina Jolie as Grendel's mother. It's been larded with the full Hollywood treatment, losing the essence of story in a morass of overblown action, gratuitous nudity, and technological razzle dazzle. The epic failings of this movie can be summed up by the words of the director,Robert Zemeckis: “Frankly, nothing about the original poem appealed to me....I remember being assigned to read it in junior high school and not being able to understand it because it was in Old English.")

The battles are certainly memorable, but I prefer other sections of the tale. The action is often interrupted with extended scenes in which a singer/poet "unlocks his word-hoard" and recounts the feats of other heroes, like the legendary dragon-slayer Sigemund. The most harrowing story-in-a-story tells of a queen who loses her entire family-- father, husband, sons, -- to the violent imperative of the blood oath. This tale foreshadows what will happen to Hrothgar's sons, who will be killed by their uncle who covets the throne.

Beowulf's end is particularly moving. An aging king himself, Beowulf is beset on all sides by invading tribes. When a rampaging dragon, angered by the theft of a golden cup from his hoard, begins to pick off his people, Beowulf faces a choice. He can battle the dragon alone, risking not only his own life, but also the future of his people, who will be over-run when his enemies learn that the renowned warrior king is dead. Or, he can forego glory and take his men with him to battle the dragon.

Beowulf chooses the path of glory. Perhaps he is recalling the words of Hrothgar, who tells him early in the poem:


It is always better
To avenge dear ones
than to indulge in mourning.
For every one of us,
living in this world waiting for our end.
Let whoever can
Win glory before death.
When a warrior is gone,
That will be his best and only bulwark.

Beowulf dies, thus guaranteeing the extinction of his race.

On a height they kindled the hugest of all
Funeral fires; fumes of woodsmoke
Billowed darkly up, the blaze roared
And drowned out their weeping, wind died down
And flames wrought havoc in the hot bone-house,
Burning it to the core. They were disconsolate
And wailed aloud for their lord’s decease.
A Geat woman too sang out in grief;
With hair bound up, she unburdened herself
Of her worst fears, a wild litany
Of nightmare and lament: her nation invaded,
Enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles,
Slavery and abasement. Heaven swallowed the smoke.

It is a breathtaking, melancholy end-- to the hero and to his people, to the poem and to an age.

Both Beowulf and The Lord of the Rings are, in the end, profoundly melancholy works, lamentations for lost, idealized worlds of heroic men and deeds. As Tolkien says in his essay, "It is a poem by a learned man writing of old times, who looking back on the heroism and sorrow feels in them something permanent and something symbolical." The poet, writing of an earlier, lost time, knows that "those days were heathen--heathen, noble, and hopeless." He may as well be speaking of The Lord of the Rings, where Aragorn, the last of the heroic peoples of Numenor, ultimately dies and the elves sail into the East and diminish. Or of Tolkien's lost boyhood friends, who all died on the fields of Somme in WWI.

If you're interested in some of the background on Beowulf, I recommend the fabulous Norton Critical Edition. It includes critical commentary, genealogy charts and maps, Tolkien's essay, and loads of pictures from archelogoical sites, like the fantastic buckle from Sutton Hoo pictured below, and the helmet, which has a boar on the crest just like the one described in the poem.




I also highly recommend the CD with Heaney himself reading the poem...or at least most of it. (The copy on the back refers to "unabridged excerpts," which is not the same thing as unabridged.) Hearing Heaney read the poem in his Irish brogue is a delicious experience. Here are some snippets to whet your appetite.

Here's an informative and fun site on all things Beowulf.

And here's a link to some reproductions of Lynd Ward's woodcut illustrations for an edition of Beowulf. (For a previous post of Lynd Ward, click here.)


Rating: Five buckles (out of five).




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Sunday Book Notes -- Fried Green Tomatoes at The Whistle Stop Cafe

I'm inaugurating a new weekly feature -- Sunday Book Notes. If I counted all the objects I own, the vast majority would be books. I've lived a lot of my life in worlds spun of words, so much so that when I was a kid, I often couldn't remember if I had read something, dreamed it, or lived it. Plus, I am lying in bed sick (on Memorial Day weekend! No Fair!), so I've had a lot of time to read this week.

Fittingly enough, I picked this book up at a cafe. Like the one in the book, the cafe is old-fashioned and a little disheveled, serving up unmatched tables and delicious apple pie in a sunny corner building that once was a hardware store. One wall is covered with bookcases. You are welcome to borrow or donate a book. So, when I saw Fried Green Tomatoes on the shelf, I took it home.

I've wanted to read Fried Green Tomatoes since the movie came out in 1991. I loved this quiet little film, which alternates between the story of Eleanor, a fat, unfulfilled, middle-aged housewife in the late 1980s and the tale of lesbian couple Idgie Threadgoode and Ruth Jamison in Depression-era Alabama, which Eleanor hears from an old woman she visits in a nursing home every Sunday.

Now, a strange thing happens when you've seen (and liked) a movie before you've read the book: It is almost impossible not to imagine the actors -- their voices, expressions, hair and clothes -- when you read the book. This is not necessarily a bad thing, especially when the actors capture the characters as beautifully as they did in Fried Green Tomatoes. Kathy Bates is perfect as the frumpy housewife who discovers her spine, and Mary Stuart Masterson and Mary Louise Parker are just as good as tomboy Idgie and the gentle, doe-eyed Ruth who steals her heart. So, as I've been reading the book, I've been seeing and hearing these actresses in my head. (That said, I always try to read the book first. I pity kids whose first exposure to The Lord of the Rings or other treasures is through the movie, no matter how wonderful the movie may be. But I digress.)

While the film captures the essence of the novel, it does gloss rather daintily over the lesbian relationship at its core. The book's matter-of-fact depiction of this life-long love affair is one of its charms. When 16-year-old Idgie, the fierce "bee charmer" who hunts and fishes instead of going to school, falls for "sweet to the bones" Ruth, it doesn't seem to faze anyone. Years later, after Idgie rescues a pregnant Ruth from her abusive husband, Idgie's father gives her $250 and tells her to start a business so she can feed her growing family. There's no sense that they must explain or justify themselves. It is just the way it is. Whistle Stop accepts them into the fold, just as they accept and expect segregation.

Flagg portrays the violence and racisim of the South as matter-of-factly as she does the love affair between Idgie and Ruth. Idgie and Mary are quietly subversive, selling barbeque out the back door of their cafe to blacks in spite of threats from the Ku Klux Klan, among other details I won't give away in case you plan to read the book.

The fictional world of Whistle Stop, Alabama feels real. You have the sense of observing lived lives. The book captures, in a way the film cannot, the full fabric of this little town, through vignettes of people, black and white, most of whom live on the wrong side of the tracks. It's not just Idgie and Ruth's story, but the story of their son Stump, of hobo Smokey Lonesome, Eva the town whore, Buddy, Sipsey, Big George, Onzel and Naughty Bird, with all their joys and human failings. When the trains stop coming through Whistle Stop and people start to move away, when the decades roll on by until the cafe is replaced by a McDonald's, I feel a pang of loss as strong as that when a beloved character dies.

Despite its often rather grim subject matter, this book is full of its laugh-out-loud humor. But, whenever I'm tempted to lapse into an idealized vision of a simpler time of practical jokes and tales tales and scenes of big extended families laughing over Easter egg hunts, Flagg brings me up short with a young man being beaten to death in a tar-paper Hooverville or an ominous visit from men in white sheets.

Perhaps I'm also drawn to the book because it sheds light on my grandparents and parents. Mom and dad spent their childhoods in hardscrabble Oklahoma during the Depression, and Whistle Stop, Alabama reminds me of pictures of my grandmothers standing in their faded cotton dresses in front of sagging frame houses, babies draped casually over their arms.

I also enjoy the disjointed nature of the book, which shifts time periods and narrative perspective from one short chapter to another. We may hear about an episode first from a brief item in the chatty local newspaper, then observe that same event from an omniscent perspective in the next chapter. As I a writer struggling with structure in my memoir, I'm fascinated by Flagg's deft handling of this technique. I wonder if she wrote the book chronologically, then moved the chapters around afterward?

I suppose I ought to give the some stars or thumbs up or something. I'm tempted to use tomatoes, in honor of the book inaugurating this weekly feature, but that's already been done. So how about pies? Every time Evelyn visits Ninny in the nursing home, she takes her pie or cake or biscuits or some kind of tasty treat, and reading this book made me hungry.

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe: 4 slices (out of a possible 5).
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