SONG OF SOLOMON

 Toni Morrison. SONG OF SOLOMON. Knopf, 1977.

After Hagar’s funeral, Pilate and Milkman drive to Virginia to bury the bones she has treasured for years. The last scene is a Pieta, on and off Solomon’s Leap. I close the covers, the yellow jacket, reverently. I am propelled to walk. To stand outside the banquet hall and waylay revellers as they leave. To put my hand on their sleeve and say: Wait. There’s something I have to tell.

It is forty-three years old, published in 1977. It uses the n word. There is violence and death. Deaths. Vigilantism. Murders. Attempted murders. Attempted abortions. Suicides. Off the top of Mercy Hospital. Somewhere in Michigan, with Lake Superior visible. Gitchie Guma. The name is important. Names are important.

Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon is a story about the importance of names and naming. About divination. About the children’s rhyming verses and games which keep stories alive. Until Milkman can tease out the secrets. The names of the places and what happened there. The parents and grandparents who fled, and the great grandparents who flew. The women who caught and cached and cherished the stories and the coincidences which brought the generations home, to catch the stories before they died with the tellers.  

It’s a story about the importance of place. It’s a story about the importance of place to name, and place to person. About knowing who you are and who you come from and where you come from and why you’re here. And it’s about the intergenerational effects of trauma. About what happens to children who see their father blasted in two, shot off a fence, by neighbours who wanted his land. Children who have to pick up the pieces and bury them. Children to are visited by the ghosts of the dead, with riddles, with names, with pleas. Mysterious pleas.

It’s a story about what is not passed down to the son by the father who knows only death. The father who cannot love. The father who competes for the son’s loyalty, without offering any affection in return.

I imagine myself out walking, masked, alone, like the Ancient Mariner, stopping passersby to tell them the tale. How Hagar was dumped. Used and then abandoned. How it made her mad. But her mother calls for Mercy at the funeral and asserts to the nervous congregation: She was loved. How….

THE GREEN ROAD

 Anne Enright. THE GREEN ROAD. Norton, 2015

Margaret Laurence would have loved this book, as do I. In another country, Ireland, and another century, another matriarch, as difficult as Hagar Shipley in The STONE ANGEL, does a runner, in this case on Christmas Day. Before this happens, we meet, in separate chapters set in separate places and times, her now-adult children: Hanna, the new mother and actor with a drinking problem. Dan, the failed priest who escaped to New York to find himself just as AIDS arrived on the scene. Constance, at a mammography screening, thinking about her teenage children, her successful builder husband, her fancy car, and refusing to think about her mother. Emmet, who seems comfortable with non-gender specific fantasies, and works for low pay saving starving people in Africa. And the mother herself, Rosaleen, hyper-critical, manipulative, deciding without input to "sell the house" and move in with whichever adult child she chooses. The characters are beautifully sketched from the inside. Almost as beautifully is the west-Ireland landscape from Limerick to Ennis along the Flaggy Way and the green road itself, unpaved, along the coast. With views of Galway and Connemara. I enjoyed this story more than I did Enright's Booker award winner, The GATHERING. 

SKELETON MAN

 Tony Hillerman. SKELETON MAN. Harper, 2004.

Two planes crash in 1956, scattering bodies and body parts into the Grand Canyon. A passenger with a case of diamonds handcuffed to his wrist was never found. When one diamond shows up fifty years later after a burglary, the rightful heir goes looking, with the help of locals including retired Lt. Leaphorn, Chee, Bernie, Cowboy, & his cousin. Rain causes flash flooding. 

SON OF A TRICKSTER

 Eden Robinson. SON OF A TRICKSTER. Vintage, 2017.

Loved Eden Robinson's MONKEY BEACH and this first in the TRICKSTER TRILOGY has been on my MUST READ list for three years. Now I wish I had read it earlier, because I cannot separate some of the scenes in the television series from what happens in the novel. The series is a great adaptation. Beautiful and incredible. My only hesitation is that Jared seems quite old for high school, but that's probably just me, 50 years later. 

SON OF A TRICKSTER is the story of Jared, a high school student living with his Mom and her boyfriend on a reserve somewhere around Kitamat/Terrace in northern BC. Jared seems like one of those super-dependable kids (like the adult children of alcoholics); he pays his father's rent and his mother's hydro bills while coping with family breakup, violent step-fathers, unpredictable grandmothers, along with the usual teen concerns of school, friends, girlfriends, dead pets.  

On one level, Jared's is a story of a child living in the chaos of a bi-polar mother with her own generational trauma, hooking up with her dealers, not averse to a bit of criminal activity to assure her own business survives. Taking in boarders relegates Jared to a curtained off corner of the mouldy basement. There are scenes and lines which made me laugh out loud. There are scenes of magic which make me wonder what is imagined and what is cultural. Jared is a survivor and you cannot help but root for him. But when you think back about it, the one thing he does repeatedly is cry. He is living a PST-inducing life.

This story really made me sorry that I was unaware of the chaos and trauma of some of the high school students I taught. It made me look up some names, to see whether they were still alive. 

TRICKSTER DRIFT awaits but I am saving the pleasure. RETURN OF THE TRICKSTER is scheduled to be released this year. 

READING LIKE A WRITER

 Francine Prose. READING LIKE A WRITER: A Guide For People Who Love Books And For Those Who Want To Write Them. HarperCollins, 2006.

Wonderful. Lived up to my expectations. Especially the chapter on Chekhov. 

ALL the DEVILS ARE HERE

 Louise Penny. ALL the DEVILS ARE HERE. Minotaur, 2020.

My Thanksgiving Weekend gift to myself. The Gamache family goes to Paris. Wonderful. 

TIDE'S END

 Meredith Egan. TIDE'S END. Amity, 2019.

Taylor tries to get it together. Second in the Just Living series.