While
living on the boat, we are able to catch up on our reading. As I haven’t made the transition to the
Kindle yet, we ship up a box of books for the summer and they sit on our little
bookshelf on the boat, awaiting their turn.
Part of the fun is looking through them, deciding upon the next
read. I selected a number of novels,
some recommended by our son, Jonathan.
It
took a younger generation, Jonathan to be precise, to introduce me to some fresh,
intelligent and extremely moving literature, not only Eric Puchner's Model Home which I thought was a fabulous first novel, and
now his second recommendation, another first novel, The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint by Brady Udall which was published
in 2001 (Puchner’s novel is more recent, 2010).
These
are extraordinary first novels, major literary talent. Udall has published his follow up, widely
praised as well, The Lonely Polygamist which
I have yet to read. Interestingly, both
the Puchner and Udall novels are set in the west and southwest (when I think of
that area, I think of the photograph below I took somewhere in the southwest years
ago), perhaps the new home of the American dream or the American
nightmare. However, the two novels differ
greatly in their perspectives and voice, Puchner reminding me somewhat of
Updike, Cheever, and Yates, while Udall’s The
Miracle Life of Edgar Mint is a little Huck
Finn, Oliver Twist, Rule of the Bone and The Book of Mormon – oh, and throw in the Paul Newman film, Hombre, about a half breed Apache.
Udall
writes a genuine Bildungsroman, our lovable
but struggling protagonist Edgar Mint living out an upside down life (“In many ways, it occurs to me now, I have
lived my life in reverse. In the first
half of my life I had to make all the hard choices and ride out the
consequences, while in the second half I have lived the sheltered and
uncluttered life of a child.”) He is
an orphan but like Oliver Twist has to go through a horrific childhood before
emerging into the sunshine of a loving caretaker.
Along
the way we meet his friends and his Fagins, the story gathering force and
momentum as it unfolds, beginning with his self-assessment: “If my life could be contained in a word it
would be this one: accident.” From
there it is one finely written calamity to the next culminating in a complete
circle, Edgar achieving peace and a kind of maturity that only hardship can
teach.
He
is a half breed, part white (a “cowboy” father from Connecticut of all places!)
and an Apache mother who becomes an alcoholic and deserts Edgar, who ends up in
an orphanage from hell, not unlike those in Dickens’ novels. (“For the seven years my mother and I were
together, I was nothing but an inconvenience to her, a burden, a source of
pain, and her pregnancy with me was no exception.”)
Like
the last book I read, Richard Ford’s Canada, its
first paragraph is spellbinding: “If I
could tell you only one thing about my life it would be this: when I was seven years old the mailman ran
over my head. As formative events go,
nothing else comes close; my careening, zigzag existence, my wounded brain and
faith in God, my collisions with joy and affliction, all of it has come, in one
way or another, out of that moment on a summer morning when the left rear tire
of a United States postal jeep ground my tiny head into the hot gravel of the
San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation.”
He
actually dies but a young doctor, Barry Pinkley (even the names give homage to
Dickens) brings him back to life and Pinkley becomes obsessed with Edgar’s well
being afterwards (“Everyone agreed that
my survival was either an absolute miracle or a freak happenstance…but there
was also general agreement that simple survival was as far as the miracle would
go: there was no chance on earth I was going to be anything but a mental and
physical equivalent of a turnip.”)
But Edgar befriends an older man in the hospital, Art, and when Edgar is
diagnosed with “Dysgraphia,” the “inability to write,” Art insists that they
get Edgar a typewriter. Even though
Edgar confesses: “I have to say it was
not love at first sight,” when he was given a Hermes Jubilee 2000
typewriter. It becomes his salvation and he carries the albatross of his
enormous output in a trunk wherever he moves: great comic fiction with lots of
dark humor driving the story.
Out
of the hospital he is sent to the William Tecumseh Sherman School (“My first day of school at Willie Sherman and
I was about to realize that I was no longer Saint Edgar the miracle-boy,
hospital sweetheart, beloved by all, but a walking target, a chicken among the
foxes. Not only was I the new kid…[and]
not only was I a crossbreed.”)
But
our hero survives and he is finally placed with a foster family in Utah, a Mormon
family, the Madsens, as dysfunctional as any other American family, but at
least a warm bed for Edgar, who thinks that this is the answer to his
salvation, even receiving Baptismal and endeavoring to learn the Mormon
religion. That too is not the answer for
him, but he thinks he has developed a calling in life and that is to find the
mailman and to forgive him (Edgar knows that the mailman thinks he had killed
him).
While
Barry Pinkley and his foster mother Lara Madsen figure prominently near the novel’s
conclusion, it is ultimately from this “calling” that the novel culminates into
one of the finest written last chapters that I’ve read in years, gripping in
its emotional power and a testimony to Udall’s writing gifts by constructing
the perfect coda.
As
I am merely about ten years late in discovering this novel, there are plenty of
other sources for more information, but both Udall and Puncher are on my radar
screen for fine writing in the future.
Before
posting this I also finished Motherless
Brooklyn, by Jonathan Lethem, another recommendation made by my son. I do not mean to diminish its importance by
not covering this novel with its own entry, but mysteries are not my usual
reading fare and I feel a little off base reviewing the book. But while a mystery, this novel is a
brilliant piece of writing, with the very clever conceit of the main character,
Lionel Essrog, having Tourette's syndrome which gives Lethem a platform for
demonstrating his writing skills. I’m
also partial to Motherless Brooklyn
as it is set not far from where I lived for almost ten years and through Lethem
I could almost feel the macadam of the setting, Court Street, Carroll Gardens
and Cobble Hill.
It
shares some of the themes of Udall’s novel as well, a novel about an orphan, Dickensian
characters, a coming of age story but in the form of a detective novel, our
erstwhile hero endeavoring to find the murderer of his mentor, an underworld
character, Frank Minna, who has rounded up Lionel and other orphans from the “St.
Vincent Home for Boys” to serve his nefarious ends, not unlike, again, Oliver
Twist’s upbringing.
The
“language” of Tourette's is like a
coiled spring throughout Lethem’s tour de force: “I’m tightly wound. I’m a loose cannon.
Both – I’m tightly wound loose cannon a tight loose. My whole life exists in the space between
those words, tight, loose, and there isn’t any space there – they should be one
word, tightloose. I’m an air bag in a
dashboard, packed up layer upon layer in readiness for that moment when I get
to explode, expand all over you, fill every available space. Unlike an airbag, though, I’m repacked the
moment I’ve exploded, am tensed and ready again to explode – like some
safety-film footage cut into a loop, all I do is compress and release, over and
over, never saving or satisfying anyone, least myself. Yet the tape plays on pointlessly, obsessive
air bag exploding again and again while life itself goes on elsewhere, outside
the range of these antic expenditures.”
There is one surprise after another in these
pages, a labyrinth that the reader is compelled to negotiate to a fitting
ending. Simply put: I loved reading Motherless Brooklyn. One is always
rooting for Lionel, his eccentricities giving him a special place in literature
and, no doubt, the mystery genre.
