by Andrew Hedglin

A couple of weeks ago, I was doing some due diligence as a bookseller, and was reading the author interview in the book section of the Sunday Clarion-Ledger. This interview was with Phillip Watson, author of Garden Magic. Now, I’m not much for gardening myself, but as I read the interview I came across this really interesting quotation he used to explain the title: “Magic isn’t so much what you create. It is what you notice.”

I’ve been thinking a little bit about the nature of magic due to two fantastic novels I just read simultaneously: Avenue of Mysteries, the latest novel by John Irving which was just released this past November, and I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive, the 2011 debut novel by country music singer Steve Earle. The two stories are ostensibly about male characters who are looking for a brighter future and trying to outrun their past, respectively, but the novels orbit around two Mexican teenage girls; Graciela in I’ll Never Get Out of This World and Lupe in Avenue of Mysteries.

Graciela is an eighteen year-old from a tiny town called Delores Hidalgo, before she finds herself in the care of an abortion doctor named Doc Ebersole on the South Presa Strip in San Antonio, Texas. Doc has been haunted by the ghost of Hank Williams ever since he gave Hank (in this version of events, anyway) the drugs that lead to his overdose. After ten years of chasing his heroin addiction across the Gulf South, Doc lands in San Antonio, Texas, plying his trade for girls in trouble and outlaws who can’t go to real hospital for fear of the law. Graciela’s arrival in late 1963 changes the course of not only his life, but also that of the entire neighborhood. The catalyst to the looming change begins with the investigation by a curious, hotheaded priest named Father Killen into the mysterious and perhaps miraculous goings-on on South Presa.

What he looks to confirm is this: Graciela has a mysterious healing power that is both physical and moral for Doc’s patients. Guided by the teaching of her late grandfather, she is connected to the spiritual world. For instance, she is the only other person besides Doc who can see Hank’s ghost. She just seems saintly. She gives off an aura that seems selfless (mostly true) and virginal (less so).

Lupe, however, casts a long shadow in the other direction. The 13 year-old younger sister to the protagonist 14 year-old Juan Diego, she hails from the city dump just outside of Oaxaca. Due to webbing in her vocal chords, her voice is unintelligible to everybody but Juan Diego, but must translate for her. She can read minds and—perhaps—predict the future. She is opinionated, salty, and later on, quite vulgar. She takes orders from no one, but like Graciela, she is a born protector. She and her brother are named after Virgin of Guadalupe, a vision of Mary who appeared in Mexico in the 1500s, and the Aztec man who discovered her. She is capable of great faith, but demands results.

Because Avenue of Mysteries follows both Juan Diego’s childhood in Mexico and a trip to the Philippines after an adulthood in Iowa, Lupe appears in only half of the story—but it’s the more intriguing half. Irving, just as in A Prayer for Owen Meany and Last Night in Twisted River, writes slightly more fantastic and compelling childhoods than he does adulthoods, but the stories are interlocked rather than sequential, so the book never loses its momentum. Also, because we know Juan Diego’s fate in adulthood, what we wonder as they progress from the dump to the orphanage to the circus, is not what happens, but how (and was it inevitable?), especially regarding Lupe’s absence from the modern day narrative.

Although neither Graciela nor Lupe is, as I’ve said, the protagonist of her story, it’s hard to argue that each is not the star of the story. Graciela defies a hard realism in Earle’s novel, and Lupe a slightly softer one in Irving’s. Their fates differ wildly, but both leave an indelible impression—on the other characters, and the reader. Miracles seem to follow Graciela and Lupe, but what they can do is often a product of what they can see, and know, rather than what they will to be. They rarely use their abilities to their own ends, and the church is loath to anoint either of their magic as a miracle.

To be honest, I don’t quite know what to make of the use of archetype by authors who are clearly not of Mexican heritage. I can’t tell if use of the culture seems exploitative, or if the culture is a fertile setting and fair game for such a tale, or if both those things are true. I do know that when I studied the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a Colombian (and Mexican!) master of such of a form, in school, I learned that magical realism is often created in the belief gaps between two different cultures, and there certainly is that tension all throughout both novels. But regardless of where the magic comes from, it is there, and is worth noticing.

by Andrew Hedglin

On the first day I started working at Lemuria in June, my tour of the store concluded in the back of the store where we keep the ARCs (advance reader copies). I spent a few minutes looking at them, and the first one to really grab my eye was You Don’t Have to Live Like This by Benjamin Markovits. First, it had an eye-catching cityscape cover with big, white words superimposed onto an advancing Detroit skyline. Second, it’s hard to resist the comforting pull of those words, even and especially if they signal that the person hearing them is in a pretty bad place, and I had just left behind an ill-fitting career.

The title comes from a fictional Obama speech in the middle of the novel, but it also applies to the protagonist and narrator of the novel, Greg Marnier (a.k.a. “Marny”), at both the beginning and end of the story. Marny, a Millenial in spirit if not age, quits his middling job in European academia before being approached by a college friend from Yale and politically ambitious hedge-fund millionaire, Robert James, with an intriguing opportunity: to help revitalize—or gentrify—some neighborhoods in Detroit. The project, eventually known as New Jamestown, sounds a bit like something you might hear about on an episode of This American Life and the shady economic dealings behind the scheme are something you would DEFINITELY hear about on Planet Money.

“Let me ask you a question. This is what I don’t understand. Those are some nice houses on Johanna Street, but what are you going to do when you get there?”       

“I don’t know. I’m drifting for a bit right now.”

“Well, what are you good for?” she said.

This strategy works out only slightly better for Marny than it does for Wash.

This exchange occurs when Marny is—poorly, drunkenly—introducing himself at a party to his future love interest Gloria, an art teacher and native Detroiter. Marny helps fix up the house he lives in, writes a community newsletter, and becomes a substitute (then part-time) teacher. But he’s always a little underemployed, especially for somebody who enjoyed the benefit of an Ivy League education.

This preferred method of living is part of why I get why people would be frustrated, or even maddened, by Marny. But, ultimately, I think, he’s a gentle and empathetic, if somewhat self-interested, soul, who really does believe in New Jamestown. He thinks its residents really can build a community. Though he’s interested in exploring the lives of radically different people, because he tries to understand everybody’s point of view, he’s not very good at helping people from different groups communicate. And that’s when things go to hell.

Even if you don’t like Marny (who I think it helps to picture as acting and sounding somewhat like Jesse Eisenberg), there’s still a lot to love about this book. The story is sort of about race, definitely about privilege, partially about economics and class, and above all, it’s about cities and community. In the words of the great Rembert Browne, “ I care about cities, because that’s where people are forced to intermingle. I care about cities, because that’s where the culture is. And I care about my city above all, because it’s mine.” This book is about that hope to create, or desire to defend, that sense of ownership of a city, Detroit.

Sometimes that contact becomes conflict, and sometimes that conflict becomes conflagration. Two racially-charged incidents, one involving two of Marny’s closest friends, bring into sharp focus the tension between predominately white New Jamestown settlers and the predominately black Detroit natives. Since gentrification itself produces deep divisions, it doesn’t take much to turn a spark into a flame.

This might sound like a heavy story, but the breezy, funny-peculiar narration doesn’t read that way at all. The style is readable, un-self-concious and unliterary, even to the point of narrative apology at the very beginning of the book. It reminds me a little bit of books I’ve read by Jonathan Tropper, Richard Russo, Tom Perotta, or Meg Wolitzer (although the intended audience feels like it skews younger, generationally). It comes off as a little bit of a paperback read, but there’s enough depth and length to justify value as a hardback.

I don’t know. I’m still learning about how I don’t, and do, have to live. And living other people’s stories through books has always helped me do that.

by Andrew Hedglin

A Free State by Tom Piazza has a great title. It might not jump out at you on the shelf, but trust me, it’s great. Back when I took classes teaching me the craft of poetry, the thing I enjoyed most, besides playing with the musicality of language, was finding a phrase that meant many things without being too self-conscious about it.

That’s what this title is—and that’s what the book is: highly artful while remaining accessible. Short, but with a lot to see. What does a “free state” mean? Let me count the ways:

1) a free state – a term you might recognize form social studies class. One of the states in the American union that outlawed slavery before the Civil War. In this case: Pennsylvania (specifically Philadelphia), 1855. This is where we find our two protagonists: Henry Sims, a runaway slave from Virginia, and James Douglass, a former farm-boy who literally ran away with the circus and is now managing a blackface minstrel music revue.

2) a free state – the freedom from life’s banality that James Douglass finds in musical performance. Douglass was raised on a hardscrabble Pennsylvania farm in a household that reminds me of a line mentioned in the John D. MacDonald biographies on the back of all the Travis McGee novels: “Imagination was frivolity and frivolity was not on the agenda.” One day when he sneaks into a minstrel show by Joel Walker Sweeney, that’s it for him.

He follows music as far as it will take him from the farm, through the circus, to the theaters of Philadelphia. When he describes this journey to Henry, saying he felt “as if [he] had been freed from a life of oppressive servitude,” Henry can only answer “with a look half amused and half derisive…‘Your eloquence is admirable.”

3) a free state – Henry’s condition, real only in each moment that he exists with it, of being escaped from chattel slavery. Henry is a prodigious, electrifying musical talent that grants him privilege that transcends his race—up to a point—on both the Virginia plantation where he is from and the Philadelphia stage he performs on in defiance of the law.

The impetus for Henry’s flight from the plantation is not physical brutality but emotional betrayal by his master; although there is plenty of evidence of the former where’s he from. Like Douglass, he is also brought to a higher place by music, but with that higher place comes higher risk—of being brought back into enslavement, even death, as the savagely violent slave hunter Tull Burton fanatically pursues him.

Henry’s journey is particularly fascinating and complexly imagined as he struggles to run from the past he hated and yet misses; to play the music of his servitude and not be ashamed. The abolitionists in Philadelphia tell him to put the banjo away: “They said it was a slave instrument, and he had thought, I am nobody’s slave.”

Douglass and Henry meet and agree on a mutually beneficial agreement wherein Douglass provides the opportunity and Henry provides the talent. From there, both men—and the reader—consider the stakes as they navigate questions of love, trust, and moral responsibility. They both have to decide if they find something more valuable than their beloved and hard-won freedoms. The stakes are so high and consequences so real it is easy to forget Douglass and Henry are both no older than their early twenties, and are still growing in their personhood.

The final chapter is particularly stirring, told from the perspective of a recognizable, important historical figure. This anecdote is the antidote to believing that the story, Henry’s story especially, ends with the novel itself. Henry’s final song is haunting, much like the novel itself is, lingering with you long after you receive its final words.

by Andrew Hedglin

I’m a little worried, as Harriet Chance often does about her own life, that this review might not live up to its full potential. By turns wrenching and farcical, with a rich emotional landscape, This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! by Jonathan Evison is a lovely, bittersweet novel of surprising humanity.

The story here is about Harriet Chance (née Nathan), a widow and former housewife from Washington state who has been haunted of late by the ghost of her recently departed husband, Bernard. When she is informed of an Alaskan cruise Bernard bought for her as an uncharacteristic surprise, she feels compelled to take it to honor his wishes. After her best friend Mildred backs out as her traveling companion, Harriet (eventually) spends the cruise with her recovering-addict daughter Caroline and massive, slovenly, thoughtful Kentucky tourist Kurt Pickens.

Although half of the book is a straightforward story set just last month in August of 2015, the frequent flashbacks in second-person perspective are narrated like an exaggerated version of the dulcet television tones of Ralph Edwards, host of the 1950s reality show This Is Your Life. In its heyday, the show profiled everybody from movie stars to WWII survivors to housewives not unlike Harriet herself. The tone of the show straddles the line between empathetic and exploitative, judgmental and reassuring. Riddled with not only 1950s social mores but also the accompanying circumlocution of delicate topics, it’s a curiosity to most modern readers, but it is be a framework that Harriet herself would recognize.

There is one notable difference between the show and the novel: whereas the show told a person’s story in linear fashion, the book ping-pongs throughout different eras of Harriet’s life, although the overriding narrative arc moves backward. We are constantly asked to reassess whether Harriet is the victim or the perpetrator of her greatest failings: the failure to become the independent woman she always wanted to be, and the failure to fully love her daughter Caroline.

The lurid glare of a television show, however, serves as a less-apt metaphor than the old stand-by of the Russian Matryoshka nesting dolls: we have to go deeper and smaller into her life to finally find the unbroken image within.

Although the big tentpole events might seemed to have charted Harriet’s course, it’s the quotidian acts of forgiveness and mercy, grace even, that’s necessary to end her story at peace with her husband, her children, her friend, and herself.

In my opinion, Harriet’s heroic attempts at absolution absolutely are as haunting as any apparition appearing on this Alaskan cruise. This book is about chances that do (and don’t) pass Harriet by. Don’t let this book pass you by this autumn.

[Jonathan Evison will be signing copies of this book at Lemuria on Wednesday, October 7, at 5:00 p.m. and will be reading at 5:30.]