Dear Listener,
Most people that know me know that I became a little obsessed with The Marriage Plot, writing multiple blogs on the subject, reading it multiple times, and giving it out as a gift more than half a dozen times. It sang to me on several levels, one of them pertaining directly to my age. A big portion of the plot for The Marriage Plot outlined the way twenty-somethings must realize that they do not, in fact, understand the world at all. College seems to have a tendency to bubble, giving the impression that the student does understand the world. It is that post-college period that is so difficult and life forming. Naturally there are other books written about the subject, not just The Marriage Plot. What is odd is there are two books, both published within the past couple of months, both paperback originals, both dealing with this very issue. I’m one who simply can’t help himself, therefore read both over the course of three days. 
Wichita by Thad Ziolkowski looks great on paper. It follows a young man named Lewis who graduates from Columbia University and moves home with his New-Ager mother in Wichita, Kansas, where she is starting a storm-chasing company and possibly a ponzi scheme. She is possibly in a polyamorous relationship. She has a man living in her backyard in a tent who may or may not be making LSD. Lewis’ brother is also living at Mom’s. The brother is bi-polar, prone to stripper friends, drugs, and risk taking, among other things. Lewis’ father’s side of the family is stubbornly intellectual. Basically the opposite of the house in Wichita. All of these things sounded interesting to me. I anticipated it to be a funny, trying, interesting read. For a while it even seemed that way, but the farther I got into it, the more I realized that Ziolkowski built a landscape for his protagonist to shine, but never formed a protagonist. Lewis turns out to be dull and heavily predictable. For a character so engulfed in an interesting setting, Lewis has no personality to speak of. The book turns right with the character, suddenly becoming bland and uninteresting. I don’t want to say Wichita was a bad novel, because it wasn’t. The writing itself is very fine, in most places flowing quite well. I don’t want to say that I hated or even disliked this book, because I really didn’t. It was, however, disappointing. I found myself disappointed. 
The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac by Kris D’Agostino looks, on paper, like a book I would love at sixteen years old. Calvin just dropped out of film school to move back in with his parents, his high school aged pregnant little sister, and his suit wearing, go getter brother. His little sister delays telling her parents about her pregnancy, probably because her father is out of work due to his cancer. Meanwhile, Calvin gets a job as an assistant teacher in a preschool for autistic children. I wasn’t hoping for much with this book. I was expecting a funny little romp that would contain very little maturity. Just like I overestimated Wichita, I found that I truly underestimated Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac. It was touching. The characters are very real and very endearing. I was following most of the story, but the last quarter of the book caught me completely off guard. I was stunned, saddened, irate, and filled with glee. I did not expect to feel anything when I opened the book, and I was wrong.
Read both. Disagree with me. But accept that sometimes books can surprise you and disappoint you and still make you happy.
I’ve been really digging Maps & Atlases’ newest album Beware and Be Grateful which came out a few weeks ago. It seems to me that “beware and be grateful” perfectly describes the art of reading. Below is their first official video from the album. Enjoy!
by Simon
Olmstead states, “If a writer doesn’t read with an eye toward noticing specific, technical strategies, development is almost always slow and torturous, an endless cycle of trial and error. By reading insightfully, a writer improves more quickly, develops a sense of what good writing sounds like, and how it works” (1). Many of the exercises I undertook from Olmstead formed the beginning of stories that went on to be a part of my thesis. Whenever discouragement started to settle in, I would go back to Olmstead’s book and read the last line of his introduction: “The best writers have already written the best short stories, novels, memoirs and books, until you write one better. Here is where you begin” (2). In a sense, a writer begins again each time they sit down to the blank page. Without fail, Olmstead proved a guiding light when the task of starting a new story appeared daunting. He was an excellent instructor.
It is absolutely undeniable that The Coldest Night possesses an immense amount of sentences that sing. My reading life involves a great deal of stealing. If a book doesn’t contain a line I wish I had written, I am often unable to connect with the prose. Not so with Olmstead. During my graduate years, I learned that to write even one paragraph without stirring at least one of the reader’s five senses was one too many. One of the paragraphs in The Coldest Night that I really felt occurred in Part II, during the protagonist’s stint in the Korean War: “The wind blew like a scythe, but they kept north, crossing another plateau and marching up the road. It was an empty and evermore desolate country they entered, a landscape of stunted evergreen, granite boulders, and swirling winds of snow” (120). That first line, “The wind blew like a scythe” does a great deal of work on the page. I believe a lesser writer would have stuck with something along the lines of “The soldiers shivered as they walked, “ or “The wind cut like a knife”—lines we’ve read again and again. But a scythe—now that really speaks, sings as I said before. I hear the sound a scythe makes when it swishes through wheat, feel the sharpness of the blade and the cold steel, and of course, there’s the connection we make between death and the scythe—a poignant evocation since our protagonist is at war. And even the pronunciation of the word “scythe” has a cutting and cold sound on the tongue.
As a story, The Coldest Night is affecting in its depiction of war and the trauma many endure in war’s wake. I was reminded of The Iliad and The Odyssey while reading, since our hero is flung into the thralls of war, and afterward sets out to get home again. Home also includes the story of Mercy, the love of Henry’s life, who was torn away from him through a sort of Romeo and Juliet family conflict. Part III is especially reminiscent of Hemingway, namely his short story “Soldier’s Home”, as our hero, Henry, struggles to find his footing upon returning to a home greatly altered from the one he left behind, and subsequently shaped by his disastrous experiences at war. Such a story is particularly significant for our 21st century, as we Americans progress through what some have termed a state of “permanent war.” There’s no glory or hyper-patriotism here, just brave kids trying to stay alive, both in and after the war.
The setting first takes us to Pontiac County, Quebec, around 1900 where Irish famine farmers and French Canadians had settled along the St. Lawrence River and eventually moved into the hinterlands of Quebec, hoping to farm and cut more trees.
Joe’s father, in reckless pursuit of adventure, had died in South Africa. Joe, being the oldest, becomes the automatic head of the household, confident, strong and stocky until the mother remarries a ne’er do well whose only claim to fame is as an obsessive fiddler whose wretched behavior towards his step children will lead them to a necessary act of kidnapping where the kids do the napping and the adult is the one literally kicked out of town.
It’s a beautiful story, a big sweep through history and the dynamics of a troubled family. Yet, there is a strength and beauty in this imperfect relationship bolstered by the physical landscape at both ends of our country. The land and the people dance together and they retreat like boxers in a ring, often coming out fighting, victors not always clear.
