Blockade Billy by Stephen King: Casting the movie with C.B. James and Sandy Nawrot

For a change of pace, Sandy at You’ve GOTTA Read This and I decided to cast the screen adaptation of Stephen King’s novella Blockade Billy instead of writing traditional reviews. Blockade Billy is a story from the golden age of baseball. Billy arrives fresh from the farm and takes his minor league team by storm. The team’s aging pitcher takes young Billy under his wing in an attempt to ride the gifted cathcer’s shirttail to the major leagues. The crusty general manager and the fatherly third base coach watch young Billy’s rise, unaware of the dark secret he harbors. This is Stephen King country in the end.

My casting calls:



Corey Monteith

 Corey Monteith as Blockade Billy Blakely. Corey Monteith, who currently plays the role of Finn Hudson on television's Glee, is the epitome of small town, Midwestern American farm boy. Just look at him. He can pull off the aw-shucks gee-whiz corn fed innocence of the young ball player fresh off the farm. He has not done anything yet to prove himself capable of playing a character with a dark side, but that is a mark in his favor.  The audience must be shocked by the final reveal. No one would suspect Finn Hudson was ever capable of hurting anybody, just like no one suspected Blockade Billy.

Eli Wallach

Eli Wallach as the team’s general manager Joe DiPunno. Eli Wallach could have played all the parts at some point in his career, but now, he’s perfect for DiPunno. Few actors can play crusty with a heart of gold as well as Eli Wallach. King’s characterization of DiPunno is very close to stereotype, but an actor as capable as Eli Wallach can use that to deliver a scene stealing performance.

Mr. Wallach is getting a lifetime achievement Oscar this year, which can only bring prestige to the production. Blockade Billy should be a prestige King movie, along the lines of Shawshank Redemption or Stand By Me, since there are no supernatural elements in the story. Think The Natural with a murder at the end. The presence of one Oscar winner in the cast only serves to bring the Academy’s attention to the rest of the actors when nomination time rolls around. And we may be able to get some of the other actors to settle for scale for the chance to work with a legend like Eli Wallach. If we’re aiming for acting Oscars, we’re going to have to keep a low budget.

Tim Roth

Tim Roth as the pitcher Danny Dusen. Tim Roth has proven he can bring the washed out edge to his performance that this character needs. While he’s not altogether unsympathetic, Danny Dusen is close to an overt villain. He tries to use Billy as his ticket to the majors and happily attempts to corrupt the young ball player. Roth is a brave enough actor to play someone devious enough to use young Corey Monteith for his own advancement. He can play someone the audience hates but still feels a little sorry for in the end.

Kevin James

Kevin James as the third base coach Granny Gantham. Kevin James is known as a comedic actor, so we could probably get him on the cheap if we promise him a prestige dramatic production. The role calls for an everyman, average Joe type who has lived past his promising youth. Basically, all Kevin James would have to do is be a believable nice guy, and he has that down pat. He also has a male fan base so he could bring in that audience, while Roth and Wallach bring in a more art house crowd and Corey Monteith brings in the date-night teenage set. All four could make for an excellent date movie.


Kellan Lutz


Sandy has selected Kellan Lutz for the title role of Billy Blakely. Mr. Lutz’s claim to fame is portraying Emmet Cullen in the Twilight series. This is sure to draw some viewers, as Sandy says, but I think it’s also sure to drive others away. At this point Twilight is a double edged sword. Mr. Lutz may bring in young women, but as soon as young men hear “Twilight” they’re going to head for the door. Mr. Monteith has a similar problem since he’s from Glee, but Glee is not nearly as famous as Twilight. I’m also going to argue that Mr. Monteith is the much more wholesome of the two. Mr. Lutz looks like he has a dark secret, so it won’t surprise the audience. They already know he’s a vampire. Mr. Monteith looks like he’s never had an impure thought. He’s certainly never sucked anyone’s blood.



Mark Wahlberg

 Sandy likes Mark Wahlberg for the role of Danny Dusen. I see Danny Dusen as a snake in the grass. While Mr. Wahlberg can probably pull this off, I prefer Mr. Roth in the role. Danny Dusen has a flamboyant, outspoken edge to him that Tim Roth is better suited for. Dusen talks a lot. Mark Wahlberg is best when he is quietly intense.  It's somehow easier to believe him when he's not talking.

Leonardo DiCaprio

Leonardo Di Caprio as third base coach Granny Gantham is just not going to work for me. While I can appreciate Sandy’s desire to see him in baseball pants, I just don’t see anyone believing he really knows the game. Kevin James looks like a guy who knows baseball. It’s easy to believe a new player, even a seasoned one, would look to coach Kevin James for advice. Coach Leonardo DiCaprio? I’m not buying it. Overall, Sandy’s cast is too pretty. If we want to make a believable baseball movie we’ll need a sufficient number of non-pretty actors to create authenticity. If we want a prestige production that will win awards we can’t have a cast as pretty as Sandy’s. I know. But it’s true. Pretty actor’s don’t get Oscars unless they make themselves look ugly.

Tommy Lee Jones

As for Tommy Lee Jones as general manager Joe DiPunno, Sandy is absolutely spot-on. If we can’t get Eli Wallach, who will probably have lots of offers now that he’s finally getting an Oscar, we should get Tommy Lee Jones.  He'd be terrific.

So, Hollywood, if you’re out there, we’ve already made the tough decisions for you. Give Mr. King a call. Bring Blockade Billy to the big screen.

To read more about Sandy’s choices go to You’ve GOTTA Read This.

The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson

Accidents ambush the unsuspecting,

 often violently, just like love.

Opening to The Gargoyle

by Andrew Davidson.

The narrator ought to be sympathetic.  We should feel for him.  He has no parents.  No close friends.  He is recovering from a terrible car accident that left him severely burned.  So severe that toes, fingers and other appendages were burned completely off.  He spends weeks in a coma and months in the hospital recovering.  One by one, those who knew him stop buy to visit  never to return after seeing how grotesquely deformed he has become.

We should feel bad for him. 

But he's repulsive.  He made his fortune producing pornography, first as an actor then as a director/producer.  He never formed a real relationship with anyone. He was high on cocaine at the time of his accident, so he has no one to blame but himself.  He's mean to the hospital staff who  try to help him recover.  Ungrateful at every turn and angry at the world around him. 

We should believe the story.  The narration of recovery is exact, detailed.  It reads like the author is writing something he once lived.  The medical procedures and the psychological states of mind the narrator goes through are harrowing reading, but every moment rings true.  Even the fact that its narrator never becomes sympathetic adds to the novel's realism. 

Enter Marianne Engel, a former patient in the psychiatric ward of the same hospital.  She begins to make regular visits.  She claims she knows the narrator, that they share a history he does not remember, that he has been burned twice before.  She claims to have met the narrator when she was a scribe in a German convent, sometime in the late 14th century.  The narrator was hidden in the convent while he recovered from his first set of burns, received in battle.  His cohorts, mercenaries sworn never to leave the group except in death, thought him mortally wounded, but under Marianne Engel's care he recovered.  The two fell in love and left the convent together trying to escape the mercenaries and start a new life together.

Hard to believe.

But it all works.  Mr. Davidson's The Gargoyle draws the reader into the story the way an excellent thriller does, but without car chases or cliff-hanging escapades.   The Gargoyle takes its time.  Before we meet Marianne Engel, we have accompanied the narrator through his accident and the early stages of his treatment and recovery.  We have come to empathize with him even though we don't sympathize.  Marianne reveals her history, or what she believes is her history, slowly, through flashbacks, as she tells the narrator the their life together.  He always suspects she is delusional, as do we, but neither of us can help but become involved in her tale.  Both his narration and hers could stand alone and hold the reader's interest without fail.  Together each tempts the reader to skim one alternating chapter to find out what happens next.  Will the couple in the past find safe harbor?  Will the couple in the present find a way to life with each other's medical conditions? 

Unfortunately, The Gargoyle falls short in the end.  Once an author has his readers completely hooked temptations loom.   Just how much are we willing to believe?  Once everything is firmly grounded in reality, can the book enter the fantastic?  Had the novel stopped twenty pages earlier, maybe even ten pages earlier, I would be singing its praises without reservations.  But Mr. Davidson just went that little extra step too far.  From point A to point N, when he should have stopped at point M.  A minor quibble maybe, but endings are as important as beginnings.  Whether or not we sympathize, we need to believe.

Sunday Salon: Random, Random, Rant.



Ice Cream photo from The Good Food Revolution.

 Random #1: It's not a challenge; it's a read-a-long!

I've been thinking about hosting a couple of reading challenges in the new year, but the book blogosphere seems to have turned against them.  This month I've found several end of the year posts decrying unfinished challenges and pledging none in 2011. 

However, when I mentioned running a western reading challenge in my review of Butcher's Crossing last week, several people said that they'd be up for it. 

So, what if instead of calling it a challenge, I call it a read-a-long?  The Hop-a-long, Git-a-long, Read-a-long?  What if all you had to do was read a single western during the month of May?  I pick May because John Wayne was born in May. Anyone up for something like that?  If you have trouble with westerns, don't think of them as westerns; think of them as historical fiction. 

The second reading challenge I have in mind is more of a dare.  Make a New Year's resolution to read only books from your TBR stack for as long as you can.  One book, one week, one month.  Whoever lasts until April 1 wins!  It wouldn't be a reading challenge either.  It would be "The TBR Dare!"  Are you brave enough to take the dare?


Random #2: I won't take comments personally if you won't

While I like how respectful book bloggers are both on their blogs and in each other's comments, I wish there was a way to be more passionate without risking offense.  Even when people are leaving an "I'm not going to read that" sort of comment, they are very careful not to offend the blogger or the writer.  Sometimes I read a blog post and I just want to scream, "You're totally wrong!!!!!"  

I have left a few comments here and there that openly disagree with something someone says, but I'm always nervous about it.  I always spend extra time toning them down.  I don't do this at  my book club where there have been meetings when voices were raised over literature.  We are still friends afterwards.  As long as everyone agrees with me in the end. 

But book blogs are much more polite.  Jess, one half of  Park Benches and Bookends recently ran a post about six books she hates that most people love.  I'd read five of the six and loved them, so I left a comment about how I should probably rush out and read the sixth book. ( It was The Gargoyle, by Andrew Davidson. I did rush out; I did love.)  As soon as I hit publish, I started worrying about it.  Was I being too snarky?  Worrying over this comment sparked my brooding over this topic.  (It was clear from her reply that Jess saw the humor in my remark.)

I think book blogs could use a little more Siskel and Ebert-ness, a few voices raised over literature. Sandy at You've GOTTA Read This and I have tried this.  (See here and see this blog on Tuesday.)  It was fun being a bit snarky and free with our criticism of each other's comments.  We both had lots of fun with it.  I think we would have had more fun if we'd disagreed more, but we both liked like the book. 

Amateur Reader of Wuthering Expectations is an exception.  He has left  a few pointed comments about my reviews, and I sometimes get the feeling that if we were face to face he might try to poke me in the eye now and then, but I appreciate the debate.  It's good to have someone who forces you to defend your remarks.  That's one way to develop critical skills.  And I've seen enough Three Stooges movies to block an on-coming eye poke.

I don't want less civility.  I like this polite little corner of the internet we've carved out for ourselves.  I'd just like to put a little passion back in the relationship.  So roll up your sleeves and have at it.  Disagree away.  I won't take it personally if you don't.


Rant: My marriage is not a double scoop cone.

What if the old saying that the personal is political applies directly to the most profound relationship in your life?  What if you've been reading a particular blog for a while, when one day you find a post dismissing the most profound relationship in your life as a sin?

A post about loving the sinner but hating the sin; about not having anything against certain people just against the things they do; about  not being a bigoted person for believing  this particular group of people is going to hell; about having  a right to certain views and a right to speak up;  a post that said,  "If my friend was getting fat from eating too much ice-cream, I'd say something." 

I paraphrase.  A little.

C.J. and I have spent fifteen years together, through fat and thin, sickness and health, richer and poorer, side by side.  Is that something you'd object to the same way you would to an overweight friend about to splurge on a double scoop?

I think that's sick, and I have a right to say so. Just like I would if I had a good friend who still smoked Menthols

End of sermon. I feel much better now. 



Please let me know if you think I should go ahead with the "Hop-a-long, Git-a-long, Read-a-long" or "The TBR Dare."  And feel free to passionately object to either or to both or to just list your favorite ice-cream flavors if so moved.  Mine is Java Chip.

Dakota's Favorites: The Gift of Stones by Jim Crace

I found The Gift of Stones via a discussion on the BBC's A Good Read which can be streamed through their website.  Each week two guests and the shows host discuss the three books they've selected.   It's like listening in on a very well run book club discussion.  The strange thing is that when the guests are authors the book choices are frankly very dull.  But when the guests are celebrities--actors, television celebrities or pop-stars-- the book choices are  fascinating.  I've forgotten who selected Jim Crace's novel, The Gift of Stones but I'm glad he did.  It's a wonderful, unusual book.


"My father's right arm ended not in a hand but, at the elbow, in a bony swelling."

Opening line to The Gift of Stones by Jim Crace.

The Gift of Stones by Jim Crace takes place at the end of the stone age in a community of stone workers. The people of the village are divided into two groups: the stone cutters who spend their days in their workshops and the traders who run the market place and become wealthy by bartering with the many people who come to the village for the stone cutters excellent flint tools and weapons.

But The Gift of Stones is the story of an outsider, neither stone cutter or merchant. In his childhood the unnamed protagonist loses his arm after the village is attacked by horsemen. This is the most likely explanation, anyway. The protagonist is a story-teller, the creator of lies, who has told many different versions of how he lost his arm. The narrator is the story teller's daughter, and it is up to her to filter out what her father has made up to entertain his audience and earn his living and get to the truth of his story.

The protagonist grows up without a mother or a father, raised by a stone cutter uncle who has a family of his own to care for and cannot be bothered with another mouth to feed. So the protagonist is left to his own devices. No one believes a one-armed man can cut stone, so he is never trained to do any work at all. His uncle feeds him until he is grown and does not really notice when he wonders off from the village one day.

The protagonist walks to the sea where he finds a widow named Doe and her daughter. Doe has lost her husband and her sons and now makes her living from the land around her and from what she can get from the men who pass by her hut in exchange for a few minutes in the tall grass. The protagonist befriends Doe and takes her back to his village. He becomes close to the daughter who eventually comes to think of him as her true father. It is she who narrates the novel through her own narrative voice and through repeating the tales her father told her.

The Gift of Stones can be enjoyed as a historical novel or adventure tale but it can also be read on a much deeper level. The narrator doesn't just give us one version of the events, the one she thinks is true, she tells us the many different version her father, the storyteller, told. So many version of the same story begin to reveal much about the teller and about the nature of stories. Why make something up when the facts are known to both teller and audience? Why does the audience enjoy the version they know to be false so much more than the version they know to be true? Is the story teller responsible to the truth or to his audience? The protagonist tells his stories in exchange for food, they are the goods he brings to the market place. How does this commodification of his stories affect the way he tells them? Even in the stone age, the story teller has to be aware of what his audience brings to the tale. His daughter on the other hand, can narrate the story any way she chooses. Or can she? How do the issues that affected her father affect her? How do they affect the author?

I find these issues fascinating as you can probably guess. If you find them annoying, don't worry. You can read The Gift of Stones as a straightforward historical narrative and find much to enjoy. The presentation of life in the stone age is interesting throughout the novel. Showing us a village at the end of the stone age makes it possible for Mr. Crace to present what happens to stone cutters once bronze tools arrive on the scene. I'm giving The Gift of Stones by Jim Crace five out of five stars.

Finishing the Hat by Stephen Sondheim



There are only three principles necessary for

 a lyric writer, all of them familiar truisms.

Opening to the preface of Finishing The Hat

 by Stephen Sondheim.

My grandmother had a difficult time dealing with the fact that her grandson was gay.  Sometimes she appeared fine with it, other times she'd remember how evil she thought it was.  At some point in one of far too many arguments I blurted out, "You took me to see Cabaret when I was nine!  What did you think would happen?"

Cabaret at age nine?  Any wonder I became a fan of musical theatre.  When alphabetized, the albums in my dorm room milk-crate ran--Patti Smith, Stephen Sondheim, Bruce Springsteen.  Horses, Follies, and Born to Run.   

It's not as strange as it sounds.  Two of my good friends in those days were  hardcore punks and dedicated fans of the ballet.  Just because you enjoy slam dancing doesn't mean you can't appreciate a good pirouette.

All of this, some of it anyway, makes me the target audience for Stephen Sondheim's new book Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes.  I found it marvelous good fun.  Mr. Sondheim provides the inside scoop on the production of his shows and describes the difficulties the songs presented without lingering too long on any particular one.  While his book is informative, it does not fail to entertain as it enlightens. 

There is plenty to satisfy any former nine-year-old theatre queen.  For instance, the final lyric in "Officer Krupke" from West Side Story.  The song, a bit of comic relief in the midst of the second act's tragedy, describes all of the various people who are supposed to help  delinquent youth.  In the end, once it's become clear that no one can help them, the Jets all yell "Krup you!"  This was not the original last line to the song.  When the song's original lyric was first played for the show's  producers one of them visibly blanched.  Columbia Records informed them that if the original lyric was on the cast album, obscenity laws would make it illegal to ship it across state lines.  So instead of being the first Broadway production to feature the f-word as intended--"Krup you!"  Mr. Sondheim writes that it's actually a much better lyric because it fits the "kidlike nature of the Jets better."   He ran into a similar problem in the same song with the word 'schmuck' which had to be recorded as 'schmo' for the cast album.  Turns out 'schmuck' was too dirty.

While there is plenty in Finishing the Hat for theatre lovers, Mr. Sondheim's commentary on what makes for good lyric writing can easily serve as a primer for writers of all sorts.  Love his shows or hate them, he has been a very successful writer, and one would do well to take whatever advice he has to offer.  He believes that all lyrics must serve the ideal of clarity.  To this end he follows principles familiar to every reader of Strunk and White:  content dictates form, less is more, and God is in the details. 

He uses his commentary on Oscar Hammerstein to explain how lyrics must work together with the music; a fact which often makes them look flat when read as poetry.  For example, one of Mr. Hammerstein's best lyrics doesn't look like much on the page.

Oh, what a beautiful mornin',

Oh, what a beautiful day.

I got a beautiful feelin'

Ev'rythin's goin' my way!

But when sung to Richard Rogers's music at the opening of Oklahoma, these lyrics soar and they effectively set the tone for the show that follows.  Mr. Sondheim compares these to a bad lyric also by Oscar Hammerstein:

You are the promised kiss of springtime

That makes the lonely winter seem long.

It's the music that makes the difference.  The first one comes to vibrant life while the second, with music by Jerome Kern,  is made simply bathetic.  (Bathetic: effusively or insincerely emotional.   I had to look it up. Sondheim can be like that.)

If it's possible to learn anything from bad writing, Mr. Sondheim has learned it from Lorenzo Hart, long time songwriting partner of Richard Rogers.  Together they wrote much of the Great American Songbook including songs like My Funny Valentine which contains the lyric "Your looks are laughable, unphotographable."  Mr. Sondheim quibbles, surely he means unphotogenic, not unphotographable.  Mr. Sondheim's basic critique of Lorenzo Hart is that he is a lazy writer, unconcerned with character and willing to sacrifice meaning for  rhyme.  In context, "My Funny Valentine" is sung by a teenage girl to her guardian. It's a bit creepy.  Hart once remarked to Alan Jay Lerner, "I've got a lot of talent, kid.  If I cared, I could probably have been a genius."  Hart did come up with his share of gems like "Glad to be Unhappy."

Unrequited love's a bore

And I've got it pretty bad,

But with someone you adore,

It's a pleasure to be sad.

Think what he could have done had he cared.  Mr. Sondheim cares.  To this day he laments many of his own lyrics like those to "Somewhere" from West Side Story where the significant note in the opening bar falls on the word 'a.'  That's attention to detail,  worrying about the word 'a.' 

Treasure Island by Robert Lewis Stevenson, illustarted by N.C. Wyeth

Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest

 of these gentlemen having asked me to

 write down the whole particulars about

Treasure Island, from the beginning to the

 end, keeping nothing back but the bearings

 of the island, and that only because there

 is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my

 pen in the year of 17--, and go back to the

 time when my father kept the "Admiral

Benbow" inn, and the brown old seaman,

with the sabre cut, first took up his lodging

 under our roof.

Opening to Treasure Island
 by Robert Lewis Stevenson.

Adventure can rely on character.  Robert Lewis Stevenson demonstrates this in his classic novel Treasure Island.  There's plenty of adventure in Treasure Island:  mysterious strangers arrive on stormy nights;  innocent people survive savage attacks;  abandoned ships drift out to sea;  pirates climb the walls of forts under the cover of darkness to attack sleeping innocents;  castaways, marooned for years, are rescued;  fortunes are found and lost again.

But what the reader walks away from Treasure Island remembering is the books characters.  Long John Silver is the best known, but there are plenty of others, pirates and non-pirates alike.  It's these characters that have kept readers coming back to Treasure Island generation after generation.  They continue to frighten, to intrigue and to entertain.

Illustration by N.C. Wyeth

In fact,  most of what we know about pirates, we learned from Treasure Island.  Pirates have wooden legs and wear  eye patches.  They walk with a crutch, but in a pinch, they can transform their crutch into a deadly spear.  They keep parrots as pets and teach them to say "pieces of eight."  When they get together, they can't help but sing "Sixteen men on a dead man's chest/ Yo, ho, ho, and a bottle of rum!"  They are charmers, but they cannot be trusted.  They terrify us, but we can't help but want to be like them.  And we're always a little bit relieved when they get away in the end.

Illustration by N.C. Wyeth

The menace and magic of Robert Lewis Stevenson's pirates are both captured by N.C. Wyeth's illustrations.  The elder Wyeth has been admired by illustrators for generations, and many consider his artwork for Treasure Island to be his best.  I don't know enough about the art of illustration to effectively judge N.C. Wyeth, but C.J. and I have developed a few standards in  almost 15 years of shared museum going.  One is do we believe the figures in the painting existed before the moment of the artwork and will they continue to exist afterwards.  I think Wyeth's do.  His illustrations capture parts of a larger moment. 

N.C. Wyeth is also a master of composition.  Notice this group of three pirates climbing the walls of the fort.  The viewer sees the two on the wall right away, but did you notice the third one who has already entered the fort's shadow?  And look at the angle of the mast and the yard arm in the illustration above.  There is no steady, level place for Jim to hide in as he climbs the ship's rigging to escape the pirate.  Everything is sharp angles and  dangerous slanted beams.  The only solid right angle in the picture is the horizon off in the distance.  Beyond that horizon, the safety of home.

I can see why N.C. Wyeth is considered one of the best.  His illustrations create characters with lives outside the paintings just as a good author creates characters with lives outside the book they inhabit.  Wyeth and Stevenson are wonderful together. 

Butcher's Crossing by John Williams

The coach from Ellsworth to

Butcher's Crossing was a

dougherty that had been

converted to carry passengers.

Opening to Butcher's 

Crossing by John Williams. 

Reading challenges can take you places you never thought you'd go.  I saw the  NYRB Reading Week as an excuse to visit  second hand book stores in search of spines with the NYRB logo.  Of the four I found, one was a western called Butcher's Crossing by John Williams.  It's turned out to be a strong contender for my 2010 list of favorite reads.

Butcher's Crossing is the story of Will Andrews.  With his head full of Emersonian ideas about man's "original relation to nature," he leaves Harvard before completing his degree and heads west where he hopes to find some sort of work with a distant family friend, Mr. McDonald, in the town of Butcher's Crossing, Kansas.  In the 1870's, when the novel is set, Butcher's Crossing is a town built on the  buffalo hide boom.  Will rejects Mr. McDonald's offer to join him in a land speculation scheme and soon falls under the wing of  experienced buffalo hunter Mr. Miller, who is looking for someone to fund an expedition to find one of the last full size buffalo herds in the Rockies.  Andrews agrees to provide the needed funds and becomes one of four expedition members.

By the 1870's what was wild about the American West was just about gone.  There is no mention of Native Americans in Butcher's Crossing because there are few left on the plains by this point.  The railroad is on its way west bringing civilization with it. The smart money says leave trapping and hunting behind, buy land as close to the railroad as possible if you want to get rich.  The buffalo are in their final days as well.  The hunters have been travelling farther and farther afield only to return with fewer and fewer low quality hides.  Miller hopes to find one last herd as big as those he found when he first came to the plains when the herds covered the horizon.

Buffalo hides awaiting shipment, Dodge City, Kansas.

I could argue that all great westerns are set at just this moment in time, when the wild is about to give way to the civilized.  The last great cattle drive, the last stand of the native tribes, the end of the gunslinger era.  Shane is about a cattle rancher's attempts to keep farmers out of his valley.  True Grit is about a frontiersman's final days of usefulness. As soon as Americans started moving west, the west was finished.  If the Jacksonian ideal of one man standing on his own against the wild and all those around him ever existed, it only existed as a doomed figure, trying to keep the end at bay as long as possible.  His days were always numbered.  His greatest misfortune was that he would live to see the end.

Butcher's Crossing exists firmly within this tradition of the wild west's final days.  It's drowning in it.  Miller looking for one last great hunt.  McDonald trying to buy up all the land he can for all the profit he can make when the railroad arrives.  The impending arrival of the railroad itself.  Will Andrew's desire to experience the wilderness before it's gone altogether.  Experience it he does.  In the book's centerpiece scene, the buffalo hunt, at the exact heart of the novel.

After a while Andrews began to perceive a rhythm in Miller's slaughter. First, with a deliberate slow movement that was a tightening of the arm muscles, a steadying of his head, and a slow squeeze of his hand, Miller would fire his rifle; then quickly he would eject the still-smoking cartridge and reload; he would study the animal he had shot, and if he saw that it was cleanly hit, his eyes would search among the circling herd for a buffalo that seemed particularly restless; after a few seconds, the wounded animal would stagger and crash to the ground; and then he would shoot again. The whole business seemed to Andrews like a dance, a thunderous minuet created by the wildness that surrounded it.

One man, Miller, kills almost every member of the last great buffalo herd, leaving the hidden Rocky Mountain valley where he found it dotted with skinned corpses, like a hellish landscape by Hieronymus Bosch.  Then, like Ernest Hemingway's Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea, Miller must get his 'catch' back to town where he can sell it. 

Butcher's Crossing is a classic western.  It does not break any molds, nor does it offer an ironic, modern take on the events it describes.  There's even the familiar young man at the side of an older mentor/idol as there is in just about every John Wayne western one can name.  While Butcher's Crossing works completely within the norms of the western genre, it works.  That the post hunt journey back to Butcher's Crossing and the novel's final scenes play out exactly as readers familiar with Old Man and the Sea would expect does not detract from their emotional impact.  In the end, the reader feels the personal loss of the hunter's broken dreams and the larger loss of a wilderness laid waste for a quick profit and a passing fad.

Sunday Salon: Live long enough and they'll give you an award.

Click to play

Friday Picture Reading with James Dean

James Dean Reading

Bat 6 by Virginia Euwer Wolff

Now that it's over, we are telling.
Opening to Bat 6,
by Virginia Euwer Wolff

This may not be a fair review.  I have a few issues with Bat 6.  You have been warned.

Bat 6 is the story of how racism hit home following World War II in small town rural Oregon.  Every year, the sixth grade girls in the rival towns of Bear Creek Ridge and Barlow Road have a softball game.  It's a big deal.  Everyone in both towns comes to see the game.  The girls spend the entire school year practicing for it.  It's meant to bring the two communities together, to inspire good sportsmanship, and to build the character of the girls and everyone who attends. 

In 1948 two new girls arrive.  Aki is not really new--her family was sent to a relocation camp along with most of the Japanese Americans living in the western half of America.  They are trying to restart their orchards.  "After a few minor incidents, Aki's family is re-integrated into the town.  Everyone is basically embarrased by what happend to them and anxious to leave the past in the past.  Shazam, Shirley to her teachers, is on the new girl on the other team.  She has come to live with her grandmother because her own mother is not capable of supporting her and her father, a sailor, was killed when Pearl Harbor was bombed. Though she is a difficult person, the girls on her team try to help Shazam adjust to her new home.

This should be a good review.  The book is well written, well intended.  It does not sugar-coat the issues it deals with nor does it resort to preaching.  The characters are strong, and the suspenseful plot holds the reader's interest as the story builds to a thought provoking climax.  But I still have a few issues.


I find it hard to believe that none of the girls besides Shazam have any problems with Aki.  Nor do any of their parents.  There is set of fathers who will not speak to each other becuase one was a conscientious objector while the other fought in the war.  I find this well within believabitily.  But I find it hard to accept that the only other character in town with any significant prejudice against Aki and her family is Shazam.  It's only 1948. 


Which brings me to my second problem with Bat 6.  The prejudiced character, Shazam, is dirt poor, the product of an absent single mother, probably emotionally disturbed and mentally handicapped.  While she is an excellent ball player, she cannot learn her multiplication tables.  The rest of the girls have no issues with prejudice.  While they are not all wealthy, they are the product of well adjusted, two parent families and none of them are as poor as Shazam's grandmother.  That Shazam is the only "bad" girl in the lot is problematic at least.  It makes the novel imply that only certain types of people carry racial hatred.  If your parents are good people like us, you won't be prejudiced.  This has not been my experience with prejudice.

Lastly, why do YA authors and publisher insists on using multiple voices in their novels?  Every girl on both teams takes a turn narrating Bat 6.  Even adult readers find this device confusing.  It's the thing I hate most about Bleak House.  Time and again my students have told me they don't like multiple narrators because it confuses them.  Even with a relatively easy read like No More Dead Dogs, the mulitple narrators serve to confuse and irritate many middle school readers. 

Please stop it.  The sixth and seventh grade students in room 29 implore you.

School for Love by Olivia Manning



When they reached the top of the hill 

 from which the road snaked down in

 the Seven Sisters' bends, the driver

 nodded to the opposite hill and

 said: 'El-telq.'

Opening to School for Love
by Olivia Manning.


Olivia Manning never made it big.  A workhorse of a writer she had 22 titles under her belt when she died in 1980.  While she made a living as a writer, somehow, both critical and popular success eluded her.  Now, most of her work is out of print.  That she remains in print at all is due in large part to the television adaptation of her Balkan and Levant trilogies called Fortunes of War.  Those six books make up one of the greatest epic stories of the 20th century.

Ms. Manning spent World War II with her husband, both civilians, first in Eastern Europe and then in Egypt and Palestine.  Her stay in Jerusalem provides the impetus for her novel School for Love.    Of course one should avoid looking for signs of the author in the novel, but Ms. Manning was well known for inserting the people she knew into her books, sometimes as a form of revenge, so it's difficult to avoid falling into the authorial trap. 

Consider the profound events of Ms. Manning's time in Jerusalem.  During those years, she became pregnant.  Tragically, her child died in utero, but because of the laws and customs of the time she was forced to carry it until it reached full term some two months later.  It's easy to see this experience working its way into the plot of School Of Love.  Motherless children and childless women abound.

School of Love is about young Felix, a teenager, on his own after the death of his mother.  Felix finds himself in the pension of a distant relation's sister-in-law, Miss Bohun.  Miss Bohun is an eccentric character, an Englishwoman on her own in Jerusalem.  Her primary interest in Felix is the money the British government will pay her for taking him in but she puts on a great show of genuine feeling.  Felix is enchanted with her, at first.  Alone in the world, he adopts Miss Bohun as a surrogate mother figure and adopts her cat Faro as his one friend. 

The novel is set in the closing days of World War II, a time when British nationals abroad as well as refugees from all parts of Europe were finally getting an opportunity to return home. Many had been away for years, some of them simply caught unaware by the war.  Jerusalem was a place full of people waiting their turn to leave.  It's much like the opening scenes of Casablanca. 

Olivia Manning.  c. 1930's
Source. Wikipedia

As Felix begins to grow aware of just how miserly Miss Bohun really is, a new guest arrives-- Mrs. Ellis.  Mrs. Ellis is much younger than Miss Bohun. She is also both newly widowed and pregnant.  She does not settle in for dinners and evenings with Miss Bohun.  Instead she goes out nightly to cafes where she meets with Jewish and Palestinian intellectuals.   She takes Felix along, and he begins to fall in love with her a bit, though he clearly also sees her as a more suitable mother figure than Miss Bohun. 

It's an odd love triangle.  Miss Bohun wants affection from both Felix and Miss Ellis.  Felix, who is moving on from Miss Bohun, seeks motherly affection from Miss Ellis while at the same time desires something more.  He is 15, just at the stage for a full Oedipal complication.  Miss Ellis is simply marking time with both.  She enjoys Felix's company, but wants nothing more than that.  He knows she will forget him two days after he is gone. 

School for Love shines a light on wartime experience that we don't often see.  What happens to the civilians who are left stranded by events?  How do they find a way to get by, to get shelter, to get employment?  What toll does years of waiting for a chance to return take on their lives?  What happens to a boy who is forced to grow to manhood under these conditions? 

One could argue that not much happens in Olivia Manning's book.  While I think this is largely true, I think it produces two worthy results.  One, it allows Ms. Manning's characters to get under the reader's skin.  It's been years since I last read the Balkan or the Levant books, but I still feel like Harriet and Guy Pringle are old friends, people I haven't heard from in a while but should probably send a Christmas card to anyway.  Two, in the end the readers see that things were happening all along, under the surface perhaps, but happening just the same.  When events finally do reach a climax, it is one to remember. 

By the end of School for Love it's clear that neither woman wants much to do with young Felix.  He sees that even Faro, his cat, just keeps him company because he is the one feeding her.  Felix discovers that matters in the end is not who loves you, but whom you love. 

TSS: NYRB Reading Week, Dueling Westerns, 5 Bucks a Bag Book Sale and 47 Years

NYRB Reading Week hosted by The Literary Stew

 Yesterday was my birthday. It was also the end of NYRB Reading Week.  I spent the week with two NYRB books.  The first was School for Love by Olivia Manning.   I think Olivia Manning is still an unjustly overlooked author.  Her two trilogies The Balkan and The Levant are among the best I've read.   She writes about the experience of war from the civilian point of view.  School for Love opens as World War II is ending.  The hero, Felix, is sent to live with a distant relation in Jerusalem while he waits for a berth on a ship bound for England and home.  It's difficult to imagine now, but when World War II broke out, civilians who were overseas at the time found themselves stranded, often for years.  Even the few who could find passage home had to be willing to risk the danger.  So small colonies of British and American exiles and refugees from occupied Europe formed in places like Alexandria and Jerusalem.  Ms. Manning writes of this life with the insight of someone who lived the experience.

School for Love
by Olivia Manning
NYRB Edition

I'm in the middle of my second NYRB book, Butcher's Crossing by John Williams.  Will Andrews, a young man caught up  in visions of natural paradise from reading Emerson, travels west in the 1870's to Butcher's Crossing, a once thriving town now just surviving on the tail end  of the buffalo hide market.  Will joins a small team of buffalo hunters determined to find one last great hunt in the Colorado Rockies.  Things are not going well for the hunters so far.

I found a very good article about westerns on The Daily Beast.com.  It's not often that one finds a good article about books there or at Huffingtonpost.com anymore.  It's a shame really.  Both of these sites started out strong, but they've fallen into celebrity nonsense now.  I don't know why Ariana Huffington thinks anyone should care what Alec Baldwin thinks about anything.  I've nothing against him, but how does being a supporting cast member on a sitcom qualify you to write about anything other than being a suporting actor on a sticom?  And their book section has become an endless series of dull top ten lists, as has the book section at The Daily Beast.com.

Butcher's Crossing
by John Williams
NYRB Edition

The Daily Beast article compares Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove with Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian both of which have 25th anniversary editions out this month.  The atricle's author, Allen Barra, comes down on the side of Larry McMurtry.   It's well worth reading, even if you're not a fan of westerns.  At the heart of the matter is a difference between writing for a general readership and writing for art's sake.   Mr. McCarthy will get  the awards and make lots of sales to English departments and MFA programs, but Mr. McMurtry will touch the hearts and minds of many more readers.  I find I'm losing patience with MFA program authors.  They are becoming the fictional equivalent of their colleagues in the English department, producing a kind of writing that's only of interest to other department members.  Readers who understand and appreciate their work are welcomed as members of an elite group.   Readers who don't are really too simple to bother with anyway.  I worry that literary novels may soon go the way of poetry.   Do you know anyone who regularly reads poetry?  It used to be a common occurence, something everyone read and enjoyed in books, magazines, even daily newspapers   Not anymore. 

Mr. Allen's article contains a short reading list of westerns.  While it looks like an inspired reading list to me, Mr. Allen reveals a slight bias--"serious writers who have written westerns." 

The roundup of serious writers who have written Westerns over this span is impressive: E.L. Doctorow’s amusing revisionist take on the pulp Western, Welcome to Hard Times (1960), Thomas Berger’s epic Little Big Man (1964), Charles Portis’s True Grit (1968), which is soon to appear as a Coen Brothers’ film for Christmas release, Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), Ron Hansen’s Desperadoes (1979) and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (1983), Pete Dexter’s elegiac twilight-of-the-gods account of Wild Bill Hickok’s last days, Deadwood (1986), Daniel Woodrell’s Woe to Live On (1987), made into Ang Lee’s film Ride With the Devil, Susan Dodd’s heartrending fictional biography of Jesse James’s mother, Mamaw (1988), N. Scott Momaday’s juxtaposing of the legend of a young Kiowa boy with that of Billy the Kid, The Ancient Child (1989), David Thomson’s witty and original Silver Light (1990), which straddles the lines between fiction, film and history by mingling the destinies of real-life Westerners with film characters, Robert Coover’s phantasmagorical Ghost Town (1998), Philip Kimball’s sweet, sad and savage Liar’s Moon (1999), and, this year, Deep Creek by Dana Hand (pen name of Anne Matthews and Will Howarth), a grim and fascinating fictional account of the actual slaughter of Chinese miners in 1870s Idaho.

Anybody interested in a little Western Reading challenge next year?  I'm thinking of making this list my own little syllabus. 

So I had westerns on my mind when I went to the Benicia Friends of the Library's Five Bucks a Bag Book Sale yesterday morning. I was fifth in line until a large group showed up just before the door opened to claim their space two people ahead of me.  I hate it when that happens.  But the rule is as long as you leave a bag in line while you go get coffee, you're still in line.  Unfortunately, I only found one western.  I made no attempt to stuff my bag full since I've already got an over-flowing TBR shelf, but I did find a decent stack of books:

• The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass an American Slave by Frederick Douglass
• Solaris by Stanislaw Lem, translated by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox
• The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, translated by H.T. Lowe-Porter
• The Thin Red Line by James Jones
• Sea of Glory by Nathaniel Philbrick
• The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, translated by Mirra Ginsberg
• The World Below by Sue Miller
• The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preson with Mario Spezi
• A Woman Named Drown by Padgett Powell
• Snow by Orhan Pamuk

My new used copy of The Master and Margarita has the following inscription on the inside cover:

Dearest Goddess,

This is my favorite book. I hope you find it as magical as I did. 

Love, S.H.

The book has a 1952 copyright date, so I choose to think it spent a lifetime on the shelf said goddess before
finding its way into my five dollar bag. 

And yesterday, I turned 47.

Dakota's Favorites: Regeneration by Pat Barker

I had never heard of Pat Barker before I took up book blogging.  She has become one of my favorite authors.  Her best work today, at least judging from the selection of it that I have read, is her Regeneration trilogy.  I reviewed the first volume of it in July of 2008.  Towards the end of my review I compare the situation of the soldiers in Ms. Barker's novel to that of American soldiers today.  While what I say was accurate in 2008, I hope the situation has improved by now.


I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.

Regeneration by Pat Barker combines the stories of real and fictional people to create a compelling account of life in a psychiatric hospital for British soldiers during the first world war. Barker uses the true stories of poets Siegfried Sassoon and Owen Wilson, who met and worked together during their stay at Craiglockhart Hospital, Dr. William Rivers their psychiatrist and the fictional Billy Prior. The three soldiers, along with the other patients in the hospital, are all officers who have all suffered nervous breakdowns to varying degrees. It is Dr. Rivers's job to cure them and return them to service, either back to the front in France or to some other work.

The novel is a true ensemble of characters; each takes a significant turn at center stage and each is fascinating in his own way. While there is no single narrative thread to the novel, the psychological profiles of the four main characters that emerge and their struggles to regain a sense of normalcy, to recover from their experience enough to return to it, make for compelling reading.

Whether Sassoon has suffered a breakdown is not clear. He is placed in the hospital to save the army from embarrassment. A true war hero, decorated for bravery after saving the lives of many wounded men, he joins with several prominent pacifists and publishes a declaration against the war. Friends of his convince the army that he has had a breakdown and should be treated instead of court martialled. (This will save the army a good deal of embarrassement as well. ) Dr. Rivers treats him, as he does Owen and Prior, through basic Freudian techniques, the talking cure. Nightmares are problems for all of the soldiers in the hospital, so there is plenty of dream analysis in the book, all of it interesting reading.

Many of the officers in Craiglockhart want to be cured so they can go back to the battle, because they want to return to their men whom they feel guilty about leaving and because they have difficulty dealing with civilians who do not understand their experience. Billy Prior meets a local girl during the times he is allowed to leave the hospital and a romance develops. She knows that he is a patient, that he has had some sort of breakdown, but he does not tell her the details. He keeps her innocent of his experience so that her innocence can be his place of refuge. He loves her because she is not a part of the war; but this fact also separates them, prevents him from opening up to her in a way that would make a deeper bond possible.

Dr. Rivers becomes friends with many of his patients and often visits them after they leave the hospital. He is older than his many of his patients, actually old enough to be their father which makes it even easier for the doctor-patient relationship to become father-patient. His techniques and his manner with his patients work so well and are so admirable that I began to reconsider my own general skepticism about psychiatry. The men in Craiglockhart are so well looked after that it becomes tempting to read Regeneration as a commentary on how mental illness is viewed in the military today. Sassoon can have a 'breakdown' and return to battle as an officer in charge with no apparent loss of face while in the U.S. today we regularly hear stories about soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan who won't seek counseling for fear of repercussions from their superior officers that might end their careers. (How does this attitude contribute to the high suicide rate amoung U.S. soldiers today seems like a questions we're not really allowed to ask if we want to "support the troops.") But towards the end of Regeneration Dr. Rivers goes to a psychiatric hospital in London where he witnesses a different sort of treatment. The Doctor there treats his patients through prolonged sessions of electric shock. A patient who is mute has shock treatments applied to his throat, neck and mouth, until he is forced to speak again. The patient is speaking by the end of the near day-long session, but Dr. Rivers is horrified by the force that has been used as is the reader. The best treatment, that of Dr. Rivers, is reserved for the officer class while the other soldiers are subjected to treatments that would be classified as torture today.

The story continues in The Eye in the Door, and The Ghost Road which I'll be getting to shortly. I found Regeneration an enjoyable read the same way I found Olivia Manning's Balkan Trilogy enjoyable. In each series the reader is not rushed down a plot driven road towards a climax. Instead, we get to spend time with a set of characters who make up an enjoyable circle of friends. I'm giving Regeneration by Pat Barker five out of five stars. I'd have consider it a major contender for my top five books of the year.

No More Dead Dogs by Gordon Korman

When my dad was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, he once rescued eight Navy SEALS who were stranded behind enemy lines.

Opening to No More Dead Dogs by Gordon Korman.

Kids hate it when the dog dies. Okay, we all hate it when the dog dies.  I've taught Old Yeller a couple of times, and, even though the narrator tells us in the first paragraph how the story ends, the kids are still surprised, shocked, angry at the ending.  I've never been brave enough to read Where the Red Fern Grows--two dogs die in that one.  Even a book like Sounder, where the dog lives, is too much.  If there's a dog on the cover and a teacher is handing out copies to the class, the kids know what to expect.

So of course the hero of Gordon Korman's novel No More Dead Dogs, Wallace Wallace, wants to rewrite the ending of Old Shep, My Pal when his teacher selects it for the school play.  No one wants to see Old Shep die, even if it is a classic.  Let the dog live for once! 

Wallace ends up rewriting the school play through misadventure.  While on  suspension from the football team, he has to spend his afternoons watching rehearsals and just can't refrain from offering up suggestions.  Turns out, his suggestions are good.  After fighting him off as long as he can, Wallace's teacher begins incorporating the suggestions and finds that he has a hit on his hands as a result.

No More Dead Dogs is a perfect book for avid and reluctant readers alike.  There is this notion that the only way to get certain kids to read, boys mostly, is to force gross-out humor on them-- books like Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Captain Underpants.  I've not read either of these so I cannot comment on them, but the idea that boys will only read books full of crass humor is insulting.  Boys, just like girls, will read books that entertain them and offer them a compelling reason to read.  No More Dead Dogs delivers the humor, it delivers an entertaining story that keeps the reader turning the pages, and it delivers an admirable hero for both boys and girls in Wallace Wallace.

And my 7th graders all thought the book was very realistic.  I asked.

Gordon Korman probably won't win many awards for high quality writing.  Entertaining his readers is always his main goal, but somebody should give him a medal for doing that.  Entertaining young readers is not an accomplishment to be sneezed at.  No More Dead Dogs entertains.

By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham

The Mistake is coming to stay for a while.

Opening to By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham

I have read all of Michael Cunningham's novels, even Specimen Days. (I deserve some credit for reading Specimen Days.)  He didn't come on the radar of most non-gay readers until his mega-hit The Hours, but there were two books before that: A Home at the End of the World and Flesh and Blood.  Count me as a fan of both. So, I was excited to receive notice from my library that it was may turn to read his new novel, By Nightfall.  I read the entire novel in a single sitting one rainy Saturday evening.   (I confess, I did a bit of skimming.)

By Nightfall is about a fortyish straight man who lives with his wife in a loft apartment in  New York City's SoHo District.  Both have what most of us would consider glamorous jobs: she works for a culture magazine and he owns a successful art gallery.  He is slightly estranged from his grown daughter and worried about the future of his gallery.

By chapter two I was dreading the thought of spending another 180 pages with a novel about elite New York society written by a member of it.  Do these people have nothing better to do than write novels about themselves? 

But, because I am a big fan of Mr. Cunningham, and because I kept hoping I'd fall in love with the characters like I did with A Home at the End of the World or with the novel's execution like so many of us did with The Hours, I kept reading.  After a while, I was glad that I did. 

But then in the end, I kind of wished I hadn't.

By Nightfall can be read as an inside look at the New York art world.  If you read it this way, you'll find it's quite good. So much time is spent following the main character through his workday that By Nightfall almost becomes a novel about work.   Mr. Cunningham's portrayal of the art world, the artists, the patrons, the deal-making, the marketing and the back-biting, all have the ring of truth and all make for interesting reading.  Mr. Cunningham  invents several artists and their work.  My favorite is a woman who films random people on the street and creates installation pieces around them.  A man in a raincoat entering a building becomes a celebrity when displayed on a monitor surrounded by memorabilia:--action figures, lunchboxes, posters, Halloween costumes for children-- all featuring his likeness.  That's an art installation I'd love to see.  I might even buy one of the action figures.

Meantime, the much younger, drug addicted, brother-in-law comes to stay.  The main character finds himself attracted to this beautiful young man who spends most of his time lounging around the loft apartment sans clothing.  Slowly, the main character is overcome by a physical desire he has never felt before, leaving him more than willing to excuse the brother-in-law's drug use.  This is all portrayed so believably that I've no doubt it happens to straight men all the time.  Not to any straight men I know, but then I don't move in an elite New York social scene.  Towards the end of the novel  there is a twist worthy of a Henry James story when a brief dialogue reveals that all we thought we knew is wrong.  This is followed by a second twist that struck me as a cheap shot, unworthy of a novel as good as By Nightfall.

So I didn't like it.  Then I liked it. Then I loved it.  Then I didn't like anymore. 

I think you're just on your own this time.

Short "Story" Monday: "Charles Dickens" by George Orwell

I've been working my way through the collected essays of George Orwell.  Not working.  Enjoying.  Mr. Orwell is best known, to American high school graduates at least, as a novelist, author of Animal Farm and 1984, but his best writing can be found in his non-fiction: Homage to Catalonia and his essays.  His essay, frankly, rock.

George Orwell was a fan of Charles Dickens.  Though he is clear-eyed about Dickens's faults, his admiration shines through in his essay "Charles Dickens."  He writes about Dickens as a critic would, particularly as a Marxist critic would.  Since Dickens was the champion of the middle classes, he's perfect fodder for a Marxist critique.  But Mr. Orwell also writes as fan of Dickens.  Clear-eyed, aware of Dickens's faults, but a fan none-the-less.

The first, and main, part of Mr. Orwell's essay is devoted to determining Dickens's message.  Mr. Orwell finds Charles Dickens firmly rooted in the Victorian Middle Class, unable to accurately portray the higher levels of nobility or the lower levels of the working class.  Dickens attacks many institutions of his day, but never offers an alternative to them.  For example, he famously attacks English schools again and again throughout his career, but he never offers a workable alternative.  In the end, Dickens simply wants everyone to behave more decently towards each other.  He does not want to change the education system, just to encourage school masters to  treat their charges without malice.  Mr. Orwell is correct in asserting that Charles Dickens was no social revolutionary.
Towards the final part of his essay, Mr. Orwell address the question of Charles Dickens's aesthetics:

I have been discussing Dickens simply in terms of his "message," and almost ignoring his literary qualities.  but every writer, especially every novelist, has a "message," whether he admits it or not, and the minutest details of his work are influenced by it.  All art is propaganda. Neither Dickens himself nor the majority of Victorian novelist would have thought of denying this. On the other hand, not all propaganda is art.  As I said earlier, Dickens is one of those writers who are felt to be worth stealing.  He has been stolen by Marxists, by Catholics and, above all, by Conservatives. The question is, What is there to steal?  Why does anyone care about Dickens?  Why do I care about Dickens?

In the end, Mr. Orwell cares because Charles Dickens is damn good at what he's damn good at.  The character, the scene, the "unnecessary" detail, are all things Charles Dickens does so well that he's impossible to forget.  Once you've read him, Mr. Orwell believes, you can't go  more than a week without recalling him.  There is a scene in Great Expectations that Mr. Orwell does not discuss that has stayed with me since I was first forced to read the book in high school.  In it a nervous Joe Gargery fiddles with his hat during his first meeting with Pip at the home of Miss Havisham.  Joe attempts to set his hat on a mantle piece only to drop it to the floor again and again, unable to control his nerves in a social situation he is unsuited for.  Ever since, some 30 years later in fact, whenever I'm feeling socially out of place I think of Joe Gargery and his hat.  It's this attention to the unnecessary detail that so many readers deplore, but it's exactly what makes Dickens so good.  No one overwrites a scene better than he does.

That is something to be reckoned with. 

In spite of over-writing, of melodramatic plot twists that don't make sense, of characters who slip into out-of-character behavior, of repeated deus ex-machina endings of impossible good fortune, Dickens writes descriptions that remain with us long after we've finished his books.  The book bloggers who recently completed the Bleak House read-a-long will forever after look for dinosaurs hiding in the fog.  There's a very minor character in David Copperfield who sits over his school desk looking at his book with his head in both hands "as if it might explode from a sudden on-rush of knowledge."  A modern editor would have cut this line, probably would have cut this scene entirely and told the author to get on with the story.  This character serves no purpose.  I can't even remember his name.  But I see him almost every day in my own classroom. 

I meant to write about George Orwell writing about Charles Dickens and have somehow strayed.  You can find Mr. Orwell's wonderful essay on Charles Dickens in A Collection of Essays by George Orwell. 

They totally rock.

Sunday Salon: Is reading short books just to meet a challenge goal cheating?