This mesmerizing 1993 novel revolves around two nineteenth-century women. An actual historical figure, Mary Ellen Pleasant is a free black woman, a business owner and an abolitionist. A fictional character, Annie Christmas, is a mulatto who walks away from a privileged life in Jamaica to fight slavery. The two women meet in 1858 at a speech by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper on “The Education and the Elevation of the Colored Race” where Annie speaks up against the notion of the Talented Tenth, saying that all people deserve respect. Mary Ellen takes her to dinner at a restaurant named Free Enterprise which becomes the locus of an abolitionist group planning a war of independence to begin the following year.

The only name connected with that war that lives in common memory today is John Brown, so this story becomes a potent reminder of all the people who worked for that cause.

Freedom and its absence are found in many forms. We also meet a white society woman, Alice Hooper, who invites Mary Ellen to a fancy dinner. Alice herself is encased by society's norms, as is her cousin Clover Hooper, who is a photographer. One of the first portrait photographers, Clover is also an historical person, a wealthy socialite from Boston who married Henry Adams and is buried in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C. In this story, she and Alice visit Civil War battlefields.

The book actually begins in 1920 when Annie is living alone, deep in the bayou. When she wants company she sneaks into the nearby Carville leper colony where the women convene to share their stories. Annie's closest friend is Rachel DeSouza who is assumed to have leprosy although she has no external symptoms simply because she is a Jew from Suriname. “The Surinamese strain flourished especially among Jews and Maroons.” Rachel tell of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, that symbolic year for Americans. I remember visiting a ruined synagogue in Toledo and thinking about the uprising there and about the consequences of the expulsion, not only for the Spanish Jews but for Spain itself.

The narrative is fractured, moving back and forth in time, sometimes with Annie, sometimes with Mary Ellen or other women. It is like the scrap of patchwork that Annie cherishes. Created by a slave out of bits and pieces snipped on the sly from rich people's clothing, it shows a lion holding a gun. Such a perfect way to tell the story of these two women whose lives have been buried by the “dominant paradigm” of John Brown's revolt, lives that have to be excavated and fitted together piece by piece. I can't remember when I was last so deeply involved in characters in a book. I breathed with these women, listened and walked with them.

Lillian Smith (1897-1966) was a writer of extraordinary power and an activist who refused the roles pushed on women of her time. Raised in Florida, she lived the rest of her life, aside from school in Baltimore and three years teaching in China, in rural Georgia. In her novels, essays, and lectures, she dissected her Southern culture and with clarity and passion laid bare the effects of segregation on both black and white. Her most famous novel is Strange Fruit inspired by Billie Holliday's rendition of that song. It raised a storm of protest on both sides of the issue and inspired future Civil Rights workers.

This collection of magazine articles, speeches, and letters from 1942 to her death is arranged in three parts. The first part specifically addresses the South and segregation, both her recommendations for change and her analysis of their necessity. The second part moves beyond the South, extending discussions of discrimination and racism to wider, related issues about what it mean to live together in a postwar world that is becoming more global even as it feels the new threat of nuclear obliteration. The pieces collected in the third part tackle gender issues, men's and women's roles and the cultural myths behind them.

I first heard of Lillian Smith 44 years ago when I met her sister, Esther Smith, then a college professor. Fresh from the riots following Martin Luther King's murder and working for change through the Civil Rights movement, I tore through Lillian Smith's books and have carried them with me ever since. I hesitated to read this collection, though these pieces were new to me, because I was afraid they would seem dated and, driven by her opposition to segregation, irrelevant in a time when integration is the law.

How wrong I was! These pieces speak directly to today, to the racism that may have been driven out of the buses and schools and lunch counters, but thrives in code words and hate-mongering rants on internet and television. Speaking of ideas fundamental to our civilization, such as that “every one in the community has a right to be protected from violence” and that each person has a right to speak freely and hold different beliefs (if they do not harm others), she says:

When men stop believing in these great ideas, when they silence their conscience and trample their reason, when they make their own image their god—or their economic or political beliefs their god—then we are in for trouble. For then, they hold even constitutional law cheap. They sneer at the high courts of their government; indeed, they say they obey only the laws they want to.

When this happens, the free people with their limitless potential for growth and for good will metamorphose into the mob.

I have rarely read a more cogent diagnosis of what is wrong with the U.S. today. She also says: “War is the human race's Number Two enemy. Number One enemy is the creeping, persisting, ever-widening dehumanization of man. This is the disease of which nuclear war may be the terminal symptom.”

And amid the current news stories of scandalous attempts to prevent people from voting, drug tests for welfare applicants, and the tide of testing that is drowning our schools, what could be more relevant than this reaction to the use of IQ tests as poll tests?

But the real answer to this talk of valid and invalid tests is that it simply does not matter. If you are morally civilized you treat people right regardless of their intelligence or their looks or their weakness or strength. You don't keep a crippled man from voting or riding the bus; you don't bar a poet from a restaurant because he is a genius and the rest of us are not; you don't cheat a child who can't count his money.

I have written about my dismay at seeing the old myth of Eve destroying Adam's paradise updated, so I was particularly interested in Smith's examination of the history of women's roles: from the fear of Eve's discerning gaze to the dichotomy of Madonna/bitch, Goddess of Mercy/Kali the Destroyer, Beatrice/witch. She suggests that in the age of reason, the dichotomy in the way women were viewed persisted but in the context of race. Also during the 19th century, she points out, came the new role that Ibsen wrote of: “the little girl, the woman who never grew up (and therefore could never dominate a man), the doll who lived in the doll house.” She writes movingly of the generation of women, more educated and skilled than any previous generation, who after World War II gave up their jobs and allowed themselves to be shut up in suburban boxes.

Certainly another reason why this book is so readable is Cliff's careful editing. The chronology within the subject groupings and the deletions to avoid redundancy enable the reader to follow the progress of Smith's thinking and feel the power of her arguments. These exhortations to treat one another humanely are directed at our reason. They may not convince the mob, but if we are morally civilized we will listen.

INTERVIEWS

August Authors: Barbara Morrison: Let Us Tell Our Stories

Interviewed by John Byk on WritersAlive

Interviewed by Aaron Henkin, The Signal, 27 January 2012

Review of Innocent, by Elizabeth Millard, ForeWord Reviews, 9 January 2012

Review of Innocent, by Linda Mae Wolter, The US Review of Books, December 2011

Review of Innocent, by Therese Purcell Nielsen, Library Journal, 1 September 2011

Review of Innocent, by Girija Sankar, JMWW, Fall 2011

This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel alternates between two stories. In the present day (1970s) Lyman Ward, confined to a wheelchair by a bone disease that is gradually fusing him into a statue, has taken refuge in his grandparents' old home in Grass Valley. His wife having deserted him with the onset of his illness, he is cared for by Ada, the third generation of her family to work for the Wards, while being pestered by his son to move into assisted living. The retired historian refuses, choosing to stay on in Grass Valley, going through his grandmother's papers and telling her story.

It is this story that alternates with Lyman's. Susan Burling grew up in a cultured home and as a young woman “was in love with Art, New York, and Augusta Drake.” The two women met in art school and stayed on in New York, building lives full of famous artists and writers and working on their own art. This life was cut short for Susan when she married a mining engineer in 1876 and followed him to the West.

In spite of the coarse lodgings and—in all but one camp—lack of company that shared her interest in the arts, Susan always wore the elaborate dresses and whalebone corsets of her Edith Wharton past. She threw herself into the work of living while also helping to support the family with her art and writing. Although a brilliant engineer and inventor, Oliver Ward lacked the political knowledge and ambitious dishonesty that might have made him rich. So Susan trailed after him from one camp to another, as he worked equally hard at trying to support her and provide the kind of surroundings he thought she deserved.

Susan's story fascinates me, this gently nurtured, artistic woman having to live in a one-room cabin among rough miners. With moving descriptions, Stegner gives us a hard look at the stereotype of a pioneer woman. I loved his descriptions of the camp at Leadville where many engineers trained at Harvard and Yale congregated to work on the mine and on government surveys, providing Susan with an enviable salon. However, learning about her life through the eyes of her historian grandson, we are kept at a remove. Lyman guesses at her feelings and the empty spaces in her letters. We are constantly pulled back into his life and his thoughts about Susan and Oliver.

Writers often circle back to themes and constellations of characters, so it is not surprising, perhaps, that this book, like Crossing to Safety, is about paradises that have been lost because of a woman, a woman of remarkable abilities, whose husband, though of equal abilities, is a failure, unmanned by his desire to please his wife. Susan is certainly a more complex and more sympathetic character than Charity. Other characters are barely sketched in, Lyman not having the insight given him by Susan's letters, articles, and other writings. The places where they live become vibrant characters, though, the landscape, the people, the homes.

The flow of the story is as accomplished as the descriptions. What I admire most about Stegner's writing is the way he slides seamlessly between past and present. In some cases he gives us Lyman talking about the letter he's reading, then a quote from the letter itself (Susan's voice), before going into dramatized scenes continuing Susan's story. In other chapters, he moves from a first person description of Lyman commenting on something in Susan's life, to a brief third person narrative of where we are in Susan's story, before plunging fully into dramatized scenes. Sometimes he alternates chapters, devoting one to Lyman and the next to Susan, but there is always something about Susan at the end of Lyman's chapter to ease the transition. He rarely comes back to the present except with a new chapter.

I was a little disappointed with the ending, mostly because I found Lyman's story so much less interesting than Susan's, but overall this is an absorbing and beautifully written book.

My book club selected this book primarily because Hillenbrand is also the author of Seabiscuit. Most of us had seen the film though, unusually for us, no one had read the book.

Unbroken is a nonfiction account of Louis Zamperini, a former Olympian who went down in the Pacific during World War II. He survived a miraculous 47 days in an inflatable raft before being captured by the Japanese. Although he is treated well at the first place he is taken, given food, tea and medical care, it isn't long before he is sent off to a POW camp, where he is tortured and brutalized. He spends more than two years in a series of camps, each worse than the last, only released by the ending of the war.

The details of the story are excellent. I liked, too, that Hillenbrand continues the story into his post-war life. She also does a great job of maintaining a neutral tone in describing the atrocities. I believe that is the only way to get through such a story, though the necessary distance it creates can be detrimental to the reader's involvement. Zamperini remained a mystery to me, much as I admired his creative resourcefulness both on the raft and in the camps.

I mistrust stories that have been told and retold hundreds of times, polished and rehearsed. After the war Zamperini spent many years as an inspirational speaker, telling this story. Such repetition perhaps adds to the distance and lack of emotion in this narrative. It's clear, though, that Hillenbrand has done a great deal of research, noting where her research supports and occasionally contradicts the established story. I like the way she uses this research to provide context even for the most abusive guards.

I also mistrust tales that set off my propaganda detector. This is a U.S.-centric story. U.S. equals good; Japan equals evil. Always. Even the Hiroshima bombing is only told from the point of view of the U.S. pilots who worry that they won't get away fast enough. Don't get me wrong: the Japanese behaved horribly during World War II. I know about Nanking. I know they used POWs as slave labor, tortured them, and subjected them to medical experiments. But other countries, including the U.S., behave horribly too. Why reawaken the anti-Japanese hysteria that I saw in my parents and others who lived through that war? Hillenbrand could at least have noted that after the war Japan went to great lengths to change their culture so that such atrocities would not happen again. If only the U.S. would do the same.

Others in my book club pointed out that to add that kind of nuance and give any of the Japanese point of view would make it a very different story, not the kind of feel-good story that the author meant to write. Any softening of the view of the enemy would take away from the glory of this man's amazing survival.

Zamperini's story is meant to be an uplifting tale about the strength of the human spirit. I confess it did not inspire or uplift me. I came away depressed—again—at the depths of cruelty and sadism people can sink to. Such behavior comes from the same self-centered view that I see in our public discourse today, where it is okay, even applauded, for people who are not rich to die for lack of medical care. The solution Hillenbrand offers in this story seems to me inadequate.

I was delighted to hear that this blog has been given a Liebster Award by Bonnie J. Vesely. Her blog Right Livelihood, Just Ventures is here and is certainly worth a read.

The Liebster Award is a way to showcase a blog you think deserves merit and more followers. There are a few responsibilities:

1. Thank the one who nominated you by linking back.
2. Nominate five blogs with less than 200 followers.
3. Let the nominees know by leaving a comment at their sites.
4. Add the award image to your site.

So here are my five nominees:

1. Shirley J. Brewer's The Goddess Blog. Shirley is the author of A Little Breast Music and the genius behind Poetic License which provides personalized poems for special occasions.

2. Chris Stewart's Embarking on a Course of Study blog in which she describes her attempt to follow a course of study similar to that perhaps undertaken by Marianne in Sense and Sensibility.

3. Fernando Quijano III's The Word Pimp Spits. Fernando is the Vice President of the Maryland Writer’s Association & author of From the Bottom Up, an op-ed column featured on theurbantwist.com.

4. Deborah Batterman's The Things She Thinks About blog always makes for good reading. Deborah is the author of Shoes Hair Nails, a hilarious and moving collection of short stories.

5. Amelia Mason's Annoy the Neighbors blog sizzles with her writing about music, mostly of the folk/indie variety.

After a disastrous operation six years ago, a disillusioned Alec Milius left MI6 and has been living under the radar ever since. He believes that both MI6 and the CIA, who figured in his last op, are looking for him, so he employs all the counter-surveillance techniques he learned as a spy: multiple phones, multiple email accounts, always on the watch for a tail. He's landed in Madrid where he's built a new life for himself, working for a banker, Julian Church, whose wife is Alec's mistress.

This life is thrown into disarray by two occurrences: a visit by an old friend from England—his first contact with anyone from his past—and a job Julian sets him. Alec's careful attention edges into paranoia as he wonders if Saul's visit is actually an attempt by MI6 to entrap him. Perhaps even Julian is out to get him, sending him to San Sebastián to interview Basque separatist Mikel Arenaza and report on the current stability of that part of Spain. Alec likes Mikel, and they plan to meet later in Madrid, but Mikel disappears en route. Caught up in Basque politics, unsure whom to trust, not even sure if he can trust himself, Alec tries to find out what happened to Mikel.

This, for me, is the best type of spy novel, the kind that tests my brain. Intelligent and surprising, it is not an adrenaline-fueled race to the finish, though suspense does build through the book. The characters, men and women, major and minor, are well-drawn. Alec, himself, is not someone I would want to know, but his honesty about his faults is enough to put me on his side. And there's also the integrity in him, twisted perhaps by his past, and the possibility of redemption. Adding to his appeal is his predicament as a loner, working outside the system, like so many of Le Carré's spies.

I loved the descriptions of life in Madrid, recognising many places and customs from my visits. Cummings does a good job of working in the necessary background about Basque politics in a natural way that did not drag even though I was already familiar with it. Even the title works well; there are prisoners here, though often in dungeons of their own making. I didn't realise this was a sequel to Cummings's first novel, A Spy by Nature. The book works fine as a stand-alone. Sufficient information was provided for me to understand where Milius was coming from. I will certainly go back now and find that novel and others by Cummings.

Recently I reread Kerouac's On the Road for a book club and was surprised to find only brief flashes of the sense of adventure that filled my memory of reading it in my teens, and even these flashes were overwhelmed by the sadness and yearning that made up the bulk of the story. I am not so old that I do not remember the feeling that life—real life—was going on somewhere else, like a party or distant music whose location I couldn't quite pin down. I remember the occasional wild night with loud music and too much wine, and remember, too, the bleak grey mornings that followed. I even recall feeling that maybe a bum's life was what I wanted, though my version was a beachcomber on a South Sea island. Some writers believe that they must live wild, or at least unusual, lives in order to write: hop boxcars to San Francisco, hitchhike into Mexico, smoke hash in Morocco. Schmidt demonstrates in this collection that it is possible to make brilliant poetry from that most unpromising of material: suburban life.

In these poems, Schmidt takes a simple truth, such as that the way to a woman's heart is by befriending her cats, and draws it out detail by detail until it comes to mean much more. Scattered among the collection are a handful of numbered Suburban Myth poems that give us the roar of history and culture embodied in even the simplest experiences: vacuuming the rug, raising the hood of the car. There is also a brilliant sequence of poems about G.I. Joe, imagining his life as an action figure. These are funny but carry a sting of recognition about how we raise boys, corporate life, the military, or the ever-changing relationship between men and women.

What makes these poems resonate is the depth of emotion and experience contained within their uncomplicated, often humorous lines. Writing advice columns often caution young writers that accruing experience as they continue to write might be more valuable than racing to see their first efforts in print. A few months ago I picked up the first issue of a new college literary magazine, nearly all of the contents written by students though the magazine hoped for broader submissions for later issues. The stories and poems were limited by narrow experience—a party, a bad breakup, the death of a grandparent—but also by a lack of further insight. There was surprise that something bad could have happened and perhaps some anger or sadness, but none of the complex emotions and negotiations behind our relationships with others and with the world that I find in Schmidt's collection.

A good example is “He Ho Ha” where a father tries to calm his daughter's fear “that a T. Rex will suddenly / break in through her window / two stories tall with a head / the size of a Volkswagen.” He tries several ways of reassuring her. Her replies make me laugh, not only by how unexpected they are, but by the mix of fantasy and practicality that a five-year-old, suspended between two worlds, can produce. In these brief lines, illuminated by perfect details and images such as the Volkswagen, you can see him learning to be a father.

Schmidt is a local poet whom I have run into a few times. In this collection he shows how experience, a thoughtful eye, and a sense of humor can create moving and memorable poetry out of the minutiae of ordinary lives. Take heart, all you poets and writers! It can be done.

As the novel opens Larry recounts waking up in a cabin in northern Vermont, part of a family compound where he and his wife, Sally, have been coming for many years. It is Larry's voice that tells this story of a friendship between two couples. Larry and Sally meet Charity and Sid when Larry takes up his first teaching job in Madison, Wisconsin, where Sid also teaches. In an extended flashback we learn about that magical year in Madison, where the couples become friends right off, one of those rare mutual friendships where both sets of spouses become the closest of friends. Larry is driving himself to write stories and articles on top of his teaching load, while Sid and Charity are becoming ever more deeply entwined in the life of the college and the town.

With generous returns to the “present” of Vermont, we find out about the next phase of their friendship, before returning fully to the present. This is a novel that covers most of a lifetime, so of course the joys are tempered with sadness. Even so, it is a mild story. In fact, that is one of the reasons Larry the novelist gives for not writing about the four of them: that their lives don't include the kind of drama that modern fiction demands.

I'm grateful to my book club for selecting this novel. I hadn't read anything by Stegner before. I was delighted by the first part, feeling immediately that I was in the hands of a excellent writer who delivered the best kind of story-telling, best for my tastes anyway. I was never in any doubt as to where we were with the flashbacks. I loved the length of them, while the initial and intervening scenes in Vermont were sufficiently vivid that I never forgot where we would end up.

Yet as the store progressed I became more and more uneasy. Not because the golden youth of the two couples gave way to the inevitable griefs and losses of middle-age, but because of the way the two women were presented. Sally, stricken by polio—no spoiler; we learn this in the opening pages—becomes more and more of a saint. We never see her impatient or unhappy. She's simply perfect. I find it hard to believe in a marriage that is 100%, 24×7 sweetness and light. Charity, on the other hand, appears more and more of a witch as the story goes on, until the final scenes where she behaves despicably.

One person in my book club pointed out that she had to be the most fragile of all of them to behave so, which may well be true, but Larry doesn't allow her that excuse. She is simply awful and has destroyed his old friend, Sid, in the process. Unfortunately, this depiction of the two women ruined the book for me, being too close to the old madonna/prostitute way of judging women, that they must be one or the other. Aside from the implicit misogyny, the flatness of the characters was disappointing in an otherwise excellent book. Main characters should be multi-dimensional and complex for me to fully enjoy a book. It's a major plus when even minor characters are too. Here, everyone other than the four friends, even their children, are barely shadows on the story.

Another member of my book club told us that this novel, written when the author was in his late 70s, was really a memoir. She'd met the daughter of the real-life Sid and Charity and showed us photos of the Vermont camp. I've written before about the grey area between fiction and memoir. Knowing the story was drawn from life didn't change my opinion of it. I don't know to what extent this story was fictionalised beyond changing the names. The daughter said that Stegner allowed the family to read the manuscript and deleted scenes they objected to, which surprised me given the negative depiction of Charity compared to the saintliness of Sally.

I felt this flaw of the one-dimensional women the more deeply because everything else about the story was top-notch. I will try more of his stories to see if the depiction of women is a more general problem for Stegner, or if it was just a problem in this book where his feelings for Sid surely played a role in his presentation of Charity and those for his wife affecting his depiction of Sally. If anyone out there has read this book or others by Stegner, please let me know what you think.

In this extraordinary memoir, Owens delves into his mother's past, into the childhood memories that suddenly began to surface when his mother is in her fifties. While properly skeptical and examining the controversy around recovered memories, Owens comes to believe in the terrible abuse his mother, Judy, suffered at the hands of her mother. This woman, deserted by her husband and left with a detested five-year-old, takes out her frustrations on the child. Confronted later by Owens's father, she does not deny any of it.

The book is more than a woe-is-me or even a woe-is-she memoir. Bringing together history, photos, journals and narrative, Owens contrasts his mother's horrific early life with the enchanted childhood she provided for him and his sister on Golden Glow Drive. Gradually revealed in this mosaic is Judy's amazing ability to survive and to put behind her everything she had been taught about child-rearing in order to become the loving and attentive mother she herself had longed for.

Judy received some love from her grandmother, Anna, who gave her presents which Judy's mother made her burn as soon as Anna left. I couldn't help but wonder why Anna, why any of the aunts and uncles didn't do something about the abuse of this child. Owens traces the strain of violence in the family back through Anna's husband and cousin Raymond. Anna herself took refuge in her garden from her bully of her husband. Owens also says that “children were property then, it was not one's place to intervene” and refers to the Protestant ethic of the time that called for extensive use of the rod in raising children.

He pulls back to offer some local historical context. Judy grew up in the Finger Lakes region of New York, where Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn and General Sullivan led a march through the area, burning crops and villages belonging to the Iroquois, causing widespread famine. Another piece of the area's history is the Helmira prison where Confederate soldiers were housed in terrible conditions. Owens talks of “lives in one century commingling with, rubbing against, those in other eras.” It is something I have wondered about, too, the presence of the past, the local history, and its effect on you as you grow up.

Further context he provides is insight into the multiple fundamentalist movements that took root in the area during the 18th century, such as the Publick Universal Friend, founded by one of Judy's own ancestors, who settled in the area, calling their land New Jerusalem. More cults settled in the area in the 19th century, their waves of evangelical firestorms giving the region the name “Burnt-Over District”. He wonders about the lasting effect of these “historical and at times hysterical passions” on the region's inhabitants. I have one of these evangelical reformers/cult founders in my family tree, one I know of anyway, and shiver at the idea that some remnant of her genes inhabits my cells.

Owens brings poetry's attention to sound and compression to this work. His narrative structure is unusual but appropriate for this fractured tale. No matter how far he pulls out, he always ties his ruminations back to his mother, her ordeal and her survival. I particularly liked the chapter where he reveals local history within the story of Judy running away from home, pausing as she passes certain landmarks to give us the necessary background, but in such an organic way that I didn't realise what he was doing until I read the book a second time.

Being alert to covers, I have to give the book designer credit for the cover. This photograph shows a man and three women all laughing. One of the women, presumably Judy's mother, has her hands around the child's neck, a child whose face and body are contorted with pain. The other adults laugh at the camera. They do not seem to notice the child's agony.

The author sent me a copy of this book to review, and I'm very glad he did. This powerful book deserves a wide audience. It is one I will never forget.