When I travel and have connecting flights, I usually download short novels that I can polish off around the time the first leg finishes and a longer ones that can read in spurts and stops no matter what delays and interruptions occur.
My short book for Boston-London-Geneva was Doctor Rat by William Kotzwinkle (1977, Bantam Books, 215 pages). He’s an unorthodox writer and acquired taste, but this one won a major fantasy award in 1977, though it was dismissed by the New York Times as “zoo-radical-chic.” I love a good controversy and came away understanding both the praise and the mudslinging. It has echoes of 1984 but is usually compared to Animal Farm, though Doctor Rat makes it seem like a petting zoo! Doctor Rat manages to be hair-raising, stomach-churning, and funny at the same time, but it’s definitely not for the squeamish.
It is set inside a research test lab in which animals are used for all manner of ghoulish tests. The descriptions describe factory-level animal torture and the lab head, dubbed “Learned Professor” by Doctor Rat, is a veritable Josef Mengele. There are obvious parallels to Nazi deathcamps, yet Doctor Rat supports the lab with Stockholm Syndrome-like fervor. Doctor Rat sees everything as advancing science, “writes” of one gruesome thing after another in his “newsletter,” and carefully “cites” sources. Those include treatises about his own species such as “How to Roast a Rat.” When a quavering animal is removed from its cage, he shouts “death is freedom,” a distressing echo of “work sets you free,” the slogan above the gates of Auschwitz. Doc literally sings the praises of the lab. As we learn, he is intelligent but was driven mad from endless time in the lab mazes. Thus, Doc’s studies and writings are probably imaginary.
When a power struggle erupts between his own compliant species and rebellious dogs, you can guess where his loyalties lie. And Doctor Rat certainly wants nothing to do an interspecies alliance seeking to take over the lab and free its subjects. Brutal experiments and vivisection appear in more detail than most will wish to read–skimming recommended–but you can draw lessons about blind followers and discovery-at-any-cost science. Fascist metaphors abound, but back in the 1970s Kotzwinkle also intended critiques of the Vietnam War and unexamined nationalism. This book is horrifying, but the bigger question is whether his points are valid and his implied warnings important.
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I wanted something lighter after this, though I only sort of chose my next book wisely. I don’t like John Gresham very much, but a friend suggested trying his non-courtroom novel A Painted House (2001, Dell, 466 pages). I won’t say I loved it, but it has parallels to contemporary American immigration issues.
On the surface the novel seems like The Grapes of Wrath: The Next Generation. It takes place in 1952 during a single Arkansas summer when Luke Chandler is seven-years-old. He lives with his family in Black Oak, a backwater cotton country dot on the map. His dream is to one day either play baseball for the Cardinals or become a road grader. That’s a strange combo, but his life his life has been defined by poverty, snakes, tornados, outhouses, family feuds, debt peonage, and disputes between Baptists and Methodists. He is supposed to hate Northerners, though he’s not sure why, and there is no telephone or TV. Luke sees a World Series game at the storeowner’s home, but some worry that “modern America was slowly invading rural Arkansas.” The Chandlers’ unpainted house and barn are symbols of a stuck-in-time existence.
Luke’s father is a sharecropper, needs to hire outside help to get the cotton picked, and doesn’t have enough capital to be choosy about whom he hires. He lucks out by securing a hard-working crew of Mexicans that includes “Cowboy,” who loves baseball almost as much as Luke. The Chandlers are unlucky in that they also hire the Spruill family, which includes the brutal Hank, one of the reddest rednecks in the region. The Spruills are down on their luck, but retain a sense of superiority over the Chandlers and especially over Mexicans. Old hatreds, barely hidden secrets, threats, and violence hang in the air like sharp scythe about to severe hopes of a successful harvest. Not even baseball can resolve hate, but a painted house suggests a frail possibility of redemption. Re: the Spruills’ hatred of Mexicans, it’s like a 19th century French writer put it, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”
Rob Weir
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