More from the Stacks: The Horse, After This, Warlight, The Comfort of Ghosts

 

 

From the Stacks II

 

Here’s more from my literature clean out efforts, with more to come!

 

 

Sometimes fate thrusts a book into your hands you’d probably overlook otherwise. Such a novel is The Horse (2024, 192 pages), a short work from Willy Vlautin. An old musicians’ joke has it that life goes downhill the day you get a guitar. That’s the story of Al Ward, who got one from one of his mother’s boyfriends: a 1958 butterscotch Telecaster. Al wasn’t much for school, but he became a fine picker and composed hundreds of songs, mostly old-style country western, though he wasn’t keen on the genre. Vlautin tells Al’s story with a lot of flashback memories that takes us from the first time he went on the road, inside the truck stop bands that were going nowhere, and gigs with polished outfits that almost made it. In the present he’s living on inherited land in a Nevada ghost town that’s miles from anywhere. He survives on booze, music, Campbell’s soup, old memories, and few old compadres who help out. One day a blind horse wanders onto his property that triggers–see what I did there– memories of heartbreaks and losses. What does a guy who has been mostly reactive, lives as a hermit, and knows nothing about horses do next? It’s a poignant tale that’s by turn poignant, funny, and sad. ★★★★

 

 

 

How I love the literary prose of Alice McDermott. McDermott’s characters embody the broader changes in post-World War II American society. After This (2006, 279 pages)  introduces us to Mary, an Irish-American gal in a Manhattan typing pool with sad sack Pauline. Mary ponders whether she will get married, but by page 19 she is Mrs. John Keane and well on her way to birthing four children: Jacob, Michael, Annie, and Claire. Manhattan gives way to blue-collar life on Long Island. John, a vet, has a limp from the war, but also bearing scars from being older than Mary and discomfort with how fast the world is changing. Jacob is named for one of John’s war comrades but is ridiculed for having a Jewish name and becomes reclusive. Michael, though, is a rambunctious kid with his toy soldiers and a bit of a troublemaker. Annie will be an early adopter of social mores; Claire, the youngest, is pious and saintly. After This takes us from the early 50s through the Nixon years of the 1970s and is full of unexpected surprises. John and Mary struggle to make sense of a life that’s not as they imagined it. I can’t begin to do justice to this amazing book in a capsule review, but suffice it to say that McDermott so expertly captures small details that define the Zeitgeists of the 1950s and 60s that you’ll feel the wax paper crumble, smell the Brylcreem, and experience John’s anxiety over Pauline, his ethnic neighbors, and the moral gap between duty and the Vietnam War. Seldom has the shift from a faith-based to a questioning society been captured with such elegance. ★★★★★

 

 

 

 

Speaking of great stylists, Michael Ondaatje fits that bill. Many readers (and film fans) know him for his Booker Prize-winning The English Patient, but if you’d like to delve into his writing more deeply, Warlight (2018, 285 pages) is a superb novel. It delves into the question of when a war ends. Warlight opens in 1945 after the defeat of Germany and flashes back to the days of the Blitz of London. As you imagine, London and much of Europe are years away from reconstructing what was destroyed by bombs and battles, but that’s not the rubble on the minds of Nathaniel or his older sister, Rachel. During the Blitz, their parents left them in the hands of Walter, whom they call The Moth. The official story is that their father had business in Asia and that their mother went to be with him. That’s untrue, but where did they go and why? Warlight is told mostly from Nathaniel’s point of view. To say that he and his sister had a very unusual path to maturity undersells matters. Warlight has some of the characteristics of a coming of age tale–education, first love, new experiences–but theirs is also a home through which other dodgy people pass, including The Darter, whom they suspect is a criminal. Imagine also misty morning drop-offs along the Thames, people with foreign accents, vague reassurances, trips to smuggle greyhounds to dog tracks, the return of a parent, a death, and Nathaniel’s 12-year-search for the truth. How all of this connects to a kid thatching a roof is yours to discover. ★★★★★

 

 

 

The Comfort of Ghosts (2014, 338 pages) is also set in England during and after World War II. Is has been billed as the final installment of the Maisie Dobbs mysteries of author Jacqueline Winspear. You need not have read them all to appreciate this one, though it helps to know that Maisie grew up on an estate where her parents were domestics, was a nurse during World War I, lost her husband, and became a ward/heir of the estate owners. She is also a psychologist and private investigator married to an American diplomat and has oodles of money. As a PI, she’s more like a middle-aged version of Jane Marple than a dashing Sherlock Holmes. After the war quite a few empty or partially destroyed domiciles became home to squatters hoping that owners would not return. A delirious, weakened man makes his way to one and is cared for by a group of fearful street children surviving by theft, subterfuge, and wit. As Maise investigates a sinister wartime plot, she will meet the children and their patient. Winspear takes us inside a wartime program of which very few people know. As in Warlight we see that what comes after a war is over can be as fraught as the war itself. Note, though, that the two books are quite different. There is more grit in Warlight; The Comfort of Ghosts is more genteel. ★★★ ½