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Thomas Keneally–CONFEDERATES

Aug 20th, 2013 by

Note: This novel was SHORTLISTED for the Booker Prize in 1979.

“War means fighting. The business of the soldier is to fight. Armies are not called out to dig trenches, to throw up breastworks, to live in camps, but to find the enemy and strike him; to invade his country, and do him all possible damage in the shortest possible time. This will involve great destruction of life and property while it lasts; but such a war will of necessity be of brief continuance, and so would be an economy of life and property in the end.”–Gen. Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson

Thomas Keneally, an Australian National Treasure, winner of the Booker Prize for Schindler’s Ark in 1982, and the author of thirty-one novels and seventeen non-fiction books, has never limited himself to subject matter from Australia, however rich and compelling that might be.  Only about a dozen of his novels are actually set in Australia.  His other novels, many of them prize winners, have been set in places ranging from Antarctica to Yugoslavia, Eritrea, and the Middle East, so it should be no surprise that Keneally became fascinated enough by the issues involved in the American Civil War that he wrote Confederates in 1979, a dense, epic novel of American history written on a scale reminiscent of Tolstoy’s War and Peace and filled with similar themes, though it is only half as long.

Unlike War and Peace, Confederates spurns romanticism, employing instead the innate dignity of ordinary men and women and the mundane details of real life lived close to the soil to convey the horrors of warfare with a realism almost unmatched in Civil War literature. With no comic relief, no hints at happy endings, and no escape from the inevitability of this nightmare, the cumulative effect of Keneally’s novel is staggering.

The Confederate army we meet here consists of ragged and hungry teachers, musicians, small farmers, orphaned children, men in their 60’s, conscripts, and even the sorely ill and walking wounded, all people the reader comes to know well through the stories they share and the simple dreams they reveal as they trudge resignedly and painfully across Virginia toward their destiny – the Battle of Harper’s Ferry/Antietam. Despite the tactical brilliance of General Tom “Stonewall” Jackson, the battle itself eventuates in one of the most horrific blood-letting and soul-wrenching traumas in history, and Keneally records it all.

Portrait of Stonewall Jackson by William Garl Brown, from the Virginia Historical Society

Homely details, described in a plain, almost offhanded manner, lend great irony and bring the enormity of the carnage into focus: split-rail fences with their “crops of dead,” cornfields with human remnants “lying in heaps that must be climbed,” young soldiers forced to tread on “a mat of Christian boys,” and the very air above the cornfield “flying with bits of the corn crop and with limbs, naked and clothed, and with haversacks and heads and hands.”

The male characters, so pre-occupied with the war and its effects on their families, their fellow soldiers, and ultimately on their own psyches, draw in the reader because they are vividly and realistically drawn, but it is the female characters, who are not on the battlefield, who truly come alive here.  I cannot imagine another Civil War novel which will affect the reader more profoundly than this one. Exhaustively researched, historically accurate, brilliantly depicted, and absolutely unforgettable, it pulses with the lives of our forebears and makes gratitude seem inadequate for their sacrifices.

Note: Though CONFEDERATES is currently out-of-print, there are copies of this book available, Used, on the Amazon MarketPlace (some of them for only a penny plus postage), and on other Used book sites.

ALSO by Thomas Keneally:   SCHINDLER’S LIST (ARK), VICTIM OF THE AURORA,       THE TYRANT’S NOVEL,        DAUGHTERS OF MARS,     NAPOLEON’S LAST ISLAND

 

Alexander Gardner’s photo of Confederate casualties at Antietam, with the Dunker Church in the background. Note the poignant detail of empty shoes, bottom right.  Double click to to go to National Park Service photos from the period.

Photos, in order: The author’s photo was taken from a video, here: http://www.theage.com.au

According to an article in the Times Dispatch, this oil portrait of General Stonewall Jackson was painted beteeen 1863 and 1864 by William Garl Brown, and was completed from a photograph after the General’s death.  Gen. Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson was fatally wounded at Chancellorsville and died at Guinea’s Station, VA on May 19, 1863.     http://www.timesdispatch.com

Historic photo of Confederate casualties at Antietam, with the Dunker Church in the background.  The National Park Service has a series of photos by Alexander Gardner, here: http://www.nps.gov

Posted in 8-2013 Reviews, Epic Novel, Historical, Literary, Social and Political Issues, US Regional | No Comments »

Jim Crace–HARVEST

Aug 15th, 2013 by

Note: This novel has been Shortlisted for the 2013 Booker Prize.

“[On harvest days] our work is consecrated by the sun. Compared to winter days…it’s satisfying work, made all the more so by the company we keep, for on such days all the faces we know and love…are gathered in one space and bounded by common ditches and collective hopes…Anything we say is heard by everyone. So there is openness and jollity.”

Jim Crace’s powerful and dramatic new novel, set in an unnamed rural farm community in England in an unstated year, wastes no time in shifting the atmosphere from the “jollity” and feeling of community resulting from the hard work of the harvest to the kind of mindless hysteria, based on fear, which American readers will instantly recognize as similar to that which existed during the Salem witch trials (as is seen in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible). Working for Master Kent, whose wife inherited a large portion of land from her family, the farmers on the land are all too aware that theirs is a tenuous life, one in which they have a small cottage for their families and a small portion of the harvest for their own use in exchange for back-breaking work under uncertain weather conditions, with most of the harvest going to Master Kent. Bad weather or a bad harvest means hungry winters and less seed for the next season’s planting.

Main character Walter Thirsk came to the manse originally as Master Kent’s manservant, but he, too responds to the need for extra hands when harvest day arrives. He has married one of the women from a farming family, and though now widowed, he still lives in a cottage among these workers and feels closer to them than to the residents of the Master’s manse. Times have changed since he first arrived, however, and the number of workers on the farm has decreased below the number needed to bring in a big harvest. “We’ve lost good friends but not had much success with breeding their inheritors or raising sturdy offspring. We’re growing old and faltering. Harvests have been niggardly…[and] there are days in winter when our cattle dine and we do not.” This year is especially difficult. A stranger has been watching the men harvest the barley crop, recording what is happening, measuring and surveying, and appearing to map the land. No one knows what he is doing there, but tensions rise as some workers begin to wonder if the Master is going to sell the land on which they are totally dependent.

Barley field

On the last day of the harvest, two plumes of smoke are seen—one from a hearth fire outside a remote hut newly built by three strangers. An ancient ruling allows the right of settlement and a portion of the harvest for any “vagrants who might succeed in putting up four vulgar walls and sending up some smoke before we catch them doing it.” Three people, two men and a woman who resembles a sorceress have staked out a claim on the Master’s land and, with it, a right to a portion of the meager harvest the community of workers has just worked so hard to bring in. When the newcomers’ hut is investigated, the farmers discover bird bones, proof enough for some workers that they have stolen and eaten some of the Master’s prized doves. The newcomers, overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of hostile residents, greet them armed with bows and arrows, further heightening the tension.

Fairy caps, photo by Bob Hoefer

The second plume of smoke proves to be the roof of the Master’s haylofts, where his doves live. Though Walter Thirsk knows from the outset that the newcomers have not set the barn fire, he keeps his mouth shut when the group of harvesters decides differently. Thirsk saw three residents among the harvesters who were under the influence of the wild fairy cap mushrooms they collected that day and heard them implying their involvement, but he convinces himself that they have simply set the fire in an effort to smoke out the doves. As there is no constable nearby, the Master eventually sentences the two newcomer men to the pillory – seven days and nights to be spent confined outside, uncovered, in the elements – not for the burning of the barn but for the theft of one or more of the Master’s doves. Thirsk knows that this charge, too, is false. The feathers found at the hut were black, not white, but still, he refuses to act against his loyalty to the harvesters.

The shorter of the newcomers was unable to put his feet flat on the ground when he was pilloried, forcing him to stand on tiptoe for the entire time of his punishment.

Creating a lively and exciting narrative from this fraught beginning, Jim Crace quickly advances the novel from its initial feeling of foreboding to a feeling of terrible inevitability, adding details and events which horrify the reader for what they portend. Crace’s community is pagan – nature-bound, not traditionally religious – and this shift in emphasis forces the reader to take a harder look at the motivations of the characters and see the action for the human moral tragedy it is, one that exists apart from any religious fervor which might take place in other communities. One cannot blame religiosity or ignore the biggest conflicts – those between the haves and the have-nots – whether they are between the master and the workers, between the long-time farm workers and the newcomers, or between those with a sense of social responsibility and those protecting their own self-interest.

Guilt vs. innocence, the use of raw power to control outcomes, the callous manipulation of resources (such as land) at the expense of human beings who are dependent upon it for their very survival, the question of one’s responsibility to a small community as opposed to one’s responsibility to uphold the truth, the question of vengeance, and ultimately, the question of how it is possible to define “right” in a community which has no religion and no legal system are all important themes represented in this largely allegorical novel. Vibrant descriptions of the changing seasons and of the characters’ connections to nature add a sense of universality and gravitas to the action, and the well-developed and sensitive characterization of Walter Thirsk make him a character with whom most readers will identify, despite his weaknesses. Written in a language and style that feels reminiscent of the period, this is a novel to sink into, one in which the author is so in control of his material, style, and themes that the reader can sit back and savor the narrative, its twists, turns, and inevitabilities, while also believing that the author holds out hope for the future of mankind.

Photos, in order: The author’s photo is from http://www.bbc.co.uk/

The barley field appears on  http://peacedeen.wordpress.com

The orange fairy caps, photo by Bob Hoefer, may be found on http://www.bikerumor.com

The drawing of the pillory is from http://www.reocities.com/

Posted in 8-2013 Reviews, Book Club Suggestions, England, Historical, Literary, Social and Political Issues | No Comments »

Robert Boswell–TUMBLEDOWN

Aug 11th, 2013 by

“Readers [always] encounter the impossible in vastly dissimilar ways. Some throw the goddam book across the room and curse the author by name. Others imagine the snide comments they’ll post on a book review website…[But] every sane person has to find every day some manner of accommodating the impossible, some way of covering up for the failures of the rational world. This might actually be a reasonable definition of sanity.”

The theme contained in this quotation – that every day a sane person must figure out ways to deal with the impossible – permeates every aspect of this novel by prize-winning author Robert Boswell, whose recent collection of stories, The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, deals with similar issues. In Tumbledown, Boswell uses his experience as a psychological counselor to create realistic but damaged characters who try and fail every day to accommodate the impossible. In his dedication to the book, in fact, Boswell honors “all the clients who survived my tenure as a counselor and to the one who didn’t,” an ominous introduction to this novel set in a residential facility, where main character, therapist James Candler, is responsible for six young clients, most of them under the age of twenty-five.

Candler, age thirty-three, is neither a psychologist nor a psychiatrist, and his own life is a mess. He has bought a house outside of San Diego on which he cannot make the payments, and which is now “under water.” He has jumped at the chance to buy a used Porche Boxter which he does not need and cannot afford. He has spent six years living with a woman he thinks he might have loved, but she has left him and has married someone else. Now engaged to a woman with whom his primary contact has been by e-mail, he is also at the mercy of his raging desire for another woman who was once a patient. His only big achievement on the job has been to set up a sheltered workshop for his clients, hoping that they will eventually be able to get jobs on an assembly line. Not at all insightful and frequently patronizing, Candler sticks by the rules and tends to pigeonhole people, not only his clients but the people he knows outside his work. For mysterious reasons, the departing director of the Onyx Springs Rehabilitation and Therapeutic Center has encouraged Candler to apply for the job of director of the facility, and he appears to have the inside track for the job.

A native of Tucson, Candler grew up on the wrong side of the city, the son of two artists, with an older sister Violet, an older brother Pook, who died as a teenager, and a best friend, Billy Atlas, with whom he used to spend hours trading baseball cards and creating an unusual superhero comic strip called Same Man, illustrated by his brother Pook, who made all the faces in the strip the same. Now, almost twenty years later, Candler and his friend Billy are together again – Billy has moved in with him “temporarily” while he takes over Candler’s job of running the sheltered workshop at the Center in anticipation of Candler’s promotion. Billy has never been able to get organized and has spent much of his “career” working at a U-Tote-M convenience store. He has no qualifications at all for the job at Onyx Springs, other than his big heart.

Billy Atlas's longest job was at the U-Tote-M convenience store.

For the first third of the novel, author Boswell introduces his dysfunctional characters, their past histories, and their problems, not just for the clients but the staff, too. Guillermo Mendez resides at the Center hoping that after two tours of duty in Iraq that someone there will declare him unfit to return for another terrifying tour of duty. Alonso Duran disappears into the bathroom so often that Candler has to bribe him to keep him focused on something – anything – else. Karly Hopper, the gorgeous client with whom most of the men, including Billy Atlas, are in love, is mentally handicapped, with an IQ so low she is unable to function her own. She lives “off-campus” with a mysterious, long-distance trucker in his forties, who returns to her place between trips. Bellamy Rhine, a pathetic sort, dreams of Karly, and later of Maura Wood, a tough, smart client who cannot stand him and tells him so. Mick Coury, the client that readers will probably care most about, was a happy, productive teenager until he became the victim of schizophrenia. Stuck, as he sees it, between being a zombie as a result of his medications or being violent and self-destructive without them, Mick agonizes, yearning for the life he remembers from just a few years in the past. Constantly experimenting with his meds in an effort to become closer to “normal,” Mick tries to court Karly, having no clue about her personal life outside the Center and no ability to read the signs or signals she sends.

The Laguna Mountains, photo by mdolly, were a place which client Lowell Darringer yearned to see, similar to his childhood home in the mountains of Montana.

The “plot,” a collection of vignettes involving the characters and their interactions with each other and with life in general, unwinds on several levels at once – sometimes involving scenes of the clients interacting with each other, sometimes clients in conjunction with one or more members of the staff, and sometimes staff members with each other and/or with the two women in James Candler’s off-campus life. The often grotesque ironies in the characters’ lives and their sometimes bizarre interactions, do, at times, lead to scenes bordering on farce, but the overlay of the clients’ dysfunctions and the sympathy these people engender in the reader keep the novel grounded, even when the characters are seriously disturbed. Their irrational behavior represents their best efforts to deal with life’s impossibilities, even when they cannot evaluate their actions in relation to the wider world or see that world for the sometimes absurd, illogical place that it is.

Candler, Lise, and Billy Atlas go to Petco Park, and while there, Lise makes an important confession. Photo by Philkon.

Ultimately, the author summarizes his themes in relation to specific clients and characters in the novel, remarking in the surprising conclusion that “Every reader wants the impossible acts addressed: a big brother’s sudden and permanent and utterly inexplicable disappearance – how is that possible? A son’s baffling descent into madness? A husband who one day cannot lift his coffee cup? A woman who discovers that she has put a price tag on some part of her soul?…” But he then reminds us that “every sane person has to find every day some manner of accommodating the impossible, some way of covering up for the failures of the rational world.” Everybody lives in a “tumbledown” world and there is no going back. “Believing in those days of seamless reality is the real madness,” Robert Boswell says, and the conclusion of this novel, filled with contradictions, impossibilities, and elements of wish fulfillment undeniably proves this.

ALSO by Robert Boswell:  THE HEYDAY OF THE INSENSITIVE BASTARDS

Photos, in order: The author’s photo is from http://vimeo.com/

The red Porsche Boxter, which Candler could not resist, appears on   http://visualogs.com/

Billy Atlas’s longest job was at the U-Tote-M convenience store, pictured on http://www.dailyyonder.com/

The Laguna Mountains were a place that Lowell Darringer yearned to see, a reminder of his early, lost childhood in the mountains of Montana.  Candler promised to take him there.  Photo by MDolly on http://www.westcoastwildlife.com/

Candler, Billy Atlas, and Lise Ray attend a baseball game at Petco Stadium in San Diego:  http://en.wikipedia.org. Photo by Philkon

ARC: Graywolf

Posted in 8-2013 Reviews, Experimental, Literary, Psychological study, United States, US Regional | No Comments »

Jaspreet Singh–HELIUM

Aug 7th, 2013 by

“Everything flows. Nothing is constant. India was once a part of Africa, and India separated from Africa, turned and moved and turned and moved and collided with Asia. India was never constant, and its Himalayas were never constant, they are still growing…and after all the growing they will shrink and turn and shrink and turn again.”—Dr. Raj Kumar

Dr. Raj Kumar, the speaker of this ambitious and often exhilarating novel, decides, ultimately, that “What holds things together is more important than what separates them,” but by the time he discovers this, he has explored the world on more levels and examined life in more detail than one finds in ten novels by many other authors. I cannot recall a novel which has kept me reading so slowly and so happily for so long.  Brimming with unusual insights, the novel remains firmly focused on life itself, not just on the speaker’s life, but on the grandest and sometimes most horrific aspects of all life—socially, historically, artistically, scientifically, and even cosmically. As I read this, I was constantly in awe of author Jaspreet Singh’s creativity, vision, and literary execution, and I am still recalling some of the novel’s finest moments, while at the same time wishing my non-scientific background had not limited my insights into some of the author’s other, more arcane  imagery.

The speaker, Dr. Raj Kumar, has returned to his native Delhi twenty-five years after he left to attend college at Cornell University.  He remained there, obtaining his doctorate and becoming a professor specializing in rheology, the study of the flow of complex materials, which he describes as “materials with memory.” (This is illustrated clearly and more fully in the book.) He is also fascinated with the element of helium, “the noble gas” – a primordial element which “prefers isolation and solitude,” as it constantly escapes the earth’s gravitational field. However complex this may sound, the speaker uses these images symbolically and successfully as he tries to understand himself and his own search for information about an event which he witnessed in Delhi in 1984 and which has left him traumatized ever since. Now married and the father of two American children, Raj is essentially a loner, preferring isolation and solitude (like the element helium).   Returning to India to confront his past, he sorts through the flow of his own memories (a kind of personal rheology) and tries to understand them and their significance in the context in which they have occurred. In the process, he also discovers that events related to his trauma, but which he knows nothing about, have affected others around him in extraordinary ways. Ultimately, he must uncover the whole past if he is to understand who he really is and what his obligations are, if any, as a human being.

Moving backward and forward through time as his memories return, develop, revise themselves, and then become new memories, Raj Kumar describes his earlier life, from his time as an 18-year-old student in 1984, up to the present in India, where he has been doing research about important historical events in which he was unwillingly caught up. His most traumatic memory occurred when, as a graduating high school student, he returned from a class trip to Shimla with a few classmates and his favorite professor, a Sikh with whom he had been close. During lunch on the day of the return trip home, someone turned on the radio and discovered that Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had been assassinated by two of her bodyguards, both Sikhs. When the train with the students and professor arrived in Delhi, disaster struck. An anti-Sikh mob attacked the turban-clad teacher at the station, putting an automobile tire around his shoulders, spraying him with oil, and setting him afire. Further rioting after Mrs. Gandhi’s death eventually cost over three thousand Sikh lives, and life changed forever for those who were “lucky” enough to survive.

The former Viceregal Lodge now serves as a library and archive for Indian history.

During this return to India, Raj intends to visit his father, a former high-ranking policeman, along with the widow of his professor, with whom he stays briefly as a guest. Throughout his stay, he has the constant feeling the “something is not quite right,” but he is unable to figure out what it is. Nelly Singh Kaur, the widow, is about to retire from her job as an archivist, a job located at the Viceregal Lodge from colonial days, now used as an Indian library. As someone widowed by anti-Sikh violence, Nelly hopes to compile an oral history that will finally force people to take responsibility for the events of 1984. The perpetrators of these horrors have never been punished, no one has been held responsible, and no one, apparently, has ever felt any guilt. The alliance of religion and politics, and the existence of religiously based political parties, have allowed perpetrators to feel innocent, as long as their own party has prevailed.

The Chandigarh Legislative Assembly building by Le Corbusier represents a destruction of the past for Raj Kumar.

The issue of personal responsibility on a human level is one of the major themes in this rich and absorbing novel. Is someone responsible for events about which they know nothing when it is in their power, if it is not their personal obligation, to find out about them? Author Jaspreet Singh believes so, as he illustrates through the search for information which Raj Kumar undertakes during his lengthy stay in India.  Eventually, Raj learns something which affects him so deeply that it completely changes him, making it impossible for him to remain isolated and uncommitted any longer.

Nek Chand's mosaic figures made from shards and discarded materials represent new meanings for Raj Kumar. Photo by Carol Mitchell.

Throughout this novel, the word “soul” never appears.  Instead, the author uses a great deal of bird imagery and flight in its place.  The imagery of rheology and of helium pervades the novel, adding scientific and cosmic elements.  Political changes in India in the past half century are reflected, physically, by architectural changes, which the author notes throughout.  The Viceregal Lodge, serving as an Indian library, is only the beginning.  On a trip to Chandigarh, where his father studied, Raj sees buildings by Le Corbusier, who has “erased the past.”  Later, he visits the “outsider” Rock Garden with figures by Nek Chand, who assembled sculptures out of shards, broken plates, old tires, and scrap metal, infusing old objects with “new meaning.”  Though, near the end, the book bogs down somewhat under the weight of its own themes and images, author Jaspreet Singh has infused this “Indian novel” with new meaning in an ambitious work about people and their responsibilities. He says what he wants to say without restricting himself – committed to ideas, and willing to take chances, stylistically, in order to depict past history in ways that people, twenty-five years later, will recognize as responsible, truthful, and significant.  Though he pays homage to Primo Levi and W. G. Sebald with his style, Jaspreet Singh ultimately creates his own style, unique and creatively daring.

ALSO by Jaspreet Singh:  CHEF

Photos, in order: The author’s photo appears on http://www.canada.com/

The headline announcing the death of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi is from http://www.voxs.info/2012_10_30_archive.html

The former Viceregal Lodge in Shimla may be found on http://lzscene.files.wordpress.com/

The Chandigarh Legislative Assembly Building by Le Corbusier is from    http://www.theguardian.com Photo by Jophn MacDougall.  Raj Kumar considered this building to be destructive of the past.

The photo of Nek Chand’s mosaic figures in the Rock Garden is by Carol Mitchell: http://mosaicartsource.wordpress.com/

ARC: Bloomsbury

Posted in 8-2013 Reviews, Book Club Suggestions, Experimental, Historical, India, Literary, Social and Political Issues | No Comments »

Dorothy Baker–YOUNG MAN WITH A HORN

Jul 31st, 2013 by

“I’d rather play a trumpet than a piano – I don’t know, seems like it’s closer up to your head somehow. You play a piano you play it way down here, but with a trumpet you put it right up beside you on your mouth and it feels like you got more to do with it.”—Rick Martin, age fifteen.

In this newly reprinted, remarkably “fresh” novel from 1938, considered the “first jazz novel” ever written, author Dorothy Baker takes the reader into the mind and heart of a young white boy whose desire to excel as a creative jazz musician in the 1920s is so overwhelming that he lets nothing get in his way – not the fact that he is only a child when he begins to pursue his interest, not the fact that he is an orphan living virtually alone with a young aunt and uncle who are home only once or twice a week, not the fact that he is supposed to be in school, and not the fact that he has no instrument at all that he can play. Born in Georgia, Rick Martin has recently moved to a poor section of Los Angeles where his guardians have found work. Though he is not a good student in his school’s assigned subjects (and cannot remember how much seven times seven is), he has learned to read music and “could memorize like a flash anything that had any swing to it, anything that he could take hold of rhythmically.”

At fourteen he becomes a truant, “discontinuing his studies” to hang around All Souls’ Mission, a black church which is open, but empty, all day long. There he discovers his Holy Grail, a piano. Regarding the Mission as merely “a room with a piano in it,” he goes there all day, every day, for months, teaching himself to play from the hymnals that are in plentiful supply. When a group of slightly inebriated early arrivals for a service unexpectedly discovers Rick, his blonde hair highlighted by the setting sun like a halo, they decide that Rick is an angel. Their attempt to get the Message they believe God may have given him devolves into impassioned yelling and praising of the Lord. Frightened, Rick escapes, no longer daring to return.

Watching and listening at the Cotton Club from the transom window

Knowing that he will never be able to buy a piano, he begins to haunt pawn shops looking instead for a trumpet, which he thinks he might be able to buy with money he earns as a pin-setter at a bowling alley. It is at the alley that he meets Smoke Jordan, an eighteen-year-old black man who gets so caught up in the rhythm of sweeping the alley’s floor that he forgets the purpose of his job and merely stirs up all the dust. Smoke is “a professional drummer with amateur standing” because he’s never been able to afford to get himself a union card, and he and Rick become best friends, inseparable, since neither of them has ever had a best friend, especially one who shares his interest in jazz. Their relationship is one of the treasures of this novel as these two come to trust each other completely, sharing their lives in unexpected ways, and when Rick eventually goes alone to the funeral of a musician friend, at which he is the only white mourner, he also comes to know Smoke’s family, which shows a kind of love for each other and for him that he has never known before, a passage of great warmth and beauty.

Rendez-Vous Ballroom, Balboa, California

It is through Smoke that Rick is introduced to Los Angeles’s Cotton Club, though Smoke does not dare to take him inside. Neither Rick nor Smoke has any qualms about the other’s race, but Smoke is not so sure about the other people who spend their time at this all-black social jazz club. Smoke does not abandon his young friend, however, and he and Rick end up instead spending three or four nights a week for months, sitting outside and listening through the transom of the Cotton Club to all the jazz of Jeff Williams and his band. Eventually Rick meets the band, and persuades the trumpet player to give him informal lessons on the trumpet once a week.

“Fortune, in its workings, has something in common with a slot-machine. There are those who can bait it forever and never get more than an odd assortment of lemons for their pains; but once in a while there will come a man for whom all the grooves will line up, and when that happens there’s no end to the showering down.”

Paul Whiteman, “the King of Jazz,”  the most popular band leader in New York

Within five years, Rick is playing trumpet with a dance band at the Rendez-Vous Ballroom in Balboa, down the coast from LA, which caters to college students during summer vacation, but he is chafing at the restrictions involved in playing prepared arrangements that have been consigned to paper instead of “flying” with his own creativity. By the age of twenty, he has moved to New York City. Here, too, however, life becomes more and more complicated for Rick, and it is in these last two sections of the novel that the author’s insights make Rick’s jazz life and the conflicts that sometimes arise with his personal life come fully alive.

Basing the musical career (though not the life) of Rick Martin on that of the real jazz trumpet player Bix Beiderbecke, Dorothy Baker performs the remarkable feat of getting inside the head of Rick Martin, sensitively describing the details of how it FEELS to take a simple melody and then twist it, turn it upside down, and even inside out, so that it takes on a completely new life. She gives the less creative reader the ability to appreciate a jazz musician’s ability to recognize and savor that magic moment when his creativity with a particular solo or piece of music has reached its peak, while also recognizing that this moment with this piece of music will never happen again in quite the same way – each performance among jazz musicians is unique.

In 1950 Hollywood turned this sensitive novel into an extravagant showpiece for Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall, and Doris Day, with Hoagy Carmichael as the piano player.

The compulsion for a creative artist like Rick to continue going and going and going in search of the perfect sound, the perfect arrangement, and the perfect combination of instruments and thematic elements, no matter how exhausted he may be physically, is presented with sympathy and understanding, and it is here that Baker shows her full recognition of the possible hazards of the jazz-obsessed life. In order for Rick to stay up virtually around the clock, as he feels compelled to do in search of continuous “perfect moments” with his music, he begins to rely on alcohol to give him the energy he thinks he requires to perform both on and off-stage. Slowly but vividly, she shows the toll that this destructive pattern takes on Rick’s body, as it also did on that of Bix Beiderbecke, a sad but not unexpected result in this story of two shooting stars, one fictional and one real.

Note: Dorothy Baker (1907 – 1968) wrote this debut novel in 1938, one of four novels (some of them controversial) which she wrote before her death at age 61.  She was married to poet Howard Baker.

Photos, in order: (The only photo of Dorothy Baker, the author, is one from her UCLA yearbook, one so small and fuzzy I did not use it.)

The photo of the youthful Bix Beiderbecke, long before he affected his mustache, is from https://data.desmoinesregister.com/famous-iowans/bix-beiderbecke

The photo of the boy in the transom window is from the film and appears on http://new-savanna.blogspot.com

The Rendez-Vous Ballroom in Balboa, CA, may be found on http://www.balboabattle.com

Paul Whiteman’s poster is from http://en.wikipedia.org The media referred to Whiteman as “the King of Jazz.”  He was the most popular band leader in New York and, arguably, of the whole country in the 1920s and 1930s.

The poster for the 1950 Hollywood film extravaganza, starring Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall, and Doris Day is featured on http://en.wikipedia.org/ The film differs significantly from the novel, which is more sensitive, much less melodramatic.

YOUNG MAN WITH A HORN
REVIEW. Biography, Jazz, Bix Beiderbecke, Book Club Suggestions, Coming-of-age, Literary, Psychological study, US Regional
Written by: Dorothy Baker
Published by: NYRB Classics
Date Published: 09/11/2012
Edition: Reprint.
ISBN: 13: 978-1590175774
Available in: Ebook Paperback

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