James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life **** 1/2

I picked up The Shepherd's Life expecting an immersive description of a rural lifestyle, as a respite from my suburban world. The book delivers on this expectation. It interleaves practical details about the day-to-day operation of a Lake District sheep farm with lyrical descriptions and just the right amount of shepherding jargon ("lowsing the tups"). The well-chosen photos add to the ambiance.

The fields are sliver-wet with a late-autumn dew, and where the sheep have run the grass has been shaken back to green.

The introductory section, titled with a nice piece of northern English dialect ("Hefted"), got me to approach the story with bigger questions in mind. On the first page, before any mention of sheep or fells, Rebanks relates a story of an assembly from his schooldays:

Sitting surrounded by a mass of other academic non-achievers listening to an old battle-weary teacher lecturing us how we should aim to be more than just farmworkers, joiners, brickies, electricians, and hairdressers. We were basically sorted aged twelve between those deemed intelligent (who were sent to a "grammar school") and those of us that weren't (who stayed at the "comprehensive"). ... This bloody teacher woman thought we were too stupid and unimaginative to "do anything with our lives." We were too dumb to want to leave this area with its dirty dead-end jobs and its narrow-minded provincial ways.

The rest of the section notes the gap between the (literally) Romantic view of the Lake District and the experience of its residents.

I don't believe that outsiders fail to recognize the dignity and pride of shepherds, joiners, and brickies –– many of us read books like this one because we feel that the lives portrayed may be somehow more authentic than ours. However, the attitude of the education system and of Lake District tourists shows how condescending our admiration is. By starting the book with these stories, Rebanks got me thinking about what makes a life or lifestyle meaningful, what constitutes success, how tradition interacts with progress, and my proper comportment as a tourist.

 

My Literary 2020: An Analysis

I read slightly fewer books this year than usual, due no doubt to the COVID-19 pandemic curtailing my shuttle commute. 2020 was a typical reading year for me in terms of the balance between fiction and non-fiction: a dead heat at 22 of each.

While the average rating ended up being about the same as past years (3.27, just above expectation), the variance was higher than usual. That is, I gave more 4+ star ratings this year and also more 2- star ratings. Is that due to the selection of books I read or to the circumstances under which I read them? Hard to say.

My favorite literary discovery of 2020 was The Island of Second Sight. I am also happy to have finally gotten around to Nobel Laureate Alice Munro and The Makioka Sisters, both of which proved the folly of my prejudice against "woman's lit."

Paula Fox, News from the World ***

 News from the World is a short book of short pieces from the novelist Paula Fox. The entries come in reverse chronological order, from 2011 to 1968; an interesting choice that makes them land differently than they would in the more traditional order.

The first several pieces are pure reminiscence about people and incidents from Fox's life. They are well written, but come across as engaging dinner party conversations rather than standalone narratives. Fox's style eschews interiority, so we learn little about her personality. I imagine these pieces would be more interesting to readers of her novels or those interested in the midcentury upper East Side milieu in which she lived.

About halfway through the book are two very fine stories: "The Broad Estates of Death," about a couple visiting the husband's dying father, and "Grace," about an unlikeable man who adopts a dog. The man in "Grace" often corrects people's grammar ("'Lovingly' is not an adverb that applies to literature"), which creates an interesting reflection when two of the next essays, from a few years previous, concern the use of language.

The pieces, both fiction and non, get shorter as the book comes to its close. The stories from the 1970s and 1980s count as "sudden fiction."

Jay Kirk, Avoid the Day ** 1/2

The subtitle of Avoid the Day is "A New Nonfiction in Two Movements," which hints at two aspects of the book: it has two distinctly different parts, and it uses music as one of its key tropes.

Avoid the Day starts out strong with an evocative chapter about Béla Bartók visiting Vermont in the 1940s. From its first paired image of a train's headlight piercing the forest and a car's headlight winding downhill to converge on the station, the chapter creates a gothic atmosphere, limns Bartók's character, suggests that his use of folk melodies makes him a vampire, and sets out the themes of the book (the relationship between authentic experience and meaning). The rest of the first "movement" describes the author's visit to Transylvania and his interest in a missing Bartók manuscript. 

In the second "movement," the author joins his friend on an Arctic cruise, where they attempt to make a guerrilla horror film. What does this have to do with the first part? Well, you see, the friends went to the Arctic in pursuit of authentic experience, just like Bartók went to Transylvania in pursuit of authentic folk music.

I learned a lot about Bartók and about the Romanian countryside in the first few chapters, but the author soon drifts off course with cut-rate Hunter Thompson-isms. One motivation for his trips is avoiding his father's deathbed, and stories of his relationship with his father become more prominent as the story goes on. Unfortunately, his descriptions of his supposed mental anguish fall flat and remain unbelievable. I hope that his eventual suicidal ideations are fiction, because I was unmoved by them.

In short, the book started as an offbeat five-star hybrid that slowly but surely got worse as it went along.

Binnie Kirshenbaum, Rabbits for Food ****

 A mordant novel about a woman dealing with depression. The first half describes the New Years Eve when Bunny's depression tipped over into a condition requiring hospitalization; the second half covers her first three weeks in the psychiatric ward. Interspersed throughout are Bunny's assignments from the hospital's Creative Writing activity, most of which are anecdotes from Bunny's childhood.

There's nothing too remarkable about Bunny's story; in fact, many of the incidents are nearly cliché for stories about mental illness. But Kirshenbaum captures something elusive in her prose. The early chapters, for instance, illustrate the fine line between a sardonic worldview and depression; the chapters in the hospital show tacit compassion for Bunny's fellow patients.

A few of my favorite parts:

• The story about when young Bunny opted out of a family Thanksgiving in favor of some alone time. Her sister came back to gleefully tell her that nobody even asked where she was. "In retrospect, that was my happiest Thanksgiving ever."
• In order to get the hospital staff to quit pestering them about joining in activities, a few of the patients set up a Monopoly board on the table between them, then did their own things.
• The story about the time when Bunny's husband Albie agreed to get her some cantaloupe without hesitation. It was a clear portrait of Albie's character in 300 words or less.

Brian Castner, Disappointment River ** 1/2

Well, I suppose the word is right there at the front of the title.

I am a connoisseur of books where an author retraces the travels of an historical explorer through a compelling landscape, such as Jonathan Raban's Passage to Juneau. This approach is a means for the author to color their descriptions of an exotic place with insights from their historical significance, and to show the present is shaped by the past. In Disappointment River, the place is the Mackenzie River in the Northwest Territories of Canada, the explorer is Alexander Mackenzie, and the historical context is the 18th-century fur trade and the quest for a Northwest Passage to Asian markets.

Disappointment River was well written but let me down in several ways.

First of all, there's no map. The story describes voyages through the pays d'en haut (Upper Country), but any time I wanted to get a sense of where they were –– which was often –– I had to pull out my atlas, which didn't always use the eighteenth century place names.

Second, Mackenzie's voyage and Castner's don't illuminate or enrich each other. Both explorers are so wrapped up in their daily struggles with weather and mosquitoes and logistics that they fail to capture their surroundings. For example, at one point Castner and his partner appear to be struggling in the wilderness along a tricky section of the river, when suddenly a barge nearly swamps them. So there is commercial traffic this far up the river? Chapters alternate between the trips, but they feel completely unrelated; even the country sounds different.

Third, the balance between adventure and historical context is off kilter. The first half of the book outlines Mackenzie's childhood and describes the business of the fir trade. Mackenzie and his modern counterpart don't arrive at the mouth of the river until page 138, almost exactly half way through the book.

Lastly, I think it's misleading to suggest that the Mackenzie River represents a Northwest Passage. First of all, it provides a passage only for the far northern section of the fur trapping area: the trip to the headwaters at Great Slave Lake remains arduous. Also, in Mackenzie's time the outlet in the Arctic Ocean was icebound.