Books Both Near and Far

originally published February 6, 2008

Welcome to my first column of 2008, a new year already a month old yet still brimming with promise. We can look forward to a new era of sweeping change brought about by 30 percent of us going to the polls and voting in the same people we elected during the last new era of sweeping change. The finest athletes in the world will gather to compete in Beijing as the rest of the planet watches breathlessly, provided there’s nothing better on TV. Millions will flock to the cineplex to see if Hollywood can top the comic brilliance of Meet the Spartans. Yes, it will be a splendid year for us all.

In between these milestones, however, we can kill the time with good books, and I look forward to telling you about them. Think of this installment of “The Reader” as sorbet, something to cleanse the palate and clear the decks for a year that promises a lot of good reading coming our way.

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The Bad News First: I wanted so badly to like The Romance Readers’ Book Club (Penguin Putnam Trade, 2008) by Watkinsville author Julie L. Cannon. I truly did. Not only does she have a deeply faithful local audience, fans of her other books True Love and Homegrown Tomatoes, Mater Biscuit, and Those Pearly Gates, and not only is she from all reports an incredibly nice person, but her novel touches upon a subject near and dear to my heart, the redemptive and liberating power of books. I wanted to like the novel, but I just couldn’t do it.

The book, set in drought-ravaged rural Georgia in the mid-1970s, is a coming-of-age story about Tammi Lynn Elco, a high-school girl trying to navigate the awkward years under the thumb of her grandparents, especially her rigidly fundamentalist Granny, who believes a young lady should be pious and modest at all times. Unfortunately pious and modest are the last things Tammi wants to be, and her internal life is a struggle between her need to rebel and that all-seeing, vengeful God who sent the drought to punish the sinful and worldly. On Halloween, Tammi and her mentally challenged uncle Orr sneak out for some illicit trick-or-treating and light at the house of an old lady who gives them, not candy, but a sackful of lurid romance novels from her boundless stash. Inside the pages, Tammi begins to discover worlds beyond the confines of Southern Nowhere, full of passions and longings that give names to the stirrings of Tammi’s adolescent libido. Given the opportunity to live out her nascent fantasies, will Tammi risk damnation?

It’s all heavy stuff, soaked through with the familiar Southern themes of guilt and revelation and redemption in the kudzu, but the novel ends up suffering for it. Cannon relies on characters and situations as familiar and reliable as old shoes - the repressive church-lady grandma, the retarded man-child, the fire-and-brimstone preacher, the flashy aunt with the sassy attitude - all of whom we’ve seen before in abler hands. And because we already know these people, their trajectories are predictable. Some readers may find this comforting, like cheesy grits on Sunday morning, but I found myself wishing for something catastrophic to happen to everybody just to shake things up.

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Now The Good News: I am much more enthusiastic about A Field Guide to the North American Family by Garth Risk Hallberg (Mark Batty Publisher, 2007). Hallberg is not a local, but one of the 50-plus photographers who contributed to the book is Maury Gortemiller, an MFA candidate at UGA. Gortemiller could not have picked a better project to be involved in, as Hallberg’s book is just plain brilliant.

A self-described “illustrated novella,” Field Guide is an alphabetically arranged series of short entries, cross-referenced and accompanied by evocative photographs, that tell in non-linear fashion the story of two neighboring families, the Hungates and the Harrisons, and their lives of quiet upper-middle-class desperation on Long Island. Through entries with titles like “Adolescence,” “Fidelity,” “Security,” and “Meaning, Search for,” we get glimpses of the inner lives of the husbands, wives, and teenaged children as they navigate the deep-seated tensions and silently screaming insecurities that lie behind the bucolic suburban facade they try to maintain and the traumas that shatter those carefully constructed fronts. Dad Frank Harrison, a secret smoker, dies of a heart attack, and his wife Marnie tries to cope while raising their son Lying Thomas, who deals with his pubescent loserhood through petty theft and fantasy, and daughter Lacey, a cheerleader in love with Gabe Hungate, the sullen boy next door. Gabe does graffiti, channeling his rage at his parents’ divorce through his art until an accidental explosion burns him alive, forcing his folks into an uneasy accord and leaving his little sister Elizabeth to work through a host of abandonment issues.

Hallberg serves up these stories in snapshot glimpses that force the reader to put them together. The alphabetical arrangement of the entries is arbitrary, and one can read them in any order, bouncing around the book at will to construct the same haunting portrait. We are thus drawn into participating in the book itself, as different approaches to this construction will yield different ways of looking at these lives. It’s a fascinating conceit that works very well, rather like American Beauty done as a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book. The photographs are almost all very good and well-chosen, as evocative as the text and a terrific showcase for this array of artists. The sum of all these parts is a deeply satisfying, if disturbing, whole, a labor of obvious love of the publishing art. Friends of Maury Gortemiller in town surely know about this book, but the rest of us can congratulate him on his work and the fine company he keeps.

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Smells Like Litigation: There’s further news from a couple of items I mentioned in earlier installments of the column. Missy Chase Lapine, author of The Sneaky Chef, the book about slipping healthy ingredients into kid-friendly food that many believe was cribbed by Jessica Seinfeld for her book Deceptively Delicious, has reversed her decision not to sue and is apparently going after the Seinfelds with both legal barrels. The case itself may not pass the giggle test (especially as nutritionist Annabel Karmel has been writing books on the same topic for years), but Lapine has added a defamation of character complaint to the mix after Jerry Seinfeld appeared on the David Letterman show and riffed on the subject of Lapine’s mental stability, referencing “Missy Chase Lapine” in the same breath as “Mark David Chapman” and “James Earl Ray.” I’m not sure how name-checking the killers of John Lennon and Martin Luther King, Jr. is funny, but Seinfeld’s a comic genius, so what do I know?

And according to the Associated Press, celebrated actor, author, and American patriot Chuck Norris is going ahead with his lawsuit against Ian Spector, author of The Truth About Chuck Norris, over the book’s flagrant inaccuracies. As it turns out, Norris was not in fact the fourth Wise Man who visited the infant Jesus, is not responsible for the existence of ghosts, and did not create Jet Li and Jackie Chan by kicking Bruce Lee in half. As someone who has read the book and believed every word of it, I am aghast at discovering that I was lied to so egregiously. One can only hope that Norris succeeds in forcing a recall of the books and receives sufficient restitution to restore his good name before he ceases to be a deterrent to terrorists everywhere. As our very lives depend on the rest of the world fearing Chuck Norris, Spector’s book constitutes a threat to homeland security, and I apologize for recommending it.

John G. Nettles