Book Reviews
By Kathy Mullins
Published irregularly about four times a
year,
From
Tom Gerald, resident Southern Gentleman who came to us from
Prime
Green: Remembering the Sixties by Robert Stone
(Harper, $25.95).
Memoirs,
by definition, do not have to rely on strict adherence to the truth, but only
on perception. Some writers are better, more precise, with their memory than
others; some are simply more honest.
Robert Stone, in his dedication, a little island of words on a white
page, lets the reader know up front that his Prime Green is about
enduring friendship, about seeing and experiencing a time that has gone by.
As
with his fiction, Mr. Stone doesn’t follow a linear pattern. He begins in
his twenties, aboard ship bound for the waters of
Prime
Green is
a marvelous book, loosely constructed and freewheeling but filled with sobriety
and lessons that only experience can teach. Forget that rueful cliché,
“If you remember the sixties you weren’t there.” Stone lived
the time and shares it, not as some lost, golden era, but as a life lived,
warts and all. Defining the
experience is left up to others who care to do such things.
Prime
Green
is about watching, glimpsing the magic inside a moment before definitions boil
the beauty right out of the ephemeral.
Ed Gregory, manager of
Falling
Man by
Don DeLillo (Scribner, $26)
Don
DeLillo’s new novel is about 9/11, directly.
“It
was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near
night.” The opening line takes us to
“There
was glass in his hair and face.”
He walks straight to the apartment of his estranged wife and his
son. “It was not possible. Up from the dead, there he was in the
doorway. Like gray soot head to
toe, I don’t know, like smoke, standing here with blood on his face and
clothes.” She takes him in
and he moves back in.
The
rest of this beautifully written story concerns his understandable initial
drifting after the shock and his ongoing drift into the life of a seemingly
permanent drifter. This, I think,
is the “falling.”
There
is a falling man in the story, a performance artist. In post-9/11 times he harnesses himself
to various structures in the city and throws himself over the side, dangling
while holding a position mimicking those who jumped from the towers. But the main concern of the novel seems
to be the main character’s mostly unsuccessful attempts to right himself
and the attempts of the world around him to understand.
The
Shadow Catcher
by Marianne Wiggins (Simon & Schuster, $25)
I
am close to finishing this novel and it was not included in the
newsletter. In many ways it is an
odd book, yet I am so thoroughly enjoying it that I’m embarrassed at my
emotional involvement. I want the
critics to like it and fear they will not.
Edward
S. Curtis, the famous photographer of Native Americans, is a subject of the
novel. In fact, “Shadow
Catcher” may have been a name Indians called Curtis. But Shadow Catcher, the novel, is
about a whole lot of other things besides Edward Curtis.
The
author herself, Marianne Wiggins, is one of her tale’s main
characters. The story is about
Curtis and his family, Wiggins and her family, photography, Teddy Roosevelt,
Indians, pioneering, Seattle, the Mohave Desert, Zorba
the Greek, modern day Los Angeles and Las Vegas. It is also about human relationships,
including the male propensity to, in Mark Twain’s words, out of the mouth
of Huck Finn― “light out for the territory.”