Jim Grimsley

Now that I have all my time more or less to myself, reading has become a reward rather than a duty. Now when I read it is an act without obligation. I find that I am kinder to fiction, more willing to meet a piece on its own terms. There is always the running critique in my head, not articulate, just a thread of response, liking this and disliking that, drawn forward by the motion of the sentences, then moreso as the drama beguiles. Reading is so many experiences. Reading fiction is what I am really talking about here. When a story becomes compelling, what has happened? I am inside a certain book at a moment. I have opened it with that bit of trepidation. Will the writer know what to do? Will I understand it? What kind of prose will I find? I can read in service to the use of language, the placement of words, their sound and form and beat. If the writing is very strong it hits unexpected notes and that’s what keeps me sitting at the book. It might be the slightest sort of moment as long as its sentences are well-arranged. If the piece manages engagement with a story, with a sense of person, and this goes well, I want to hold onto the reading, to continue as long as I can. If the story is one that touches my boundaries, shares something like what I know (or want to know) then I am suspended inside the writing. I think of this as the most pleasurable experience of all, and engagement of the whole. My emotions are exercised. When I read for the intellect it is a cooler experience. Some writing ignores drama in favor of thought and weight. I enjoy these books more than I used to but nevertheless find it easy to put them down. I might respect the book without liking it very much. Yet the reading is still a comfort. I am improving myself by the act.

A Princess of Roumania by Paul Park
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I enjoyed the beginning of this book, the modeling of the world, the writing, and the structure; I enjoyed so many parts of the book at that point that I wondered why I did not enjoy the book itself more. The problem with so much of literature is that what works in one book gets repeated so many times in other books that it all wears out. This book feels so much like the introduction to a series that it fails for that very reason, in my view. It is like one long preface. The world of Miranda and the world of the baroness are very separate. Their refusal to come together until the very end of the book weakens the narrative immensely; at the beginning we understand it to be important to Miranda to reach Roumania and for an entire novel she wanders in the same forest having one incident after another. I would not even call what happens to her adventure. The chapters of the book that take place in Roumania are much more active but the refusal of the two separate settings to merge makes everything that actually happens among the baroness and her set to feel like a preamble. The story never feels as though it actually begins. Miranda has the kind of quality one expects from young golden-daughter characters, but also has a blankness that leaves the core of the book wanting. She goes through the motions of being stalwart, surviving against all odds, and this feels very tired. Maybe it’s my reading that’s at fault here, but there’s nothing that happens in this book that feels crucial – and I know when I think about what did happen there were some very crucial moments – but they don’t have the right feeling, they are disconnected. I have the sense that most of this book could be eliminated, at least the Miranda chapters, and she could get to Roumania quickly and get the real story started. A very bad beginning for me, and too much like the world of the Pullman novels – which had their own problems. I suppose I am simply grumpy these days.

O Beulah Land by Mary Lee Settle
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the first-written book of Settle’s quintet about American identity and I think it is an impressive piece of writing in many ways, especially in the authority with which it creates the world. It is easy to forget what that notion of a more savage time entails. The world of colonial Virginia in the 18th century was made up of so much violence, the struggle of the law to maintain its authority, and the almost impossible effort of people to make a daily life composed of some comfort and love and family. The fact that this all happens in land that is being wrested away from its original occupants is endemic to the drama. This book at its best makes all those trials felt and the struggles of people to make a new life are moving. She is also adept at weaving the ideas that concern her – the origin of the ideals of liberty and their collision with the reality of slavery, the theft of land from the people of the First Nations, the retributions exacted by all of this. She has an economy of style that is admirable and a beauty of diction when writing of landscape. The novel suffers, in my view, from its scope: it covers periods of specific drama spaced out over forty or fifty years, and its cast of characters is large. Settle does a brave job of handling all this, but the result is that many of the people drawn here appear childlike and distant, and there are no good examples of people drawn in their complexity. Her novel Prisons, which is the first installment of this series, was written much later and is a better novel than this one, I think; she focuses the book on one character and makes him fully concrete, limiting the world to what he could utter about it in his own voice. But O Beulah Land is nevertheless a lovely novel. A modern reader would want a fuller depiction of the people who were slaves, less dialect spelling, and more of an examination of race. At least this reader did. The enslaved are mostly faceless and utilitarian. The First Nations characters are largely the same. But in fact so are the settlers with only a few exceptions. This is a book of ambition but in the end the ambition is not achieved, but there is some greatness in the attempt.

Prisons by Mary Lee Settle
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a good companion read to Morrison’s A Mercy, from the same era of history, on the opposite side of the ocean, and with a different form of narrative. The voice of John Church tells the story, moving back and forth in time from childhood to his days in the parliamentarian army during the English civil war. Settle’s writing is sure-handed and exact, and shares with Morrison the economy of its approach. The story is not drowned in historical detail but rather shapes itself precisely as if it were the memory of Church, sometimes focused on moments that expand into a tactile tapestry and other times pulling back to look at passages of time, avoiding the monotony of the army experience, for instance, when, as he says, most of the service was waiting and next-most was marching. But the book is not one in which a reader loses himself to a sense of the other world; the reading here is colder than that, though the story itself is very deeply felt. My sense of the other characters in the book was in general that they were objects that the writer picked up and put down; useful but not rich. The character of John’s aunt, who is also the mother of his illegitimate child, and of Thankful Perkins, his best friend, were the most complex of the portraits. But this is not psychological fiction. This is something equally rich but less engaging to the emotions. The background is full of vivid still-life depictions of characters seen for a moment, then gone. There is a satisfying and somewhat sardonic motif of a woman who is cooking a goose at the same time that she betrays John and Thankful from their hiding place; they eat the cooked goose when they are imprisoned; and later their own goose is cooked when they are shot as traitors by Cromwell. Settle looks on this novel as an examination of the origins of American ideas of freedom, liberty, and conscience, and it is satisfying as that. An eerie counterpoint to the week before the inauguration of Joe Biden. The voice of the novel is spiced with archaisms, but not overly so; the dialog made me giggle a bit, but it’s superior to that in her book O Beulah Land, which I am reading now. She is a really distinctive and powerful writer who knows her business.

A Mercy by Toni Morrison
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

One of those moments in reading in which I remember why I fell in love with books in the first place. It’s been a while since I read Toni Morrison. This novel is short, intense, almost perfect. I read it just after finishing Juneteenth and the contrast is remarkable. The narrative moves in the most surefooted way from one time to another, from one character to another, with an effortless, masterly air. If you think an historical novel must be big, overblown with detail, you should find this slim volume and allow it to teach you. Morrison displays a certainty about the period, which is complex, messy, full of strangeness, our history but not one we discuss very often. A few decades after European colonization brings forced labor of all kinds to bear on the transformation of the American landscape, a Dutch farmer takes a wife, buys an Indian slave, is given a wild girl, and receives a young black girl as payment for a debt. There is a momentary resemblance to Beloved in the choice of a slave mother to give away her daughter in order to protect her – the book jacket copy makes mention of this – but this book stands perfectly on its own. This is a microcosm of women who, for a while, create their own world, with the Dutch husband at the center (because he has to be), with everyone taking a role, finding something of peace for a space. Nothing sentimental about this accident. They simply find a moment in which they can breathe before more disaster overtakes them again, the death of the Dutchman, the illness of his wife. Somewhere in all that the book begins, but its weaving back in time makes the journey rich with small repetitions, repeated moments, events viewed through different eyes. It cannot end happily. We feel this as a decision of the author. That is the only artificial tone I found. But the hard world consumes them, and that’s right, one understands it; this was that kind of era. This is a magical book and I am grateful to have encountered it.