My Antonia

I’m a sap for this whole genre, historical fiction specifically about the great American expansion and the romatic themes of the movement out west. These authors write powerfully and simply. Louis L’Amour, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Ralph Moody, Willa Cather (aren’t their names perfect?) told stories that are comfortable but nuanced, with memes that speak to my inner adventurer and homebody. Here’s what it is. These books are like literary hot chocolate. Rich, multifaceted but don’t take themselves to seriously. They are familiar but they wake us up to something a bit beyond ourselves, like hot chocolate next to an iced over window before the sun has really come up. They are quintessentially American, and I feel like I walk away a better person for having read them.

I loved this book. I liked that it was the classic coming of age story but that wasn’t the point. I loved the descriptions of farm life vs. town life and the vivid musings on nature. Oh, as an aside; a line that made me put down the book and just sit for a minute was at the part where Jim’s grandfather was praying. He prayed for all those who lived in the big cities whose struggle for survival was so much harder than their own out on the prairie. Wow. Antonia was really interesting to me. The interest didn’t stem from being able to relate to her, but feeling like she was a girl/woman worth being friends with. I would like to have dinner in her kitchen surrounded by her gaggle of kids and bemused husband. I think the thing I loved most about her character was that she didn’t excel at the roles she was given. Rather she gravitated towards roles that suited her and that she loved and thus excelled naturally. She also worked hard and was driven…qualities that I wish I had more of.  Jim was interesting also, because while it was told from his perspective he never felt as opaque and real as the rest of the people he described for us. I liked him. I liked seeing the man he grew into. Maybe I’m conditioned by modern novels where first person (especially present tense) is used to trap you in the protagonist’s head so completely that everyone else seems lesser somehow (The Hunger Games, for example). Jim tells the story, but mostly tells it as a series of exernal events, instead of this happened to me and this is what I thought and did and me and me and I…etc. Overall it made me happy to revisit this time period when life was hard but straightforward. Also I loved that Jim studyed “Georgics,” I really should read it, being an aspiring farmer and all.

Breakfast At Tiffany’s

Now the literary snob in me can be appeased because I can say I’ve read Truman Capote. This was my choice for my turn in book club on the advice of my good friend, Jamie, who also is an English teacher and fellow snob. The consensus of my book club was that they liked Capote’s writing but couldn’t stand the main character. What the What? I didn’t get that and the more I think about it the less I get that. I love Holly Golightly. I want to stand back and look at her because she is interesting and different and broken and captivating in her own weird way. Not in a rage to become best friends with a Holly Golightly but I can appreciate her. It’s like my sister Chanel. She and her husband are both successful stylists at a very high-end salon and they both look the part. They are high fashion, (she wore beetle earings to go hiking…3 inches long an inch wide, brass beetles hanging from her ears) inaccessable and distant but beautiful. We get along well but are almost too different to really be good friends. Jamie explained it wonderfully: I love Picasso’s Guernica. I love looking at it, it is moving and poignant and emotional. But I’m not going to hang it in my living room. That’s how I feel about Holly Golightly.

I get now why Truman Capote is one of the great American authors. He is a master of Subtly and Nuance. For the most part pop culture is formulaic and straightforward. Not easy to predict but you just have to find the happy medium between “oh look! shiny and new and different” and “safe, comfortable,  known” without going into “new and different and distrubingly weird.” None of that needs or even wants subtly and nuance, but I think those two things are what make a classic. And it takes a great author to even start to do that well. Those two things allow me to make the book/movie/song what I need it to be in my head right now, but in ten years when I experience it again it can be what I need it to be at that time. Does that make sense? A classic grows with you. And that makes a classic timeless and brilliant. In Holly he created a character that speaks to a part of all of us, wether we admit it consciously or not. The part that so desparately wants to name the cat but can’t or won’t. I think most of us figure out a way to name the cat but alot of people never get there and live perpetually with the mean reds. The best part is, Capote asks you to look at this about yourself without telling you what you should do or think about it. Subtly. Nuance. I loved it.