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| A Literary Map of America. Image courtesy of National Writers' Series. |
As I’ve changed my route, I thought I’d plot another “… map of America”. I’ll have to redraw the line for my musical map soon but thought I’d do a new one and offer you my books map of America for each of the states I’m visiting.
New York, as the city where I start my trip, is a place of many novels, and so I couldn’t limit to myself to just one here. Even two is ludicrously insufficient—but I’ve gone for two classics: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Twenties trailblazer The Great Gatsby, following a cast of characters living in the fictional town of West Egg on prosperous Long Island in the summer of 1922, and J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, which isn’t about playing baseball in a wheat field, rather Holden Caulfield recounts the days following his expulsion from Pencey Prep, a private school. After a fight with his roommate, Stradlater, Holden leaves school two days early to explore New York before returning home, interacting with teachers, prostitutes, nuns, an old girlfriend, and his sister along the way
There’s always a debate about Washington DC and its inclusion and non-inclusion on states lists, but I’ve gone for it and the classic All the President's Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein – immortalised in film with Clint Eastwood.
For Illinois and my visit to Chicago I’ve picked Native Son by Richard Wright. It tells the story of 20-year-old Bigger Thomas, an African American youth living in utter poverty in a poor area on Chicago's South Side in the 1930s. While not apologizing for Bigger's crimes, Wright portrays a systemic inevitability behind them. Bigger's lawyer, Boris Max, makes the case that there is no escape from this destiny for his client or any other black American since they are the necessary product of the society that formed them and told them since birth who exactly they were supposed to be.
Next on my itinerary is Iowa City (our sister City of Lit) and the Iowa-set Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, which won both the Pulitzer prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 2005, is my next pick. Gilead is the first in her trilogy about the eponymous town of Gilead and centres on Reverend John Ames, an elderly Congregationalist pastor. It’s a wonderful tale of aging, legacy and the American Mid-West.
A Death in the Family by James Agee is Tennessee’s selection. The novel is based on the events that occurred to Agee in 1915 when his father went out of town to see his own father, who had suffered a heart attack. During the return trip, Agee's father was killed in a car accident. The novel provides a portrait of life in Knoxville, Tennessee, showing how such a loss affects the young widow, her two children, her atheist father and the dead man's alcoholic brother.
I’m off to New Orleans next and Louisiana’s book is A Kind of Freedom by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton. Sexton’s wonderful debut novel traces a family through three generations in New Orleans—from a star-crossed romance in the 1940s to the crack epidemic of the 1980s to the unfathomable changes wrought by Hurricane Katrina. Injustice, hope, ambition, and the history and truth of New Orleans are the underlying subjects of this novel, explored through the stories of these well-drawn characters.
In Texas, you can’t escape Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. It is the first published book of the Lonesome Dove series, but is the third instalment in the series chronologically. The story focuses on the relationship of several retired Texas Rangers and their adventures driving a cattle herd from Texas to Montana.
I’ve picked two books for New Mexico: Mornings in Mexico and Etruscan Places by our own Bert (DH Lawrence) and The Milagro Beanfield War written by John Nichols. I felt it was a bit unfair on NM’s native writers to just pick the man from Eastwood, but couldn’t leave him out either. Mornings in Mexico is actually set between New Mexico and Mexico itself, and has some beautiful vivid descriptions of the pueblo people who his host Mabel Dodge-Luhan introduces him to. Nichols’ novel by contrast is a more comic affair which tells of one man's struggle as he defends his small beanfield and his community against much larger business and state political interests.
Arizona brings us Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko - A marvellous tapestry of narrative and voice that tells multiple stories from multiple times but more or less centres on contemporary Tucson, and the woman who is translating what may be an apocalyptic Aztec prophecy. Drug-dealers, shamans, revolutionaries, deviants, psychics and crime-lords cross and re-cross one another to create a grim cacophony of Native American history, experience and anger.
For my final state, it has to be John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Set during the Great Depression, the novel focuses on the Joads, a poor family of tenant farmers driven from their Oklahoma home by drought, economic hardship, agricultural industry changes and bank foreclosures forcing tenant farmers out of work. Due to their nearly hopeless situation, and in part because they are trapped in the Dust Bowl, the Joads set out for California. Along with thousands of other "Okies", they seek jobs, land, dignity, and a future.
Maybe this will give you a few ideas for some post-holiday reading and I’ve got a few recommendations go catch up with too - Almanac of the Dead looks especially good!