A Prayer for the Dying by Stewart O’Nan (fiction). “The Horror! The Horror!” This quote from Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” could be superimposed on “A Prayer for the Dying,” but the evil is not greed but disease.
Originally published in 1999, “A Prayer” has renewed relevance after our global bout with Covid-19. The story takes place after the civil war in a small town called Friendship, Wisconsin. The main character, Jake Hansen, is the town’s sheriff, undertaker and preacher. He rides everywhere on his bicycle to avoid bad war memories involving horses
This is a character made for the movies: Imagine a Western sheriff taking off on his bike, gun strapped to his hip, arresting the bad guys, then arranging to have any bodies towed to the sheriff’s-office basement, where he drains them and prepares them for a decent burial.
Crime is a rarity in Friendship, however. When Jake is called to a farm where a soldier’s body has been found, he straps on his gun for his image, rather than necessity. With the farmer’s son driving a wagon carrying the body back to town, an ailing woman is picked up on the way and taken to the doctor along with the deceased. Doc informs Jake that the soldier probably had sex with the woman, and both are victims of diphtheria. The disease spreads quickly, picking off its victims, including Jake’s wife and baby daughter.
In Friendship, news of a death is broadcast from the church bell tower, where the town “idiot” rings out the age of the victim. The bell keeps ringing. When it stops, Jake knows the bell ringer is dead.
Jake tries to protect public health by enforcing a quarantine on the town, a move that brings him nothing but abuse from people who want to travel for business, visit relatives or escape. (I am reminded of Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical officer for both President Trump and President Biden, who was vilified for his actions during Covid. He still requires police protection because of death threats). Finally, a few people are allowed to leave because a forest fire is bearing down on the town, incinerating everything in its path. A nightmare of catastrophes!
This novel will seep into your subconscious. It’s an edge-of-your-seat read. The night I finished it, I dreamed I was pedaling my bicycle frantically to escape a raging fire – but without Jake’s gun strapped to my hip. The Horror! The Horror!
The Dark Flood Rises by Margaret Drabble (fiction). We turn now fromexcellent writing through action and dialogue to the excellent writing of Margaret Drabble through the inner thoughts of her characters — who are those uninteresting people called senior citizens.
Note to writers: If you want to know how to write a novel, you can’t go wrong by analyzing Drabble’s “Flood.” She takes a typical group of tarnished human beings who are slouching toward their end times and makes them compelling. Most of us think we aren’t this compelling in real life. But, note to older people: Maybe we’re wrong.
The character around which the other characters pivot is Fran Stubbs, who is an inspector for an agency that advises and approves sheltered housing for the aged, a most fitting employment for a woman in her 70s. She has always been fascinated by death and dying. As a child she read and loved E. Cobham Brewer’s “A Dictionary of Phrase and Fable,” especially the section on “Dying Sayings.” Beethoven, for example, supposedly said: “I shall hear in Heaven.”
On the road to a job, Fran feels somewhat threatened by a white van that is traveling too close on a rainy day. She remembers the Brewer section on “Death from Strange Causes,” where recorded deaths included the swallowing of goat hairs, grape stones and toothpicks. Supposedly Aeschylus was felled by a falling tortoise. Fran wonders if there will be a tally of deaths by little white vans. Or what about the woman who died because she had suffered a stroke and couldn’t open her bathroom door? Killed by a door knob.
Fran’s friends are as old, as amused by their thoughts and as troubled by aging as Fran is. They are educated, literary people, and the reader will be able to pick up only 50% of the name-dropping, partly because Drabble is British. Doesn’t matter. Look them up online or read on.
It takes a gifted writer to take a downer like aging and make it into a humorous notion. On a junket for the shelter agency, for example, Fran thinks she can understand why a 23-year-old nurse could poison her aged charges.
“The feeble, as never before in society, in history, are outweighing the hale . . . it’s a disaster movie. The hunter-gatherers wouldn’t have let themselves get into this kind of predicament. They abandoned the elderly, or drowned them, or clubbed them to death, or exposed them on snowy mountain sides. They kept on the move.”
Fran is definitely a “kick.” Some of the characters are not as lovable. But that’s life, isn’t it? There are boring, whiny, old people and there are lovable old coots. Read this book and Get the Love On!
Survivor in Death by J.D. Robb (fiction). This is No. 20 in the “In Death” mystery series. It features a super-tough, super-sexy heroine, Eve Dallas, and her super-smart, super-sexed husband Roarke. They are mystery-novel cliches, i.e. Dallas is a tough-talking, foul-mouthed, hard-to-like-but-always-respected lieutenant in the New York City Police and Security Department. Roarke is a snarky, rich tycoon who exchanged his life of crime for faithful husband and police aide. Both come from incredibly scarred childhoods featuring tortures and murder.
Subsidiary police characters mimic the dialogue of Dallas and Roarke. Amazing how everyone can come up with a smartass response to every question or comment. They are always “on.” It’s police stand-up.
Thankfully, the one thing missing from this book is the stupid, harassing department supervisor. All cop shows have a boss who cares more for the bottom line than arresting murderers. Dallas, however, is free to search for the perpetrators of a family’s vicious deaths even though she chases through city streets, injuring people and storefronts along the way.
Oh yes. Dallas shows her humanity by sheltering a 9-year-old girl, the sole survivor of the title. But Dallas does not succumb to her nurturing vibes. She’s a police officer, damn it, not a babysitter. Anybody who thinks otherwise will be fired!
This is your book if you have always wanted to read about AI-assisted orgasms. That is not a typo.
Look For Something Good by Robert Drews (fiction). If you’re tired of smart-ass, potty-mouthed detectives, here’s the antidote. The two main characters in “Look for Something Good” are two good men searching for The Good.
Father Thomas is a former teenage-thug-turned-Marine, now a dedicated Catholic priest, who takes a break from his parish to attend his high school reunion. He decides to hitchhike his way back to Los Angeles, and on the way, he meets good people who, in one way or another, have transformed their lives by finding faith and helping others.
The love of baseball saves J.J. Werth, a rather weird, aging bachelor who names his car Ruby and likes hanging out in laundromats. He spends some ugly time being depressed after being laid off unexpectedly. He goes to his baseball pal Fr. Thomas for a chat in “the box.” In the Confessional, Fr. Thomas says the best way to get over bad is to look for The Good. J.J. decides to go on a pilgrimage to clear his mind of negativity and find evidence of good in the world.
So there you have it: two good guys off on the highways and byways to see if they can do good when they meet up with Goodness. This does not seem like an engaging plot – not even a remotely possible plot. But it turns out the novel is rather like the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” starring Jimmy Stewart. It simply engages the old emotions that Mom and Dad honed in us, the ones that everyone is supposed to have but tries to disguise in our modern, cut-throat world.
Atheists and “nones” might get turned off by this story. There are lots of Bible quotes going on, but the writing is top-notch. The cultural details (pop music, baseball, cities on “the road”) are riveting. There’s enough “stuff” here to keep the skeptics enchanted — maybe against their will. Readers have to be willing to go back in time, to the place where people still believed in helping, loving and saving the shaggiest of characters. It might take 50 pages to get to this place, but it’s worth the effort.
A Woman of Independent Means, starring Sally Field (TV series). This six-hour mini-series first appeared in 1995 but is available again on cable. It’s a “family saga,” and the family is interesting, mostly because Sally Field is interesting. The story’s heroine, Bess Steed Garner, is less interesting. She starts life traditionally: dutiful child, clinging wife. Widowhood changes her into a narcissistic and controlling woman, which the series tries to translate as “female independence.”
The quarter century between the first appearance of this series and today’s woman is very obvious. “Independence” then and independence now are very different conditions. Women today may not receive equality in all things, but no one questions whether they should strive for any role on the planet.
There was a chance to rescue the heroine in this series. Her husband dies young from influenza, leaving Bess with three children and a failing insurance company. Bess refuses to declare bankruptcy because she wants to save her late husband’s efforts. She could have become a prime mover in the company, like Katherine Graham inheriting the Washington Post. But this doesn’t happen. She returns to her former role as a Texas socialite because her mother dies and wills her a lot of money. Inheritance is what makes her independent. The insurance company simply drops out of the picture – literally.
Maybe the character isn’t flawed. Maybe she just is what she is: a rich, Dallas socialite who can afford to resist the intentions of the men she meets. Dallas socialites in the early 20th Century didn’t dabble in business. They went to parties, had tea with guests and dominated their children who were taken care of by nannies. This viewer expected better.
There is one flaw that can’t be escaped, however. The third episode is pointless. If the series had ended with the second episode, we would see a woman who manages to take a chance and marry the man who loves her: wealthy, down-to-earth Sam Garner. She makes him sign a pre-nuptial agreement, however, which seems crazy to him but signifies that Bess is a “modern woman.” She even smokes a cigarette when she forces him to sign, the dubious symbol of the modern woman’s independence.
Stories are supposed to enlighten, contain a moral. Aesop’s Fables, Superman and L.A. Law all show how the good guys win in the end. In the third episode of “A Woman of Independent Means,” however, an empty nest and aging lead mercilessly to wrinkled, decrepit dementia and death. This is the extended version of the bumper sticker: “Life Sucks – And Then You Die!”
The ending of the second episode was the way to wind it up: People can survive catastrophe, but they have to allow themselves to be saved by love.
On the Basis of Sex, starring Felicity Jones (TV movie). This movie about the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her early years presents a truly independent woman. Even viewers who didn’t agree with her liberal decisions could empathize with her experiences in the 60s.
Ruth (affectionately known as Kiki), a wife and the mother of a toddler, not only finished law school, but also helped her husband keep up with his law-school studies when he was suffering from testicular cancer. In spite of this super-human performance, she was turned down by every law firm she approached and had to settle for a job teaching law rather than practicing.
Then a breakthrough case comes along. Ruth’s husband persuades her to take it with the help of his firm. The case involves a never-married man who has been refused a tax deduction for caregiving because he is not a woman. Bingo. The Ginsburgs recognize that winning this case will set a precedent against discrimination based on sex. Miraculously, Ruth wins the case at the Supreme Court level. The stage was then set for victories involving discrimination against women.
Excellent movie – and interesting background based on a true story.
