Last One to Kansas City Is a Hippie

Rick Hill has written a compelling (but hilarious!) narrative of the Great American Road Trip, a journey from Southern California to Kansas City by hitchhiking, train hopping, and automobile stealing. Fueled by copious amounts of liquor and marijuana, four men, led by Mac (a KC hipster trying to recapture his glory days in the 1940s), set off in 1970, determined to travel with such style and ease that they’re sure to impress the fairer sex. Along the way, however, they encounter mobsters, drug dealers, possible Charles Manson supporters, and cops, all of whom threaten their lives.

Last One to Kansas City Is a Hippie is told through competing points of view and through various stylistic devices, including flashbacks, but it never becomes confusing or seems “gimmicky.” Instead, the story is propelled forward as the four men have a series of adventures and encounters with bizarre people. One of the more outrageous escapades is when they hook up with two young women in Oklahoma City, never suspecting that they are the daughters of the local gambling and pornography kingpin. This low-rent mobster then swears to kill them and uses his private plane to chase their car.

Most of the story, including the “framing device” set in 1993, is told by Dan, a man whose life has fallen apart. When he remembers the greatest month of his life—the road trip to Kansas City 23 years earlier—he becomes determined to both recreate it and to write a screenplay for a movie in vein of Easy Riders. The novel then repeatedly shifts from 1970 to 1993 as we follow the young Danny and the alcoholic, melancholic Dan on their respective journeys to discover themselves. Both journeys are entertaining, absurdist romps, and I can say that I enjoyed every minute of them.

In conclusion, all I can say about this novel is, “Well done, Mr. Hill!”

Justifiable homicide?

Sounds justified to me. As a character says in a Graham Greene novel," I'm a prose man."

MOSCOW, January 29 (RIA Novosti) – Poetry can kill after all.

A former teacher was detained in Russia’s Urals after being accused of stabbing an acquaintance to death in a dispute about literary genres, investigators said Wednesday.

The 67-year-old victim insisted that “the only real literature is prose,” the Sverdlovsk Region’s branch of the Investigative Committee said.

The victim’s assertion outraged the 53-year-old suspect, who favored poetry, and the dispute ended with the ex-teacher stabbing his friend to death, investigators said.

Both of the men were purportedly drunk at the time.

The incident took place last week, but the suspect fled the scene and was not tracked down until days later.

The man, whose name has been withheld, was placed under arrest and charged with murder, punishable with up to 15 years in prison.

This is not the first time high-brow disputes have led to bloodshed in Russia. In September, a man was shot in a line for beer in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don after enraging a fellow beer drinker with his views about the work of Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant.

Honoring Ray Wheeler

Dickinson State University will honor Ray Wheeler tomorrow (Monday) evening with a reading from his collection of short stories. Details:

Having retired after more than four decades of teaching at Dickinson State University, L. Ray Wheeler is an Emeritus Professor of English and Philosophy. For several years he chaired the Department of Language & Literature and was the founding editor of The Dickinson Review. Wheeler has published poetry and short stories, as well as had his original plays staged by college and university programs. He continues to reside in Dickinson, North Dakota. 

This program will feature current and former DSU faculty reading from Wheeler's recently published story collection, Bar Talk and Tall Tales, and offering anecdotes about their beloved colleague. The collection will be for sale during the reception that follows the presentation. 

For more information on this or other Heart River Writers' Circle events, contact Dr. Peter Grimes at peter.grimes@dickinsonstate.edu or 701-483-2142.

Mark Twain & Ambrose Bierce

The second of the special programs associated with Civil War 150 is this evening (7:00, Beck Auditorium) when I speak about the American authors Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce. I’ll be drawing from my recent New York Times articles for this presentation.

Afterwards, we’ll serve refreshments, including authentic hardtack.

Attending your own funeral

Kevin Baker tells what it's like for an author to attend a book club scheduled to discuss his novel:

Soon someone cleared his throat, told us his name and said he was usually the club’s discussion moderator. But not tonight: “I just didn’t like this book that much, so it’s fine with me if somebody else wants to lead the discussion.”

Wait a minute. People were going to give it a thumbs up or down right from the beginning? Uh-oh. But so it went with the next person. And the next. And the next: “I didn’t really like it that much either.”

This was a disaster. And now it was my turn. I was embarrassed not only for myself but for the members of the club. How would they feel once they discovered the author they had just dissed was sitting right there? Everyone stared at me expectantly. I swallowed hard and did the only decent thing — I gave them the name of an old roommate. “I’m Richard Feeley,” I mumbled, eyes downcast, “and I rather liked it.”

In the Garden of Beasts

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin is the third of Erik Larson's popular history books that I've read. Like the first two, The Devil in the White City (2003) and Thunderstruck (2006), Larson's latest book compellingly tells a true story that is "stranger than fiction."

This book centers on William Dodd, American Ambassador to Germany from 1933 to 1937, and his family, especially his daughter, Martha, as they live in Berlin while Adolf Hitler rises to power. Larson is curious how the Dodds reacted as they witnessed first hand the Nazi Party seize complete control of Germany. He especially wonders, for example, if the ambassador could have helped to prevent the horrors that were about to envelope Europe by insisting that President Franklin Roosevelt take a stronger stand against Hitler and the National Socialist Party.

In the summer of 1933, as FDR struggled to get a recalcitrant Congress to pass his economic proposals to combat the worsening Great Depression, at least four men passed on his invitation to be Ambassador to Germany. Roosevelt finally offered the position to a historian of modest renown, currently teaching at the University of Chicago, William Dodd, who reluctantly accepted what everyone in Washington knew would be an extremely difficult job. Dodd packed up his family, including his 24-year-old soon-to-be divorced daughter, and moved to Berlin.

That daughter, Martha, a literary editor at the Chicago Tribune, had had a number of tempestuous romantic relationships over the previous few years, including an affair with Carl Sandberg and a flirtation with Thornton Wilder, and her father hoped that life abroad would settle her into adulthood. But Martha, enchanted by the bright lights of Berlin, shrugged off as “rumors” the talk about concentration camps springing up to house communists and Jews and threw herself into the nightlife. She took a number of lovers, including at least one senior Nazi official as well as a Soviet spy. After the Night of the Long Knives, however, she, like her father, would resolve to work against the Nazi cause.

In addition to telling the story of the Dodds, Larson provides background to life in Germany at this time. For example, he explains why the laws restricting Jews from certain professions didn't matter to American tourists and why even many Jews thought that the threats made by Nazis were primarily bluster. He also details the origins of the ubiquitous Nazi salute, the mandatory sterilization of "defectives" laws, and invention of the deadly Zyklon B gas used in the concentration camps.

Larson's book, like the other two that I've read, is narrative history at its best, and I definitely recommend it.

Early American literature

Could we just admit that colonial American literature is terrible and stop pretending that it’s worth reading?

If you enjoy Puritan religious screeds about how people are condemned to Hell, regardless of their good works, or if you enjoy political tracts about how an enlightened government should function, then, without question, colonial American literature is for you. For most readers, though, it’s God-awful boring stuff.

The comparable period of English literature (1600-1800), which is the late Renaissance through the early Romantics, has such luminaries as Shakespeare, Milton, Jonson, Swift, Pope, Coleridge, and Shelley, among many others, who are certainly worthy of the 1,000 pages they take up in the Norton Anthologies, but the 1,000 pages of the Norton for the same years are devoted to the likes of Mather, Edwards, Jefferson, and Franklin. What’s going on?

Understand that I certainly recognize the genius of these colonial writers, and their works are well worth studying if you’re interested in religion or political thought. My argument is that they aren’t “literature.”

So what is literature?

Literature has an imaginative complexity and ambiguity that forces readers to think deeply about human nature, their relationships with others, and their place in the universe. By “imaginative,” I mean the opposite of “functional,” which is prose that has a utilitarian purpose. In other words, narratives (fiction or non-iction), poetry, and drama qualify as “literature.

By my definition, which is admittedly subjective, American literature begins with Washington Irving’s Sketchbook in 1820, but it doesn’t fully blossom for another couple of decades until Hawthorne and Poe began writing their stories. Poetry took another decade or two (believe me, you can skip Longfellow and Whittier!), but by the Civil War, Whitman and Dickinson began writing, and so America truly had some original poetic genius to claim as its own.

Perhaps it simply took a few hundred years for American literature to get grounded, or perhaps it took a traumatic event like the Civil War to kick it into a higher gear, or perhaps simply too many intelligent men and women were too busy establishing a new republic to focus on the production of literature, but maybe it’s time to admit the obvious: American literature really begins ca. 1820. We can skip what came before.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2013) makes me feel conflicted, but not for the reasons that Mira Nair would like. In other words, I have no doubt that she wants the audience to feel conflicted by the film’s protagonist, the Pakistani youth Changez, who wavers between simply opting out of Western values and becoming a jihadi, and on this level, the film succeeds. But I doubt that Nair would like the audience to feel conflicted on whether or not the film itself is any good.

To start, I should say that Mira Nair is one of my favorite directors. I have seen nearly all of her films, from Salaam Bombay to The Namesake, and Monsoon Wedding is one of my all-time favorite films. I admire not just her stories but also her incredible visual sense, complemented by stunning music soundtracks. Moreover, her actors, many of them not professionals, usually give extraordinary performances. So what’s wrong with The Reluctant Fundamentalist?

First off, the lead actor, Riz Ahmed playing Changez, is exceptional as a brilliant Pakistani who attends Princeton and, determined to make a fortune, then takes a job on Wall Street as a financial analyst. He soon falls in love with Erica, a young, wealthy woman (played by Kate Hudson), and so he seems set for life in the adopted country that he has come to love, America.

9/11 changes everything.

Returning to New York after a business trip a week after the attacks, Changez is treated harshly by airport security officials, who strip search him with barely restrained brutality. Over the next few months, he is treated with scorn, if not outright hatred, by the people around him, including the co-workers who had been his friends just a month earlier and by strangers he meets in his day to day life. In response, Changez begins to speak positively about Islam and to grow a beard. Predictably, he then encounters even more hostility until he decides to resign his career to return to Lahore, where he becomes a college professor the government later accuses of radicalizing his students.

My problem with the film is that the Americans—from his love interest (played by the mediocre Hudson) to his boss (the wooden Kiefer Sutherland)—are cardboard figures that act in the most stereotypical ways. We’re to believe, for example, Erica would really mount an art exhibition around the theme “I Slept with a Pakistani” that she intends as an expression of her love for him. She’s baffled that Changez feels deeply insulted and exploited. This scene is simply unconvincing and irritating, as are most of the scenes with Changez and his venal, greedy boss.

It’s surprising (and disappointing) that Mira Nair goes for predictable conflict and easy politics in The Reluctant Fundamentalist. I hope she back on track with her next film!

Enduring Love

Ian McEwan is one of the major novelists of contemporary literature. Although he's written a dozen novels—and many short stories, screenplays, and even librettos—he never gained much recognition outside of England until the film version of Atonement, which won a number of awards a few years ago. Since then, his novels have sold well in America, and some of his earlier works, such as Enduring Love (1997), are starting to gain more recognition, too.

Enduring Love begins with suspense, literally, as Jack Rose, enjoying a picnic with his wife, Clarissa, finds himself trying to grab a rope on a runaway helium balloon that has a terrified boy in its gondola. Five other men, including the balloon's captain, desperately grab the rope, too, but a sudden gust of wind, estimated later to be 70 mph, launches them into the air. Most of them hang suspended a few feet before they become frightened and let go and drop safely to the ground. One man, however, doesn't release and is then carried more than one hundred feet into the air before he loses his grip and plunges to his death.

Surprisingly, the rest of the novel doesn't really directly dwell on the aftermath of this bizarre accident but, instead, focuses on how one of the other men who released the rope, Jed, a fanatical Christian, begins to stalk Jack, who writes for popular science magazines and is scornful about religions. Jed will not accept that Jack has no belief in God and will never seek solace through prayer, and so, increasingly more frantic, he pursues Jack because he feels compelled to "save" him. These traumas—witnessing a death that he might have helped to prevent and then being stalked—have a terrible effect on Jack's emotional state and, consequently, on his marriage.

But what if Jed isn't stalking Joe? What if, in fact, Jed doesn't exist except as a figment of Joe's anxieties about his personal failures in life?

In addition to this disturbing plot, Enduring Love is a meditation on many themes, including the nature of time, the inter-complexities of human relationships, and the impact of science on the modern world. McEwan, for example, speculates about the limits of empirical knowledge and rational thought in the face of seemingly random, inexplicable tragedy.

I've read a half dozen of McEwan's novels, and although they all, like Enduring Love, wrestle with challenging philosophical questions, they are written in such lucid prose that they are accessible for general readers who want to read about interesting characters placed into compelling situations.