Heroes and Heroines

I am not someone who reads science fiction or fantasy. I will gladly watch it on TV, but when it comes to novels, I have never progressed far beyond Ray Bradbury or Terry Pratchett. As critical as I am of fiction in general, I am even more critical of science fiction and fantasy novels. So when a friend presented me with R.A. Salvatore’s The Highwayman (419 pages, $7.99), it almost goes without saying that I was skeptical.

Fantasy writers have an awful habit of alienating potential readers like myself by giving characters overly complicated names, never ever writing in anything except the passive voice, and using laughable phrases like “he knew not”- symptoms of bad writing in general. Mr. Salvatore is no different. He cobbles together names out of the messiest bits of the alphabet: d’s and y’s and r’s all lassoed together, awkward vowel clusters, and sometimes names with no vowels except y, which is just mean. The inevitable result is a character list that includes names like “Rulhio Noylan” and “Guldibonne”. My spelling checker is having a field day with those. I’m not saying that every character should be named Steve, but complicated and unintentionally funny names distract from the flow of a storyline.

The novel tells the story of the rise of a Robin Hood-esque figure called the Highwayman. All the clichés are accounted for: his humble roots, bullied as a child, an oppressive government just begging to be overthrown, death of certain family members at the hands of said oppressive government, and, of course, the fair maiden who loves him. One needs an exterminator for this massive cliché infestation.

On the bright side, Mr. Salvatore wisely chose to have the Highwayman overcome physical obstacles instead of teenage angst. No one likes a moody hero; the man constantly crying, “Why me?” and pulling his hair in between fights. The author introduces the Highwayman after two hundred pages of back story as someone with serious physical limitations, which made me perk up and take interest. Physical obstacles are far more formidable than mental obstacles, and I found myself wondering how in the world this man could turn out to be the hero.

I did also enjoy the fact that Mr. Salvatore refrains from writing his characters as cardboard cutouts despite all of the clichés. The characters acknowledge two sides to their personalities, although it is only the men who do so. The women, even those that are not the typical damsels in distress, are pure, and don’t have an ethical gray area. The Highwayman admits to himself that stealing from the rich and giving to the poor isn't just the right thing to do, it's fun. Getting revenge on those who humiliated him is fun. Being able to woo his beloved as the famous Highwayman is fun. He isn’t the squeaky clean boy scout as much as he would have others believe. He does have the typical Arthurian code of chivalry that most heroes have, but adding an impish dimension to the character seems more real. I find it interesting that Mr. Salvatore never misses an opportunity to inject a bit of triteness into his plot, yet his characters occasionally show some depth. In The Highwayman, good people do bad things, and some of the bad guys are allowed to have a conscience.

Mr. Salvatore does have potential, but his writing style is forced. He composes his phrases indiscriminately; he doesn’t pay enough attention to the nuances of his choices. Daylight might surround a character, but the day probably would not. He can also be too adjective-happy, dumping them all over the place. It is better to be plain-spoken than to force finesse. The book would have been infinitely better had R.A. Salvatore shaved the clichés, stopped trying to decorate every line, and just let his characters speak.

Next week: White Oleander by Janet Fitch

Slowing Down

There is a difference between the word “house” and the word “home”. A house is a shelter made of bricks. It can crumble, burn, be destroyed, and we can build a new one. A home is an idea. Few people know how to build a house, but anyone can build a home. It’s Christmas and birthdays, and that huge fight you had with your mom when you wanted to paint your room. It can be a house, an apartment, another person. When you’re tired and beat at the end of the day, when everything has gone wrong, and you want to go home, you don’t want to go to the house. You want that space you have created that’s yours; you want your people, your pets, or just to be alone in that place you call home.

Sarah Orne Jewett’s Deephaven (305 pages, $27.58) is about a sleepy New England coastal town that becomes home for two summer visitors. Kate Lancaster invites her good friend Helen Denis to spend a few months at her late aunt’s house, and the two quickly become integrated in the community. It is a community of fishermen and housewives, each with their own story to tell. It is a small town where everyone knows everyone else’s history. The fashions are from another generation, and there is little in the way of excitement, yet these two young women are never bored with the inhabitants of Deephaven.

The girls befriend the fishermen of the village, stopping to watch them work and listen to their stories of being on the ocean. They visit their friends in the lighthouse, and go fishing for their dinner. They spy on the secretive old captains who sit sunning themselves on the wharf, hoping to catch the outrageous tales they tell each other.

My favorites are the stories Captain Sands tells Helen and Kate. He tells them about all of the times when his relatives and acquaintances have known when someone close to them is about to die. He believes that people are connected in a way that science cannot yet explain. We still hear such stories today. The mother that wakes up in the middle of the night knowing that her child is in danger, the twins that know when the other is upset no matter where they are, and the wife who knows when her husband is ill even if he is not there. A pessimist would say that it is blind luck, but maybe, just maybe, we are connected to the people we love. Either way, Ms. Jewett is building on her themes of home and community. In the novel, a community is not a collection of random people, but is a kind of extended family. The neighbors take care of each other with the same compassion they would a family member.

The girls become part of the community even though they are not permanent residents. Acceptance is instantaneous; there is no suspicion of outsiders. Deephaveners are warm and friendly, and the girls quickly become as caring and attentive to their neighbors as those that have lived in Deephaven for years. As someone who has very little knowledge of her neighbors, I found this openness fascinating. Suburbia allows its inhabitants to create their own little islands using privacy fences. Getting to know your neighbors is optional, but it is mandatory in Deephaven. Deephaveners are far from resentful of this fact, and see their way of life as the best. Larger cities like Boston are regarded as exotic, but hardly appealing. It seems that the other people of the village are what make Deephaven home. The familial ease between neighbors transfers to the girls. Their relationship eventually becomes the relationship that Deephavers have with each other. They are more like sisters when they leave than when they came, which made me wonder if community begets community. The girls spend months around people who treat them like family, and the two become closer to each other than ever. Does the mere presence of home and family cause others to create their own home and familial relationships?

Admittedly, Sarah Orne Jewett is not the author one should go to for excitement. Intrigue, mistaken identities, and love triangles are nowhere to be found in her stories. She is the author one reads to slow down and relax. Her tone is never hurried, and she addresses her reader as a friend. She lovingly moulds her characters through the stories they tell. Every inhabitant has a “pet story” they love to tell, and it says more about the teller than the people it involves. The book is lovely, but something you have to be in the mod for. In the age of Twitter and instant everything, there’s something to be said for taking your time.

Next week: The Highwayman by R.A. Salvatore

The Surrender

Finding myself once again at a loss for something to read last week, I wandered aimlessly among the shelves of my local bookstore, alternately poking fun at the titles and randomly grabbing anything that caught my eye. The result, of course, was that I spent over an hour being incredibly disappointed until I noticed a name that I did not expect to find outside of the tiny plays section: Tennessee Williams. I can’t even be sure how I noticed the slim, white, unimposing volume surrounded by thick, colorful spines sporting their authors’ names in raised twenty-point font, but perhaps it was exactly this contrast that attracted my eye. After all, Tennessee Williams is a name that needs no glitzy cover to find its audience. The man is renowned as the author of plays such as “A Streetcar Named Desire”, “The Glass Menagerie”, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”, and “The Night of the Iguana”. To my surprise, that day in the fiction section I found that Tennessee Williams also wrote a collection of short stories called Tales of Desire (104 pages, $9.95).

Tales of Desire consists of five separate stories: “The Mysteries of the Joy Rio”, “One Arm”, “Desire and the Black Masseur”, “Hard Candy”, and “The Killer Chicken and the Closet Queen”. Each story explores the secret cravings of its male protagonist for the company of others of the male persuasion, yet the journey is always new. While the protagonists of “Mysteries” and “Hard Candy” eventually find themselves in the Joy Rio Theater, “Mysteries” deals with the sexual desire and loneliness of an aging watchmaker, while “Hard Candy” is purely about the lust of a retired merchant. Yes, both deal with lust, but Pablo Gonazles in “Mysteries” is attempting to replace his feelings for his dead love by seeking out brief encounters in the theater.

“One Arm” is the story of a man with a sordid past awaiting execution in a southern prison. Desire is something that others have always put upon him, and something which he exploited. In the end, he seeks comfort through physical contact. In the opposite corner, “The Killer Chicken” relates the story of a lawyer who has repressed his sexuality, pushed his desire so far down that he does not even recognize his yearnings when they emerge. Mr. Williams also sets up this story so that the protagonist’s repression of his sexuality results in the repression of his very identity, so that he mirrors his mother’s personality. Perhaps repression is just another word for hiding. In which case, the protagonist of “Killer Chicken” unconsciously hides behind the idea of his mother, throwing up road blocks between his illusion and reality.

In all the stories, desire is something secret to be fulfilled in dark corners; something that, as in “Desire and the Black Masseur”, goes hand-in-hand with shame. “Desire” follows Anthony Burns in his quest to cleanse himself of sin through torture. Burns feels that his desire has swallowed him whole, and he must atone for his sins at the hands of a black masseur that he meets at a Turkish bath. Tennessee Williams brings up an intriguing and somewhat frightening idea in this story. “The nature of man is full of such makeshift arrangements, devised by himself to cover his incompletion. He feels a part of himself to be like a missing wall or a room left unfurnished and he tries to as well as he can to make up for it. The use of imagination, resorting to dreams or the loftier purpose of art, is a mask he devises to cover his incompletion. Or violence such as war, between two men or among a number of nations, is also a blind and senseless compensation for that which is not yet formed in human nature. Then there is still another compensation. This one is found in the principle of atonement, the surrender of self to violent treatment by others with the idea of clearing one’s self of his guilt” (45). (I could have paraphrased, but I thought it would be a good opportunity to demonstrate Mr. William’s skill as a writer.) Mr. Williams, as an artist, is pointing out that art is a way of compensating for something the artist lacks. I wondered if it were true. If imagination compensates for what reality lacks, and art is an expression of the imagination, then the pursuit of art is the pursuit of compensation. Seems depressing, doesn’t it? What if the pursuit of art, greatness, scientific achievement, etc. were all just a cover? Do we indeed erect skyscrapers, declare war, and cure diseases because we feel incomplete? Our single-mindedness in certain areas of our lives means that we do not have to turn to see our failings. Perhaps. Then desire would be a craving of completion.

The commonality in the stories seems to be that a desire, once fulfilled, results in the death of its carrier, as though desire had filled the physical shell to the brim. The protagonists allow this desire to consume them until they are nothing without it, but it has already been established that this book is not just about sex. It is about the need to be one of two, instead of just one, even if it can only be for a brief moment. The feeling of desire is the connection to Earth. Physical contact allows the protagonists to reaffirm their sense of belonging to the human race since without it they drift like so much flotsam. Yes, the fulfillment results in death, but maybe the brief connection is worth the price.

Next Week: Deephaven by Sarah Orne Jewett