South Pacific Archives - A Geography of Reading

Crafting Emotional Honesty in In the Quiet by Eliza Henry-Jones

August 20, 2017 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

It’s not hard to trigger a newish mom’s “what would happen to my family if something happened to me” fears, but it is hard to sustain a quiet story over 350 pages. In In the Quiet, Eliza Henry-Jones does both so beautifully that not only did I feel immersed rather than manipulated, but I stayed up many hours past bedtime to surrender to the world of this book and to the life of this family.

When the book begins, the narrator, Cate Carlton, is already dead and looking in on her family in poignant moment after poignant moment—like when her daughter (Jessa) gruffly stonewalls a grief counselor or a son (Rafferty) pulls a box of the last flowers Cate ever picked from beneath his bed. We don’t know how Cate died—the detail that ends up forming the central mystery of the novel—but the family moments are so touching and real that we quickly focus all our attention there and nearly forget that Cate is also missing this critical piece of information. Perhaps because the family story is so strong and each member so individual, the book is satisfying all the way through and I only occasionally noticed the bumpy edge of a clue being dropped on the page and when all is gently revealed, I realized I already had all the information that truly mattered.

The Objective Correlative

The jacket copy of In the Quiettalks about the grief this family alternately endures and learns to cope with, but the story is a lot richer than that. There are daily rhythms to be maintained and reinvented—specifically (and symbolically), there are horses to be fed, trained, and potentially sold to pay some of the family’s expenses.

One horse, Opal, is the most valuable, the most wild, and is lost to the family around the time of Cate’s death. Bass, Cate’s widower husband, is looking for Opal because she could help ease the family’s financial burden. Family friend Laura cares for Opal the way she once cared for Cate. Jessa’s relationship with Opal is the most dynamic—clinging hard to the horse even as others are trying to get Jessa to let go and ultimately making some strong, hard decisions. All this while Rafferty shies away from Opal for reasons that don’t become clear until much later. I thought I knew why pretty early. I was deliciously and wonderfully wrong.

By using Opal as an objective correlative like this, Henry-Jones’s displacing the family’s emotion onto the horse. Not only is this something that happens frequently in grief (you should have seen my family with a pile of jewelry and a stop watch after my grandmother’s death), this literary device allows Henry-Jones to explore on the surface what’s happening deep inside each of her characters. This is one crucial element of what makes In the Quiet heartfeltly intelligent rather than sappy and sad.

Characterization

If I had to pick a favorite character in this book, I couldn’t. And if I had to pick a least favorite, I also could not. Both, to me, are a sign that Henry-Jones’s created a well-written, round cast of characters by exploring their humanity and idiosyncrasies at a depth which does the characters, and the reader, justice.

If we look for a moment just at Beatrice and Laura, the two women who grow closer to Bass after his wife’s death, the healing and stealing of the widower being a trope in both literature and life, we find strong, interesting characters with motivations far beyond getting the guy. That’s wonderful in its own right, but it’s much more extraordinary when you consider that this book is being told first-person through the eyes of the woman who lost Bass when she died. Cate’s exploration of her history with both of these women, one her sister and the other her best friend, gives an understanding of the gifts they bring to the world of the book and to the wounds that they themselves are trying to heal. It also gives Cate a chance to heal and for us to care about and cheer for both women.

Narrative Time

As with blending bits of Cate’s history with Laura into the narrative of the present, Henry-Jones gently drops bits of flashback amidst the forward-moving momentum of this book. The result is a lovely, patterned collage of what Cate is seeing after her death and what she experienced while living. I have not taken the time to diagram the placement of the flashbacks, but the book’s rhythm is so soothing that I’d wager they happen at very regular intervals. The mastery of Henry-Jones’s prose is that the rhythm doesn’t feel episodic or repetitive and I don’t think most readers would notice it unless they went looking.

Tears were shed in the reading of this book, but not in the way I’d expected. Instead, my husband found me weeping only as I was wrapping up the final pages. Because of the craft and emotional honesty of In the Quiet, I was so engaged in the tender family portraits that I scarcely had time to mourn the family’s loss until the end. Or maybe it was that the family didn’t really lose their mom until the end. Or at least she didn’t lose them.

In the Quiet is a quiet, beautifully crafted, engaging book. I’ll admit I put off reading it because I didn’t know how good it would be. Don’t make the same mistake.

If you want to see how to transform a potential tear-jerker into a work of literature, or just read a really heartfelt story, pick up a copy of In the Quiet.

The Legacy of Family and I Married Adventure by Osa Johnson

June 21, 2015 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

When I pulled I Married Adventure with its rough, zebra-printed cover from my rapidly-thinning to-read shelf this week, I did it because I remember my dad loving the book. I remember how he’d buy copies and sell them along with his other Africana at gun shows. I remembered entering and re-entering that book into his sales database back when Lotus 1-2-3 was a thing.

But on opening the book, I found torn pages held together since long-ago with cellophane tape. This could not have come from my dad’s inventory. I flipped to the inside cover and saw this:

That’s my Baba’s (my father’s mother’s) bookplate. In her maiden name. It had never occurred to me that the love of this book could have had a deeper origin. I started thinking about the quiet, gentle woman my Baba was and how once when I told her that a picture of my Djiedo (grandfather) looked like trouble, her eyes glimmered.

As ever, there was so much more to her than she showed on the surface, and suddenly the image of her reading about a small-town Kansas girl who marries a small-town Kansas boy and sets on a life of real adventure made a lot of sense. I kept this feeling throughout the book and so I felt like I was rediscovering my Baba as I was discovering Martin and Osa Johnson.

A Loving Memoir

I confess, part of the reason I’d avoided reading this book all these years is a niggling fear that the book would be filled with doting accolades from a wife who never felt like she could equal her husband. I’m all for sweetness, tenderness, and love, but overt fawning and the failure for a woman to see her own value make me uncomfortable.

This is not that book. Instead, while Osa Johnson clearly loves and admires her adventurer husband, she devotes equal energy to telling of her own exploits and triumphs. Although Martin was a world traveler before he met her, you get the sense that much of what they achieved together was due to the magic of them as a pair. I loved that. I loved how much they loved each other. I loved what each of them contributed to their adventures from the South Pacific to Africa.

Undiscovered Savages

The one part of this book that’s harder to read in the “modern” age is the way other cultures and races are viewed. This book, although very much of its time, is far less offensive in that way than say Travels With Myself and Another. The Johnsons do traipse into almost undisturbed tribes and they have some uncomfortable adventures along the way. The language is not always politically correct, but she does have respect for the cultures she encounters. And it’s educational to read into how much our perspectives and the way we talk about things have changed in the last 100 years.

There’s also a tension in the book between the Johnson’s love of the animals they are filming. Although they want to educate the world about these animals so they can be preserved, there are moments when they must kill them or be killed and others when they bring friends in to “complete a museum’s collection” with a few key trophies. But Johnson’s un-glossed look at survival among large and sometimes dangerous beasts like elephants and lions helped me realize how complex some of these issues are and the meat from the animals they killed was never wasted like I throw out a steak left in the fridge for too long.

My Father the Adventurer

It felt wonderful to read this book in the few days leading up to Father’s Day. Partially because I finally got to see what he loved in this book. Partially because I gained this warm vision that maybe my quiet, unassuming Baba had encouraged him to become the man he is. And partially because I realized I might be able to do the same for my own son.

My dad has always been a bit of a restless adventurer. When I tell people what he does, I sound like a liar because I say only the part that is relevant to the (always shifting) conversation. While all true, that means I sometimes call him a pilot, forester, economist, woodcarver, bookseller, and more. He took my family to Chile for a year when I lived in second grade. He threatened to take us to Rome when I was in high school. His stories are as big as his laugh and most of them are at least partially true 🙂

My Son, the ?

In contrast, while I’ve traveled extensively on four continents and lived on three, I feel like a homebody. Like my Baba, I do most of my exploration through the pages of books. She visited over 100 countries in her life and saw many things, but I think she was most at home at her melamine breakfast table in Austin, Texas watching the birds, squirrels, and deer feed off the treats she left for them.

So although I am most at home on this couch in our living room snuggling with our dog and listening to the neighborhood birds (all while reading a book and wearing a sweater from Martin + Osa, a brand I only today realized was named for the Johnsons), I now have faith that I’m not limiting my son’s opportunities. Together with my husband, we’ll find new adventures and, I hope, provide a strong platform for this kid to become whoever he wants to be.

There are many ways to adventure, and there are many ways to raise an adventurer. I hope my son finds a life that excites and enriches him. I will take him abroad, eventually, but mostly I will try to emulate Martin Johnson’s mom and just keep my worries about whatever explorations he undertakes to myself. I will trust him to find his way and trust that he knows he always has a safe place to call home. I think that’s part of what worked for my dad as he signed up for the Marines at 17 and flew charters out of Santa Fe in the 1960s.

Conclusion

I Married Adventure ends far too abruptly, but such is life. After all of their adventures abroad, including small plane travel, Martin Johnson was killed in a plane crash on a flight from Utah to California. Osa intimates that they were about to start a new chapter in their lives and maybe settle down. I wonder what that would have looked like. I took comfort in thinking about the richness of their life, though, and the closeness of their connection. We should all be so lucky.

I’m feeling lucky this Father’s Day to live a life filled with adventurers of all kinds. I am grateful to my dad for teaching me how interesting and exciting it is to be abroad in the world. I am grateful to my Baba for showing me that there is adventure at home. And I am grateful to my husband, on his first Father’s Day, for sharing this adventure of life with me. It will be whatever we make it, and there’s nothing more extraordinary than that.

Wishing you a happy Father’s Day too.

If you want to explore the world with I Married Adventure, pick up a copy from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

The Art of Voice in Keri Hulme’s The Bone People

July 13, 2014 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

I admit I probably picked upThe Bone People by Keri Hulme because I was looking to flesh out my South Pacific section. It won the Man Booker Prize back when it was still called the Booker Prize and I was intrigued by the description. But late in the night when I dusted this book off and took it to bed, I had no idea what I was in for. Starkly original and painful (and at times even painful to read), this book taught me more about originality and writing with your authentic voice than anything I’ve read in a long time.

The story of a lone woman, a mute boy who seeks her out, and the boy’s adopted father, The Bone People broke my heart over and over and over with complex tales of isolation, abuse, and alcoholism. I’m going to focus on the writing part today (partly because I don’t know how to do the story justice without revealing too much), but if you ever need to see how well broken people can be inhabited and conveyed in a way that is neither overly sympathetic nor antagonistic but always deeply heartfelt, read this book. I learned so much and I know there’s a lot more to learn should I read it again.

Writing Your Culture

Part Maori and part British Islander, Hulme is a New Zealander through and through. I knew from the moment I read in her introduction, “I live five hundred miles away, don’t have a telephone, and receive only intermittent mail delivery” that this was a woman who was living a life very unlike my own. And that comes through beautifully in the book. The craggy landscape, the relationship with the sea, the nuances of interaction between the indigenous population and the settlers—it’s all there and it’s conveyed with an extraordinary authenticity. Funny how you can point out the things that tie a book to its culture, but if you try and write it from the outside, it’s never the same.

Writing Yourself

The similarities in this book between the author, Keri Hulme, and the protagonist, Kerewin Holmes, including her ethnicity and her penchant for isolation, were uncanny enough that I thought they would interfere with my reading of the book. They did not. Instead, she managed to create this work that is so wholly her own that fact and fiction don’t matter. I was so enthralled in the narrative at times that I’d avoid picking the book up because I knew I could not put it down again.

“I was lucky with my editors, who respected how I feel about… oddities. For instance, I think the shape of words brings a response from the reader—a tiny, subconscious, unacknowledged but definite response.” – Keri Hulme

And this book is original. From the opening line, “He walks down the street. The asphalt reels by him,” through the first few pages, I had no idea what was happening, but the force of her writing compelled me forward. I had the sense that this book came from the very depths of Hulme and I always wanted to read more.

Nonconformity in Writing.

To be fair, there are lots of writers out there doing their own things with language. Some very subtly and some very obviously. But few have reshaped the conventions as much as Hulme does in this book and managed to win so much acclaim. She starts the book with a fugue state where the reader has no idea what’s happening. She invents her own style of how the text should look. She intersperses whole Maori phrases. It’s an absolutely maddening book. But it’s so completely compelling, too.

Maybe she wrote this book this way because it depicts a lifestyle that’s outside the literary norm. Or maybe this is the way the words come to her. What’s important to me about this book is that for all of the differences between her style and whatever expectation I may have had, she grabbed me by the emotional core and hung on. Every difficult passage or heartbreaking moment is rewarded by some insight into either the characters or a way I could be rethinking my own language.

Finding my Voice

Subscribers to this blog know that I’m wrestling a lot with my writing right now in the months following publishing Polska, 1994, my first novel. What I learned from Hulme is that I need to pull inward, to find that voice at the center of my core. I can (and do) learn all kinds of tools from the writers around me, but the gestation of my voice is my individual responsibility. It comes from learning to trust myself, from praising myself instead of seeking praise, and from being willing to dwell alone in that creative space. I may not run 500 miles from the nearest telephone (although that sounded wonderful for a few brief moments), but I must be willing to sit with myself and my writing. That’s the only way I’m ever going to make anything worth reading again.

What are the books that have most challenged you? What did you learn from them? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

If you want to explore the magical heartbreak of The Bone People, pick up a copy from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Kira Salak and Adventures in Travel (Writing) with The White Mary

June 10, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

I read The White Mary by Kira Salak on a flight from Seattle to Paris at the start of my first trip abroad in four years. The story of a journalist on a quest for her idol who the world thinks is dead but she thinks might be alive in the deep jungles of Papua New Guinea seemed like an auspicious start to my own (much tamer) adventure: a family trip to Croatia.

I used to be a citizen of the world. I’ve visited twenty-four countries, lived on three continents, and can converse in five languages. Except that most of that was before I graduated high school. Though I have done a lot since then to become the person I want to be, I have neglected my wanderlust and let my language skills fester. I had become someone who only travels in the company of a tour director and I became afraid to step outside that bubble.

Contemplating the rigors of travel with a coffee in the ruins of Roman Emperor Diocletian's palace — Contemplating the rigors of travel with a coffee in the ruins of Roman Emperor Diocletian’s palace

In contrast, Kira Salak is a travel writer by training and it’s evident in her lush descriptions of foreign people and places. Her protagonist, Marika Vecera, is determined, culturally aware (mostly), and savvy. Things I used to believe about myself. As I read about Marika’s kidnapping in the Congo, I was worrying I wouldn’t be able to communicate well enough to order breakfast. When she was coordinating her trip to the deep interior of Papua New Guinea, I was trying to figure out if I was capable of getting bus tickets from Dubrovnik to Split. I realized how fearful I had become.

The White Mary is engaging overall and I liked reading it. The love story is a little empty—it feels like Salak was as uninvested in it as Vecera was—but I am glad I read this book and even more glad that I passed it along to a fellow traveler.

Croatia, though a fantastic trip, turned out to be much more mundane than the wilds of the South Pacific. I managed to communicate in very basic Serbo-Croatian, German and Slovenian, though most people spoke English. We were never more lost than a missed freeway exit, and I even got to take a train. I was mistaken for a local (my favorite!) once and very briefly. I don’t think I’ll become a travel writer in the near future (unless…), but at least I now remember that the world is full of people, not scary monsters, and I can navigate the globe if I only try.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The White Mary from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

The Thorn Birds and the Vast Outback

April 23, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

I’ve been wracking my brains for a book that I might have read or might have on my to-read to start to fill out this South Pacific category. It turns out I rarely read books from the region, which means I could leave it off, but I would be ignoring an entire continent let alone all the countries in the vicinity (if you know of a fantastic book from E. Timor, please tell me). I thought about linking Australia and New Zealand into a larger British Empire category, but I didn’t want to put India there (let alone the US and Canada). So I had to figure out what I’ve read or am interested to read from the South Pacific.

I thought first of Ngaio Marsh. My grandmother was fond of her mysteries and I “borrowed” many, many books over the years. She became one of my favorite mystery writers and I loved her New Zealand stories most of all. But, as with most mystery writers, I often cannot remember the books well enough to differentiate between them, and that makes them a bad candidate for this form.

I decided to discuss The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough, and I’m going to break one of my own rules and focus on the miniseries more than the book.

I was very young the first time I watched this miniseries with my mom and I was captivated. I thought Meggie Cleary was so beautiful (she looked a little like my mom) and Ralph de Bricassart was aloof and handsome (and may have screwed up my view of men forever). I became so obsessed with Meggie that when asked to nominate a Time Woman (or Man) of the Year for a class assignment, you can guess who I picked.

In some ways the most amazing part of the miniseries was getting to see Australia and the outback life of sheep ranchers. One of the things I love most about books is being introduced to unfamiliar worlds, but the one limitation (if you can call it that) is that any world created by the conversation between my mind and a book is limited by things I’ve seen before and what I can imagine. For example, when I was a little girl and we were moving to Chile, something about the way my father described it made me imagine we would be living someplace exactly like our house and street except upside down. When I read Islandia (the book from which I am named), the images I created of the landscapes of that imagined world all drew heavily from places I have seen in my travels. What I’m saying is, as a child in northern Idaho, I had never seen anything like the Australian Outback and The Thorn Birds introduced me to the vast flatness of the land and a sense of isolation that was entirely new. It may be the first foreign land I “travelled” to.

I did later read the book and I enjoyed it very much, but I have to admit that it is Rachel Ward and all that dusty country that I remember best.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The Thorn Birds from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.