Literary Detours: Ernest Hebert's "A Little More than Kin" (Re-Read)

"A Little More than Kin" by Ernest Hebert is one of those novels that stays with you.  I first read this novel back in 1993 after I found it on a discount rack for $1.00.  It was (and it remains to this day) one of the greatest literary buys of my life.  I devoured the novel over Spring Break of that year and even went as far as trying to contact Ernest Hebert to express my gratitude for his work.  I savored this book like it was ripe fruit and enjoyed every angle of it.  I even took the book with me to Japan the summer of 1994 and re-read it a little over a year the first read (I hadn't touched it again since).

What is still clear to me now as it was then was how little I knew (and still know) about the Darby Series and about Ernest Hebert's work overall.  "A Little More than Kin" is the second in a series called the Darby Series, which include "The Dogs of March" (Hebert's debut) and "The Passions of Estelle Jordan."  I read the series out of order, and surprisingly felt no ill-effects for it.  Not only do the books stand on their own, but even in the case of chapters the reader can appreciate how any of them can actually be published as stand-alone short stories.  I believe that is the masterful genius of Ernest Hebert.  He gives us the pieces to put together and doesn't go cheap on detail and connectivity.  It is truly a work of art to see how characters and events flow from one book or chapter to another.  Technically speaking, that is one of the greatest talents of a master storyteller.  Ernest Hebert is such a master, a true American master writer and probably the best known kept secret in American letters.  I say this not because he's not widely known, but just like many other literary fiction writers he's not a household name that rolls off the tongue of housewives book clubs.  He's in good company, I might add, since many of my other favorites (like Paul Auster and Haruki Murakami) fall in the same category.

The story centers around the Jordan clan, a family of social misfits that claim roots to the New Hampshire backwoods.  Ollie Jordan and his idiot son, Willow are the protagonists of "A Little More than Kin," and they share the stage with the town's dramatis personae in a way that is charming, entertaining and "addictively" readable.  Ollie has been evicted from the land he occupied, his shacks bulldozed to the ground.  While the Jordan family is not known as setting permanent roots anywhere, Ollie suffers as his world is rocked and his stability shattered.  His wife, Helen, had (according to Ollie) been seduced by the Welfare Department, and his fear is that the government agency was now after Willow.  He fears they might try to "teach" Willow and "destroy" him by doing so.  Ollie Jordan believes his son just needs time, that in due time Willow would blossom out of a cocoon and exercise his genius.  As a result, Ollie takes to the woods with Willow.  Spread across the narrative are characters as alive as the reader himself.  The people of Keene, New Hampshire are picturesque without being typical, honest, not stereotyped and given a natural opportunity to come about in the story and find their own way into it.  This is the masterful stroke of technique in fiction.  Very few writers know how to allow characters to ebb and flow into a narrative like Ernest Hebert does.  It is truly magnificent how the pieces simply link and flow together.

The only negative criticism is that of Ollie Jordan's many philosophical meanderings.  I am not saying that a character that is uneducated, prone to emotional impulse and dependent on instinct more than brains cannot have his or her philosophical moments, but Ollie's epiphanies are kilometric in length, and, as a result, they take away credibility from Ollie's nature.  There are far too many of these, long renderings of Ollie's thoughts that turn into pedantic ramblings of existential inquiry.  In this scene, Ollie is inside a Catholic church, and while I can see the function behind having the character ask questions about his surroundings, it is the lengthy philosophical tertulia that does the damage:  "He touched the Christ carefully, discovering something unusual on his head.  At first it seemed like some simple hat such as cousin Toby Constant had worn before they sent him to Pleasant Street in Concord.  But after testing the hat with the tips of his fingers, Ollie determined that it was made of something like barbed wire strung tightly around the skull, an instrument of torture.  He pondered this evil.  These Romans, they like to hurt the head.  So did the Welfare Department.  However, there was a difference.  The Romans only wanted to dish out some pain, probably just for the drooly fun of it.  The Welfare Department wanted you as stove wood to keep stoked the fire in their own private corner of hell.  They made hats so pretty you would want to put them on, and they put things in those hats--devices--which removed information from the mind, planted ideas and clouded memories.  He figured that Christ had pulled a fast one on the Romans, getting himself killed all spectacularlike, knowing his death would serve as a kick in the ass for his followers, that for him to die was to live forever through them."  It goes on for a while, and Ollie's perceptions are not too off track with the real story of Christianity.  A few paragraphs down, Ollie's meandering continues: "Another question that popped into Ollie's head was whether the Romans finished the crosses with anything, some kind of varnish or stain, or whether they left the wood raw.  Certainly, they would have to season the crosses because a green cross of any wood would be too heavy to carry.  That raised some interesting questions.  Was a cross used only once, perhaps buried with the man who had been hung on it?  Or was a cross used over and over again until it just wore out?  The latter idea excited Ollie.  He could imagine nothing grander to look at than a cross that had been up and down countless of hills, laid across the backs of countless Christs, the wood aged by the sun, stained with blood, sweat, tears and dirt.  If such a cross could know, it would know everything.  No wonder these Christians hung their imitation crosses everywhere.  The cross was a story of a human pain revealed in the beauty of wood.  The Romans must have put fellows in charge of the crosses--crosskeepers--men who picked the wood right from the tree, cut it down, shaped it, dried the wood so it did not split or check, and then fashioned two pieces in a cross with wooden dowels and glue.  Course now and then a fellow would cheat, as workmen will out of anger or boredom or laziness, and join the pieces with mahaunchous bolt.  The crosskeepers would store his crosses in barns when not in use, keeping them away from moisture so the rot wouldn't get to them.  Later, when the crosses were retired from active duty, the crosskeeper would buy his old crosses at auction from the state, or maybe steal them if he could, cut them up and make them into coffee tables, selling them to the rich who lived down-country, or whatever they called down-country in those days.  He bet those crosses lived long lives, longer than the poor bastards who were hung upon them."  

Inasmuch as the seemingly countless passages like this one represents the meanderings of a "simple-minded" character then much of the narrative works; nevertheless, I am inclined to point out (not without a little pain) that passages like this one are far too many in the novel.  They are correctly constructed behind the idea that Ollie simply lets his mind wanders (bold for emphasis in the quoted passage) but the reveries of the mind are far too many within the novel.  I am reminded of the television detective from the 1970s series "Columbo" whose constant line was "And one more thing..."

"A Little More than Kin" is simply a classic of American literature, unknown but crafted like the widely accepted classics of the canon.  It is truly a shame that this novel (along its Darby companions) do not list right up there with Mark Twain's work as illustrative of "the other America."

James Salter' "Dusk and Other Stories"

Some years ago, I bought a copy of "A Reader's Manifesto" by B.R. Myers at a used bookstore.  The book might have been misplaced, or shelved incorrectly on purpose by a disgruntled employee or customer or both.  I didn't read the book... the introduction was enough to make me put it down and regret spending all of $2 on it.  B.R. Myers apparently got a memo from God telling him Ed McMahon had died, and God decided (against His better judgment) to name Myers the new host of "Star Search."  Perhaps my humor doesn't carry via the Internet, or the joke is simply my own personal bitterness at the misguidedness of B.R. Myers.  It's one thing to singlehandly decide, "well, here... this is what is wrong with contemporary American literature... it's full of pretentiousness and high-brow idiots," and to actually say it with a straight face and mean it, and publish a book about to boot.  It is another thing altogether to actually have the credentials to criticize indiscriminately while at the same time not having produced a novel of the quality of any of the authors he blasts throughout the book.  I know, I know, I can already hear Myers say, "If you didn't read the entire book, you can't say shit about it."  But more on this later because, as you will see, I can say shit about it.

The introduction to this post is based on the fact that when I began reading "Dusk and Other Stories" by James Salter I couldn't decide on whether or not B.R. Myers was right all along.  James Salter was introduced to me by a very good friend, and since my good friend is someone whose literary taste I have supreme confidence on, I figured I had nothing to lose and everything to gain.  The first short story, "Am Strande von Tanger" struck me odd from the start.  What I mean with this cryptic statement is that I couldn't decide if this was great literature because of its style, or whether I was being filmed secretly by a "Candid Camera" crew waiting to see my reaction.  It was tough going, but once I got to the middle of the story, I was hooked.  My initial reaction was based, in part, on some criticism I read while in graduate school about the "young literary men" of the 1920s who tried so hard to imitate the language and style of "The Sun Also Rises" that everyone sounded like Ernest Hemingway regardless of genre.  Imagine a romance novel written in the voice of Nick Adams and you might get the idea.  I don't know much about Salter, but the first few pages of "Dusk and Other Stories" made me think he was a left-over from that very period of time.  Here's a sample of the opening story,
"Morning.  Villa-Lobos is playing on the phonograph.  The cage is on a stool in the doorway.  Malcolm lies in a canvas chair eating an orange.  He is in love with the city.  He has a deep attachment to it based on a story by Paul Morand and also on an incident which occurred in Barcelona years before: one evening in the twilight Antonio Gaudi, mysterious, fragile, even saintlike, the city's great architect, was hit by a streetcar as he walked to church.  He was very old, white beard, white hair, dressed in the simplest of clothes.  No one recognized him.  He lay in the street without even a cab to drive him to the hospital.  Finally he was taken to the charity ward.  He died the day Malcolm was born."  And then, a little further on...  Malcolm has a pair of shorts made from rough cotton, the blue glazed cotton of the Tauregs.  They have a little belt, slim as a finger, which goes halfway around.  He feels powerful as he puts them on.  He has a runner's body, a body without flaws, the body of a martyr in a Flemish painting.  One can see vessels laid like cord beneath the surface of his limbs."  But by the end of the first story, I was a convert... James Salter is down-right a master of descriptive artistry and a weaver of amazing plot structure.

Two things are absolutely genius about Salter's work.  First, the amount of description can be misleading.  I've tried to analyze the amount of skill and talent it takes to pull this off, but to no avail.  Salter draws the reader in with descriptive passages that paint a complete picture in the reader's mind.  He builds the characters around these settings and allows them to take shape inside these imaginary worlds.  Secondly, the number of brilliant literary analogies (often found at the end of paragraphs) makes me feel like a young lady sighing the night away.  Somehow (and this is the part that is nearly impossible to pin down), all of the stories work so brilliantly that any suspicion of pretentiousness or high-brow posturing evaporate.  There's a genius here that is hard to dissect, a type of word-craft and skill at writing that borders on absolute perfection.  Not one word (and this is no hyperbole) seems out of place.

The story "Dusk" is (despite being the title story) not one of the most impressive, but it illustrates Salter's ability to construct a character by telling details about her/him all the while incorporating the character into the description, the setting, the vast canvas of the imagined world.  The main character, a woman named Marian is, from start to finish, an enigma... even when minute details about her life story have been revealed, she remains open to the reader's interpretation.  It is simply masterful, and I can't stop saying it again and again.  The entire collection is an absolute pleasure to read and an intellectual challenge to boot.

Which brings me back to B.R. Myers.  James Salter did, in fact, bring back B.R. Myers to the forefront of my literary reading list.  My impression of Salter made me dig out the little book of criticism, but after re-reading the introduction, I had to once again put it down.  This is all I need to know about "A Reader's Manifesto."  You have to understand... I wasn't always a scholar.  I was a U.S. Marine in my youth and not prone to lengthy diplomatic discussions about any topic.  So, when I read Myers' criticism of my favorite writer, Paul Auster (the anointed one... the Great White Jewish One... pound for pound the best writer in the world) I took it personally.  I won't stand for it.  I worship the literary ground Auster walks on, and, as a devotee, I have a strong warning for B.R. Myers that comes from the regions of my being where I am still a hard-charging U.S. Marine, an infantryman with a bad attitude and a cutting-edge will to get the mission done.  First, stop using initials and write out your real fucking name--most pretentious, high-brow asshats use initials.  Second, you criticize Paul Auster again, and I swear I will fucking cut you, bitch.  (End of rant).

"Perfect Reader" by Maggie Pouncey

There's a confusing force behind the (mis)label of "first novel" that mythologizes the new author, flooding him/her with the misnomer of "rising star," among other deceiving titles. My purpose is not to criticize the process of examining an author's experience or maturity and how the media introduces said author; this, I believe, is inconsequential. What I am most concern with is how this label straddles the thin line between a promising future and the proverbial "kiss of death" effect. Maggie Pouncey needs not be afraid. Her "first novel," "Perfect Reader" shines with the quality of an established author. The novel evokes not only the writer's experience in terms of plot building and expository techniques, but also a curious knowledge of intimate emotions--the very emotions that make fiction a mirror of life. Ms. Pouncey's talent is "up there" with the likes of Claire Messud, Arundhati Roy, and Zadie Smith. "Perfect Reader" is a bright start to a future in contemporary fiction that totally banishes the artificial barrier of "first" or "debut" novel. I recommend "Perfect Reader" without reserve.

The novel builds on the relationship between Flora Dempsey and her recently deceased father, Lewis Dempsey, poet and college president, among many other known and unknown roles. I've already read some reviews out and about the Internet encircling interpretations around the theme of Electra complex. I will borrow a statement previously recorded to describe this limited interpretation: To say "Perfect Reader" is about Electra complex is to say the Grand Canyon is just a big hole in Arizona. Catch my drift? The fact that Flora shares the spotlight with so many other characters in the plot is not a deficiency in this novel. On the contrary, there's Cynthia, Flora's father's last lover, and the strain it puts on Flora to account as one of those examples of shared spotlight. Cynthia is characterized in a way that makes the reader change directions... to like her, or not to like her, that might just be the question. Flora's mother is another case of unpredictable twists and turns. It is the same with Flora, I am afraid, but it is that ambiguity that made me want to read this to whatever conclusion it came to. The ties between the characters is masterfully done. Who would think to make Lewis Dempsey's attorney (Paul) Flora's lover? That I did not expect. It is not that it makes the plot complicated in frivolous ways, but the nature of the relationship between Flora and Paul is a novel in and of itself. Those who claim Flora as an ambiguous character impossible to relate to must consider the opposite of that argument: Flora is NOT a predictable character. Would that had made her more likable? I doubt it. The character does its job quite well, and keeps the reader interested in not just the protagonist and her decisions.

Reviewing a book is not the same thing as summarizing a plot. My reading of "The Perfect Reader" was also enjoyable because of the craft and artistry of the language. Here's a passage that I just had to reproduce here: "He imagines the two of them meeting years earlier, when they were young, when she was still a girl, her body 'serpentine, unbitten; the bulb below my ribs not yet ripened.' Had he not realized what was undone under such revisions? For example, Flora? Better to have Cynthia from the beginning than to have had Flora at all? And her mother, beyond being erased, became the emblem of all that had gone wrong, fifteen years of marriage reduced to a regrettable error corrected only with the second coming of love, the Edenic Cynthia, the post-apocalyptic redemption of sins past, the clean slate, or brave new world, the wonder and rightness of it all, at long bloody last. If her father had lived, these paroxysms might have come to seem overdone even to him, but he had not lived, and so their passion was poised and immortalized in the state of perfection, in the state of poetry." This passage refers to Flora's painful interpretation of her father's poems. She feels he wanted to erase his Ante-Cynthia life, erase Flora from the face of the planet, and the rest of an entire world with it. And all of this for Cynthia? Impossible. Thus Flora does all she can (as her father's literary executor) to delay and/or stop the publishing of the poems. The conclusion of the struggle regarding with the poems displays a character that, having gone through a gamut of emotions, grows in perspective, maturity and compassion. Her relationship with Cynthia settled, Flora embarks on seeking her future away from Darwin College.


There's another passage I had to keep reading again and again. This takes place when Flora meditates on what the place (Darwin College) and her father's role in it meant to her. The reason I love this passage so much is because, for the first time in my academic life, I have been told what academia really is and what it stands for without any need for apologies. "She was done with Darwin College. What was it to her? Her father's employer; her family's former landlord; the setting of her childhood. A collective of disappointed people burying themselves under ideas. Who privileged (their word) thought about all else. Ambitious thinkers, grasping, striving, while trying to look contemplative, nonchalant, and depressed. And reading, reading, reading. Infinite reading. Always ready with the right reference, the counterargument, the dazzling associative leap. They had what looked to the rest of the world like the most outrageous gig--you barely had to be there; you were an expert; you walked to work. And yet there was something wrong with all of them." I take this as someone having the insight and the brass to tell it like it is. I read this quote to a colleague and she asked me if I didn't feel in the slightest insulted. Like a politician, my answer could have been based on false emotion, but it felt great to see her react to such an aggressive definition of what we do.


I enjoyed "Perfect Reader" tremendously. I pray and hope Ms. Pouncey is not buried under the monikers and titles defining "Perfect Reader" as her "first novel." She has much to offer and knows quite well how to do it.