Little, Big - by John Crowley

Little, Big by John Crowley

This is a novel to savor. It’s the Tale of Edgewood, a five-fronted house in the center of a pentangle of lands somewhere in upstate New York. This house, built around 1900 by architect John Drinkwater for his bride, Violet Bramble, daughter of Theosophists, hosts an ever-widening circle of Drinkwaters, Clouds, and Barnables. Violet as a child was known to have seen fairies, and one of her sons uses his granddaughters to entice and photograph them. The folk of the surrounding woods have names like Marjorie Juniper, Grandfather Trout, Amy Flowers, Robin Bird – while not fairies exactly they are sympathetic spirits. The world they inhabit touches ours, but is not the same as ours. Little, Big of the title refer to the interpenetrating realities variously larger and smaller than one another, and their larger and smaller inhabitants.

City cousin George Mouse hosts a party, at which his quiet noncommittal friend, Smoky Barnable, meets tall red-haired Daily Alice, for whom he leaves everything to join her at Edgewood: having children, teaching school to the neighbors, tinkering with the orrery (large moving brass model of the solar system) at the top of the house. Smoky, a mild rational man who doesn’t believe in fairies, lives with a household who consult an ancient tarot, keep secrets, and pursue dreams. Daily Alice’s father, who wrote dozens of children’s books about animals, confesses to one of his grandchildren that he didn’t make up the stories, he just eavesdropped on the small creatures of the woods and fields.

Society deteriorates. In the City, George Mouse converts a city block of rowhouses into Old Law Farm, the center an open space where he and those who join him raise goats and chickens, vegetables, and burn excess furniture to stay warm over increasingly long bitter winters. Wolves human and canine roam the streets, Old Law Farm is barricaded with locks, bars, and bricked-up doors and windows. Smoky and Daily Alice’s youngest child, Auberon, comes to the City to seek his fortune and takes up residence there, falling in love with Sylvie, a Puerto Rican with a Destiny, whose disappearance hollows out his sense of purpose, all his joy. He writes scripts for a popular soap opera, “A World Elsewhere,” based on his grandfather’s children’s stories.

A Hero wakes from eight centuries asleep, more demagogue than savior, and, questing for his lost Empire, foments war. In the struggle and economic collapse people starve, winters deepen and lengthen, and his Empire shudders along. Violet Bramble’s illegitimate daughter Ariel Hawksquill, a mage in the art of memory, first advises a cabal who seek to control the Hero, then when they turn on her, casts her lot with him. But Ariel’s wisdom lacks the chaos element. Late in the story, at Edgewood she observes, “No memory mansion of her own was built more overlappingly, with more corridors, more places that were two places at once, more precise in its confusions, than this house. She felt it rise around her, John’s dream, Violet’s castle, tall and many-roomed. It took hold of her mind, as though it were in fact made of memory; she saw, and it swept her into a fearful clarity to see, that if this were her own mind’s house, all her conclusions would now be coming out quite differently; quite, quite differently.”

Little, Big is full of joys and sorrows, wonderfully apt names and a multitude of small brilliant observations. One could read it a hundred times and find new connections, new notions, surprises and satisfactions. Like the greatest fictions of invented places, it has unerring internal consistency, integrity. We are the playthings of time and space, and other worlds interweave with the one we’re accustomed to, in ways we might glimpse or may never be capable of acknowledging. If you find “the world is too much with us,” as William Wordsworth’s poem says, take respite. Dig into this Tale, reimagine life.

Review: John Crowley's Four Freedoms

John Crowley explores mind, body, spirit and human society through intriguing individuals. He's unafraid of coincidence, magic, or mystery, every person enmeshed in a life that constricts in some ways but exalts in others.

His 2009 novel Four Freedoms is about World War II America.
"We look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression--everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way-- everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want . . . everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear . . . anywhere in the world."
--President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Message to Congress, January 6, 1941

Roosevelt's optimistic assertion is not enough to transform the status quo, but in combination with America's shift to a wartime economy and the removal of white men, drafted and sent overseas, from their accustomed dominance, it adds impetus to a sea-change. Marginalized people - cripples, minorities and women - are suddenly wanted, and paid, to step into the vacancies - and so they flower, and thrive, and find fulfillment far outside their accustomed niches.

We follow Prosper Olander, a young man with a twisted spine and useless legs, who journeys from Chicago to an airplane factory in Oklahoma. This factory, the creation of a pair of brothers long fascinated by flight, is a self-contained village: houses and streets, clinics, child care, a newspaper, cafeterias and entertainment - an ideal community dedicated to war materiel. Its round-the-clock workforce have come from all over the country to earn top wages. Most are women, many married to servicemen but others single, excelling at work they've never before been allowed to do.

Crowley's story flows from one character to another, into their lives and thoughts. We learn important moments in their histories, we see how love and loss have blunted them, and we watch as they form alliances then break them. Prosper, though crippled, attracts certain women, and proves a simpatico and able lover, a catalyst who makes them consider a more open future.

This book is primarily about women: Prosper's father left when he was small, his struggling mother fell ill, he grew up with a pair of maiden aunts. Meanwhile, the women he meets are on their own in ways unthinkable just a few years before, their resourcefulness surprising not just to them but to society at large. One is a standout softball pitcher, another a young mother who becomes a highly competent inspector in the factory.

Crowley fully evokes wartime: the way ramped-up military manufacturing ended the Depression; the rationing of food, gasoline, and other resources; the sounds, smells and habits of an era. Changing circumstances shook society into motion: new places, new roles, new confidence. The weakening of the family gave rise to individual success, and like-mindedness trumped blood ties as people sought personal freedom within relationships. By ending the story after V-E Day but before the servicemen come home, he leaves us with a hopeful vision of America's future - along with the realization that in every era greatness is squandered, and we permit or maybe even welcome the fetters of the past.

What books make you happy?

We're approaching April Fools Day, the Taymes New Year, so I naturally turn to foolishness, silliness and laughter.
And I think about books I've read that have given me great delight - without the Angst!
Here's my list - send me yours:

Little, Big by John Crowley - I plug this book constantly. To me it has the perfect blend of wit, joie de vivre, magic and insight. If you haven't read it, you ought to, if you enjoy authors who take your hand and lead you places your mystic self remembers, that lighten your spirit.

Fame and Love in New York by Ed Sanders - I've read as much of Mr. Sanders' output as I can find, and this is his magnum opus. In his semi-mythic New York a group of writers recreate the conditions in which Balzac wrote so prolifically: they lock themselves in a room (accessed through the Duct Tape Boutique) with a gigantic coffee urn, and pound those typewriters. The book is replete with marginalia - what a fun read!

The Jamais Vu Papers by Wim Coleman and Pat Perrin - a psychedelic excursion. Go find a copy!

A Confederate General from Big Sur by Richard Brautigan - in his melancholy way, Brautigan wrote many books that make me laugh. I cannot see a can of mackerel in the grocery store without recalling how, when there was nothing else to eat, his characters were unable to converse about philosophy. And the frogs drove them crazy.

A Graveyard for Lunatics by Ray Bradbury - in which this wizard of language romps through the special-effects movie creations of Ray Harryhausen. Bradbury has written many fine books and is one of our short story masters - who can fail to delight in "The Laurel and Hardy Love Affair" in which a few people hear the comedic pair's ghosts moving a piano up a long flight of steps on certain LA nights?

Giant Bones and The Innkeeper's Song by Peter S. Beagle - he shares with us a fully imagined world with its own peoples and animal species - very down-to-earth magic here.

Tom Jones by Henry Fielding - the author's tongue-in-cheek asides to the reader are perfectly matched by the characters in Tony Richardson's movie addressing the camera - one April Fool's Day, Fred and I dined in swank at the Watergate then saw this fine movie - a stellar anniversary!

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon - I was in a book group that read this. Mostly older women, they were put off by the quantity of subplots. I told them it was just like a comic book: you get an installment of the cover story along with several one- or two-pagers and an extended lesser story or two. They liked it better after that. My only twinge of disappointment: alas, no pictures!

On the Road by Jack Kerouac - if you don't crack a smile reading this, you are taking life too seriously. Even if you've never driven somebody else's Cadillac across a cornfield, you can enjoy the ride of Sal Paradise, with Dean Moriarty at the wheel.

The Thurber Carnival by James Thurber - much of his writing hasn't aged well - his mocking of his black servants' language is jarring to the modern reader - but most of the stories in this collection are hilarious. His eccentric family stars in these short pieces, which may be fiction or what is now known as creative non-fiction. His other standout is "You Could Look it Up" - a midget is sent to pinch-hit in a major league baseball game. All he has to do is stand there with the bat on his shoulder while the pitcher misses his strike zone four times. But no, he has to swing. And make contact. And run on his short legs... For whatever reason, this piece seems to have evaded every Thurber anthology.

The California Book of the Dead by Tim Farrington - he has the ability to sketch a character in under a dozen words, which fills me with admiration.

Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe - this isn't a comedy but the writing is vivid and the punctuation trippy, and Kesey's Merry Band of Pranksters are a fun bunch to hang out with - at least, for a while.

The Milagro Beanfield War by John Nichols - absurdity tweaks normalcy every chance it gets in this small New Mexico community.

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman by Richard Feynman - I laughed most of the way through this autobiography. Feynman could never manage orthodoxy. His fearless curiosity leavened with blazing intelligence made him a titan in the world of physics. If you're even mildly interested in the Manhattan Project, read this book.

Well, that's a start. I'm sure I've left out some good ones. What are yours?

Defining "Commercial" vs. "Literary" Fiction

One trope suggests that commercial fiction is plot-driven and literary fiction character-driven. But I see their difference at a structural level:
In commercial fiction, story is all-important; the structure, from sentences to chapters, is designed to keep you turning pages quickly. J.K. Rowling does this so well that in the last Harry Potter book I failed to register a much-noted revelation about Dumbledore - I was reading so avidly that the details evaporated.

The words and phrasing of literary fiction call attention to themselves. Writers such as Thomas Pynchon and T. C. Boyle use words you're unlikely to know. Either you pause to look them up, or miss the point. This sort of thing can be a gimmick - a chapter seemingly constructed around the use of an obscure word - but I appreciate their efforts to expand my knowledge.

Writing in the vernacular, though frowned on by writing instructors, is a marker of literary fiction. I wonder if Jaimy Gordon's novel Lord of Misrule would have won the 2010 National Book Award without the phonetic spelling mirroring each narrator's vocal style. You almost have to read it aloud, which slows you down, which makes you savor a story and remember it longer.
Unusual use of punctuation is another way of establishing Voice - an example is Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I find his playful use of colons helps re-create the wildness of those early heady days of psychedelics.
I've been chided for my use of dashes - and finally noticed where I picked up the habit: I gave Ernesto a copy of one of my all-time favorite books, Little, Big, and for the accompanying card, I leafed through to find a quote. And there were the dashes, a whole population of them - I can't tell you how delighted I was, or how vindicated! Knowing John Crowley uses them, I feel less alone, less out-on-a-limb with my writing style.

Sentence length is another show-stopper. Ernest Hemingway's short declarative sentences and straightforward strings of phrases linked with ands, are far more accessible than Henry James' comma-laced concoctions. The latter is probably only read by English majors any more, which is a pity - I find that his sentences begin on the edge of a subject then circle around, phrase by phrase, gradually reaching a focal point - by the time he gets to the nut of his sentence, I know exactly where I am.
Very long sentences compel careful reading, for example Leonid Tsypkin's Summer in Baden Baden, a retelling of Dostoyevsky's The Gambler. A single sentence can run a page or more, but this is no stylistic gimmick - Tsypkin evokes in the reader a visceral empathy with the obsessed young man hopelessly in thrall to his gambling addiction, whose notions of luck and sensitivity to the humiliations of his daily struggle, are made more vivid by the particularity of each sentence.
The cadence of commercial page-turners eases your way forward, flowing smoothly, while the interruptions (what's that word mean? what did she say? etc.) of literary fiction slow you down, inviting you to savor the unfamiliar.
Your reading pleasure needn't be either-or - sometimes, the perfect book is a romance or mystery. At other times, the play of language is just the thing.