Saints at the River by Ron Rash

Tight. The author interwove two past sub-stories (the burning of the kids and the car accident killing Allen’s family) with the current romance and the main story of the kid in the river. This was my kind of book: in each chapter he built suspensively to all the plots and still made the stories mean something -- and he did it all in 237 pages. All plots included the theme of redemption: Allen wanting to assuage the guilt of being an absent father; Maggie and her dad both needing to reconcile the past; and the dead girl’s father trying to make up for his inability to save his daughter. In the end, no one got what he or she wanted. By the time the bodies surfaced after the dynamiting, Allen’s displacement of his own daughter’s death and Herb’s will to get the body were squashed by the death of Randy and the dysfunctional dam. Maggie’s reconciliation was by her own acknowledgement, “maybe as much as we were capable of.” But Rash’s message, I think, is that life does not have happy endings, and each time there seems to be one, new problems are spawned because we are humans and humans have a hard time getting out of their own way. Not lost here is the religious message and that is centered on Luke. All kinds of food for thought here: “Luke” is an author in the Bible and he is also a medical doctor (or healer). I think of the Hippocratic Oath, to do no harm, which was Luke’s mission toward the environment. Luke, like the loyal disciple, also makes it clear he will die for the river; a river which has supernatural powers (and definitely can decide who lives and who dies). I think he is one of the “Saints” at the River (he is even described by Maggie in the scene where he almost drowns as “beatific.”) He doggedly defends the “God” he believes in (the river) and in the end will give his life, swimming to stop Ronny from damaging the river. But after the congregation prays for Randy to be resurrected, it is Ronny who frees the bodies, but the irony is he is no savior, but just another example of the flaws in mankind. Seemingly left open is what punishment is dealt to Ronny, but I think it’s obvious: there is no punishment. A precedent has been established, the bulldozer has come, the rocks drilled, and now devastation by explosion. Luke’s domino theory has begun. On Rash’s writing: another reason this book fit my comfort zone was that he succeeded in his description and narrative with simple, but concise language. One example was when Maggie described a family dinner when Ben first came home from the hospital: “every question and answer was in syllables, not sentences.” Lastly, on page 2 when I learned the narrator was going to be a woman, I thought of Jack Nicholson’s character in “As Good as it Gets.” an OCD author who was asked how he writes women so well. His response was that he thinks of a man and then takes away reason and accountability. I was glad Maggie did indeed possess both these qualities and more. But this does lead to the one negative comment I have about the book: I don’t think the romance was that well developed because I could never really feel any “heat” between them. But perhaps Rash was trying to say that a book was like a camera in that there is always more that lies outside its framed mechanical truth. Perhaps, too, then, he was trying to say something about himself when he named the dynamiter after himself. Thanks for letting me ramble – I give this book a 9.

After Long Silence by Helen Fremont

The overarching point about this book is one that has been said before: this story cannot be told enough times. That is, the Nazi Holocaust remains the pre-eminent example of the results of racist actions and speech in a society, and most in a civilized society agree that a people reaching these depths of brutality are destined for self-destruction and, well, Hell. Most surely, there is another book out there that chronicles the Holocaust and most likely one that would mention similar stories and details of actual gruesome events. So, although I’ve read historical accounts and watched the countless television documentaries, I have not been exposed to enough, and After Long Silence succeeds in delineating circumstances that further educate and illuminate. That being said, most other aspects of the book fall short, and seem like patches inserted to hold the book together rather than tell a story, which it purports to do. Although I’ll never forget some scenes, such as author Helen Fremont’s account of her mother and Zosia evading the massacre in their hometown and the ordeals of her father in a Siberian prison camp, the “true” story does not pull things together in an organized fluid manner. Instead, events are put together like scraps of information, loosely organized like a collage, with the hope that the reader can complete the story by melting it all together at the end. The time between her father being taken captive and her mother being separated, for example, does not adequately answer a key question: Why would she continue to wait for him when she is not really sure he is dead or alive? And, although the “love” story of the two was described briefly, it does not show how a commitment of the two would be so strong as to chew up seven years of youth (even though punctuated by traumatic events) . And why does Louis risk so much? Why didn’t she marry him? The answers to my questions, I believe, lie in the first pages of the book when Fremont states that the “true” story contains some “imagined” events. Rarely though do we know which are made up and which are not. So what is true? Furthermore, both her parents disapproved of the book, which, therefore, lends to more suspicion that there are inaccuracies. On a scale of 1 to 10, I give this a 5.

Patrimony by Phillip Roth

Phillip Roth has four main topics to deal with in Patrimony and they are all about being Jewish, except, ironically, there is very little religion (as being Jewish is a religious connection to Abraham) in the book, and most of the characters seem disinterested in religion. The four topics Roth covers are the dying of his father, the Jewish-ness of his father, the holocaust, and discrimination of the Jews in the US.

What this book is primarily about is the chronicling of the last months of the life of Herman Roth, Phillip’s father. For this, Roth gives insight into a man who has stubbornly gone after a full life throughout his 87 years of existence, and even in the bleakest diagnosis of a deadly brain tumor, he still asks for “a couple of more years.” It includes the doctors visits, the rapid physical deterioration of Herman’s body, and the anguish of a son watching a loved parent go down hill.

Although these insights are interesting and thought-provoking, there are just not enough of them. It is said that writers work because they can tell the story better than the rest of us. So the question becomes, do I need Roth to tell this story? The answer here is no. It is a fact of life that most people deal with the death of a loved one; as people get older the chances are greater they will watch their parents die and probably suffer too. So most of what Roth told us we already know about the dying elderly: the irritability with life, the denial of mortality, and the loss of bodily functions such as when Herman ‘beshat himself.”

His attempts to give an honest portrayal, letting the reader know Herman was not kind to his wives was not effective; for most people this verbal abuse trumps even the finest of other character traits. I checked out myself about then.

As for the Jewish-ness, that was dealt with mostly with depictions of Jews who were hard scrabble businessmen who made good, and one of the themes of the book, remembering, was illustrated as Herman remarkably recanted the locations and names of long-ago businesses and businessmen.

Roth seemed to throw in the topic of discrimination of insurance employees by Metropolitan Life, as he admits it is a retelling from another book he wrote. It seemed he was trying to make a page-count.

Lastly, his dealing with the holocaust and concentration camp survivor Walter Herrmann seemed to be a tag-on in order to get in two signature elements Roth is known for, humor and pornography, and also to add to the page-count. It seemed strange that this German Ron Jeremy, someone having difficulty with English, could translate with perfect grammatical clarity.

In this book, Roth manages to accomplish much though. He has paid tribute to his father; brought attention to holocaust survivors and discriminated Jews in the US; and probably most of all showed the savvy of Jews in business, for after realizing that he got fourteen bucks off me for this book I almost beshat myself.