Barkskins

Barkskins

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

When I picked up Barkskins (2016) by Annie Proulx, I expected a book about trees. And trees there most certainly are growing among its pages, although not in the Richard Powers’ The Overstory sort of way; trees are not characters and the tree-inspired figurative constructs with which Proulx crafts her novel differ greatly from Powers’. What I found was something more than trees but certainly relating to them both as a subject and a metaphor. Proulx’s multi-generational story spans the course three and half centuries. In that sense, it is tree-like; many arboreal species live much longer than that. Spread over so much time, this hefty novel (it exceeds 700 pages) comes to life with a large cast of characters, so large that the family trees at the book’s end are useful, even necessary. At the heart of all their stories is a familial link to trees.

Trust

Trust

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

Hernan Diaz’s Trust (2022) is a novel that plays with various texts as it scaffolds a story across genre: a novel, two memoirs (although one reads more like an incomplete autobiography), and a diary. Broken into four sections authored by four different characters, Diaz’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel constructs a layered tale about a New York City financial mogul and his wife during the 1920s and 30s.

Lost Journals of Sacajewea

Lost Journals of Sacajewea

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

Certain stories resonate in history. Specific people become fascinating characters lodged in the minds and hearts of a nation; their feats become a part of culture. Yet, often these fictions fail to realistically reflect the history; over time characterizations and backgrounds shift. This is especially true for famous historical figures who left no written records, many of them women and people of color. Such has certainly been the case with Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery, particularly with regard to the young Shoshoni woman who accompanied them for most of their journey. Even the spelling of her name—Sacagawea (derived from Mandan for “Bird Woman”) or Sacajewea (from her native Shoshoni meaning “boat-launcher) is uncertain. And yet, she was a woman with a voice, even if written history fails to capture any of her actual words. Debra Magpie Earling’s The Lost Journals of Sacajewea (May 2023) provides her a voice and a story in a spectacularly crafted novel that provides Sacajewea with her own journals, in an answer of sorts of the famous Journals of Lewis and Clark.

Perma Red

Perma Red

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

Nearly twenty years ago, I read a book about Native life western Montana that shook me with its vivid descriptions of place, its unsettling scenes of poverty and institutional Indian schools. Debra Magpie Earling’s Perma Red (originally published 2003) was beautiful in its intensity, startling and raw. It captured the harsh conditions of life on the Flathead Indian Reservations in the 1940s. And then it went out of print. Happily, the good folks at Milkweed Editions rectified the situation and Perma Red returned to print in the fall 2022; and I eagerly revisited the story that wowed me all those years ago.

Valentino and Sagittarius

Valentino and Sagittarius

Chris Mathers Jackson
The Classics

Valentino and Sagittarius are two novellas, both by Italian modernist, Natalia Ginzburg, translated from their original Italian. Both novellas are told in first-person, from the perspective of a young adult woman, an insignificant daughter. Both include parents with seemingly unrealistic expectations for one of the narrator’s siblings. Both come to life in post WWII Italy as they grapple with the theme of disappointment and generational divides.

The Lincoln Highway

The Lincoln Highway

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

There are many ways to tell a story and many ways to construct a hero. Amor Towles’s most recent novel The Lincoln Highway (2021) certainly plays with how a story might unfold and who readers identify as its star(s). His previous two novels focus on specific protagonists and take place over different time periods—Rules of Civility (2011) is an older woman’s retelling of one year in her life thirty years prior and A Gentleman in Moscow (2016) is one man’s story told chronologically over the course of thirty years. The Lincoln Highway takes an altogether different approach both in terms of characters and telling.

Horse

Horse

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

Geraldine Brooks’s most recent novel, Horse (2022), threads the lives of various characters existing across 150 years of American history into a powerful story. The three storylines braid together as the narrative builds; and it is a horse that binds the strands to one another. As she has did in People of the Book, artifact and historical characters speak to the lives of modern ones and a tapestry of individuals and subplots work their way toward mutual resolution.

Ghost Wall and Summerwater

Ghost Wall and Summerwater

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

Just like the ceaselessly falling rain, unusual even in Scotland’s wet climate, there is something eerie from the start in Sarah Moss’s Summerwater (2020). It was a similar feeling to that aroused by the opening scene of bog sacrifice in her Ghost Wall (2018). Both begin with scenes that portend harm, that set an ominous tone. And yet, there is also something so everyday about so much of the human experiences and interactions in Moss’s slight books. Something so recognizable takes form amid her characters. It is that tension—the foreboding and the mundane—that make her books so compulsively readable. The reader wonders, will she go there, will it get that dark, that startlingly disturbing; it is not until the final pages that the reader can grapple with answers to such questions.

The Lucy Barton Books

The Lucy Barton Books

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction, Books for Writers

Since the publication of her 2009 Pulitzer-Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge (or for some even before then), readers have recognized the understated brilliance of American novelist Elizabeth Strout. Something in her sparse writing makes readers feel seen; their life experience, or the life experience of those they have loved looms large, mirrored through her written word. There is unquestionably a magic at work here. I recently read Strout’s Lucy Barton novels, which begin with My Name is Lucy Barton (2016) and includes Oh William! (2021) and Lucy By The Sea (2022).

The Marriage Portrait

The Marriage Portrait

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

Maggie O’Farrell has done it again. She has rendered up a heroine of flesh and blood, whim and heartache, from the annals of European history. O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait (2022) fictionalizes the brief life of Lucrezia de’ Medici who married the Duke of Ferrara (Modeno, and Reggio as well) at age fifteen. As with O’Farrell’s last novel, Hamnet—also historical fiction—The Marriage Plot introduces readers to a vivacious young woman, bound in and restrained by her time, her class, and what everyone deems her destiny. This is novel rich in storytelling and moving prose. It is a masterpiece; one that transports readers to the regal rooms of sixteenth-century Florence and Ferrara.

The Wordhord

The Wordhord

Chris Mathers Jackson
Nonfiction

Hana Videen’s The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English (2022) is a book exuding etymology and interesting factoids about what life was like during the days when Brits spoke Old English. This is a book about words, their usage, and definitions. The Wordhord is approachable and readable for a work of nonfiction that tackles a subject like Old English; Videen is clever and humorous as she unravels the onion of Old English for contemporary readers. While The Wordhord is certainly well-researched and academic, it does not lull its reader off to sleep as many books about medieval language and history might do. On the contrary, I found The Wordhord a compelling and entertaining read, one abounding with Old English words and tidbits I hope to remember long after reading.

Babel: An Arcane History

Babel: An Arcane History

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

R. F. Kuang’s Babel: An Arcane History (2022) is a fantasy-inspired, alternate history of 1820 and 30s Britain and its relationship with the world beyond. As one might expect from the time period, Babel centers on themes of empire and colonialism. Oxford is the hub in Babel and not just for the academic study ongoing there. In the fantasy-like world building of Babel, Oxford houses the Tower, the center of colonial Britain’s translators’ world. In Kuang’s clever and moving novel, language and translation claim a power that creeps towards magic and provides the writer an eloquent metaphor through which to deconstruct the colonial project.

To The Lighthouse

To The Lighthouse

Chris Mathers Jackson
The Classics, Books for Writers

Virginia Woolf is a household name when it comes to lyrically figurative writing, rambling through the interior lives of characters. Her brand of modernism pairs the poetic with the complex; she champions an intellectualism that many other modernists (as well as readers and critics that have come since) have branded snobbish and off-putting. And yet, Woolf’s writing, like that of other modernists (James Joyce, for example), attempts to capture the inner life of humanity. Her fiction and nonfiction alike, excavate the uniqueness that is human thought, love, experience. In her novel To The Lighthouse (originally published in 1927 and one of my favorites among her oeuvre) Woolf again takes up this project. In this version, her investigation is Beauty (yes, with a capital “B”), the artistic process, and the muse.

Treacle Walker

Treacle Walker

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

I have read through Alan Garner’s Treacle Walker (2021) three times this fall. After reading a good chunk of it the first time through, I discovered that the slight novel (152 pages) begs to be read out loud. The rhythm of the language and the short sections (separated by untitled Roman numerals, eighteen in total) build in a genre-bending enchantment. Narrative becomes glamour becomes something beyond the stars: timeless.

The Coddling of the American Mind

The Coddling of the American Mind

Chris Mathers Jackson
Nonfiction, My List of Required Reads, Reading & Parenting

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (2018) came out five years ago and yet its message seems even more relevant today. Published before pandemic fueled parents and youth to even greater levels of anxiety and fear, The Coddling scrutinizes the generational shift on the part of society, schools, and parents that matches the advent of smart phone technology and the rise of social media. Those cultural transformations, the authors argue, led to a generation that equates physical safety with freedom from differing opinions and world views. Their thesis, that American families, universities, and society generally have lost sight of three fundamental truths when it comes to youth; in so doing we have fostered a climate of fragility and safetyism that undermines human resilience and encourages anxiety, us-vs-them culture, and rebrands discomfort and disagreement as unsafe. If their book was a must-read pre-pandemic, it is utterly imperative today.

And Yet: Poems

And Yet: Poems

Chris Mathers Jackson
Poetry

It is precisely these sorts of modern mothering moments, among other aspects of 21st-century womanhood, that inspire the poetry of Kate Baer. And Yet: Poems (2022) is her second full-length book of poetry, and it goes on sale on November 8. As with her first collection, What Kind of Woman (2020), which became and instant number one New York Times bestseller, And Yet scrutinizes what it is to be a white, American, middle class woman at this moment. Middle age, parenting, marriage, self-image, sex, health: all of these have their moments under the bright lights that are Baer’s poems.

When Women Were Birds

When Women Were Birds

Chris Mathers Jackson
Nonfiction, Books for Writers

When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice (2012) by Terry Tempest Williams is both moving and masterful in its craft. This just-over-two-hundred-page memoir is a small book that fits easily in a purse or a large pocket. It is one designed to be taken along when you leave the house. When Women Were Birds weaves Williams’s personal and family histories with that of the land on which she came of age. As any fan of Williams will expect, this slender volume includes many a powerful metaphor, startling anecdote, and compelling social-justice perspective.

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