Breaking Clean
Judith Blunt
Alfred A. Knopf
344 pp.
$26
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The idea of a wide-open West of rawhide cowboys
and windswept lands stretching beyond the horizon is a romance
held dear by Americans, urban and rural alike, because it preserves
for us our treasured national myth of an endless frontier, that
place of hard work and sacrifice and rugged self-reliance that
proves us a tough, determined people.
So suggests Judy Blunt in her new and widely-praised
memoir Breaking Clean; in fact, it may be that very myth
that has helped generate so much interest in this quietly powerful
story of Blunt's childhood and early married years as the third
generation of ranchers clinging to the harshly beautiful and
unforgiving landscape of northern Montana.
From the first chapter, we know where the
story will take us. "I rarely go back to the ranch where
I was born or to the neighboring land where I bore the fourth
generation of a ranching family," Blunt writes in her opening
sentence. In the following paragraphs she outlines the framework
of the pages to come: this Montana ranch life is one where laboring
to bone-weary exhaustion is valued highest; where there is deep
pride in granting no measure to pain or weakness; where a girl
of fifteen can be promised to a man nearly twice her wage over
a bottle of whiskey and a handshake; where that girl, grown a
woman with children of her own, can come to realize that "it
wasn't enough," saying "my faith in martyrdom as a
way of life dwindled"; where that woman can one day gather
the courage to walk away to a difficult but necessary freedom.
"Get tough," Blunt's father exhorts
her in the second paragraph, and this, more than anything, is
the heart of life for the sparse community of families that populate
Blunt's childhood world. She faints in the garden and is simultaneously
praised as a "tough little worker," and chastised for
forgetting to wear a hat. Her brother spits out the chips of
shattered teeth and wades back in to rope calves. A grandmother
loses three fingers to the blade of a mower, "and finished
the job before she came in to get help." Thrown from a horse
and kicked by a cow in the stomach when pregnant, Blunt finds
herself as a mother struggling to comfort her own children in
their scrapes and bruises, biting back the "Oh for Christ's
sake, you aren't hurt," of her mother and grandmother before
her.
In a spare and unflinching prose, Blunt's
memoir deftly explores the strange appeal of this ideology of
suffering that she can respect even while demonstrating that
it's an idea easier to love in the abstract than to live from
day to day. In one harrowing sequence, she writes of the true
cost of living far from the comforts of civilization. It's 1977,
and elsewhere in America people are dancing to disco, and Star
Wars is about to wow moviegoers. In Montana, with their young
daughter writhing and convulsing with an impossibly high fever,
Blunt and her husband climb into the truck on a rainy night to
face what might prove an impossible journey over mud-clogged
roadways to the hospital. The child stops breathing as the trip
begins, and though her breath at last returns in ragged gasps,
the parents must endure more than two hours of uncertainty, fighting
and clawing their way mile by mile to help.
There are times when Blunt's book calls
to mind the stories of Laura Ingalls Wilder; what's engrossing
about Breaking Clean is that the 19th-century discomforts
and life-and-death dramas of howling winter blizzards, scorching
summer prairie fires, one-room schoolhouses and homes without
running water or electricity unfold against the distant backdrop
of a prosperous Baby Boomer America of color TVs, rocket ships,
and Elvis. Where the modern world seems finally to intrude on
the story is in the slow dawning of realization, for Blunt, that
for the women the Western myth of fierce self-reliance masked
a kind of indentured servitude.
"As a young ranch wife, I wed my sixties-style
feminism to a system of conflicting expectations and beliefs
only slightly altered by a century of mute nobility," Blunt
writes. "My brand of feminism celebrated strength through
silence. A woman could do anything, so long as she did it quickly,
quietly and efficiently. It never occurred to me then that silence
looked passive from the outside, or that the two served the same
purpose of not making waves, maintaining the status quo."
It was the women, Blunt writes, who rose
first to feed husbands and fathers and ranch hands, who labored
from before dawn to well after dark in the garden and the calving
shed, over the stove and the canning jars and down in the root
cellar, who cleaned away dinner plates and set the next morning's
bread to rise after the men had stumbled to bed, who managed
it all with closely-spaced children underfoot, only to see the
land of their fathers passed only to their brothers, and the
land of their husbands given only to their sons. Blunt recalls
a family meeting where the point was made clear by her father,
"We girls would be left something of value, but we should
know at the outset that we would never inherit the land."
With an emptiness unfilled by the unrelenting
hours and endlessly repeating cycles of work, Blunt turned at
last to writing, until one day her father-in-law, angry that
lunch was late for the men, smashed her typewriter with a sledgehammer.
Whether this was the proverbial final straw is uncertain; Blunt's
departure, when "as the ultimate betrayal," she takes
her husband's sons, and her daughter, and moves to Missoula,
is included, literally, as an afterword. The precise details
of that leave-taking are left mostly unsaid, but the book's ending
makes clear Blunt's bittersweet recognition that the ranch lands
of her childhood are a place where she could never really belong
but can never truly leave behind.
--Caroline Kettlwell
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Takes
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You Got Nothing Coming
Jimmy A.
Lerner
Broadway Books
399 pp.
$24.95
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In
1998, Jimmy Lerner, a forty-seven-year-old former marketing executive
with Pacific Bell, pled guilty to voluntary manslaughter and
began a two-to-twelve-year sentence in the Nevada state prison
system. He did not fit the standard inmate description, of course,
but as Lerner writes in his shockingly funny and compelling memoir,
You Got Nothing Coming, he fared better than many readers
might expect.
From Suicide Watch Cell No.3 (the standard first stop for
newly arrested capital crime suspects), Lerner entered the state
prison system as a "fish" in the "Fish Tank"
(prison slang for the cell block where new arrivals are kept)
and found himself, improbably, being taken under the protective
wing of a giant, heavily muscled neo-Nazi nicknamed Kansas. (Lerner
wisely kept his Jewish heritage to himself.) It was a friendship
that Lerner desperately needed: even if he was too old to attract
sexual predators, he could still get himself into deadly trouble
simply by looking at someone too closely while walking in the
Yard.
Usually, we let fiction and film show us prison life, with
widely varying results. Lerner's account is memorable partly
because he is such an articulate and keen observer--a rarity
in most prisons, I'd expect. Lerner's dialogue, which captures
the prison slang he learned to mimic in order to survive, is
pitch-perfect, and his ability to keep his story flowing should
rightly be envied by writers who have been working at their trade
for years. But a lot of You Got Nothing Coming's unique
appeal comes from the fact that Lerner carries so much of his
corporate experiences into his prison observations. To say that
he was a jaded, cynical executive with authority issues would
be an understatement. As far as I can tell, the considerable
expense Pacific Bell incurred to make Lerner a kinder, gentler
company man simply helped prepare him to point out how many common
traits prison life shares with the corporate world. (Remarkably,
given Lerner's supremely ironic writing voice, he actually wrote
the book while still incarcerated; he was paroled in January
2002, shortly before the book appeared in print.)
As fascinating as Lerner's insider portrayal of prison life
is, the question that looms over the book is what, precisely,
did he do that brought him face-to-face with a Murder One charge
and a possible death sentence? While he teases the reader along
with references to his victim, whom he calls the Monster, Lerner
cunningly lets the question hang for the first two-thirds of
the book, and only in the final pages does he describe the actual
killing itself. Perhaps not surprisingly, Lerner presents his
actions as self-defense, and cynical readers might find his version
too easy and one-sided (after all, he's the only one telling
the story). More sympathetic readers will probably conclude that,
given a series of unfortunate events (like witnesses hearing
Lerner tell the Monster he wanted to kill him, hours before he
did just that), Lerner's pleading guilty to an act he didn't
consider a crime was probably the best move he could make, all
things considered.
However readers may fall on the larger justice issues, You
Got Nothing Coming is undeniably a stellar look at life behind
bars, and its irony-infused realism should earn it a place beside
other classics of the genre.
--Woody Arbunkle
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Number9Dream
David Mitchell
Random House
400 pp.
$24.95
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Number9Dream, David
Mitchell's ambitious second novel, opens with a promising show
of creative muscle. Eiji Miyake, a nineteen-year-old boy from
a remote Japanese island, has traveled to Tokyo to confront a
high-priced lawyer about his father's real identity. He's not
naturally aggressive, though, and as he sits in a café
across from the lawyer's office, stoking his courage, we glide
effortlessly into a series of sci-fi-tinged fantasies in which
Eiji accomplishes his goal with agile aplomb. In one, he manages
to con his way into the lawyer's office, only to find she's smarter
than he expected and has duped him, at least momentarily, with
a double:
I glance at my gun, still on the floor
halfway between us, letting my eyes linger a moment too long.
She may be a professional blackmailer but she is an amateur hit
man--she falls for my ploy and lunges at the gun. Her eyes are
away from me for only a moment but that is all I need to aim
the carrier case in my arms at her and flip open the switchclips
without entering the disabling code. The lid-mounted incandescent
booby trap explodes in her face. She screams, I roll-dive, her
Zuvre fires, glass cracks. I spin, leap, boot her face, wrench
her gun from her grip--it fires again. Her fingernails drill
into my wrist, I elbow her face, her heel crunches my nose, the
Zuvre flies from my hand, but finally I score a full-force blow
to her head and follow up with a crushing uppercut. The real
Akiko Kato lies motionless on her bioborg twin. I didn't think
I killed her. Okinawan silverspines thrash on the soaked carpet.
Crunching glass, I retrieve the Zuvre--a much more potent gun
than my own--and the sealed file of my father, which I stuff
into my overalls. I close the door on the stain already spreading
over the carpet. I stroll back toward the corridor, whistling
"Imagine." That was the easy part. Now I have to get
out of PanOptican, and not by means of a body bag.
Not surprisingly, the real Eiji doesn't
actually get his father's secret file that afternoon, and his
superhero fantasies--which he controls--are soon replaced by
Kafkaesque nightmares that refuse to obey his wishes. Many of
the scenes are memorably surreal--like the one in which Eiji
is forced to bowl with a gangster boss (instead of bowling pins,
their targets are the heads of the boss's still-living enemies).
As unsettling and captivating as the individual nightmares and
visions are, though, the novel fails to establish an equally
strong reality in which the story can take root. And as appealing
as Eiji and his surprisingly concrete, gentle backstory may be
(his twin sister's death by drowning at the age of eleven causes
him unrelieved guilt, and she still preoccupies his idle moments),
the text swings from one simulated world to the next with a numbing
momentum.
As he has demonstrated both here and in
his first novel, Ghostwritten, Mitchell's creative range
and vision are breathtaking, and his willingness to take artistic
risks that challenge both him and his readers is admirable. But
Number9Dream is best enjoyed by readers who don't require
their books to be dissected into easily understood, coherent
chunks.
--Morris Leech
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Scorched Earth
David L. Robbins
Bantam
368 pp.
$24.95
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Scorched Earth is
the fourth book by David L. Robbins, and it seems to have more
in common with his first book, Souls To Keep, than with
his more recent work--at least on the surface. It tells the story
of a sleepy Virginia town that starts out as a bucolic, blue-collar
kind of place but through a series of events turns into a smoldering
pile, waiting for the right winds to turn it into an all-consuming
blaze of hate.
When an interracial couple loses a child
moments after birth, everyone is saddened by the tragedy...but
not enough to let the mixed-race child stay buried in the all-white
Baptist Church graveyard. After the child has been exhumed and
moved, someone dumps kerosene on the church and sets fire to
it. The next morning, a body is discovered in the ashes, and
a case of arson turns into the possibility of murder committed
during a felony--a capitol crime.
Robbins's white knight is a lawyer who
had left town in order to begin a new life, but finds himself
pulled back into the grimy pork-barrel politics he had tried
to leave behind. This is the battle that has become a Robbins
trademark--the regular Joe who heroically rises to meet all challenges.
Instead of playing it out on the grand scale of a world war (War
of the Rats, The End of War), Robbins brings this
taut, emotional chess game closer to home.
While Robbins has always been an excellent
storyteller, Scorched Earth contains some of his finest
imagery and prose. His tight, Hemingwayesque prose has been given
more poetic twists and seasonings, and the result is a satisfying
blend of language. Imagine if John Steinbeck had written To
Kill A Mockingbird and you'll begin to get the idea. Robbins
also scores big with some of his supporting cast, especially
a flawed clergyman who tries to get his congregation and himself
to do the right thing.
Scorched Earth
is another fine chapter by an author worth watching.
--John Porter
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