In pursuit of a killer

Paulette Jiles has become one of our best writers of western fiction, and she does it again in Chenneville (2023).

The plot seems simple enough, familiar to anyone who has watched many 1950s western movies. A Union officer comes out of a coma after the close of the Civil War and struggles to regain his memory. Recovery is slow, but gradually he regains his health, then heads back to his home near St. Louis. There he learns that his sister, her husband and child have been murdered by a man named Dodd. The rest of the novel tells of his long pursuit of Dodd into Texas. He aims to kill Dodd, whatever the consequences.

Yet Jiles throws in enough complications to make this simple plot interesting, even if not always unpredictable.

It's winter, and John Chenneville must struggle through the frigid temperatures and deep snow. Dodd rides horses until they wear out, then gets another. Chenneville is kinder to his animals, and thus slower. Even so, he sometimes gets ahead of Dodd. Along the way he picks up a dog with puppies. He gets very sick. A telegraph operator whom he meets later gets murdered by Dodd after he leaves, but Chenneville becomes the prime suspect. A U.S. marshal pursues him. Thus he is wanted for murder before he has a chance to commit one.

And then the best complication of all — Chenneville meets and falls in love with a female telegraph operator in Marshall, Texas. Can she dissuade him from his vow to avenge his sister by becoming a murderer? Or will she help him?

The author's News or the World was turned into a Tom Hanks movie. This novel could be turned into another fine film. Where's Randolph Scott when you need him?

Required reading

A front-page headline in The Wall Street Journal recently read, "Books in English Class Shift Little in Decades." In other words, high school students today are mostly reading the same assigned books that their parents read.

I find this surprising. I had assumed that with feminism and wokeness dominating schools of education in recent years that high school English curriculums would now be mostly books written by women, people of color and homosexuals. Yet the article says, "All of the authors of the top 10 books are white, eight men and two women."

This probably has much to do with English teachers, administrators and school board members favoring the books they themselves read in high school. Sticking with the tried and true is usually easier and safer.

Literature favored in many high schools often includes The Great Gatsby, The Crucible, Of Mice and Men, To Kill a Mockingbird and Hamlet.

The article concludes with a comment by an Illinois teacher, "I more than anything want to create a lifelong reader."

I think that should be the goal of all English teachers. Unfortunately much required reading may accomplish just the opposite. How many students forced to read Hamlet will then volunteer to read Macbeth? Probably not many. They might even avoid Shakespeare for the rest of their lives.  To Kill a Mockingbird might have a better success rate.

The ideal assigned reading for high school students should possess the following qualities:

1. It should be relatively short. Short books like Of Mice and Men are less intimidating. Students are constantly distracted by friends, activities, video games and social media. Short books are more likely to be actually read in full.

2. It should be meaningful. That is, it must bring out issues that stimulate the mind and make students want to talk about them in class.  It need not be a book about a contemporary teenager, but that might help.

3. It should be wholesome. I am talking about today's standards, not those of 50 years ago. Even so, there must be standards. Why invite controversy from parents?  A novel does not need graphic sex and four-letter words to be profound and engaging.

4. It should be interesting, even exciting. People read books because they enjoy them. When assigned a book that makes a reader want to keep turning the pages to discover what happens next, a student will be more likely to finish reading that book and perhaps even want to find another book just like it.

In that case, mission accomplished.

Bird brain

Scientists who study animals have traditionally underestimated them. Animals can't use tools. When Jane Goodall proved otherwise, others refused to believe it. And when Irene M. Pepperberg proved that Alex, her grey parrot, could communicate by speech, not just repeat words, and even do basic math, she was not immediately believed either.

Pepperberg tells their story in her 2008 book, Alex & Me.

Alex lived a shorter life than most grey parrots, yet it was a spectacular, headline-making life. Amazingly, the author had simply picked him at random among other parrots in a pet shop. She only wanted to examine scientifically just how good these parrots might be at language. One parrot, she thought, was as good as another.

She was trained as a chemist, earning a doctorate, yet had always loved birds and she was drawn to studying them, even though throughout her career she had difficulty finding teaching positions and getting study grants. Her success with Alex even seemed to work against her, as colleagues became jealous of the publicity her work generated.

Even Pepperberg underestimated Alex. Partly this was the result of the nature of science. Behaviors had to be tested over and over again before anything could be proven, yet Alex quickly became bored with repeating the same tests. Often he would simply refuse to cooperate. Or he would come up with something unexpected and clever.

Once when he was frustrated at not being given a nut, Alex said, "Want a nut. Nnn ... uh ... tuh." In effect, he had just spelled the word nut. At another time, he expressed the concept of zero without being taught. Pepperberg writes, "This parrot, with his teeny brain, seems to have come up with a concept that had eluded the great Greek mathematician Euclid of Alexandria."

Had Alex lived longer and had he been encouraged to learn more than he could with those simple tests he was put through repeatedly, who can say what he might have been capable of?

The author sums up her parrot's contribution to science in this way: "Birds can't learn to label objects, they said. Alex did. OK, birds can't learn to generalize. Alex did. All right, but they can't learn concepts. Alex did. Well, they certainly can't understand 'same' versus 'different.' Alex did. and on and on."

Save the music

Sometimes sounds turn me almost inside out with longing.

Kathleen Dean Moore, Earth's Wild Music

The sounds Kathleen Dean Moore writes about in the above line from Earth's Wild Music (2021) are the sounds of nature, Other naturalists write mostly about animal behavior or the visual beauty of nature, but Moore's focus is on what she hears when she steps outside.

These essays contain some of the most beautiful nature writing — or any kind of writing — one is likely to find. She writes about the songs of humpback whales, a rattlesnake's rattle, the calls of birds, the warning calls of various animals and even the sounds heard in one of the few places left in the United States where no human sounds can be heard.

"The whole planet sings," she writes. Yet the sound is getting dimmer. While the mission of her book is to call our attention to the sounds of nature, it is at the same time about making her readers aware that so many species are rapidly diminishing. Under the threat of expanding human development, pollution, climate change or whatever, animal life is simply not nearly as abundant as it once was. Our grandchildren will live in a very different world, one in which there is much less wild music.

"Our work is not to save our way of life," she writes, "but to save the world from this way of life's destructive power."

Reading the labels

Lewis Carroll's Alice reads a marmalade jar's label as she tumbles down the rabbit hole. This scene is a reminder, somehow, that the worst thing about death is that you can't take a book with you.

Dwight Garner, The Upstairs Delicatessen

Most people seem to crave a heaven that offers the best of what they most loved about life, whether that be a certain person, flowers, music or, in the case above, books. But my concern today is less the afterlife than Alice reading the label of that marmalade jar. Does that sound like something you might do while tumbling down a rabbit hole? Or even while sitting at the breakfast table?

I may have read my share of marmalade jars and cereal boxes in my time, mostly in my youth, but as an adult reader I believe myself to be a bit more discerning. I don't pay that much attention to labels, other than contents and carbs, or to printed advertisements. Give me a book while I am eating alone, and it had better be a good book. And while tumbling down a rabbit hole, I think I would have other priorities.

For the sake of this blog, however, I decided to read some labels, starting with a cereal box:

Cracklin' Oat Bran — "Each oven-baked, distinctly shaped 'O'-like cluster is packed with the unforgettable flavor of golden oats, coconut, and a touch of cinnamon!"

Analysis — I have long enjoyed this cereal, although it is one of the most expensive brands out there and I don't buy it often. A BOGO deal made it irresistible this time. I hadn't realized it was "oven-baked." The phrase "distinctly shaped 'O'-like cluster" is interesting. When it says 'O'-like, it actually means the cereal consists of rectangle shapes. Why not just say so? Is the flavor unforgettable? I know that the flavor is good, but what is really unforgettable is the wonderful, long-lasting crunch.

PG Tips tea — "Our envelopes are fully recyclable and the plant-based tea bags inside them can be disposed of in your food waste bin, so they can biodegrade into compost and go back to nature."

Analysis — This is a British tea, very popular in Great Britain, but we Americans might wonder, what is a food waste bin? Can you put these tea bags down your garbage disposal?

Ben's Original Ready Rice — "You know us as the brand behind the world's best rice. Now find out how we're making the world better, creating opportunities that offer everyone a seat the table."

Analysis — The world's best rice? Somehow I doubt that, but it certainly is convenient. The rest is essentially an invitation to check out their website. I might be willing to read a food label, but a commercial website? Probably not.

Nature's Bakery Gluten Free Fig Bar — "Our snacks are equal parts wholesome and delicious. From hearty whole grains to sun-ripened fruit, what we bake in is as important as what we leave out."

Analysis — I like this label the best of any of them. It even makes me want to actually open the package and taste one, although I notice it is already six months past the "best by" date. I bought it for the hurricane power outage that never happened.

The joy of solving murders

People always say that your wedding day is the happiest day of your life, but honestly, people should try solving murders more often.

Jesse Q. Sutanto, Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers

Many of us who read or watch murder mysteries probably wonder from time to time how we might do if we had a murder to solve. Most likely, of course, we would be terrible at it. But when Vera Wong finds a body in her Chinatown tea shop, she has no doubt at all that she can do a better job at finding the killer than the incompetent police. They even think it's an accidental death. What fun would that be?

Jesse Q. Sutanto gives us a truly wonderful thing in Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers (2023) — a good mystery novel that is hilarious at the same time.

Vera Wong is a 60-something widow whose tea shop has just one customer, even though the sign out front boasts that it is "world famous." She needs a little excitement in her life, and the body of Marshall Chen provides that. His death is determined to be from exposure to bird dander, to which he was allergic.

Vera quickly settles on four suspects, each with a reason to kill Marshall. They include his neglected wife Julia, his resentful twin brother Oliver, and Sana and Riki, two people Marshall had betrayed in his nonstop efforts to get rich by using others.

The trouble is, Vera comes to love her suspects. She moves in with Julia and encourages her to realize her dream of becoming a photographer while babysitting her daughter. Oliver is a nice young man who was once Julia's best friend before Marshall came between them. Sana is a talented artist whose paintings were stolen by Marshall; Riki has computer skills that Marshall took advantage of.

While trying to determine which of them might be a murderer, Vera sets about improving each of their lives, while each of them helps improve her own.

Sutanto's novel is as warm and cuddly as as murder mystery can be. And it contains a nifty mystery that Vera Wong, not the police, manages to solve.

On repeat

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves — that's the truth.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, One Hundred False Starts

F. Scott Fitzgerald

In the same article in a 1933 edition of the Saturday Evening Post, F. Scott Fitzgerald also wrote, "We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives — experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way before."

The experiences Fitzgerald describes so well usually happen in one's youth. Older people generally know better. Such things as falling in love, getting one's heart broken and mourning the loss of a loved one seem more profound and unique the first time they happen.

For most authors who strive to write literature, such experiences become the foundation for most of what they write. It helps explain why first novels are so often the best the authors ever write. Such novels as The Catcher in the Rye, A Separate Peace and To Kill a Mockingbird are about youthful characters who have life-shaping experiences. For Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller, their most moving experiences occurred when they were in the middle of war-torn Europe during World War II, resulting in the novels Slaughterhouse-Five and Catch-22.

Because, as Fitzgerald points out, such experiences are limited, writers tend to quickly run out of profound things to write about. And, thus, they repeat themselves. Or sometimes, like J.D. Salinger and Harper Lee, they simply stop writing anything of consequence altogether.