The center of your room

Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.

Stephen King, On Writing

I'm sure there are those who would debate that point with Stephen King. And not just those in the arts. There are those in virtually every walk of life who live to work, rather than working to live. Or who view life and work as synonymous. If they weren't playing football (Tom Brady perhaps?), going into the office each day, working on cars, baking bread, whatever, what would be the point? In their minds, their work is who they are.

One gathers from reading King's memoir/self-help book On Writing that he has temptations in this direction, as well. Perhaps this is why he makes it a point to put his writing desk in the corner of the room, not in its center — and why he advises other writers to do the same. Symbols, even something as simple as this, can be important. If your work isn't in the center of your room, perhaps it isn't the center of your life.

Of course, this poses the question: If your work isn't the center of your life, then what is? Your family? Your community? Your faith? Your hobbies? Or is life itself at the center? Are your work, family, faith, etc., like spokes on a wheel, the things that make it work and keep it going? Wheels with a single spoke don't work that well.

Versions of the truth

Based loosely on a true story. John Milliken Thompson's 2011 novel The Reservoir tells of a young Virginia attorney, soon after the close of the Civil War, who stands trial for the murder of his pregnant cousin. Lillie's body is found in a Richmond reservoir. It may have been suicide, but it also may have been murder, and Tommie Cluverius admits to being in Richmond that night.

Lillie is actually supposed to marry Tommie's brother, Willie, while Tommie is engaged to another girl, considered a better match for Tommie's career. Yet he and Lillie can't stop seeing each other in secret. Then she discovers she is pregnant. Lillie is a storyteller, sometimes insisting Tommie is the only man she has been with, other times saying she did it with Willie. And then she claims she has been raped more than once by her own father.

Yet Tommie proves to be a storyteller, too. He tells one story to the police and to his attorneys: that he never saw Lillie while he was in Richmond. To his brother he tells two other stories. In one he was with Lillie at the reservoir that night but that she jumped into the water, hitting her head on the way down. His sin was failing to try to save her or to report the incident. In a third version, immediately withdrawn, he admits to killing her.

Like Lillie and Tommie, Thompson avoids a clear truth, and readers may be frustrated by not knowing precisely what happened that night at the reservoir. Yet there is much to admire here, especially the courtroom drama and the relationship of the two brothers. Tommie, who though he may be the main character, is simply too manipulative and two-faced to draw much admiration. Lillie senses Tommie's dark side, which in her heart she often finds more alluring than his more stable, upright brother, and that proves her undoing.

Wild, crazy and shy

In a sense, this book is not an autobiography but a biography, because I am writing about someone I used to know.

Steve Martin, Born Standing Up

How did a shy guy become the world's most popular "wild and crazy guy," while remaining an introvert? Steven Martin tells us in his remarkable memoir Born Standing Up (2007).

Martin got his start when Disneyland opened in Anaheim, just a bicycle ride from his home. He started working there as a 10-year-old, passing out brochures. Already fascinated by magic, he hung out in the magic shops in the park and eventually got a job at one of them, demonstrating tricks and learning the comic patter.

He traces the real start to his show business career to the Bird Cage Theatre at Knott's Berry Farm, where as a teenager he performed regularly in a variety of acts for park visitors, including solo performances incorporating magic, banjo picking and comedy, most of the latter borrowed from others. Then came the long, lonely road of trying to make it as a standup comic traveling across the country from one small club to another, sometimes performing for, quite literally, an empty house.

Success came gradually, thanks to television appearances and a comedy record. He says it took years for Johnny Carson to get his act, scheduling him only when his show had a guest host. Martin clicked with Carson about the same time he clicked with everyone else, and almost overnight he was performing to crowds of thousands of people. Martin calls this success "the loneliest period of my life." It was a life lived mostly on stage and in hotel rooms, his sudden fame making it impossible for him to walk down the street or eat in a restaurant.

Martin tells about his appearances on Saturday Night Live and the beginning of his movie career, both of which multiplied his income, fame and loneliness. He quit stand-up after a performance in Atlantic City. "I  went to my dressing room, opened my travel-weary black prop case, and stowed away my magic act, thinking that one day I would open it and look at it sentimentally, which for no particular reason, I haven't."

Yet Martin does get sentimental about the Bird Cage Theatre, which he returned to refresh the memories it holds, and about his family. He says he never felt loved by his father and never got close to his older sister, yet once his days on the road ended he was able to connect meaningfully with both of them.

Martin, the author of several books, is a terrific writer. His memoir moves along spritely, full of humor and grace. And lots of photos.

Surprising origins

The origins of certain words and phrases can be surprising, even a little disappointing.

Take for example the word buccaneer,  now that the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are the Super Bowl champs. The word suggests something swashbuckling and daring, criminal yet heroic at the same time. Yet Bill Bryson notes in Made in America that the word comes from boucan, a wooden frame on which Spanish mutineers would smoke wild hogs.

Ben Zimmer made the same point in his Wall Street Journal column last weekend. He also noted we get the word barbecue from barbacoa, a Caribbean islander word for the same cooking method. So we might as well call the NFL champs the Tampa Bay Barbecuers. (This reminds me somehow that when I was a student at Ohio University, in reference to the Ohio State Buckeyes up north, a buckeye was commonly referred to as "a worthless nut.")

Chicken a la king sounds like a dish fit for royalty. In fact, Bryson explains, the original name was chicken a la Keene. A man named Foxhall Keene was a prominent diner at Delmonico's restaurant in New York City, where the dish originated. The name was changed through mispronunciation.

You can't go to a professional baseball game without singing, during the seventh inning stretch, Take Me Out to the Ball Game. The song, which is actually the chorus of a song, was written by two men who had never attended a baseball game in their lives, according to Bryson. The song itself is about a young woman named Katie Casey whose beau offers to take her to a show. She makes a counteroffer and suggests he take her out to a ball game instead.

Some of the minor-league slurs long in use originated with men's names, Bryson tells us. We get yokel from the German version of Jacob. Hick started from Richard back in the 14th century. Rube, less surprisingly, came from Reuben.

Bryson says that Maxwell House coffee got its name from a Nashville hotel, the Maxwell House, and its slogan, "good to the last drop," from Theodore Roosevelt, who expressed that opinion about the coffee. Before Coca-Cola's slogan became "the pause that refreshes," it was the more cumbersome "the drink that make a pause refreshing."

A distracted detective

One ideally should read Peter Robinson's series of Inspector Banks novels in order from the beginning (Gallows View, 1987) because the lives and loves of the continuing characters are as important and as interesting as the mysteries solved. Yet even finding (and affording) all the earlier books can be a challenge, and so we can read Sleeping in the Ground, his excellent 2017 entry in the series, and have to play catchup from the last novel you read, in my case Wednesday's Child (1992).

This time the personal life of Banks seems to distract him from solving a mass murder. A sniper hits nine members of a wedding party, killing most of them, including the bride. Yet Banks is preoccupied by the death of his first love and then by the reentry into his life of Jenny Fuller, a criminal profiler whom he had a crush on years before when he was married. Turns out, she had a crush on him, too, but now that they're both free, she's not so sure.

Even with the distractions the case wraps up quickly when the suspect is found dead from suicide in his basement. Readers will be suspicious long before Banks and his crew are because it's not yet page 100 in a 319-page book. Sure enough, there's much more to come, and the conclusion turns out to be even more exciting than usual in this series.

The novel's title would seem to refer not so much to the deceased as to the long-buried emotions of both Banks and the killer he pursues. The story is about what happens when those feelings come to the surface.

How our culture shaped our language

Two books in one, Bill Bryson's Made in America (1994) is both a lively history of popular culture in America and an etymology of the words and phrases that grew out of that culture.

Bryson tells us what the Puritans did for fun, how frozen foods were invented (by accident, like so much else), how McDonald's restaurants came to be (Ray Kroc actually had little to do with it), why in wagon trains the wagons actually traveled not in line but side by side and that the first hit movie, although it was not yet called a movie, was Fred Ott's Sneeze, showing exactly what the title says.

Shopping carts originated in Oklahoma City back in 1936, Bryson tells us, but the inventor, Sylvan Goldman, had to hire people to demonstrate to customers how to use them. 

What does George Washington's home, Mount Vernon, have to do with the word groggy? The plantation was named after the British admiral Edward Vernon, whose nickname was Old Grog. The daily ration of rum Vernon gave his sailors came to be known as grog, and those who drank too much of it were said to be groggy.

Such "classic Italian dishes" as chicken tetrazzini, veal parmigiana, fettuccine Alfredo and even spaghetti and meatballs originated in the United States. So did Russian dressing, French dressing and chop sued.

In the 1990 census 40 percent more Americans claimed to be Indians than 10 years previously. Was Elizabeth Warren one of these?

And so Bryson goes on for 400 pages. The author has a knack for digging up obscure trivia and then presenting it in entertaining prose. Open the book to any paragraph and you are likely to find something interesting that you won't remember ever hearing before — and probably won't remember tomorrow.

Easy reading, hard reviewing

The easiest books to read are not necessarily the easiest books to write about, or so I've found in my decades of writing reviews.

Take mysteries and thrillers, for example. Books that are described as "hard to put down" usually fit into one of these categories. Yet it can be difficult to find much to say about such books after you read them. You can write only so much about the plot without giving too much away. What you can say can usually be put into a paragraph or two. Then what? Even book clubs usually avoid such books because there is so little to talk about, especially if not everyone has finished reading the book.

Have you noticed that magazine and newspaper columns that focus on murder mysteries usually cover several books at once? I know this is what I usually did when I wrote a newspaper book review column. The reason for this is not just that mysteries make fast reading but that devoting an entire column to just one book can be a challenge. Sometimes it can be done, but rarely is it easy.

Children's books are also easy to read but a challenge to review. Short story collections, on the other hand, can often be difficult to read while also difficult to write about. There are a number of different stories, each with different characters, and a reader must start fresh with each one. A book with 12 stories means starting over 12 times. The reviewer, too, has a number of different stories with different characters to deal with. Wrapping everything into an interesting review can be very difficult unless the reviewer can find some common thread in the stories on which to focus the review. Reviewing the Tom Hanks collection of stories Uncommon Type was made easier by the fact that a typewriter is featured in each story, even though the stories themselves are quite different.

Literary novels can sometimes be a challenge to read, yet writing about them can often be a snap. You can say more about the plot, for one thing. Sometimes you can even give away the ending, for knowing the ending doesn't keep anyone from reading Moby-Dick or Huckleberry Finn. More importantly, literary novels have themes, which don't even have to be the themes the authors had in mind when they wrote the books. Readers can find their own meaning in a novel of this sort, giving the writer something to write about  — and book clubs something to talk about. Sometimes I just find a quote from the novel and build my review from that.

The easiest books to write about may be biographies and histories. The subject matter is all fair game for the reviewer, plus there is the particular slant taken by the author that is open for comment. Yet these books can be long and difficult to plow through. 

Early Ohio

Hardly anyone today thinks of the Ohio Valley as "the West." A great many Americans, in fact, regard Ohio as "back East." Yet when the country was very young, those who settled in Ohio were among the very first pioneers, and they are the subject of David McCullough's The Pioneers (2019).

McCullough writes that the idea for the book came to him when he was the commencement speaker at Ohio University, my own alma mater, in 2004 in tribute to the university's 200th anniversary. He took an interest in the founding of the school in 1804, just a year after Ohio became a state and when it was still mostly wilderness. He was referred to the Legacy Library at nearby Marietta College, which holds an extensive collection of original documents about early Ohio, and also about Ohio University's founder, Manasseh Cutler.

(The first building, named Cutler Hall a century later and where my father-in-law once had an office, still stands in the center of the campus. Three other university buildings are named for men also prominent in McCullough's book: Rufus Putnam, Benjamin Tupper and Winthrop Sargent.)

It was Manasseh Cutler, a minister, who was most responsible for settling the Northwest Territory in the first place. Those first settlers stopped in what is now Marietta. Yet it is Cutler's son, Ephraim, who takes most of the spotlight in this book. A significant early political leader in the new state, he left his sickbed long enough to cast the deciding vote that prohibited slavery in Ohio. (It was apparently Thomas Jefferson who was responsible for persuading many legislators to vote in favor of slavery.)

Such people as Aaron Burr, John Quincy Adams, Tecumseh and Harriet Beecher Stowe play roles in this early Ohio history, which spans the years from 1787 to the Civil War. We read of Indian battles, an earthquake, epidemics and floods. People kept coming, most of them following the Ohio River, and many kept going west from Ohio, becoming pioneers elsewhere.

This is hardly the most interesting of McCullough's many books, in part because of its broad focus. Yet it was subject matter ripe for revisiting by a historian, and McCullough is among the best.

A mother's love

A mother will do anything, whether good or evil, for her son. If Charles Todd's 2018 novel The Gate Keeper carries a message, that is it.

Not one of the better novels in the excellent Ian Rutledge series, this one makes good reading nonetheless. The Scotland Yard inspector has the weekend off to attend a wedding, but unable to sleep after the wedding he is driving down a country road in the middle of the night when he comes upon a murder scene.

Stephen Wentworth, an owner of a bookstore, had been driving a young woman home from a party when they are stopped by someone standing in the road. When Wentworth gets out of his car, he is shot and killed after a brief conversation. Rutledge happens along just minutes later.

It appears to be a murder without a motive. The only person Rutledge can find who didn't like Wentworth is his own mother, who blames him for the death of her favorite son, Stephen's brother, when they were sleeping together as small boys.

The investigation goes nowhere until there is another murder of another well-liked man with no apparent connection to Wentworth. Rutledge later hears of another murder in another village that sounds similar. Again there is no apparent connection or motive.

Rutledge has the strangest sidekick in mystery fiction, the voice of Hamish, a Scottish soldier whom he executed during the Great War in France after Hamish refused an order to lead his men on yet another suicidal charge against the German line. Now Hamish offers advice about his former officer's murder case, and this time Rutledge needs all the help he can get.

Portable magic

Books are a uniquely portable magic.

Stephen King, On Writing

To most people in today's world, their phones are probably their idea of "portable magic." It's all there wherever they might happen to be: news, games, movies, instant answers to questions, maps, sports scores, email, texting and, as a last resort, there's the original purpose of that phone — an actual conversation with someone.

For me, Stephen King and a few other holdouts, books are our idea of magic. Consider some of the "magic tricks" books can perform.

They allow time travel — Books take us into the past, where we can ride on a raft down the Mississippi River with Huck and Jim or sit in the same room with Jane Austen's characters in early 19th century England and listen to their conversation. Or they can transport us into the far future where Isaac Asimov's robots must contend with the challenging dilemmas posed by the Three Laws of Robotics.

They make our troubles disappear — Only temporarily, of course. But when we are engrossed in a thriller or some other book we can't put down, those unpaid bills or some nagging regrets are far from our consciousness. 

They allow us to read minds — Fiction puts us into the minds of characters, but nonfiction puts us into the minds of authors. What was Henry David Thoreau thinking about at Walden Pond? What were Ernest Hemingway's thoughts about writing? Without Walden and A Moveable Feast, we would know much less.

King concludes his paragraph about the magic of books by saying, "If I have to spend time in purgatory before going to one place or the other, I guess I'll be all right as long as there's a lending library (if there is it's probably stocked with nothing but novels by Danielle Steel and Chicken Soup books, ha-ha, joke's on you, Steve)." Isn't it fun peeking inside Stephen King's mind?

A house and its people

A Spool of Blue Thread (2015) by Anne Tyler is a novel as much about a house as it is about a family.

Four generations of the Whitshank family live in this large Baltimore house, built by Junior Whitshank for somebody else. To Junior, a homebuilder by trade, this particular house is so special he is determined to one day own it himself, and one day he does. He and Linnie Mae raise their children, Merrick and Red, there, and Red and his wife, Abby, raise their own family there. Later their grandchildren spend part of their early lives in the same house. The novel ends when the last Whitshank moves out.

Other than the house, does the novel have a central character? For several pages various members take command of the story, then fade into the background. Junior and Linnie Mae, perhaps the most interesting characters of all, don't take the spotlight until late in the novel, the beginning of the story nearly becoming its end. Abby dominates early on, Red not so much until after her death. Restless, unpredictable, undependable Denny, their son, may be the true protagonist, his instability a counterpoint to the stability of the house.

Denny has never come to terms with the fact that Stem, his brother, isn't actually a Whitshank. Abandoned by his mother, Stem is the son of one of Red's employees who dies. Abby insists upon keeping the little boy until his mother or some other suitable relative can be found, but soon decides just to keep him as her own. Everyone else in the family accepts that decision, but not Denny, whose feelings don't emerge until later after he has grown up and become a mysterious wanderer usually out of touch with his family.

When Abby becomes mentally unstable late in life, however, Denny comes home to stay, then is resentful when Stem comes, too, bringing his family with him. Not until the end of the novel does Tyler reveal the mystery of Denny's private life, a secret he never shares with his family.

Tyler has written a number of outstanding novels about Baltimore families. A Spool of Blue Thread ranks high on that list.

Where cliches go to party

Two cliches make us laugh, but a hundred cliches move us because we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion.

Umberto Eco

When I came upon the above Umberto Eco quote, I thought immediately of John Prine.

The singer who died last year was one of America's great songwriters. His many fans marveled each time they heard his lyrics, so clever, so beautiful, so funny. Yet as original as Prine's songs are, they often include cliches. He had a way of making tired cliches seem creative, as if we had never heard them before.

In Sam Stone we hear "monkey on his back" and "little pitchers have big ears." In Daddy's Little Pumpkin he says he will "rattle somebody's cage." In Summers End, one of his last songs, he shows that two cliches do make us laugh: "That ol' Easter egg ain't got a leg to stand on/Well I can see that you can't win for trying."

Perhaps Prine's cleverest use of a cliche comes in Spanish Pipedream: "For I knew that topless lady had something up her sleeve."

Then there It's a Big Old Goofy World in which he strings together more than a dozen familiar cliches, crafting something truly original out of them. Here we find "work like a dog," "bump on a log," "quiet as a mouse," "big as a house," "eats like a horse," "smokes like a chimney" and so on. There they all are in one delightful song, celebrating a reunion.