Tag: Omnivorous Reader

Omnivorous Reader

OMNIVOROUS READER

Endless Fascination

The troubled life of F. Scott Fitzgerald

By Stephen E. Smith

In his 1971 memoir Upstate, literary critic Edmond Wilson grouses about college kids knocking at the door of his “Old Stone House” in Talcottville, New York. “They want to know about Scott Fitzgerald and that’s all,” he writes. Wilson was Fitzgerald’s classmate at Princeton University, and he edited Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up and the unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon.

If you’re a reader of literary biographies, you can understand Wilson’s peevishness. Bookstore and library shelves are lined with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald bios. Matthew Bruccoli’s Some Sort of Epic Grandeur is the definitive work. Still, there are many other bios — at least 30 — that are worth considering: Scott Donaldson’s Fool For Love, Arthur Krystal’s Some Unfinished Chaos, Niklas Salmose and David Rennie’s F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Composite Biography, among others.

Robert Garnett’s recent Taking Things Hard: The Trials of F. Scott Fitzgerald contributes significantly to the material available on the Jazz Age author and will be of particular interest to Fitzgerald aficionados with a North Carolina connection.

Garnett, a professor emeritus of English at Gettysburg College, is best known for his biography, Charles Dickens in Love. His Fitzgerald study is less inclusive than his work on Dickens, covering the final 20 years of Fitzgerald’s life, but his research is meticulous and reveals aspects of Fitzgerald’s personality that other biographers have ignored or overlooked.

During his most prolific years — 1924-1935 — Fitzgerald’s primary source of income was his short fiction (he published 65 stories in The Saturday Evening Post alone), and he was paid between $1500-$5,000 per story when a Depression-era income for a high-wage earner was $1,000 a year. Garnett focuses on the better-known stories — “The Ice Palace,” “A Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” “The Intimate Strangers,” “Babylon Revisited,” “One Trip Abroad,” etc. — to explicate the romantic themes and ineffable mysteries that defined Fitzgerald’s checkered life.

The story “Last of the Belles,” written in 1927, exemplifies Fitzgerald’s return to the familiar theme of romantic infatuation and lost love. The story closely parallels Fitzgerald’s time in Montgomery, Alabama, where he served as a young lieutenant during World War I. He incorporates his courtship of his future wife, Zelda Sayre, into the narrative and transforms her into the character of Ailie Calhoun, “the top girl” in town. The narrator, identified only as Andy, is smitten by Ailie, but she becomes enamored of Earl Schoen, a former streetcar conductor disguised in an officer’s uniform.

“The Last of the Belles” plays off Fitzgerald’s strong sense of class, his longing to recapture youthful romance, and his grieving “for that vanished world and vanished mood, Montgomery in 1918 . . . a living poetry of youth, warmth, charming girls, and romance.” “The Last of the Belles” is Fitzgerald’s final attempt to recapture the South of his youth and its alluring women.

A close reading of the stories opens a window into Fitzgerald’s thematic preoccupations, allowing the readers to glimpse aspects of his thinking that are not readily apparent in his less spontaneous, more ambitious novels. But it also presents the reader with a challenge. Garnett provides a synopsis of the stories he cites, but to fully comprehend his explications, it is necessary to read the stories in their entirety, an undertaking that casual readers might find laborious.

Fitzgerald’s North Carolina sojourn is at the heart of Taking Things Hard. In the Fitzgerald papers at Princeton’s Firestone Library, a personal journal kept by Laura Guthrie, a palm reader at Asheville’s Grove Park Inn, draws an intimate, none-too-flattering portrait of Fitzgerald during his saddest period. “The 150-page single-spaced typescript follows him closely, day by day, often hour by hour,” Garnett writes. “Most Fitzgerald scholars are aware of it; few have read it through, fewer still have mined it.” Garnett believes Guthrie’s journal “is the most valuable single source for any period of his (Fitzgerald’s) life.”

In the early spring of 1935, Fitzgerald fled Baltimore for Asheville. He rented adjoining rooms at The Grove Park Inn, where he wrote a series of historical stories for Redbook. Garnett describes these stories as “wooden, simplistic, puerile, awash in cliché and banality, with ninth-century colloquial rendered in a hodgepodge of cowboy-movie, hillbilly, and detective novel.” These amateurish stories were the low point of Fitzgerald’s writing career.

Guthrie became Fitzgerald’s confidant, constant companion and caregiver. He and Guthrie were not physically intimate, but she was enamored. Of their first dinner together, she wrote, “He drank his ale and loved me with his eyes, and then with his lips for he said, ‘I love you Laura,’ and insisted, ‘I do love you, Laura, and I have only said that to three women in my life.’”

The story Guthrie tells is anything but inspirational. Fitzgerald was intoxicated most of the time — she recorded that he drank as many as 37 bottles of beer a day — and he insisted that she remain at his beck and call. “He is extremely dictatorial,” she wrote, “and expects to be obeyed at once — and well.” As the summer progressed, his drinking grew worse, and he eventually turned to gin “with the idea,” Guthrie noted, “that he had to finish the story and that he could not do it on beer, even if he took 30 or so cans a day, and so he would have to have strong help — first whiskey and then gin.”

In June, Fitzgerald headed to Baltimore and detrained briefly in Southern Pines to visit with James and Katharine Boyd. His conduct while visiting with the Boyds was such that he felt compelled to write a letter of apology when he arrived in Baltimore.

In late 1935, Fitzgerald took a room in Hendersonville, North Carolina, and wrote his self-deprecatingly “Crack-Up” articles. Published in Esquire in 1936, these revealing essays marked the end of his career as a popular novelist and short story writer. He would eventually move to Hollywood, spending the remainder of his days toiling for the dream factories and outlining a novel he would never complete. He died there in relative obscurity in 1940 at the age of 44.

A century after its publication, The Great Gatsby remains a mainstay of the American literary canon, and critics and scholars continue re-evaluating Fitzgerald’s life. No matter how many times they retell the story, it will never have a happy ending.

Omnivorous Reader

OMNIVOROUS READER

Finishing Touches

How Katherine Min’s last novel came to be

By Anne Blythe

The story about the making of The Fetishist, Katherine Min’s posthumously published novel, is almost as interesting as the book itself. It has been touted as a novel ahead of its time — a comic, yet sincere, tender and occasionally befuddling exploration of sexual and racial politics.

The story is told through three main characters: Daniel Karmody, a white Irish-American violinist from whom the novel gets its name; Alma Soon Ja Lee, a Korean-American cellist, who’s only 13 when the first of many fetishists she encounters whispers “Oriental girls are so sexy”; and Kyoto Tokugawa, a 23-year-old Japanese American punk rocker who devises a madcap assassination plot to avenge the man she believes to be responsible for her mother’s suicide.

The novel starts 20 years after the estrangement of Alma and Daniel and ends with them reconnecting. In between, readers get to see Kyoto’s zany failed assassination attempt of Daniel and subsequent kidnapping. They’ll learn of his dalliances with a cast of women — many of them musicians, such as Kyoto’s mother, Emi — while he longed for the excitement and thrill he felt with Alma.

The intertwining of the narratives of these protagonists and the intriguing significant others in their orbits lead to alluring plot twists and a timeless appraisal of the white male’s carnal objectification of Asian women. But let’s start with the end of the book and the touching afterword by Kayla Min Andrews, Min’s daughter, a fiction writer like her mother, who explains how The Fetishist came to be published.

It almost wasn’t.

Min was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2014 and died in 2019, the day after her 60th birthday. She was an accomplished writer who taught at the University of North Carolina at Asheville for 11 years, as well as a brief stint at Queens University in Charlotte. Her first published novel, Secondhand World, a story about a Korean-American teen clashing with immigrant parents, came out in 2006 to literary acclaim and was one of two finalists for the prestigious PEN Bingham Prize. During the ensuing years, Min worked on what would become her second and final novel, The Fetishist, reading portions to her daughter over the years.

“My new novel is very different from Secondhand World,” Min told her daughter during a phone call Andrews details in her afterword. “It’s going to have many characters, omniscient narration. Lots of shit is going to happen — suicide, kidnapping, attempted murder. It’ll be arch and clever, but always heartfelt. I’m gonna channel Nabokov. And part of it takes place in Florence, so I have to go there as research.”

Min completed a draft of The Fetishist sometime in 2013, her daughter writes. “I assumed she would pass it to me when she was ready,” Andrews wrote. “But she was still revising, polishing.” Then the cancer diagnosis hit.

Although fiction had long been Min’s forte, she stunned her family shortly after getting the news, letting them and others know that she no longer was interested in what she had been writing and instead found purpose in personal essays examining her experiences with illness and dying.

“She never looked back,” Andrews wrote. “When anyone asked about The Fetishist, Mom would say, ‘I’m done with fiction,’ in the same tone she would say, ‘I’m a word wanker,’ or, ‘I’m terrific at math.’ Matter-of-fact, with a dash of defiant pride. She didn’t refer to The Fetishist as an ‘unfinished’ novel. She called it ‘abandoned.’”

And that was that.

As Min’s life was coming to an end, she and Andrews discussed many things, such as where she wanted her “remaining bits of money” to go, and how the playlist for her memorial service should include The Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go,” DeVotchKa’s “How It Ends,” and Janis Joplin’s “Get It While You Can.”

“What we did not discuss in the hospice center was her abandoned novel. Or her essay collection. Or anything related to posthumous publishing,” Andrews wrote. After several years of grieving, therapy and a new celebration of her mother, Andrews and others saw to it that The Fetishist, found nearly completed in manuscript form on her mom’s computer, would be shared with others. Andrews helped fill in the story’s gaps.

“I am so happy Mom’s beautiful novel is being published; I am so sad she is not here to see it happen,” Andrews wrote. “I’m happy The Fetishist’s publication process is helping me grow as a writer and a person; I’m sad Mom’s death is the reason I’m playing this role. I suppose I no longer conceptualize joy and sorrow as opposites, because everything related to The Fetishist’s publication makes me feel flooded with both at once.”

Sorrow and joy are among the emotions that flood through The Fetishist, too. Min had it right when she told her daughter her novel would be “arch and clever, and very heartfelt.” The author’s note at the beginning of the novel sums it up well:

“This is a story, a fairy tale of sorts, about three people who begin in utter despair. There is even a giant, a buried treasure (a tiny one), a hero held captive, a kind of ogre (a tiny one), and a sleeping beauty,” she advises her readers. “And because it’s a fairy tale, it has a happy ending. For the hero, the ogre, and the sleeping beauty, and for the giant, too. After all, every story has a happy ending, depending on where you put THE END.”

2024 Department Omnivorous Reader

Omnivorous Reader

OMNIVOROUS READER

After the Amber

A novel of disappearance and guilt

By Stephen E. Smith

A startling buzzing blasts from your phone or TV, followed by a high-pitched whine, and a detailed description of a missing child inching across the screen. It’s an active Amber Alert — a child abduction emergency. We experience these alerts too often, but we rarely learn what becomes of the missing child or how such a disappearance affects the child’s family, friends and the community in which the child lives.

Marybeth Mayhew Whalen’s 10th novel, Every Moment Since, is a fictional exploration of the emotional forces that wear on those who knew and loved 11-year-old Davy Malcor, who went missing for over two decades. The narrative opens with an early morning phone call informing Sheriff Lancaster that Davy’s favorite jacket was found in an abandoned building near the small North Carolina town of Wynotte. The burden of Davy’s disappearance is still very much in the public consciousness, fixed there by a bestselling memoir written by Davy’s older brother, Thaddeus, who had been responsible for watching over Davy on the night he vanished. On that tragic evening, Davy’s parents were attending a cocktail party, and Thaddeus ditched Davy so he could drink beer with his buddies. Davy wandered in the darkness with a mysterious new friend until headlights flickered through the neighborhood and Davy was gone. What happened that night transformed the characters’ lives and, years later, one question haunts them all: What might I have done differently?

Whalen has provided an intriguing cast of characters. Tabitha, Davy’s mother, is divorced (a byproduct of her son’s disappearance) and lives alone in the house where Davy was raised. She devotes her time to advocating for the families of missing children. Thaddeus is profiting from his family’s misfortune with a bestselling memoir. Aniss Weaver, the last person to see Davy alive, works as a public information officer for the local police. Gordon Swift, a local sculptor, is the prime suspect in Davy’s disappearance, although there has never been adequate evidence to bring charges against him. We have all the ingredients for a suspenseful mystery.

But Every Moment Since isn’t your typical whodunnit. The plot is a trifle too straightforward: a boy goes missing, his family suffers, the community agonizes, a body is eventually found, and the mystery, albeit a slight one, is solved. There are too few plot twists or complications in the early stages of the narrative, and much of the expository information in the first 180 pages of the 363-page novel focuses on the minutia of the characters’ day-to-day lives. Throughout the story, there is a nagging need to “bring on the bear.”

Whalen’s focus, the moving force in the novel, is guilt, which the characters suffer to various degrees. Tabitha rebukes herself for having left Davy in Thaddeus’ care so she could spend an evening socializing. Aniss Weaver is troubled by her specific knowledge that Thaddeus is blameless. And Thaddeus, more than any of the characters, is troubled by the financial success of his memoir about his brother’s disappearance. Gordon Swift, although innocent, suffers from doubts about his sexuality and the community’s suspicion that focuses on him as the likely culprit.

Whalen employs various third-person points of view that are not arranged chronologically (think Pulp Fiction). And the chapters range from excerpts taken from Thaddeus’ memoir to Tabitha’s daily bouts of regret to pure narrative segments that nudge the story forward. Even Davy, who has long since disappeared from the immediate action, has a third-person limited view in parts of the novel.

If this sounds like a lot to keep straight, it is, and the reader is required to focus his or her attention on what is happening to whom and when. The only question that needs answering is why the narrative is presented in this disjointed fashion, which becomes apparent in the novel’s final chapters.

The reader might reasonably conclude that the novel was written with the audiobook in mind (available as a digital download through Kindle). Chapters featuring the various personas written in the limited third person achieve degrees of separation and distinction when read by voice actors representing the various characters. For example, book chapters about Tabitha contain too few distinctive hooks that the reader can employ to establish an ongoing connection with the character, and one’s attention must remain fixed on who is doing what and when. Read aloud, the connection is immediate and continuous.

Every Moment Since is not recommended for anyone suffering from ADHD or for casual readers who will likely put the novel aside for days and expect to pick up the narrative line without rereading. The shifting points of view will not detract from the novel’s impact if the reader remains focused.

Whalen creates believable characters and has a true talent for dialogue — and she is to be congratulated for taking on a challenging and complex subject. The disappearance of a child is a horrifying possibility for any parent, and the crippling emotions suffered by a family that has experienced such a loss are almost inconceivable. Every Moment Since is a reminder that we should take careful notice of the Amber Alerts that come blaring across our TVs and phones. They aren’t works of fiction.

2024 Department Omnivorous Reader

Omnivorous Reader

OMNIVOROUS READER

Putting the Pieces Together

Frances Mayes takes a tour of marriage

By Anne Blythe

Ever wonder what it takes to make a good relationship great or how to keep a great relationship from becoming average? Frances Mayes, author of Under the Tuscan Sun, gingerly guides readers through such questions, and more, about the nature of relationships in her new novel, A Great Marriage.

The 84-year-old author has generated an extensive list of bestsellers in the nearly two decades since her memoir about purchasing, restoring and living in an Italian villa became the basis for a Hollywood movie starring Diane Lane. Her forte — travel and food writing — is evident in A Great Marriage, a love story based largely in fictional Hillston, a North Carolina town with similarities to Hillsborough, where Mayes and her husband spent many years in a historic home along the Eno River.

Whether it’s through a Lowcountry seafood boil on fictional Indigo Island, a pub meal, too much Scotch on a drunken night in London or accounts of homes, streetscapes and waterscapes scattered throughout North Carolina, South Carolina, New York, San Francisco and London, Mayes’ descriptions have transportive power.

A Great Marriage opens in Hillston at a lavish dinner party celebrating the whirlwind romance and engagement of Dara Wilcox, a well-to-do aspiring law student who grew up in the quaint town, and Austin Clarke, an affable young British architect working temporarily in New York. The two met at a New York art gallery when Dara was visiting from Washington, D.C., for the weekend. “They looked at the contorted, deflated gray balloons glued to a manhole cover for a full minute, then at each other,” Mayes wrote. “They started laughing.”

While it depends on which character is doing the storytelling to be sure who picked up whom, there’s no question that Austin and Dara are drawn almost instantaneously to each other. They fall feverishly in love, determined to make their lives together work even though they live in different cities and are at different stages professionally.

When a glass of red wine is spilled at the bountiful meal Dara’s parents prepare for their spirited daughter, her genial and well-mannered fiancé, friends and family, it does more than make a mess. Not only does the wine stain the white tablecloth and napkins, it splashes onto Austin — and portends turmoil ahead.

Shortly after that night, Austin gets tumultuous news from London that changes his life and the trajectory of the romance that had seemed destined for the wedding aisle. He’s about to be a father. Adding more drama to the mix, the mother-to-be of the child conceived after a night of heavy Scotch drinking has a potentially fatal medical condition.

Suddenly the engagement is off.

Austin moves back to London, unsure of what fatherhood will look like for him.

Dara is gobsmacked and seeks solace from her parents in North Carolina, her grandmother on the South Carolina coast, her good friends in San Francisco, and a crew of artists with whom she spends a summer helping to give new life to an old seaside motel.

There’s an assemblage of characters that Dara and Austin call on as they go their separate ways; some better fleshed out than others. We meet many of them in the opening pages during the engagement celebration, but sometimes it can be difficult to take them all in. It can feel as though you’re at a dinner party where you barely know the hosts or the guests and you’re constantly trying to figure out how they’re connected to one another.

Stick with it. As the story unfolds, the connections become clearer and it’s easier to distinguish the incidental characters from those who are key to the plot line.

Dara’s mother, Lee, a university professor in Chapel Hill who spent her career writing a book about William Butler Yeats, and her father, Rich, a journalist who gets plum travel assignments, have one of those marriages that seems in balance. Dara’s grandmother Charlotte, or Mimi, as she calls her, has had more than one marriage, but is so well-versed in the trials and tribulations of the institution that she has written two books on the subject — The Good Marriage, which sold millions of copies; and The Good Divorce: It’s Never Too Late, also a bestseller. Austin’s father, Michael, and his sister, Annsley, are booksellers in London who come to his rescue as he ponders life without Dara.

Life lessons are dished up throughout the book about the meaning of marital vows and what makes a great marriage. Mayes is deft at showing the many angles of the predicaments Austin and Dara have found themselves in, making it possible for readers to empathize with each one.

Some might find it difficult at times to relate to Dara, who has the freedom to stay with friends for weeks at a time and travel here and there, seemingly without responsibility. There’s a bit of a fairy tale feel to the book.

But if you’re in the mood for some armchair travel and a glimpse into a world where people have the luxury of hopping across a country or an ocean in search of happiness, A Great Marriage offers a great escape.

2024 Department Omnivorous Reader

Omnivorous Reader

OMNIVOROUS READER

A Sense of Time and Place

By Stephen E. Smith

Writers have twitches and tics of style and substance that identify them as distinctly as their DNA — and writers of exceptional talent are possessed by obsession, a focus on subject matter that elevates their work to a purity that establishes a commonality with their audience. North Carolina’s Thomas Wolfe was such a writer. So is Bland Simpson.

Simpson has earned a reputation as the chronicler of the North Carolina coast and sound country. His books include North Carolina: Land of Water, Land of Sky, The Great Dismal, and Into Sound Country, books that demonstrate his love of the state and the region where he was raised. He has appeared in numerous PBS (WUNC) documentaries, and his familiar voice graces the soundtrack to travelogues exploring the coastal region. In short, he’s the go-to guy when it comes to the history and evolution of coastal North Carolina. For many years, he’s been the Kenan Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In his latest book, Clover Garden: A Carolinian’s Piedmont Memoir, Simpson remains in familiar territory — he’s writing about the state — but he’s moved his focus west to an area outside Chapel Hill where he’s lived for the last 50 years.

Where is Clover Garden?

Head west out of Carrboro until you hit N.C. 54. Drive northwest into gentle farmland until you pass the old White Oak School. If there’s a sign for Swepsonville, you’ve gone too far. You can try that, but you won’t happen upon the place name that serves as the title of Simpson’s memoir. According to Simpson, Clover Garden is closer to Carrboro than Graham. He describes it as “a small, four-square-mile country community to the old Porter Tract of the low Old Fields, lying beside the Haw River just a few miles west of Chapel Hill and Carrboro. . . .” But in truth,readers will suspect that Clover Garden is anywhere in North Carolina’s vast rolling Piedmont, any plot of land inhabited by neighbors who live harmoniously in tight-knit communities.

“Memoir” in the title is used in the loosest sense. There’s maybe a thread of chronology at work, but Simpson takes an impressionistic approach to his writing, à la Manet (not Monet). Readers who remember their art history will be reminded of the details in Music in the Tuileries and The Café-Concert, images in which all the specifics matter to the whole.

Clover Garden is divided into 45 segments — short narratives, random observations, anecdotes, even gossip — that, when taken together, comprise the “memoir” and give the readers a sense of a particular time and place. These independent segments are skillfully illustrated and enhanced with photographs by Ann Cary Simpson, whose keen eye for specific and illuminating images has enhanced Clover Garden and her husband’s previous books.

If the impressionistic comparison seems a trifle pretentious, the narratives Simpson shares are not. He writes of pool halls, pig pickings, snowstorms, country stores, great horned owls, folklore, boatwrighting, cafes and bars, stars, and riderless horses, all the bits and pieces, practical and impractical, that comprise our daily lives. And if you’ve lived in the Piedmont, there’s a good chance you’ll know a few characters who contribute color to the storytelling. If you don’t recognize any of the characters, you know them well enough at the conclusion of the memoir, or you’ll recognize their counterpart in your circle of friends and acquaintances.

Simpson’s descriptions embody an easy blending of history with a touch of nostalgia as in this sepia-tinged recollection of old friends and poolhalls (one of which was frequented by this reviewer): “In time, Jake Mills showed me his two favorite pool halls, Happy’s on Cotanche Street in Greenville and Wilbur’s on Webb Avenue in Burlington. After school in the 1950s, he and Steve Coley used to play quarter games with the textile mill hands coming off first shift and drifting into Wilbur’s straight from work. The cigarette haze hung low below the green shades, and the cry of ‘Rack!’ was in the air, and the balls clicked and clacked, and, like many a youth before them, Jake and Steve picked up pin money in this Alamance County eight-ball haven.” Even Neville’s, a long established Moore County watering hole, receives a passing mention in Simpson’s narrative explorations.

Above all else, Simpson is a master prose stylist, a poet at heart. His sentences are graceful and well-tuned — thoroughly worked on to get that “worked on” feeling out — and laced with continual surprises to save them from predictability. Simpson is always a pleasure to read, and he can transport the reader to familiar ground as if it’s being seen anew. “. . . alongside dairy cows, beeves and horses in pastures meeting deep forests of white oaks and red oaks and pines, copses of them around country churches, and straight up tulip poplars and high-crown hickories, American beech and always sweet gum, muscadine vines everywhere, willows close to the waterlines of ponds where big blue heron stalk and hunt, ponds full of bass and bream, shellcrackers and pumpkinseed and catfish prowling the bottom . . . .”

Thomas Wolfe would approve.

2024 Department Omnivorous Reader

Omnivorous Reader

More Than a Mystery

Murder haunts a college town

By Anne Blythe

The makings for an ordinary crime thriller are present in Joanna Pearson’s first novel, but Bright and Tender Dark is anything but ordinary.

In the first few pages, Karlie, an alluring and enigmatic college student, is found dead in an off-campus apartment, brutally murdered, with no clear trail to the suspect. A former busboy with an eighth-grade education is in prison, conveniently convicted of her murder and serving time for a crime that shattered the tranquility of a college town.

The whodunnit aspect is there.

Joy, Karlie’s freshman year roommate and Pearson’s complicated protagonist, thinks the justice system got the wrong man. It is through Joy’s hunt for the real killer that we quickly realize Pearson’s book is a bit different from the traditional murder mystery. Layered on top is a retrospective investigation into the psychological ripple effects that Karlie’s dark death has had on the whole community, connecting seemingly unconnected people even two decades after it happened.

Pearson, a psychiatrist who lives in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro area, is also a poet and short story writer who now can add literary crime fiction to her compilation of writing genres. Just as her short story collections show that her poetic style spans literary genres, Bright and Tender Dark shows that her storytelling skills extend beyond short stories to novels. Many of the chapters could stand alone as stories within the larger story.

Pearson is masterful at character building. We meet Joy in the throes of middle age. She’s a mother of two finding a new footing after a painful divorce, assessing and reassessing her life. That evaluation creates the springboard for bouncing between two critical times in her life: the present, in which her ex is about to become a father again with his new wife; and the past, for which she has a new obsession, a decades-old murder.

Part of her compulsion comes from an unopened letter that Joy’s teenage son, Sean, finds in a book of John Donne poetry he has borrowed for English class.

It’s from Karlie.

“The letter has made a long and improbable voyage through time after being tucked away and forgotten, never even opened,” Pearson writes. “A miracle. An artifact of an old-fashioned epistolary era. Sean hands the letter to Joy with the solemnity of someone who has grown up on Snapchat. Joy’s hands tremble at the sight of the familiar handwriting. She dare not open it.”

Joy had been taking long walks alone at night, unable to sleep. Words and phrases reverberated through her mind as it raced. “Constitutionally unhappy.” That’s how her husband had described her as their marriage was blowing up. It had been “oppressive” for him, he said.

“He made the unhappiness sound like the core feature of her personality,” Pearson writes. “A suffocating force. The way that Joy looked at the world, pinched and vigilant, bracing for fire ants, falling branches, and tax deadlines, rather than celebrations. But her unhappiness allowed her to get things done!”

Joy eventually musters the courage to open that letter from Karlie. It was written in December 1999, shortly before her death, and is filled with exclamation points and underlined words — Karlie’s “characteristic arbitrary overuse of emphasis” on full display. But the letter holds a clue, one that Joy has not seen in any of the coverage of Karlie’s death, a mention of a BMW that had been pulling up outside her apartment. In the letter Karlie wonders whether it was Joy, but Joy didn’t have a BMW, nor had she been following Karlie to her apartment. Now, nearly two decades later, Joy is determined to find out who it was.

The search takes her back to old haunts in Chapel Hill, where Joy and Karlie went to college and where Joy still lives. She spirals into the depths of internet conspiracy theorists and true-crime Reddit platforms.

Pearson introduces an intriguing cast of characters: the predatory professor who woos his female students; the mother of the man doing time for the crime; the transgender night manager of the apartment building where Karlie was killed; the teenage son of a police chief on the high school soccer team with Joy’s son; people in cult-like religious groups; and more.

She takes her readers on a journey of discovery, giving them a glimpse of each character’s flaws and leaving open the possibility that they might be the killer, while also revealing clues that raise doubts about their potential guilt.

For anyone aware of high profile murders in Chapel Hill over the past couple of decades, there might seem to be some similarities with the 2012 killing of UNC sophomore Faith Hedgepeth and the 2008 death of UNC student body president Eve Carson. But at readings and in published interviews, Pearson has said the book is not based on a true crime. It’s fiction, although as a writer and engaged resident in the area, Pearson acknowledges that she cannot escape true events that continue to haunt the community. Writers write what they know.

Readers will appreciate Pearson’s adroit descriptions of Chapel Hill, places both real and imagined. She takes you onto campus, inside its buildings, and across its many grassy quads and wooded edges. Spots on Franklin Street and in downtown Carrboro are recognizable, as are near-campus neighborhoods.

As Pearson explores the mystery of an inexplicable crime in her novel, she also delves into the many mysteries of the mind. Her novel is a dark, yet tender and bright study of the void a death creates in a community, and the way people use that memory to make sense of themselves. PS

Anne Blythe has been a reporter in North Carolina for more than three decades covering city halls, higher education, the courts, crime, hurricanes, ice storms, droughts, floods, college sports, health care and many wonderful characters who make this state such an interesting place.

2024 Department Omnivorous Reader

Omnivorous Reader

Civil War: Pastand Present

Erik Larson’s The Demon of Unrest

By Stephen E. Smith

Books about the American Civil War sell themselves. Publishers know there’s a loyal audience eager to buy reasonably well-researched volumes about the most tragic event in American history, and that’s enough to keep the bookstore shelves stuffed with warmed-over and newly discovered material. But how does a Civil War historian appeal to a broader audience? Simple: link the events explicated in his book to the present or, even better, to the future.

Erik Larson’s The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War purports to do just that. Larson states in his introduction: “I was well into my research on the saga of Fort Sumter and the advent of the American Civil War when the events of January 6, 2021, took place. As I watched the Capitol assault unfold on camera, I had the eerie feeling that present and past had merged. It is unsettling that in 1861 two of the greatest moments of national dread centered on the certification of the Electoral College vote and the presidential inauguration. . . I suspect your sense of dread will be all the more pronounced in light of today’s political discord, which, incredibly, has led some benighted Americans to whisper once again of secession and civil war.”

The major news networks have been quick to focus on the book’s possible implications, and Larson has appeared on cable news, NPR, and at bookstores and lecture venues across the country to address the possible parallels between the people, places and events of the spring of 1861 and those of the upcoming presidential election.

Which begs two questions. First, is The Demon of Unrest a well-written, thoroughly researched history deserving of the intense scrutiny it is receiving? And second, does the history of the fall of Fort Sumter offer readers insights into the cultural and political divisions in which Americans now find themselves?

The answer to the first question is a resounding yes. Larson is a conscientious researcher, and everything he presents “comes from some form of historical document; likewise, any reference to a gesture, smile, or other physical action comes from an account by one who made it or witnessed it.” He has analyzed a myriad of primary and secondary sources and produced a narrative that proceeds logically from chapter to chapter, illustrating how a false sense of honor and faulty decision-making on both sides of the conflict facilitated the terrible suffering that would be occasioned by the war.

Larson accomplishes this by drawing on the papers and records of the usual suspects — Mary Chesnut, Maj. Robert Anderson (Fort Sumter’s commander), Lincoln, Edmund Ruffin, Abner Doubleday, James Buchanan, Gideon Welles, William Seward, etc. — but he also delves more deeply than earlier historians into more obscure sources, all of which are noted in his extensive bibliography. Much of what he discloses will be revelatory to readers of popular Civil War histories.

The disreputable activities of South Carolina Gov. James Hammond are a startling example. (Hammond is credited with having uttered the oft-repeated “You dare not make war on cotton — no power on earth dares make war upon it. Cotton is king.”) In May 1857, Hammond, an active player in the Fort Sumter narrative, was being considered to fill a vacant seat in the U.S. Senate, even though he was a confessed child predator who molested his four nieces. Hammond wrote in his diary: “Here were four lovely creatures, from the tender but precious girl of 13 to the mature but fresh and blooming woman nearly 19, each contending for my love . . . and permitting my hands to stray unchecked over every part of them and to rest without the slightest shrinking from it.” Hammond not only recorded his misdeeds, he disclosed his indiscretions to friends and suffered no negative political consequences when his pedophilia became public knowledge.

Larson reminds readers that Lincoln’s election also occasioned a demonstration at the Capitol. The crowd might have turned violent, but Gen. Winfield Scott was prepared: “Soldiers manned the entrances and demanded to see passes before letting anyone in. Scott had positioned caches of arms throughout the building. A regiment of troops in plainclothes circulated among the crowd to stop any trouble before it started.”

In a lengthy narrative aside detailing Lincoln’s trip from Springfield to Washington, Larson reveals that the president-elect had to hold a yard sale to pay for his journey to the inaugural and that despite precautions to ensure his safety, an elaborate subterfuge had to be undertaken to sneak Lincoln into the District of Columbia. He was accompanied on the trip by detective Allan Pinkerton, who was determined to foil a supposed plot to assassinate Lincoln before he could be sworn in.

What readers will find most surprising is the degree to which the 19th century concept of “honor” held sway over events surrounding the fall of Sumter. As South Carolina authorities constructed gun emplacements in preparation for a bombardment of the fort, mail service continued with messages to and from Washington passing through Confederate hands without being opened and read. While attempting to starve the fort into surrender, the city of Charleston also attempted to accommodate the garrison with deliveries of beef and vegetables, which Maj. Anderson rejected on the grounds that such resupply was dishonorable.

After months of political finagling, the fort endured an intense 34-hour bombardment before being evacuated. Neither side suffered any dead or wounded; thus, the battle that initiated the bloodiest conflict in American history was bloodless.

The second question — Do the events that followed Fort Sumter’s fall suggest that violent consequences will likewise follow the 2024 presidential election? — is easily answered: No. Cliches such as Santayana’s “Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it” or Twain’s “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme” short circuit critical thinking. Nothing is preordained.

Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, who knows something about the Civil War, recently addressed this question in a commencement speech at Brandeis University. The text of Burns’ address is available online, and readers who believe we’re headed into a second civil war should read what Burns has to say.

The obvious message conveyed by The Demon of Unest is clear: Human beings are foolish, arrogant, and too often given to emotional irrationality that’s self-destructive. There’s nothing new under the sun. Ecclesiastes got that right. PS

Stephen E. Smith is a retired professor and the author of seven books of poetry and prose. He’s the recipient of the Poetry Northwest Young Poet’s Prize, the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Prize for poetry and four North Carolina Press Awards.

2024 Department Omnivorous Reader

Omnivorous Reader

Letters from Death Row

Finding purpose behind bars

By Anne Blythe

Much has been written about how the art of letter writing has been in decline for years — except in prisons. Behind the barbed fences, putting pen to paper remains a vital connection to the world outside the prison walls. It was one such letter that launched Rap and Redemption on Death Row: Seeking Justice and Finding Purpose Behind Bars, a book by Alim Braxton and Mark Katz.

Braxton, born Michael Jerome Jackson on June 1, 1974, has been in prison since he was 19 years old, incarcerated more than a quarter-century of that time on North Carolina’s death row. His co-author, Katz, is a music professor at UNC-Chapel Hill who started the Carolina Hip Hop Institute in the summer of 2019.

Braxton, who chose the Muslim name Alim in prison, read a newspaper story about the program and wrote a letter to Katz in August 2019 asking for help. Rap music had been a big part of Braxton’s life, even before prison. He had been writing and recording lyrics over the phone but was not pleased with the sound quality.

Let’s get this out of the way: Braxton killed three people and robbed two others. He accepts responsibility and apologizes for killing Emmanuel Ogauyo, Donald Bryant and Dwayne Caldwell, as he does for robbing Susan Indula and Lindanette Walker.

“I know my situation may seem despairing and perhaps unlike anyone you’ve worked with before, but despite the circumstances I still have faith and I still have a dream, and I believe that with the right sound and someone who knows what to do with my vocals I can accomplish something BIG!” Braxton wrote to Katz, who held on to the letter for a month.

“I wasn’t sure I wanted to offer my help,” Katz writes in the preface to the book. “I didn’t know him, and after all, this request was coming from a convicted murderer.” He decided to respond anyway.

“I was intrigued by his passion. I also saw an earnestness is his neatly handwritten letter that amplified the sincerity of his words,” Katz writes.

That led to a relationship and the exchange of many letters to build a team of people who worked with Braxton to record his first album — the first-ever recorded from death row — and to this book.

“It wasn’t long into our correspondence that I came to believe that Alim’s letters were worth preserving and making public, and that is what spurred me to suggest the possibility of a book,” Katz writes. “Earlier in my career, I had spent many hours in archives reading correspondence by famous musicians. I would count myself lucky anytime I found a single paragraph of interest out of a batch of letters. That is not the case with Alim’s letters.”

Braxton’s blunt but colorful accounts of how he got to prison and his life inside it are contemplative and eye-opening. He gives readers a glimpse of the inmate hierarchy, the violence, the loss of dignity, privacy and rights, the code of survival and his path to redemption, love, a wife and even hope for the future despite his circumstances.

His rap, which is interspersed with the narrative, is personal and wide-ranging. His lyrics offer views of the George Floyd protests, COVID, pop culture and much more. In telling his story, Braxton wants to make sure that the stories of others — those on death row who maintain their innocence and have cases he believes involve wrongful convictions — are lifted up with his rap.

Braxton grew up in a rough-and-tumble Raleigh neighborhood about 2 miles from Central Prison. There are times he dreams of nearby places he visited as a boy or the rolling Dix Park across the busy boulevard from the prison cell “the size of a bathroom” he now lives in.

“I have fond memories of my childhood growing up in Raleigh, but as I wrote in my song, ‘Unremarkable,’ it’s also where I learned ‘to thug it properly.’ Stealing, fighting and drinking were rites of passage in my neighborhood,” Braxton writes. “My descent into crime didn’t happen overnight. I got my feet wet shoplifting around the age of 11. By the time I was 16 I had gone to prison for two months for stealing a car. I soaked up more criminal knowledge while inside, and after my release, the front gate became a revolving door, with three dozen arrests and three additional stints in prison.”

In vivid detail, Braxton goes on to describe his first time with a gun, his move from a pistol to a sawed-off shotgun, the first time he killed a person, and the almost out-of-body experience he had during those times. It was as if he was playing a role in a movie or a TV show, he wrote. He says the adage “the decisions you make today determine your tomorrow” rolls around in his head, especially when he thinks about the 1993 robbery spree where he claimed the lives of two people.

“Why didn’t I just leave at some point during that February night in 1993?” Braxton writes. “The truth is that I was afraid that I would look weak. I know now that it’s not weak to walk away from something you don’t want to be involved in. . . . Not walking away was a pivotal decision that changed the course of my life forever.”

Not walking away from a conflict in prison is what landed him on death row. He had been spared the death penalty and given two life sentences plus 110 years for the 1993 robbery-turned-kidnapping-turned-murder. Then he stabbed a fellow inmate to death.

Although North Carolina has had a de facto moratorium on the death penalty since 2006 while lawsuits make their way through the courts, the possibility of executions starting again looms.

“The true reality of life on Death Row is that every day is a life of fear, regret and humiliation . . . ,” Braxton wrote in a newspaper letter to the editor published in the book. “I live every day with the fear of standing before my God and accounting for my deeds.” PS

2024 Department Omnivorous Reader

Omnivorous Reader

Sweet Memories

A year on the journey to adulthood

By Jim Moriarty

My freshman year in college was nothing like the one Stephen E. Smith writes about in his memoir The Year We Danced. And yet it was exactly the same.

For any memoir to rise above the level of that dusty old book sitting on the mantel in your grandchildren’s house, it has to reach a level of universality — no easy feat — and The Year We Danced does it without breaking a sweat. Except on the dance floor, that is.

Written with a touch of humor and a bit of heartache by one of North Carolina’s finest poets, Smith’s tale of his freshman year at, then, Elon College in 1965-66 is sweet without being sentimental, poignant without being preachy. While simultaneously being tethered to and free from his family back in Maryland, and with the escalating war in Vietnam a kind of constant buzz in the background, The Year We Danced is nothing less than the launchpad of a life, a survey course in Adult 101 — complete with its own soundtrack. Along the way we’re introduced to an endlessly entertaining cast of characters, drawn by Smith in distinctive, rich detail.

Smith’s father, the boxing coach at the U.S. Naval Academy, had taken control of his son’s college admission process in March and delivered the results in June like an uppercut:

“We were devouring Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks and oven-baked frozen French fries smothered in Hunt’s ketchup, our standard Wednesday evening fare, when he stared at me across the dinner table and stated matter-of-factly, ‘You’re going to North Carolina in the fall.’

“I froze in mid-bite, a flaky chunk of trans-fat-engrossed fish stick balanced on my fork. ‘I am?’

“‘Yeah, you’re going to Elon College,’ he continued. ‘It’s far enough away that you won’t be running home every fifteen minutes.’”

We are introduced to Grandma Drager, who “never forgave her wayward first husband and never passed up a chance to deliver a sermon on the evils of drink,” who travels 350 miles by bus to hand-deliver to a young man about to venture forth into the world a baffling bit of wisdom in six words, memorable only in their towering insignificance — “Promise me you’ll wear tennis shoes.”

Once at Elon, where Smith’s father delivers both him and the message that he doesn’t expect his son to make it through the first semester, Stephen meets his roommate, Carl, who has arranged his shoes in the closet alphabetically by brand and has a pricy collection of 30 or 40 bottles of men’s cologne in parade formation on top of his dresser. “Unfortunately, Carl was the loquacious sort. He was going to sign up for physics and run for class president in addition to majoring in German. Then he started in on his personal life. I had no choice but to lie there in the dark and listen to him brag about his girlfriend, who was a freshman at a college in Virginia, and how they were going to get married before the year was out, a notion that struck me as utterly demented.”

As it turns out, it becomes clear rather quickly that Carl could have benefited from one, or several, of Grandma Drager’s exhortations on demon rum. “In the time we shared room 218, Carl never once exchanged his sheets for clean ones, and the pile of dirty laundry on his desk had spilled onto the floor beside his bed and included many of the garments he’d so neatly arranged in the closet on the first day of orientation. He’d sold off most of his bottles of cologne for beer money, and, as nearly as I could determine, he’d quit going to class altogether.”

On the plus side, Carl became the subject of an essay written by Smith for the spine-chilling professor of English 111, Tully Reed. Smith picked a subject he knew and wrote the hell out of it. When the “The Making of a Derelict,” with copy as clean as anything that ever ran in The New Yorker, gained nothing better than a C– (the highest grade in the class), Smith screwed up the courage to find Tully in his office and ask the fearsome man why.

“‘It’s not A or B work,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘not for a college freshman.’ He handed me my essay, took a drag on his Lucky Strike and returned to slinging red ink.”

Smith’s dance partner, and surely one of the first honest loves of his life, is Blondie, an upperclassman (they weren’t gender neutral in 1965), who can power drink a PBR and dance until curfew, if not dawn. At their favored club, the Castaways, she takes flight. “As I watched, the simple truth dawned on me: We might be at a club where there was only one acceptable dance step, but if Blondie didn’t want to dance the Shag, she didn’t have to. She was beautiful, unique, and she didn’t give a damn about attracting undue attention. She wasn’t there to prove herself to anyone; she was there to have a good time, and she intended to do just that.”

Also unique, and on the other end of the spectrum from the fearsome Tully, was another English professor, Manly Wade Wellman, a prolific author who would eventually call the Sandhills home, just as Smith would and does. “Wellman was barrel-chested and wide-shouldered, his graying hair combed back from his broad forehead. His round, open face was accentuated with heavy eyebrows and a prominent nose below which was cultivated a tweedy, slightly skewed Clark Gable mustache. What was immediately appreciable was the peculiar way in which his eyes reflected light. The very tops of his dark irises flickered, suggesting an inner illumination. . . . If Wellman was insistent, he was also endearing. I was immediately convinced that this guy had a sincere interest in who I was and what I thought. He wanted to know about my latest writing project as if it were of immense concern to the literary community. ‘What are you working on?’ he asked.”

In a few short months, Smith had met both the carrot and the stick.

In the end, Blondie moves on. As all of our Blondies do. Then Smith gets the news that a boyhood friend has been killed in combat. “The spring of ’66 was early in the war, and although the weekly casualties were the highest since our involvement in Vietnam, I doubted anyone at Elon could name a friend who’d died in that distant war. I kept the news to myself.”

But not the sense of helplessness and futility. “I reviewed the times Barrie and I had spent together, my memory sliding from one image to another in no particular sequence — the hours playing hide-and-seek on dusky evenings in the little town of Easton, Maryland, the summer days I visited with him in Salisbury, where we skipped stones from the banks of the Wicomico. But what I remembered most vividly was a summer afternoon in 1957 — we were both eleven — when Barrie and I were singing our favorite top ten rock ‘n’ roll songs and I mentioned that I was fond of a country song, ‘The Tennessee Waltz.’ ‘I can teach you how to play it on the piano,’ he said, and then he sat down at the family’s upright Baldwin and with uncharacteristic purposefulness showed me how to pick out the melody on the white keys. It was a good moment to hold in memory, affirmative and focused, his casual smile, his fingers walking along the ivories.”

Smith’s memoir, to be released this month by Apprentice House Press, is packed full of good moments. If you know someone who is going to be a college freshman — or if you were ever young once yourself — this trip down memory lane is well worth taking. PS

Jim Moriarty is the Editor of PineStraw and can be reached at jjmpinestraw@gmail.com.

2024 Department Omnivorous Reader

Omnivorous Reader

The Color of Music

Symphony of Secrets plucks at the heartstrings

By Anne Blythe

(Photograph By David Bickley)

Brendan Slocumb, a composer-turned-novelist with deep ties to North Carolina, hopes to one day be “the Stephen King of musical thrillers.” That’s what the author of Symphony of Secrets and The Violin Conspiracy told Katie Buzard, an Illinois Public Media arts writer, in a 2023 interview.

With two books in his repertoire from the past two years and a third due out in 2025, the gifted writer is well on pace to keep up with the “King of Horror,” whose first three books were published in a three-year span. Slocumb’s most recent, Symphony of Secrets, has been chosen as one of the 2024 selections for North Carolina Reads, a statewide book club created by N.C. Humanities, a nonprofit affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, because of its exploration of “racial, social and gender equity and the history and culture of North Carolina.”

The book is set mostly in New York but features visits to Oxford and the Granville County public library. Building on some of the same themes from his first book, Slocumb continues to explore the torment of institutional and everyday racism in his second as he toggles between the present day classical music world and the 1920s and ’30s in New York.

The novel opens with Frederic Delaney, a deflated early 20th century composer whose plummet from stardom was almost as rapid as his meteoric rise, going through his pre-concert ritual 16 hours before his death — Champagne poured into two glasses and a toast to a photograph of his as yet unidentified collaborator.

We are quickly introduced to professor Bern Hendricks, a musicologist at the University of Virginia who has been consumed with Delaney (a composer of Slocumb’s invention) for much of his life. He knows every piece, all the operas and songs to the most minute detail.

Bern is deep into one composition, enjoying the layering of the alto and tenor saxes over the French horns — and the “French horns’ epic battle with the trombones, when the horns fought for supremacy, but the trombones would, in just seconds, kick their asses” — when he is summoned by the august and influential Delaney Foundation. It’s the organization that shaped Bern’s life from his early days in Milwaukee as a “poor bologna sandwich-eating kid with a beat-up French horn” to the respected academician he has become.

The foundation has uncovered what is believed to be the original draft of Red, a long-lost Delaney opera and an enigma of modern American music. It doesn’t take much coaxing to lure Bern from the Charlottesville campus to the foundation’s plush New York offices, even with the hush-hush of it all. His task is to authenticate Red, the final piece in Delaney’s Rings Quintet, a series of operas inspired by the yellow, blue, black, green and red rings of the Olympic flag.

What he discovers, though, with the help of Eboni Washington — a brilliant, sassy coding whiz from the Bronx — is a gripping history with the potential to destroy both the reputation of the composer Bern idolizes and the foundation interested in preserving an untarnished image of Delaney.

Central to the plot line is one of the most interesting characters of Slocumb’s Symphony: Josephine Reed, a neurodivergent Black woman from North Carolina with a gift for music. She arrives in New York in 1918 with a small, crumpled piece of paper in her gloved hand. We find out why she has traveled all that distance when she rounds a street corner and hears “a trombone, a clarinet and then a trumpet lifting itself up like a benediction, blessing the air with a run of notes that Josephine breathed in like the smell of the earth after a spring rain.”

She hears the sounds of the city — the subways, elevator doors, automobiles, the wind blowing through tunnels — in musical scales. “The wind whistled in a wavering B-flat up to an F-sharp,” Slocumb writes.

What further sets Josephine apart is how she sees music in colors: pinks, blues, greens, hints of brown, red and more. She has an innate vision and makes distinctive doodles on composition manuscripts that lead to the creation of masterpieces for which she never was credited — Delaney was. It was a photograph of Josephine that Delaney saluted shortly before his death.

Reed becomes a captive in an industry that devalues her because of her skin color and uniqueness. Though she eventually sheds her fragility and finds the confidence to stand up for herself, Josephine’s life comes to a tragic end. With her death, the story of the true composer of the celebrated Delaney operas remains buried until Bern and Eboni find a shipping trunk in the basement of one of Josephine’s distant relatives, and the real source of the operatic sensation that won global acclaim is unearthed.

Slocumb, who grew up in Fayetteville and got a degree in music education from UNC Greensboro, plucks at the heartstrings of his readers throughout Symphony of Secrets. In this fast-paced and galvanizing musical thriller, he reminds us that what’s past is, indeed, prologue, that white supremacy, cultural appropriation and access barriers that existed in the 1920s persist. PS

2024 Department Omnivorous Reader