...........................................................Novel : Valparaiso, Round the Horn by Madeline FFitch (2)
Strange owl, indeed. Not everyone loves this sort of dialogue, but ffitch’s imaginative scenarios (probably further muscled by her years as a performer with The Missoula Oblongata, the punk theater troupe she co-founded) almost demand it. It is the kind of thing that makes these stories a delight to read aloud.
ffitch’s characters may live on the fringes of contemporary or “plain” society, as Frank puts it in “Fort Clatsop,” but that society still leaves their stamp on them, and they wrestle with what they’ve inherited—especially in what you might call matters of the soul. The Granddad in “Storm Beach” raises Edmond to “make up his own religion, his own method, his own blueprint reason.” Still, he makes that journey down the cliffs to baptize the baby, though no one is there to witness it. The rite itself has meaning for him, even though the traditional theology may not.
In “The Private Fight,” a white man, Maxwell Conley, is on his deathbed and desperate to talk with a black man, Murray Rose, whom he hasn’t seen for years. These two men have an old, brief, intense connection: as teenagers, Murray saved Maxwell’s life—but a short while later, grieving and angry after the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Murray also said to Maxwell: “White boy ain’t got no soul.” Murray was a teenager in a moment of anguish when he spoke those words, but they have haunted the white man ever since. Maxwell was raised Catholic and though he’s mostly lived apart from that faith, the question still plagues him. Now Maxwell is desperate to talk to Murray, craving confirmation that he, Maxwell, does have a soul.
Through Murray’s response, a monologue to the dying man’s niece, ffitch deftly tackles some of the racial baggage inherent in all this—including Maxwell’s belief that somehow, as a black man, Murray should be expected to have more authority on souls:
I don’t want to hurt your uncle’s feelings now, not when he’s sick and worried, but if he wants to sit there turning us into symbols, it just won’t work, man, and it’ll only make things worse. You think I know more about souls than you people do? Do you think that’s because I’m black?... I’m no priest.
Even so, the weight of this question on Maxwell’s mind, and the story’s placement as the book’s penultimate one, lends it some import in the book as a whole. Souls are the territory of humans, all humans, ffitch seems to argue, and some ways of human living enlarge our souls, and some ways impoverish them. Finally, as Maxwell dies, “what he wants most is to be unmanaged. He wants to be twelve years old and alone with his dog, coming down Mount Rainier in the night, down past the timberline, where the Douglas firs begin.” There it is again: the draw to wild places. The desires of characters like Maxwell and others in this book may reveal a bit of the author’s belief that these wild places are the territory where the human soul most comes alive.
Or perhaps not. Maybe to live soulfully has less to do with whether we can burn our grandfathers’ bodies on beaches and more to do with a certain honest alertness and compassion-in-action, which is also in abundance in the book. It’s right there in Murray’s monologue—which is spoken in Seattle, in the “modern world”—in the fact that he speaks it to Maxwell’s niece and not the dying man himself, in his desire not to hurt Maxwell unnecessarily, though he cannot answer his question.
Whether your home base is rural, like ffitch’s, or you dwell in the city or in the suburbs, as I do, finding a potent book like this frees up the imagination—resets the moral compass—not through moralizing, but by jarring us. I read this book aloud, story by story, to my husband on our commute, and each time, it jolted me out of routine. It made me feel alive.
Jen Hinst-White recently completed her first novel, Inklings. It centers on a tattoo shop in the rural, working-class Long Island of the early 1980s.
ffitch’s characters may live on the fringes of contemporary or “plain” society, as Frank puts it in “Fort Clatsop,” but that society still leaves their stamp on them, and they wrestle with what they’ve inherited—especially in what you might call matters of the soul. The Granddad in “Storm Beach” raises Edmond to “make up his own religion, his own method, his own blueprint reason.” Still, he makes that journey down the cliffs to baptize the baby, though no one is there to witness it. The rite itself has meaning for him, even though the traditional theology may not.
In “The Private Fight,” a white man, Maxwell Conley, is on his deathbed and desperate to talk with a black man, Murray Rose, whom he hasn’t seen for years. These two men have an old, brief, intense connection: as teenagers, Murray saved Maxwell’s life—but a short while later, grieving and angry after the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Murray also said to Maxwell: “White boy ain’t got no soul.” Murray was a teenager in a moment of anguish when he spoke those words, but they have haunted the white man ever since. Maxwell was raised Catholic and though he’s mostly lived apart from that faith, the question still plagues him. Now Maxwell is desperate to talk to Murray, craving confirmation that he, Maxwell, does have a soul.
Through Murray’s response, a monologue to the dying man’s niece, ffitch deftly tackles some of the racial baggage inherent in all this—including Maxwell’s belief that somehow, as a black man, Murray should be expected to have more authority on souls:
I don’t want to hurt your uncle’s feelings now, not when he’s sick and worried, but if he wants to sit there turning us into symbols, it just won’t work, man, and it’ll only make things worse. You think I know more about souls than you people do? Do you think that’s because I’m black?... I’m no priest.
Even so, the weight of this question on Maxwell’s mind, and the story’s placement as the book’s penultimate one, lends it some import in the book as a whole. Souls are the territory of humans, all humans, ffitch seems to argue, and some ways of human living enlarge our souls, and some ways impoverish them. Finally, as Maxwell dies, “what he wants most is to be unmanaged. He wants to be twelve years old and alone with his dog, coming down Mount Rainier in the night, down past the timberline, where the Douglas firs begin.” There it is again: the draw to wild places. The desires of characters like Maxwell and others in this book may reveal a bit of the author’s belief that these wild places are the territory where the human soul most comes alive.
Or perhaps not. Maybe to live soulfully has less to do with whether we can burn our grandfathers’ bodies on beaches and more to do with a certain honest alertness and compassion-in-action, which is also in abundance in the book. It’s right there in Murray’s monologue—which is spoken in Seattle, in the “modern world”—in the fact that he speaks it to Maxwell’s niece and not the dying man himself, in his desire not to hurt Maxwell unnecessarily, though he cannot answer his question.
Whether your home base is rural, like ffitch’s, or you dwell in the city or in the suburbs, as I do, finding a potent book like this frees up the imagination—resets the moral compass—not through moralizing, but by jarring us. I read this book aloud, story by story, to my husband on our commute, and each time, it jolted me out of routine. It made me feel alive.
Jen Hinst-White recently completed her first novel, Inklings. It centers on a tattoo shop in the rural, working-class Long Island of the early 1980s.
