Bookworm: August 2024
'Mr. Texas,' 'The Hole We're In,' 'High Skies,' 'The Train to Crescent City,' 'Just For the Summer'
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This month’s reading list was shaped partly by a week in Texas, where I attended a conference and then enjoyed some vacation time with the family. Let me tell you: 100 degrees and humid is not for the faint of heart. Thank goodness for air conditioning, rivers and the escapism of reading.
Table of contents
Political fiction: “Mr. Texas,” by Lawrence Wright
Fiction: “The Hole We’re In,” by Gabrielle Zevin
Historical fiction: “High Skies,” by Tracy Daugherty
U.S. history: “The Train to Crescent City,” by Jan Jarboe Russell
Romance: “Just For the Summer,” by Abby Jimenez
“Mr. Texas”
This book came to me through a friend who once lived in Texas and worked in the Texas Legislature.
The Texas Capitol, in Austin, graces the cover of “Mr. Texas,” a 2023 satirical political novel by Lawrence Wright, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for The New Yorker. As I tried to summarize the plot for my husband, he suggested Frank Capra’s classic 1939 film “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” about an idealistic young man, played perfectly by Jimmy Stewart, who tries valiantly to keep hold of his ideals among political compromise and corruption.
That’s it, I said. It’s “Rancher Smith Goes to Austin.”
Wright is a longtime Austin resident and drew heavily on real-life Texas political figures to create his characters. They orbit around Sonny Lamb, a West Texas rancher leading a life of anonymous desperation until a chance moment of heroism, captured by a TV news crew, propels him into the line of sight of Austin’s leading lobbyist, L.D. Sparks.
L.D. just happens to be in need of a Republican candidate to replace one of his loyal state representatives, who’s moved on to the Big Ranch in the Sky. Sonny begs off at first, saying he has no political experience whatsoever. His Democratic rival — a former schoolmate — is far more polished, popular and prepared. Don’t worry, L.D. says. we always win. And they do, but only after Sonny takes his first anguished step down the moral slippery slope.
I particularly liked Wright’s wry humor. Here’s a scene in which Sonny arrives at the Capitol as a shiny-new legislator after that anguish-causing campaign. As he wanders around feeling the full weight of Texas history on his shoulders, he crosses paths with a teacher leading her fourth-grade students on a highly opinionated tour. When she learns who Sonny is, she pounces.
“See, class,” the teacher said, “this is what I’ve been telling you. One more white man to run the state. I get so tired.” She asked Sonny, “Aren’t there any qualified women in your district?”
“As a matter of fact, the lady I beat was a lot more qualified.”
The teacher nodded, reaffirmed in her beliefs. The encounter fit nicely with her lesson plan, that the patriarchy was in charge and women were subjugated and not given the opportunities to flourish because of people just like him, and this was doubly true in Texas. “Well, welcome to Austin,” she said from a towering moral height.
“The Hole We’re In”
Since thoroughly enjoying Gabrielle Zevin’s 2022 best-seller “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow,” I’ve been curious about her other novels. So I requested one from the library. Like “Tomorrow,” Zevin’s 2010 novel, “The Hole We’re In,” is a detailed portrait of people in a subculture, in this case a fundamentalist Christian family.
Roger Pomeroy is an assistant high school principal who decides while sitting through his son’s college graduation ceremony that he’s spent enough time making sacrifices for his wife and three children, and it’s time for them to make some sacrifices for him. His decision to move to Texas and pursue a Ph.D. sends all five Pomeroys down a rabbit hole of frustrated dreams, financial debt and family dysfunction. The harder they scrabble to get out of this hole, the deeper they dig themselves. Roger, a proudly pious husband and father, breaks his marriage vows. His wife, Georgia, known as George, alternatively ignores the household bills and resorts to desperate tactics to pay them. One set of secrets, lies and misunderstandings begets another.
When Roger and George’s youngest child, Patsy, is thought to have committed a particularly egregious sin, her father punishes her by denying her the money meant for her college education. She retaliates by enlisting in the Army, which sends her to Iraq. To her dismay, she returns from her tour of duty to find she’s no closer to escaping the family rabbit hole than before. In fact, she’s deeper down.
Zevin has created characters who are not particularly likable but still engaging due to their relatability. We’ve all been down one rabbit hole or another, dug in by our own and others’ choices.
At one point in the novel, George accidentally approves the wrong exterior paint for her house: a gaudy fire-truck red instead of a tasteful brick red. This sets up a showdown with her older daughter, who has insisted that the house be repainted, never mind that the family can’t really afford to do so, so she’ll have a proper backdrop for her wedding there. The book’s cover depicts this moment with a split illustration showing how the house could have looked and how it actually ended up looking. As I looked at this illustration, I found myself thinking, It was never about the color. It was all about the hole.
“High Skies”
The author Tracy Daugherty has lived in Oregon for a long time now, but he was born and raised in Midland, Texas, and it’s the setting for his 2020 novella, “High Skies.” I received a copy a few years ago but hadn’t gotten around to reading it. It seemed like a good companion for a Texas trip.
“High Skies” takes place in the late 1950s, amid the Red Scare, school desegregation and other societal tremors. In the small-town world of Midland, this unsettling zeitgeist combines with a series of severe, dangerous dust storms to create a perfect community storm, with a local school smack in the eye.
Ten-year-old Troy and his friend Stevie live at the social margins of their school, ridiculed for Troy’s asthma and Stevie’s crutches. The other students do agree with them in one way: They all adore Mr. Seaker, the vice principal, an Air Force veteran who always has time for each of them. After Mr. Seaker runs off a quartet of teen boys who are loitering next to the school playground and unnerving the girls, he becomes a hero to his students’ parents as well.
But amid change and uncertainty, fear soon arrives in Midland, and it catches Mr. Seaker off guard. That’s because he’s already beset by his own fears, which led him to decide against re-enlisting and to pivot to a career in education. When the other adults in Midland turn on Mr. Seaker as an all too-convenient scapegoat, Troy can only watch helplessly. “High Skies” is a compelling portrait of a community in a tailspin.
“The Train to Crescent City”
Some years ago I published a list of books about the World War II incarceration of 120,000 Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans from the West Coast who were deemed a threat to national security because of their ancestry. A reader emailed to recommend “The Train to Crystal City,” by journalist Jan Jarboe Russell, noting that the book shed light on similar imprisonments of German immigrants and German Americans. I started reading the book but didn’t get far. This time, I finished it.
Crystal City, Texas, was chosen as the site of a unique “family camp” for men who’d been labeled “enemy aliens” and their wives and children. Those who entered Crystal City knew they were giving up their freedom indefinitely in exchange for being together again after months or years of separation following the men’s arrests. What they didn’t know was that they’d been granted these reunions so they could all be used as pawns in a secret, elaborate prisoner exchange program between the U.S. and its World War II enemies, Japan and Germany. So elaborate was this program that it extended to other countries: Japanese Peruvians, for example, were arrested in their country and held at Crystal City before being shipped to Japan. When a pregnant German immigrant gave birth on her way to Crystal City, the newborn was promptly added to the list of those to be exchanged for U.S. prisoners of war in Germany.
Some of the 4,000 people held at Crystal City during its six years of operation could be said to have posed genuine threats, such as several followers of Hitler who tried to organize other German inmates into a branch of the Nazi party. Most, however, had been snatched out of ordinary lives simply because of their ethnicity. As at other World War II camps, many prisoners were U.S. citizens. Many of the children didn’t speak German or Japanese and were put in language classes.
To research the book, Russell pored over federal and personal documents and interviewed former Crystal City prisoners. She found that while some program administrators viewed their work as a wartime necessity, others struggled with their consciences from the start and later came to regret their roles. She focused on two families in particular, one Japanese and one German, detailing how they came to America, their lives before the war, their camp experiences, and their experiences after their deportations. Many from Crystal City were shunned and mistreated as they tried to build new lives in Japan and Germany. Many carried the trauma of their imprisonment for the rest of their lives.
The U.S. government apologized in 1988 to Japanese Americans for their wartime incarceration and made reparations for the losses they suffered. German Americans who were sent to Crystal City have asked for similar redress but have never received any.
“Just For the Summer”
This month my book club met at one member’s lake house, so we read a lake-themed book: “Just For the Summer,” the latest title from best-selling romance author Abby Jimenez. Much of the action takes place at Lake Minnetonka in Minnesota, where Jimenez lives.
Emma Grant, a travel nurse, never meant to go to Minnesota. She and her best friend and fellow nurse, Maddy, have been eagerly anticipating their upcoming contract in Hawai’i. But then Maddy shows Emma a Reddit post about a guy’s dating curse, Emma impulsively messages him saying she has the same curse, he writes back from Minnesota, they click — aaaand we have a change of plans.
Jimenez could have left the story as a classic slow-burn romance. But she takes a deep dive into Emma’s tumultuous history with her seriously unreliable mother, which gives Emma a tendency to isolate herself on an emotional island whenever she feels unable to control a situation. Meanwhile, the guy, Justin, is dealing with the life-changing consequences of his own mother’s behavior following his father’s unexpected death.
Jimenez also gives star billing to Emma and Maddy’s friendship — here are women who have each other’s backs 100 percent. Last but not least, “Just For the Summer” is a love letter to Minnesota. I’d definitely hook up with another title by Jimenez.