Then a very sad thing happens. Desperate to see Mathilde again, Manuch wounds himself and applies for medical leave. But the authorities are convinced his wound is self-inflicted, a common occurrence. He protests, but they don’t believe him; they are sure he has wounded himself, this happens all the time, and he is court-martialed, convicted , and sentenced to be placed in no-man’s-land, in between the French and German trenches to be shot at or not, who cares. He will certainly be killed, he and the four others who are in the same situation. So that is the end of the story of Mathilde and Manuch.
Ah, but the Fates have not reckoned with Mathilde. I can’t tell you what happens except to say that you’ll be surprised. It is a very fine book of its kind. It will not disappoint you, but you will probably have to read it twice before you understand everything that happens. (I’m slow—I had to read it three times.)
Sébastien Japrisot died in 2003.
TONI MORRISON
1931–
Song of Solomon
Beloved
Toni Morrison (her real name is Chloe Anthony Wofford) was born in Lorain, Ohio, in 1931—apparently, a good year for authors. She studied humanities at Howard University and earned a B.A. in 1953; she then went to Cornell, where she gained an M.A. After graduation she became an instructor at Texas Southern University (1955–57), then returned to Howard to teach English. All the time she was writing with increasing craft.
Her third novel, Song of Solomon, was published in 1977. Beloved appeared ten years later. A sensation, it earned her the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. The Nobel citation described her as one “who, in novels characterized by visionary force and import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.”
Morrison embodies the African-American voice; her books see the American reality from the viewpoint of someone who is in some ways an outsider and in others at the center of things. Her eminently readable novels are very fine and strange, which the best books almost always are. But they are eminently readable by all kinds of people, young and old, male and female, black and white. That includes just about everybody, doesn’t it?
CORMAC MCCARTHY
1933–
The Border Trilogy
The Road
Cormac McCarthy was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1933. He moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1937 and studied at the University of Texas from 195l-52. He served in the U.S. Air Force in 1953–57, then returned to Knoxville and the University of Tennessee, bought a barn, rebuilt and renovated it, largely with his own hands. He is that kind of a man. He was a MacArthur Fellow, which allowed him to live wherever he desired. He moved to Tesuque, a town north of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and began to write full time. I believe he had always known that was likely to happen.
The three books of The Border Trilogy began to appear in 1992, with the publication of All the Pretty Horses. It was followed by The Crossing (1994) and Cities of the Plain (1998). The trilogy is an extraordinary achievement and constitutes one of the finest literary works of the twentieth century.
My wife, Gerry, and I were driving west to Chicago and then Aspen from our Connecticut home in 1993, and I had bought an audio tape of All the Pretty Horses for the ride. Neither of us was prepared for the power and beauty of the first part of the book as read by Brad Pitt (at a time when he wasn’t Brad Pitt yet). Several times we had to stop along the Interstate to rest and try to get our breath back, to prepare ourselves to resume the reading. At the time Pitt had not recorded the unabridged version, so I bought a copy and read it to Gerry while she drove, and she read it to me while I did. We were enormously impressed.
The experience was particularly moving because driving south and east from Aspen we traversed some of the Texas country in which the story is set. Not exactly the same, but the same kind—horse country, where cattle used to roam. I’m no horseman, although my wife was a good rider when she was young, but I somehow felt that I was on the horse with John Grady Cole as he rode through those dry, parched, empty lands. I felt with him and understood his suffering as the country changed before his very eyes, as it has done by the end of the trilogy, much of which takes place in northern Mexico.
The Road is a novel about a father and son who are riding eastward after a nuclear holocaust has destroyed all of the world they inhabit. I know it is a very fine book but I haven’t gotten the strength to read it yet; but I will, because it is by Cormac McCarthy.
LARRY MCMURTRY
1936–
Lonesome Dove
Larry McMurtry was born in Wichita Falls, Texas, in 1936. He went to high school in nearby Anchor City, the backdrop of his novel The Last Picture Show, published in 1966. Lonesome Dove won a Pulitzer Prize in 1986. It had been preceded by other good books and has been followed by still others, but it is unique. It deserves to be considered in the same breath as The Border Trilogy, although it is not as “grand.”
The story is mainly about two men, “Gus” McCrae and Woodrow F. Call, both of them retired Texas Rangers, who with the help of several others are driving a herd of cattle north from Texas to Montana. There is also a blue pig who accompanies them all the way and a young woman who was abandoned by her man and has become a prostitute because there is nothing else she can do. Her name is Lorie, and she is very pretty. She owes her life to Gus so she goes with them, too. Extraordinary things happen along the way, things you will never forget, not least the capture of Lorie by Blue Duck, a malicious half breed who threatens to burn her alive if … Well, Gus doesn’t let that happen, but he is wounded and … I don’t want to tell you any more; it’s too much fun finding out for yourself—fun and sad, too.
DANIEL QUINN
1935–
Ishmael
Daniel Quinn was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1935. He studied at St. Louis University, the University of Vienna, and Loyola University, but he was all the time thinking about the history of mankind and the question Rousseau had answered with his Discourse on Inequality: Why does inequality and the inevitable poverty that accompanies it exist, and how did they come into being? As a very young man, Quinn discovered a very simple answer to the question—namely, that sometime in the not too distant past, some of the people on Earth locked up all the food and charged all the rest a fee if they wanted to eat it. They also declared that all the agricultural land belonged to them, and if others wanted to use it, they had to pay a fee for that, too. Simple, right?
But what to do about it? That’s more complicated, and it’s the subject of Daniel Quinn’s fine book, Ishmael (1996), and of its successors, The Story of B (1996) and My Ishmael (1997). Answering the question requires a lot of searching into the past, for example into the Book of Genesis, where the story of Cain and Abel is given a slant that may never have occurred to you. Many other hoary truths are shown to be not necessarily true, and probably false. A vision of a good world on a good Earth eventually emerges, seen through the bright eyes of Ishmael, who is not a person. What he actually is will shock you, but you will soon get over that discovery and feel you have learned something very important, although you will have trouble trying to explain it to anybody else. As I am having trouble now.