Mr. Tall by Tony Earley

I know I've mentioned here how much I like Tony Earley's short stories. Somehow this most recent collection escaped my notice till a few days ago. 

It didn't escape the Washington Post's notice -- they named it one of the top 50 fiction books for 2014. The NYT gave it a big writeup in the Sunday Book Review. Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review --- how did I miss this when it came out last year? I must have been under a rock at the time.

The minute, I mean the very minute, I read about this book,  I ordered a hard cover copy AT ONCE from Amazon. Then I decided to read the preview pages on line and started in on the opening story, "Haunted Castles of the Barrier Islands."

I was hooked. Tony E.'s voice is so perfect -- the characters are so real -- I couldn't leave them after the little taste the preview had given me.  It would be days -- two or three at least -- before the book got here. So I did what any reasonable person would do -- sought instant gratification and ordered the e-book for my Kindle.  And finished the book that night. The hardcover copy can stay nice and clean till some future date when I can get it autographed.

There are seven lovely stories in the collection -- several of which were first published in The New Yorker. One -- the enticingly quirky "Jack and the Mad Dog" -- I talked about in my post on METAFICTION. (I adore this extended tour de force of English major humor.)

Actually, I  loved them all -- and loved the fact that places and characters tend to migrate from one story to another. And what characters they are -- a lonely young bride spies on her strange neighbor, a widow is visited by what may have been the Southern version of Bigfoot, the ghost of Jesse James is hiding in an old woman's basement in Nashville. . . 

The writing is so, so perfect -- funny, sad, and beautiful -- that it kinda makes me want to cry. And start over and read right through again. Which I'm doing -- taking it slower, savoring every morsel... 

Need I say, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED?

Metafiction

 I learned something new last weekend. I learned the term metafiction which some have described as fiction looking at itself. Here's how it happened.

 While I was at the Carolina Mountains Literary Festival, I made a special point of going to Tony Earley's reading. (I've mentioned Tony before and how much I love his writing.) He read an unpublished story about Jack -- that Jack, the Jack of the Jack Tales,  -- Jack the Giant Killer, Jack and the Beanstalk -- you probably know Jack.

The Jack Tales are simple folk tales that came over from England and have been told throughout the Appalachians. The author Richard Chase collected a good many. In these tales, Jack is sometimes simple-minded but always victorious. And the other characters -- the millers, the giants, the maidens, the old man on the road -- are stock one-dimensional characters.

 In Tony's delightful story, the stock characters rebel against their assigned roles. The maidens (oh! those maidens) have a lot to say about Jack's treatment of them in the old stories.  

I was entranced. And when the reading was over, I asked Tony to let me know when the story was published so I could get a copy. 

"It's going to be in The New Yorker sometime soon," he said.

Now, Tony has had stories in this august publication before but I expressed surprise that The New Yorker would be interested in a Jack Tale.

"Well," he explained, "it's because it's metafiction."

"Oh, ahh," I said, nodding and trying to look wise, "metafiction."

(As it happened, I had to hurry off to another event and I wasn't forced to betray my woeful ignorance.)

As well as being a graduate of a MFA program, Tony is professor of creative writing at Vanderbilt. He knows this stuff. My last encounter with literary academia was about forty years ago and I have a real feeling this term wasn't in use then.

So I went to Mr. Google and quickly found some good definitions: Oxford English Dictionary says that metafiction is fiction in which the author self-consciously alludes to the artificiality or literariness of a work by parodying or departing from novelistic conventions and traditional narrative techniques.

Another source speaks of a book, either directly or through the characters, being 'aware' that it is a form of fiction. A book looking at itself in a mirror, as I said.


I also learned that many of my favorite books fall into the category of metafiction -- Tristram Shandy and Northanger Abbey to begin with -- metafiction before there was the name.  Here's a short list of some more:

 Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
Sophie’sWorld - Jostein Gaarder
Possession – A.S. Byatt
French Lieutenant’s Woman - John Fowles
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell – Susannah Clarke
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams





There are several excellent links that explain metafiction at length but I'll leave it to those of you who're interested to ask Mr. Google. Me, I'm just tickled to have learned a new and useful word!

Carolina Mountains Literary Festival . . . and a Surprise

I'm back -- and what a weekend!!!

I couldn't make it to Burnsville in time for the opening of the three hour session on the Cherokee Removal -- aka the Long Walk or the Trail of Tears -- but managed to slide in for the last hour. Such a sad story but one that, like that of the Holocaust, should never be forgotten.

There was time for a quick lunch with Sallie Bissell and Rose Senehi, the other two members of the panel I moderated yesterday, and then on to attend an incredible session with the multi-talented John Grant Jr, who played the Native American wooden flute and told Cherokee folk tales.

John was followed by Myrtle Driver ( this picture doesn't do her justice) a native Cherokee speaker who has translated Charles Frazer's Thirteen Moons into Cherokee. Barbara Duncan, Education Director for the Museum of the Cherokee Indian (in Cherokee, NC and well worth a visit!) read a scene in English and then Myrtle gave a very dramatic reading in Cherokee -- a lovely sound that I guess reminds me (in my limited experience with different languages) a bit of Japanese but somehow more musical.

When the reading was over, I approached these folks to tell them how very much I'd enjoyed the whole session and was thrilled when Barbara Duncan said she loved my books.

"You do?" I stammered. "Have you read Old Wounds? Did I get the Cherokee stuff right?"

When she said that I had, I felt like I'd just won a prize -- I did research, of course, but I didn't have anyone to check on my assumptions. So I have, ever since the books came out, hoped that I hadn't made some really dumb mistake or, even worse, said something offensive.

Whew! A load lifted!

That was Friday. On Saturday morning I led a three hour workshop of writing fools -- they wrote and wrote and wrote! It's amazing what interesting and accomplished stuff came out of a very quick workshop. They were given pictures (torn from magazines) of people and places and asked to construct a dialogue between two people in their pictures in a setting based on the picture they'd chosen. They all rose to the challenge, constructing little vignettes that left us all saying "And then what happened?" A great class!

That afternoon I did a solo presentation with a slide show -- you all have seen all the pictures -- going on behind me while I read selections from all four Elizabeth books. And then the panel, where all three of us talked about using the mystery to address social and environmental issues.

The festival ended with a banquet where I sat with another mystery writer, the charming Suzanne Adair. Fred Chappell, former NC poet laureate, spoke and read a poem created for the occasion -- actually, a poem within a poem. Another wow! moment.

I was up early this morning, on the road before 7 AM and arrived home in time for breakfast with John. Unpacking, laundry, email, bills to be paid, lunch (incredible leftover pizza by our own Papa John), and I was just settling down to post on this blog when the phone rang.

"Hi, Vicki? It's Tony Earley. We're in Mars Hill , on our way to Tennessee, and thought we'd come by."

I posted a while back about my admiration of Tony so all I'll say is I can't think of a better close to a literary weekend than to sit and rock on the front porch with the Earleys and their beautiful little girl.

Tony Earley and The Blue Star

After finishing Tony Earley’s new novel The Blue Star, I spent much of yesterday in a bit of a daze, reluctant to leave this perfect gem of a book.

The long-awaited sequel to Jim the Boy, Earley’s critically acclaimed bestseller, The Blue Star takes up Jim’s story when, as a senior in high school at the beginning of WWII, he falls in love with Chrissie, a beautiful, half-Cherokee classmate. But Chrissie is the reluctant girlfriend of an older boy, recently enlisted in the Navy, and Jim’s path to true love is full of obstacles.

The writing is spare and heart-breakingly beautiful. Set in rural North Carolina, this deceptively simple story is a small masterpiece.

Full disclosure along with name-dropping: I’m proud to claim acquaintance with Tony Earley. We met at a book fair, back when I had an agent but no publisher as yet and he was kind and encouraging to an aspiring author of (oh dear) genre mysteries. Then, when my first book came out, he was even kinder, taking time from his writing and teaching to read my book and give it a nice quote. (I suspect that the Little Sylvie part of the book was more nearly his cup of tea than the rest.) He has continued to go out of his way to encourage me whenever our paths have crossed -- and one of my fondest memories is of having dinner with him and his lovely wife and daughter, after which Tony read me a story of his which would soon be in The New Yorker. Is that cool, or what!?! (Do I sound like a groupie?)

If I had fully realized, back when I first met him, what an amazing and important writer Tony is, I’d never have had the nerve to do more than humbly ask for his autograph. Luckily for me, he’s as nice a person as the folks he writes about.

The New York Times reviewed the book at length on Thursday --
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/06/books/06masl.html
(And by the way, I heartily disagree with this reviewer’s two small quibbles. What the reviewer found fault with, I particularly enjoyed.)

And tomorrow, it’s the lead story for the NYT Book Review. With a review by Scott Turow.
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/books/

Couldn’t happen to a better writer or a nicer guy!