MEGAN STAFFEL

 

 Set in the sparsely populated state of Texas in 1870, this is the story of a relationship between Captain, a seventy-two-year-old man who makes his living as a reader of the news in small towns in northern Texas, and a ten-year-old white girl captured by a Native American tribe that he is returning to her German relatives outside of San Antonio.  This long and dangerous journey through the uninhabited territory of Texas is the action of the novel.  It unfolds in a mostly linear fashion with few flashbacks.  The Captain and Johanna are an odd pair in their small, light excursion wagon with the previous owner's business, "Curative Waters," lettered on its sides, one horse pulling, one horse following, and side curtains protecting their belongings which include a small cookstove the Captain teaches Johanna to use.
 
The Captain is a veteran of three wars and his knowledge of people, native tribes as well as the inhabitants of the towns they pass through, shows the reader that he is a careful, discerning, and moral man, who takes his duty seriously, even though his reluctant charge only wants to return to the Kiowa tribe that held her for four years and then sold her back to the white man.  Johanna thinks of herself as Kiowa and has forgotten English, German, and the habits of white people, including the wearing of dresses and eating with forks.   She is a warrior at heart, fighting the Captain and the ladies he pays to bathe and clothe her and at every opportunity, trying to escape.  When he teaches her how to cook on the stove, she makes their meals happily, but when he shows her where he stores his extra ammunition (in the canister of flour) and how to use the shotgun that is backup to the rifle he carries himself, the reader suspects he is too trusting.  But the gesture proves to be wise because slowly, Johanna becomes a true partner.
 
We learn about the Captain's previous life through backstory; before marrying and settling down in San Antonio where he had two daughters with his beloved Mexican wife and ran a print shop, the Captain was a messenger for the military. Those early years, carrying messages from one calvary unit to another, were happy ones, as is his present occupation as a news reader.  He is a nomad at heart, Johanna is too, but the Captain, as careful and wise as he appears to be, as knowledgeable about guns, is not a true warrior like his young charge, he is not even carrying enough ammunition for his rifle.  When they are attacked by a curious threesome who have been tracking them since their journey started, a white man who wants to steal Johanna for prostitution, and the two Caddos Indians that travel with him, the battle that follows may be the most exciting in all of literary fiction.  The Captain quickly runs out of bullets and they appear to be beaten.  That is when the child warrior comes into her own and they vanquish the enemy by brilliant and unusual means.
 
For the last hundred pages the dangers continue, but there is a new respect between them, even love.  The Captain thinks he is finished with love, but although they outwitted the evil pedophile, the journey to return Johanna to her relatives is not over yet, and love will call on him once again.

 
News of the World is a masterpiece of character development because Jiles is a supremely visual writer.  That may be a curious thing to say, but I believe that is the quality that makes it truly exceptional.  The narrator's eye in this third person novel (mostly limited to the Captain's point of view, but with occasional forays into Johanna's point of view as well as the point of view of a horse and a bird, so I will call it omniscient), continually shows us what things look like.  We see how the land changes; we see how the rigors of the journey alter the Captain's appearance, and we see how Johanna wrestles with the dresses she is imprisoned in, at one point tucking the annoying skirts into her belt so she seems to be wearing pantaloons.  These visuals mark the changes in their behavior and attitude; when Johanna braids her hair, she is preparing for battle, when the Captain puts on his worn and stained travelling clothes, he is no longer the elegant old man reading the news, but an armed nomad.
 
It is a cinematic novel, but what drew me in, from the beginning, and kept on feeding me as I read, was the pleasure of the language.  The sentences flow nimbly, words and punctuation are chosen for the rhythm and sound that will reveal the Captain's deepest thoughts.  Interiority is always accompanied by the visual.  As you will see in the following excerpt, the character's revelations feel anything but arbitrary because they're rooted in the concrete world and expressed though the, by now, familiar rhythms of his thoughts.  "He sat on his carpetbag and leaned against a wheel.  His mind kept going back to the fight and to put it aside he watched Pasha graze and drank black coffee and smoked his pipe.  Johanna played in the stream like a six-year-old.  She turned over rocks and sang and splashed.  To comfort himself and slow down his mind he thought of his time as a courier, a runner, and Maria Luisa and his daughters. Maybe life is just carrying news.  Surviving to carry the news.  Maybe we have just one message, and it is delivered to us when we are born and we are never sure what it says; it may have nothing to do with us personally but it must be carried by hand through a life, all the way, and at the end handed over, sealed"(121).
 
By the end of their journey, the reader knows what that message is, even if the Captain professes ignorance.  The reader has received it, and for this reader, it is radiant. 
 
Jiles, Paulette.  News of the World.  New York: Harper Collins, 2016.
 
 
 

 

 

Forster's subject is India under British rule and his principal character, the very dignified Dr. Aziz, is a Moslem who works in an English-run hospital.  Secondary characters in this third person omniscient narrative are English, Hindu, and Moslem.  Published in 1924, its subject is friendship across racial and cultural boundaries.  The love between Aziz and Mrs. Moore, an elder English woman who is in India as a visitor, and Cyril Fielding, an English resident, unfolds through dialogue that expresses their deepest feelings.  That these moments of honesty rise up within a racist society makes them seem even more remarkable.  Forster skewers the English, making them appear ridiculous, culminating with Miss Quested's sexual hysteria, moving her to accuse Aziz of an unspecified impropriety we are meant to assume is rape, but in actuality is an over-active imagination pressured by racism.  That it happened inside a cave, a dark, damp, echoing setting, is wonderfully comic.  But Forster's objective is more complicated than simple ridicule of the English, or simple exposure of their cruelties.  After all, Aziz, the accused, is locked up in a jail cell because bail is not allowed for so "heinous" a crime.  Forster has a greater, more inclusive vision and we see it at play in the courtroom scene as Miss Quested testifies.  In the course of her account, she has a moment of clarity.  She finds her way through the blur of paranoid fantasy to an actual memory, and realizes, as all eyes are upon her, that Aziz had not been in the cave at all.  She was mistaken.  She recognizes that the heat, the darkness, and the terrible echo had produced a hallucination and she emerges from it, just in time, and in a very public way, to save the life of a respectable and good man.  

 

This courtroom scene stretches across sixteen pages.  Miss Quested is brought into the courtroom with her English friends and seated.  There is a change in seating, a chant from outside as Indians call for a missing witness, and the back and forth between lawyers and officials, yet despite this busyness, Miss Quested, experiencing a moment of true existential aloneness, slowly reviews the details of the day the attack occurred.  The reader feels the pressure from the English seated around her, hears their racist remarks, and understands how easy it would be for her to give in to their view.  But Miss Quested, a confused and pathetic woman, raises her eyes.  She sees the criminal, she sees his friend Fielding with a native child on his lap, and she recognizes many of Chandrapore's residents in the audience though she doesn't know them personally.  It is a tense and pregnant moment.  And then she says, "I'm afraid I have made a mistake... Dr. Aziz never followed me into the cave."  It is perhaps one of the most dramatic reversals in all of literature and the sixteen pages that create the heat, chaos, and tension within the crowded room make it utterly believable.  The English immediately desert her, the Indians applaud her, and it is Fielding, the outsider, Aziz's friend, who gives her shelter after the debacle.  

 

A Passage to India celebrates truth, beginning with the chance encounter in the Moslem temple between Aziz and Mrs. Moore, who has wandered there from the "club" and knows she must remove her shoes before entering.  It is a sign of respect that surprises Aziz and opens the door to his appreciation for her as a human being.  They have a remarkable conversation, honest and heartfelt, but from there, the thread of truth that winds through the narrative, goes into hiding, and won't appear again until the dialogue that develops the friendship between Aziz and Fielding.  It is finally brought out into the open with Miss Quested's unexpected embrace of it.  Truth matters, and friendship across racial and cultural differences nourishes and protects it.  This is a vision that speaks to our era with the same urgency it must have had in the 1920s.  
 
This novel has been on my shelf for years.  I'd probably started it once and discovering that the opening moved at a slow pace, put it down.  This time I was ready.  During the pandemic, I'm very far from my beloved Central Library of Brooklyn, and though I can still access their vast digital collection, and I'm grateful for that, I needed to have the pleasure of a book with actual pages where I could make marginal notes.

 

And make notes I did.  Because although the build-up, or, according to the Freytag triangle, the rising action, happens at a more leisurely pace than a contemporary reader is used to, the climax in the courtroom is worth waiting for.  It is a scene of great emotional richness, and all of the elements developed during the rising action, are crucial to its effect.  The falling action is a true unraveling of expectations, and in terms of novel structure, the climax happens exactly where it should, three quarters of the way through the narrative with a steep denouement involving much chaos and re-ordering.  

 

The novel models these craft issues for writers:

 

use of setting; modulation of narrative distance; building of hallucinatory experiences, both ecstatic and paranoid; development of a believable reversal; dialogue that develops and reveals character
 

 

 

I've been living in a Daisy Johnson world after reading her collection of stories, Fen, and her first novel, Everything Under.  It's a world where the landscape is active, one where reason and logic are always subservient to imagination, where dreams and intuition rule.  Fen, her story collection, is raw and ragged, and even when the stories are less successful, it's not for a lack of boldness.  The women in these stories often identify with animals and nature while the men are possessed by a need to dominate both.  The female characters in these stories are cunning and smart, and they either overpower, slip away, or confront.  

 

These themes continue in her first novel, Everything Under, a retelling of the Oedipus myth through a gender-fluid, time-fluid story of a daughter searching for the mother who abandoned her.  It's set in the lawless houseboat communities on the English canals where shifting reflections and murky depths confuse the characters' lives, and soon, the daughter and a trans son, independent of each other, are searching for the same woman.  Despite having two point of view characters and many shifts in time and place, Johnson is a brilliant guide, teaching the reader how to navigate this restless narrative.  The story unfolds in the only way a dream-like story should, in bits and pieces, setbacks and revelations, with a mix of reality and myth.  The title is perfectly descriptive for a novel that illuminates the deepest, inchoate desires of our primal selves, the two characters groping in the watery darkness, looking for the mother who brought them into her secret world and then tossed them out, over and over.  Johnson's great accomplishment here is that she creates a formal narrative with a cohesive, logical structure and all the signposts necessary for a reader to find her way, but nevertheless feels evolving, casual, urgent and immediate.  These are all the elements of a good mystery, but this one has its own peculiar and wonderfully strange narrative force, a result, I think, of characters who were taught a secret language and eschew rational, goal driven lives.

 

Craft issues for writers: 

 

POV: a blend of first person and limited third: the sections narrated by the daughter are in first person and the sections from the point of view of the trans son are in limited third.

 

I admired the lack of mundane detail.  Johnson refuses to dabble in the minutiae of undramatic detail, nor does she worry about getting a character from one place to another.  This means that the details she does provide are charged, potent, active.  For example, in an important scene that takes place in a Chinese restaurant where "there was chips and macaroni cheese on the menu along with the spring rolls and chow mein," Fiona and the first person narrator, Gretel, order many platters of food.  "The dumplings were thick.  The pork had a layer of fat which had burned to crackling. The dan dan noodles had hidden caverns of mince buried beneath them.  I gave up on the chopsticks, asked for a fork." In this scene, as Gretel waits for Fiona to deliver an essential bit of information, information the reader already knows but is curious to see if Fiona will deliver, the food details are sensuous, and the act of eating is labored, building anticipation.

 

Proulx, Annie, Postcards, novel

Johnson, Daisy, Sisters, novel

Jiles, Paulette, News of the World, novel

E.M. Forster, A Passage to India, novel

Johnson, Daisy, Everything Under, novel

Livesey, Margot, The Boy In The Field,  novel

Spencer, Scott, A Ship Made of Paper, novel

Greer, Andrew Sean, Less, novel

Parker, Michael, Prairie Fever, novel

Lee, Jonathan, High Dive, novel

Maksik, Alexander, Shelter in Place, novel

Shattuck, Jessica, The Women in the Castle, novel

Salvatore Scibona, The Volunteer, novel

Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone, novel

Susan Straight, Take One Candle Light A Room, novel

Esi Edugyan, Washington Black, novel

Jamel Brinkley, A Lucky Man, stories

Deborah Eisenberg, Your Duck Is My Duck, stories
Louisa Hall, Trinity, novel
Joan Silber, Improvement, novel
Melanie Finn, The Gloaming, novel
Rebecca Lee, The City is A Rising Tide, novel
Rebecca Lee, Bobcat, stories
Robin Romm, The Mother Garden, stories
Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, novel
Moshin Hamid, Exit West, novel
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THE INNER AND OUTER WORLD

 

AN INTERVIEW WITH MEGAN STAFFEL by Want Chyi
First published in Rain Taxi, Vol. 15, No. 1, Spring 2010

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