Underwhelmed, to say the least, by typing in mini-reviews of these two novels-from-family-history, hitting "Post," and having the book's home page pop back onto the screen with a smarmy little message saying "Priscilla King, write a review of [the book I just did]!"--I don't like web sites that bark orders at readers, in any case...I'm going back to my own blog. Which Google, of course, will try to hide from people, and Goodsearch will try so hard to hide that it'll even redirect readers back to cached copies of the posts for which Blogjob paid. Goodheavens, the corporate would-be rulers of the world cried, we mustn't let people discover a blog that blows the whistle on sneaky corporate censorship on the Internet!
If the Internet doesn't pull a U-turn and require human review before even the ugliest porn images and hatespews can be censored, how long do you think it can last? Two years? Three? It's been fun, and I look forward to getting paid again for my special talent for creating decent-looking documents on manual typewriters...
Here, while it lasts, are full-length reviews of two short paperback novels. They can be read independently; they're best read together.
Author: Rita Sims Quillen
Title: Hiding Ezra
Amazon details:
- Paperback: 220 pages
- Publisher: Little Creek Books (February 18, 2014)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1939289351
And the sequel: Wayland
Amazon details:
- Paperback: 160 pages
- Publisher: Iris Press (September 16, 2019)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1604542543
Rita Sims Quillen is best known as a poet. No worries for those who don't like poetry; these stories are not told in the sort of lush prose that tends to be described as "poetic." Landscape descriptions like "She also loved to go to a cool, shady bend in the little branch [creek] below the church where the trees created a canopy like walls" are as "poetic" as it gets. These novels get full marks for clear, straightforward prose that's not wordy, sentimental, or difficult to read. In fact one reviewer has quoted the first sentence of Hiding Ezra as an example of a good opening line for a novel.
They read like family history. Hiding Ezra is in fact based on family history--an old journal kept by a soldier who deserted from the Army in order to help his last few friends and relative survive a set of epidemic diseases that swept our part of the world in the 1910s and 1920s. Wayland might easily be based on another old journal.
Hiding Ezra is about the oddly enjoyable summer Ezra Teague spends hiding in a cave, leaving game near the homes of people who leave bread and ammunition near the cave. It's also about his grieving sister Eva, his faithful sweetheart Alma, and all the other friends and relatives they lose to the epidemics. It's also about Lieutenant Nettles, a nettlesome outsider from Big Stone Gap who connects with his inner decent human being after exposure to the grieving and loving people of Wayland, Gate City, and Fort Blackmore.
Wayland was the real name of one of the little rural settlements outside Gate City up to the 1940s, when it changed its name to Midway. Gate City had changed its name a bit earlier--in the nineteenth century it was called Estillville. Moccasin Gap, on the other side of the gap in the mountains formed by the Big Moccasin Creek, also changed its name, in the 1950s, to Weber City--spelled Weber, as in German, but pronounced Webber, as in English--after a radio comedy about a new subdivision: "The characters were having so much fun with their Weber City, we thought we'd have one too." In these novels place names are used as they were at the time.
When I read this novel, I enjoyed its dramatic climax, but wondered why the denouement was so long and so sad. A more tactful reviewer posted online that she wanted the story to be even longer, to resolve the new issues the denouement raises for the characters. Readers be warned. The last few chapters of Hiding Ezra are the trailer for Wayland.
In between reading the two stories, I cried. I won't spoil the denouement, I think, by explaining that I don't cry about fictional characters. No, but once when the words "rock hall" triggered a memory an 85-year-old great-uncle said, "My sister and sister-in-law used to take bread to the fellows that hid in the rock house." (Actually he used their given names, and one of them was still alive to confirm his claim.) My mother wondered if he was remembering the story she'd heard about my great-grandfather leading a party of soldiers to the nearby "rock house," a cave big enough for people to camp in. No, he said, this was in his lifetime...but he was weak and never had much to say at one time, and never mentioned the cave story again.
In my family the young spoke more frankly to the old, and asked more questions, than in some neighboring families. Still, I never asked for more details about feeding the deserters in 1918. I knew the cave was real; my brother and I had been shown how to find it on condition that we not try to get inside it. I knew Great-Aunt belonged to a pacifist church, and her sons were conscientious objectors, but her husband, Grandfather's brother, was exempt from military service because he was a minister. The great-uncle who first mentioned the story had one of those given names that commemorate a family friend's given and family names: Otto Quillen.That's all I can add to the facts behind Hiding Ezra.
What made me cry was that this story made me realize how lucky the elders were. My grandfather and eight of his younger siblings lived to ages between 75 and 99. Many of their generation did not. Physically and emotionally my elders survived by keeping a healthy distance between themselves and any friends they'd had as children...and even in the 1960s I still grew up hearing "Don't get closer to town children than you can help, don't go into town unless it's necessary, don't EVER go into a swimming pool, don't go to other people's houses and if you do don't eat or take off your shoes..." Two generations later, my extended family are still known as a stand-offish bunch. Possibly the elders' losses of friends to the epidemics had something to do with that. I've heard a lot of rot about possible kinds of "hurt" might have caused our family subculture to be so clannish, but this insight rang true. And it did hurt, briefly, wondering how many school friends my elders had buried...Grandfather was one of fifteen children, eight of whom lived to ages between 75 and 99. In another family of fourteen, six children born before 1940 were still alive in 1970.
Anyway: Ezra Teague survives his adventure, but the epidemic diseases and early deaths aren't over. In Wayland Ezra has left his daughter for his sister to raise. Eva has indeed married Lieutenant Nettles, who is now a nice guy but still insecure enough to be impressed by a stranger's show of respect. That insecurity places the Nettles family at risk when the lieutenant offers a job to a "hobo" who calls himself Buddy Newman. Newman's real name is Deel, as in Scottish "de'il," and his character is a study in Human Evil. He wants to set people against each other, ruin the reputation of a pious but sex-starved old lady, and do even worse things to little Katie Teague.
The suspense of the story is finding out whether Newman's schemes will be foiled, and how, and by which of the decent local folk. There is an interesting and thoroughly local delineation of the relative vileness of Newman, an otherwise likable hobo who has an icky relationship with a teenaged boy, a rude drunk, and a murderer. Newman is a bigot, a pedophile, and also a murderer, but his evil runs deeper than that. (The narration of his evil won't embarrass readers in front of their children but the single telling details, when they emerge, may upset children.)
Did an ancestor really keep a diary that narrated such events? At least they're not the local pedophile story I always heard: it would have been fifteen or twenty years later when the man I heard described as "an escaped mental patient" did some physical damage to a local primary school girl. And I was glad. I did not want that girl, who survived but never married, to have been the real model for Katie. (Katie is characterized as pretty much the perfect niece in Eva's diary, but aunts know to allow for another aunt's auntly perspective. I think each of The Nephews is pretty much a perfect child, too, in his or her own way.)
Once again, after the main plot has resolved itself, the last two chapters go on. I didn't cry while reading Wayland but I found the denouement somewhat sad. Others may like it but I think they'll agree that, once again, the last chapters of Wayland are a trailer for another story.
I gave both books five stars on Goodreads for Keeping It Real. These are not just another stereotype of "Appalachia," the whole mountain range, from Georgia to Nova Scotia and possibly also Britain, confused with old pictures of the coal-mining town. Anything looks grim in a black-and-white photograph. In these books we see Scott County much closer to the way it must have been, between 1917 and 1930, to have become what it's been in Quillen's and my lifetime. I'm delighted.
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