Last Month's Reads

Some very lopsided thoughts on Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry and Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck

Happy Friday my dears! I come to you this week from Newport, RI, my happiest of happy places, with an unbalanced edition of Last Month’s Reads. We’re talking about two different books. One is a novel and one is a travel memoir. One is about hiding, and one is about seeking. Each is about a man, and each is about a country. Both are worth reading. So without further ado…

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Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry

I don’t really feel inspired to write about this novel. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, but I haven’t, in the month since I finished it, been able to come up with a cohesive way to write about it for you. I guess it’s not that I don’t feel inspired, it’s just not coming easily. Maybe some books are just like that. So I’m not going to force it. I’m just going to jot down a few thoughts.

I came to own this book because I saw a review of it somewhere. I believe it was LitHub’s best reviewed books of the week some weeks back, but I can’t be certain. I was intrigued by the promise of a haunting. Who better to haunt than an Irishman (which is what Sebastian Barry is). The novel tells the story of Tom Kettle, a recently retired police officer living in near isolation in the annexed ground floor apartment of an old Victorian castle on the coast of Ireland. He is content in his solitude until two young police officers and former colleagues come knocking on his door.

This visit, regarding an old and deeply personal case, sets off a chain of events, or more so, a chain of thoughts and memories, that lead to the painful, at times grueling, ultimately necessary rehashing and resettling of the deep traumas of Tom’s life. And they are deep. This book contains descriptions of child sexual abuse that I might not call graphic, but I would call matter-of-fact. You see, the case in question pertains to the Catholic Church, and its now well-documented tendency to put the hush hush on child abuse cases. What a shame that the next sentence that had already started to pour out of my finger tips was, “this is Ireland after all.” And that collective national trauma is what this book is about.

But it’s also about one man’s love for his wife, and the way that that love sets the rest of his life alight. Tom loves June more than anything in the world. He loves their two children, Winnie and Joe, as well, but the reader gets the sense that that’s mostly by association. They’re June’s children, so they’re wonderful. I don’t want to give anything away, but when matters come to June, Barry’s writing is fantastic. It literally spins out love, and there’s a real physicality to it, which is uncommon because it’s difficult to do well.

Really, Barry’s writing is fantastic the whole way through—a much happier stereotype about Ireland is that its people have a way with words. I didn’t read with pencil in hand with this one, so I don’t have handy quotes to pull out that illustrate Barry’s gifts. Kicking myself for that because there were so many times when I was stopped in my reading tracks, delighted, shocked, appalled by an image or a turn of phrase. Reading Barry feels like reading someone who is, if not creating a new language, at the very least pushing the one we have to it’s outer limits. In a good way, and one that is fascinating rather than uncomfortable to read.

Be warned that the subject matter is heavy, the tale quite sad. In the end though, there is lightness and joy. I’m glad I powered through and wrote even just this little bit. To review Old God’s Time has reminded me how much I really did love it. If anyone has read any other Sebastian Barry novels (or plays or poetry), please get in touch. That is all!

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Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck

It’s been a long time since I’ve read anything by Steinbeck. Grapes of Wrath so long ago in middle school I barely remember it, and East of Eden one summer in high school, long enough ago that I mostly only remember that there were brothers and a prostitute, and I loved it. This book—Travels with Charley—was given to me by my mother three years ago now, when I had proclaimed that I wanted to drive cross country (and back) mostly by myself after graduation. A delayed thank you to my lovely mom.

The mathematically gifted have likely discerned that the year was 2020, and those with good memories will have further intuited that my plans were rudely interrupted. My aspiration was to see and to learn about the behemoth country that I am from—to try to find out what was actually in all of the places I’d never been. In retrospect it would have been a fascinating time to undertake that kind of project, and I’m sure someone did undertake it, but to me it felt impossible.

Still I felt “the virus of restlessness,” made even worse by being literally trapped. Instead of setting out alone for several months to discover my country, I was, by lucky circumstance and a dash of spontaneity that I would not have been capable of on my own, given the gift of a more abbreviated road trip with two of my dearest friends, Maddie and Charlotte.

We drove through Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico. We camped, which was preposterous to all that knew us—though it was just car camping. But that’s a story for another time, and I’ve only said all of this to explain how I came to own this book, and how it is that I haven’t read it until now. I couldn’t bear to read the account of a trip similar to the one I had hoped to make, even though I did get a good one after all.

I also include all this background information to say that perhaps predictably, Steinbeck has awoken in me the urge to move. Even though he himself says that he did not learn any overarching truth about his country, this travelogue made me feel like I must get up and try my own hand—a mission that perhaps would be all the sweeter if I set out knowing the mission were un-accomplishable. Not being in the position to spend a year of my life alone on the road (and not really wanting it anyway aside from the passive undercurrent stirred by this book), it is a comfort to know that Steinbeck was 58 when he drove off with his dog. There is always still time.

And that’s enough about me. If it’s not already clear, this book was SO GOOD. It would not be dramatic to say that I’m kind of in love with Steinbeck. He writes so conspiratorially, but also at the same time like he’s just writing for himself. I don’t know how to describe it. He’s funny and earnest and heartfelt and bitter and he plays the wise man in such an endearing way. I want to have lunch with him every single day.

As the book opens, Steinbeck makes sure his reader knows that once a journey is planned and set into motion, it becomes an entity unto itself; it has its own mind. “We do not take a trip, a trip takes us,” and “a journey is like a marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it” (1, 2). The stage is set, and the reader is ready to surrender control, to be taken by this trip.

The rule of journeys rears its head before he even leaves, when a hurricane comes through and delays his departure. He does get off though, and the first stretch is New England, en route to Maine. While passing through, the fall leaves serve as a reminder that some things must be seen to be believed. Steinbeck is startled “to find not only that this bedlam of color was true but that the pictures were pale and inaccurate translations” (26).

When Steinbeck asks a local woman if growing accustomed to the colors made them less magnificent, she responds, “‘It’s always a glory…and can’t be remembered, so that it always comes as a surprise’” (26). I think that’s really beautiful—the idea that things we’ve seen again and again, year after year, can still be a brand new glory to a fresh set of eyes. That’s an upside to the fallibility of human memory.

Onward he goes, meditating on the road about whether the American people are inherently, genetically, predisposed to restless striking out. Whether putting down roots isn’t really for us. He thinks of city centers as swarming anthills, no real method to the movement. He calls himself an “incorrigible Peeping Tom,” who never passes an unshaded window without looking in. As a passionate ground floor window gazer, I felt seen.

Then he arrives in Montana, where he falls in love. Not much is written here because “it’s difficult to analyze love when you’re in it” (115). This section contains a brief but poigniant account of the Chief Joseph campaign against the Nez Perces Indians. Charley tries to fight some bears in Yellowstone, they cross the continental divide, which Stienbeck finds lackluster considering the fact that rain on one side falls to the Atlantic, while rain on the other falls to the Pacific—an incredible fact.

Then they’re home in northern California. I’m writing too much, and I almost feel like I’m spoiling the book even though it’s not really spoilable. I just can’t help it. The California section is obviously a difficult one for Steinbeck. He struggles to see the homeland of his boy years turned into something he doesn’t recognize: “I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction” (132).

His description of the redwoods is moving, and his description of Charley’s reaction to them was both funny and profound. The tree loving dog should go berserk at a tree the size of these trees, right? Not so—he expresses no interest. What can one do when the tree is so big, the tree loving dog can’t tell it’s a tree?

There is a chapter towards the end of the book, that takes place in the Mojave Dessert. It is far and above my favorite chapter. It is a masterpiece. I don’t know whether it was made better because I read it aloud to my lover one eveing, the only section of this particular book that I read aloud. It’s a powerful thing—the vibration of the vocal chords. I went back and read it again just in my head the next morning though, and it was just as good. I won’t say more; you’ll know it when you get to it.

Time for Texas, which he somewhat begrudgingly passes through, not being able to avoid it since his wife’s people come from there. Despite his pokes and prods, it’s pretty clear that he has a fondness and admiration for the Texan. This section will be funny and charming to anyone who has one in their life. And then, he hightails it out of there and heads for Louisiana, specifically to see the “Cheerladies” spilling their vitriol outside William Frantz Elementary School.

This section of the book was difficult to read. The reader gets the sense that it was difficult for Steinbeck to write. The seed of uncertainty that motivated this road trip in the first place, the seed that said, “you might not know your country anymore,” splits open and starts to sprout in Louisiana. On his way out, he offers a ride to a black man on the side of the road. After a short distance, during which the man balls himself up smaller and smaller into the far corner of the passenger side in abject terror, Steinbeck lets him down. Then he picks up a racist white man and reaches a breaking point. It is the only negative interaction with a stranger in the pages of this book. He hightails it home from there.

At the core, Steinbeck writes about America with a touching sentimentality and deep pride. However, threaded throughout is clear distaste for the direction of the country. The massive cutting highways, the waste, the consumption and the loss of regionality—the local accent replaced by the bland and souless TV voice. He says that he met no strangers and that Americans are more American than they are anything else but it’s not really true. In Louisiana, he is made physically ill by his fellow countrymen and women. It was 1961. It was a horror, and if those people were more like each other than anything else, it was far, far beneath the surface.

I think that still, both can be true—the pride and the disillusionment. The issues that he discusses in bursts and spurts as he moves along from town to town, city to city, state to state, are still issues. As a country, we’re still talking about many of the same things, disturbed by them, deciding what to do about them. That shouldn’t mean we can’t hold a deep and abiding love for the nation. The miracle nation. Inspired by Steinbeck, I power through discontent and take the optimistic view. When it sometimes feels like hating America is à la mode, we can cling to the fact that a willingness to fight over something represents, at its core, the admission that the something is worth fighting for. Worth something. Worth loving.

“For how can one know color in perpetual green, and what good is warmth without cold to give it sweetness” (25).

Also sorry to not be able to end on that deep note, but I can’t not mention the fact that anyone who loves a dog will love this book. Steinbeck talks about Charley (and to Charley) in a way that must be not only recognizable but self-identifying for any dog-lover.