These books are made of inspired details:
The wallpaper in Fred Brown’s house (“The wall itself was papered in a flower pattern, and the wallpaper continued out across the ceiling and down the three other walls, lending the room something of the appearance of the inside of a gift box”);
The speed-walking woman in East Rutherford (“After that, I drove west down a road bordered by factories and warehouses and ten-foot-tall reeds and only once saw a human: a speed-walking woman with kinky, orangish hair and a deep salon tan who was wearing wraparound mirrored sunglasses and neon-colored Nikes and a bright pink suit that stood out like the plumage of a tropical songbird as it swished past the monochromatic weeds”);
The painting of an eagle covering an entire wall of Le War Lance’s Washington Heights apartment (“It was done in sketchy strokes of brown on the wall itself, and one of the legs in particular was so detailed and eagle-like, with careful feathering and sickle-shaped claws, that I thought it possible he had gotten as close to a real eagle leg as he said he had”);
The way Fred Brown sipped whiskey (“Every so often, Fred would reach into his pocket and touch up his day with a minimal sip from a half pint of whiskey. He merely touched the bottle to his lips, then put it away. He did this at irregular intervals, and one day, when he had a new half pint, he took more than five hours to reduce the level of the whiskey from the neck to the shoulder of the bottle”);
The carp in the marsh off the New Jersey Turnpike (“Thrashing around in the foul-smelling muck, the carp, each approximately two feet long, did not seem at all out of place beneath the New Jersey Turnpike; the scales on their backs were gross and coarse in the pattern of worn-down radial tires”);
The star quilt that Florence Cross Dog made for Frazier (“The quilt was like a map of the reservation, with the gravel roads and dirt lanes and one-water-tower towns and little houses in the middle of nowhere stitched together and made shiningly whole”);
The catalpa trees of Martha Furnace (“The streets are bestrewn with green and blue glittering slag, but they are indistinguishable from the sand roads that come through the woods from several directions to the town, and if it were not for the old and weirdly leaning catalpa trees, it would be possible to pass through Martha without sensing its difference from the surrounding woodland”);
The little leachate seep on the side of a Meadowlands garbage hill (“But in this moment, here at its birth, at a stream’s source in the modern meadows, this little seep was pure pollution, a pristine stew of oil and grease, of cyanide and arsenic, of cadmium, chromium, copper, lead, nickel, silver, mercury, and zinc. I touched this fluid – my fingertip was a bluish caramel color – and it was warm and fresh”);
At the Pine Ridge tribal powwow, a dancer in the men’s Traditional Dance competition (“A dancer came right by me. He was a big man, and in his costume – turkey-feather bustle three feet across, feathered anklets, feathered gauntlets, beaded headband, tall roach made of a porcupine tail atop his head – he seemed magnified in every dimension, almost a spirit-being. Then I saw the wristwatch he on beneath the gauntlet and the sweat on his temple, and the concentration in his eyes”);
The wrapping string at Chatsworth General Store (“Wrapping string unwound from a spool on a wall shelf and ran through eyelets across the ceiling and down to a wooden counter”);
The big wicker basket that eighty-three-year-old muskrat trapper George Schilling carried on his back, filled with muskrats (“The muskrats had long thick black tails and long yellow teeth that were curved like uncut fingernails”);
The wildflowers at the location of the fatality marker where Suanne Big Crow’s accident occurred (“Little megaphone-shaped blossoms of pale lavender on a ground vine, called creeping jenny hereabouts, and a three-petaled flower called spiderwort, with a long stem and long, narrow leaves. The spiderwort flowers were a deep royal blue. I had read that in former times the Sioux crushed spiderwort petals to make a blue jelly-like paint used to color moccasins”).
Of the many wonderful details in these three great books, my favorite is the thumbprints of oil on the bologna sandwich that Le War Lance makes for Frazier: “At lunchtime Le went in the house and brought me out a sandwich made of a quarter-inch thick slice of bologna on white bread with lots of mayonnaise. The sandwich had a few faint thumbprints of oil on it but was tasty anyway.” I don’t know why, but that line makes me smile every time I read it. It’s such a great detail.
Another aspect of these books I relish is their nature description. That will be the subject of my next post in this series.
.jpeg)
No comments:
Post a Comment