3 Extraordinary Explorations of Place: Figuration

This is the eleventh in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three of my favorite literary explorations of place – John McPhee’s The Pine Barrens (1967), Robert Sullivan’s The Meadowlands (1998), and Ian Frazier’s On the Rez (2000) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their many vivid figures of speech.

One of the tools these three great writers use to describe their subjects is figuration, i.e., metaphor and simile. In The Pine Barrens, McPhee notes the color of the pineland streams: “In summer, the cedar water is ordinarily so dark that the riverbeds are obscured, and while drifting along one has the feeling of being afloat on a river of fast-moving potable ink.” He continues, 

For a few days after a long rain, however, the water is almost colorless. At these times, one can look down into it from a canoe and see the white sand bottom, ten or twelve feet below, and it is as clear as an image in the lens of a camera, with sunken timbers now and again coming into view and receding rapidly, at the speed of the river.

In The Meadowlands, Sullivan encounters a muskrat trapper in the Kingsland Marsh: 

But after a while, he let me look into the big wicker basket he carried on his back: it was filled with muskrats. The muskrats had long thick black tails and long yellow teeth that were curved like uncut fingernails.

Describing the hundreds of ditches in the Meadowlands, Sullivan says they “intersect all the creeks and rivers like capillaries in a hungover eye.”

Canoeing across a Meadowlands marsh, Sullivan and his friend Dave see carp: 

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.

In On the Rez, Frazier sometimes includes two similes in the same sentence, doubling its vividness. For example:

Rows of corn wound around hills in Iowa like threads on a screw; woodlots sat on the prairie horizon suspended on a shimmering, like hovercraft. 

Sometimes when he [Le War Lance] calls, his voice is small and clear, like neat printed handwriting; other times, depending on his mood and how much he’s had to drink, his voice is sprawling and enlarged, like a tall cursive signature with flourishes on the tail letters and ink blots and splatters alongside. 

One problem the Pine Ridge Reservation does not have is light pollution. The stars were like bullet holes, the galaxies like patterns of birdshot. 

Frazier is a superb describer. Note the simile at the end of this beauty:

Black cows topped with snow stood breathing steam in the whitened fields while hawks sat in cottonwoods above, their feathers so fluffed out against the cold they looked like footballs.

In my next post, the last in this series, I’ll reflect on some of the meanings I’ve extracted from these three great books.