Tell a story? Danticat tells marvelous stories

Edwidge Danticat is a writer whose name has floated in and out of my consciousness as someone I ought to know, and with Krik?Krak! I now have. And realized why I've heard of her. Mainly because she's a terrific writer.

Danticat was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1969. Before she was five her parents had immigrated to New York, leaving Edwidge to be raised by an aunt and uncle. She spoke Haitian Creole at home, French in school, and when she was 12 years old she joined her parents in Brooklyn.

She began writing when she was 9 years old, published a story in a New York City magazine written by teenagers when she was 14. She wrote another story for the magazine, "A New World Full of Strangers" based on her immigration experience. She later said, "When I was done with the [immigration] piece, I felt that my story was unfinished, so I wrote a short story, which later became a book, my first novel: Breath, Eyes, Memory" published in 1994.

She published Krik? Krak!, her second book, in 1996. A collection of stories that was a National Book Award finalist, the title means, "Tell me a story? I'll tell you a story!" Seven

of the nine stories are set in Haiti, and in spare language and telling details Danticat reveals place, character, and situation. Soldiers burst into a house. "The soldiers held a gun to Lionel's head and ordered him to lie down and become intimate with his mother. Lionel refused. Their mother told him to go ahead and obey the soldiers because she was afraid that they would kill Lionel on the spot if he put up more of a fight. Lionel did as his mother told him, crying as the soldiers laughed at him, pressing the gun barrels farther and farther into his neck." Afterward the soldiers raped Lionel's sister and arrested him and accused him of moral crimes.

Powerful stuff, but a view into the heart of darkness. Or at least into a whole other world: "In Haiti when you get hit by a car, the owner of the car gets out and kicks you for getting blood on his bumper." And one more example chosen at random: "She nearly didn't marry him because it was said that people with angular hairline often have very troubled lives."

Anyone who is interested in writing will find Krik? Krak! filled with interesting characters, situations, and ideas. Here for example is the meditation of a young girl who has been posing for a painter—but the thoughts apply equally to writers: " . . . this was why she wanted to make pictures, to have something to leave behind even after she was gone, something that showed what she had observed in a way that no one else had and no one else would after her . . . ." 

A funeral hotdish is hot stuff

Jana Bommersbach's new mystery, Funeral Hotdish, is interesting for several reasons. The author is a Phoenix journalist who broke the story that Sammy "The Bull" Gravano, the Mafia soldier who ratted out John Giotti and who was supposed to be safely stashed away in

the Witness Protection Program, was actually swanning about in Tempe, Arizona. She is a native of Hankinson, North Dakota, a town of about 900 people in the southeast corner of the state.

Her mystery features a Phoenix journalist, Joya Bonner, who discovers that Sammy "The Bull" Gravano is signing autographs in Tempe and the tragic death of a North Dakota high school girl who has a bad reaction to the drug Ecstasy (or Molly). So Bommersbach, writing about what she knows, weaves living people, actual events, and invented characters into a plausible and satisfying story.

Funeral Hotdish begins with the death of 17-year-old Amber Schlener and the coma of her boyfriend, Johnny Roth, at a high school dance. Joya becomes enmeshed in the Gravano story because the Phoenix police suspect Sammy is involved in dealing drugs—and Joya's part-time live-in boyfriend is a Phoenix cop. She is astonished to learn from her mother that Amber, back in tiny Northville, North Dakota, is dead from drug overdose. Northville? With a high school graduating class of 17? Not possible. Or a Phoenix connection?

Some readers may have problems with the shifting points of view as we move from head to head as the chapters move by, even from head to head on a single page. That said, I had no trouble following the POVs and by organizing her story the way she has, Bommersbach is able to give the reader insights and observations she would have been hard-pressed to give from a single POV.

Here, for example, is a description: "The Catholics put a low rock wall all the way around their cemetery and fancy iron gates at the entrance. Nobody remembers the gates ever being closed and they're rusted in place by now. The cemetery rises in front of you as you drive up the long entrance, the road splitting around a giant marble altar flanked by two towering alabaster angels. Christ on the cross dominates the altar. You could say Mass out here, but nobody remembers any one doing that. Mostly, people just wander around it, admiring the beautiful angels that were imported from Germany decades ago. . . ."

And here's a woman's observation: "Women gossip like a doubles game of ping-pong, everybody talking at once and throwing an idea back and forth. They'll chew on a thing until it's shredded, and then they move on. But men parcel out their thoughts slowly—two, three trains of thought with everyone naturally keeping track. Like multiple lanes of bowling where everybody knows each score. And in the middle of one train, somebody will tell a joke, and when they pick up again, nobody has to be reminded where they left off. So if you want gossip from women, they hand it over neat and tidy. But if you want it from men, you've got to hang in there for hours to get the whole story. . . ."

A funeral hotdish, of course, is what the church ladies prepare to feed the congregation—and in an appendix to the book, Bommersbach includes the recipe that comes from St. Phillip's Church in Hankinson. It's something you'd want to modify to make at home, of course; St. Phillip's version feeds 175.

Funeral Hotdish is a satisfying and engaging hybrid.

On not seeing the light of "All the Light We Cannot See"

Long time readers of this blog know that I am fascinated by the Amazon comments of readers who hated a book I liked. Did they see something I missed? Do I agree with their criticism? If not, why not?

Anthony Doerr's WWII novel All the Light We Cannot See" won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It is a legitimate New York Times best seller. As I write, it has over 21,100 reviews

on Amazon—72 percent of them five-star, 18 percent four-star. How many novels provoke that many Amazon reviews—90 percent of which are positive? For me, it makes the critics who gave the book one star that much more interesting.

A reader writes: "I rarely give up on a book but here I am on page 151 and I just can't see the point of continuing. The chapters are two pages long each and they switch between the two main characters. I just looked ahead and the whole book is set up like this. Maybe this is good writing and a good story but the lack of flow just kills my interest." In fact the point view shifts between more than two characters, and many chapters are more than two pages, not that this would make any difference to this reader.

A reader writes: "It felt like reading a cookbook. I didn't feel that invested in the characters, which was probably a good thing since the plot sputtered out and died. My favorite character disappeared." True, Doerr does not tie up every single loose end, but I would not agree that the plot sputtered out. And a character does disappear, which is a shock to the reader (this reader), but seemed appropriate in the story's context.

Perhaps the most damming critique was by the reader who wrote more than a thousand words that include: "I am a lifelong reader with a PhD in literature and 40 years experience teaching college writing and literature. The more I study fiction, the more I admire a writer who can use structure (the arrangement of the chronological elements of plot) strategically to develop the novel's themes . . .  Doerr . . .  fragments his plot for no apparent purpose. It is disjointed and difficult to follow, with no payoff for the effort. He not only switches back and forth between the two narratives but also along the timeline. Switching back and forth between the two narratives . . . would have been plenty; also switching back and forth along the timeline before, during, and after WWII creates too much discontinuity and makes the narrative hard to follow. . . . Both plots also depend on too many farfetched coincidences, so much so that it strains credulity." This critic's analysis is correct; the conclusion less so. Clearly, thousands of people were either able to follow or were caught up in Doerr's language—as I was.

I thought that at the sentence level, All the Light We Cannot See is extraordinary. This last critic, who is far more sensitive than I, points out examples in which "far too many of the descriptive passages use words as words—a piling on of sounds—rather than to convey actual meaning." Perhaps another slow edit of the book would have caught these, although I suspect not. (Reportedly Doerr spent eight years writing it; one more pass through would probably have been one too many.)

For what it's worth, I had no trouble following the chronology. I did not for a moment believe that these characters were real people in a real WWII. I was not put off by the anachronism I was able to spot. I was willing to suspend disbelief and simply enjoy Doerr's language and admire his ambition. I'd give it four stars.