Son of Svea: not an ordinary book about an ordinary man

You can read Lena Andersson’s Son of Svea as either a straight novel of Ragnar Johansson, a twentieth-century Swede, or you can read it as an allegory and commentary on twentieth-century Sweden. Or both.

The book is subtitled “A Tale of the People’s Home.” The translator’s single footnote helpfully glosses, “Folkhemmet, literally ‘the peoples home,’ is a Swedish term for what is otherwise designated as the Swedish welfare state.”

Ragnar was born in 1932, the year the Swedish Social Democratic Party won for the first time and changed the country forever. As the book says, Ragnar is a “man without cracks, but with a great split running through him, and in this he entirely resembled the society he populated and shaped.”

Lena Andersson is a columnist for Dagens Nyheter, Sweden’s largest morning paper. Considered one of the country’s sharpest contemporary analysts, she writes about politics, society, culture, religion, and other topics. Her fifth novel and English-language debut, Willful Disregard, was awarded the 2013 August Prize, Sweden’s highest literary honor. Her other novel translated into English is Acts of Fidelity. These two book expose “the cruelty and comedy of romantic obsession,” writes Alexandra Schwartz in The New Yorker.

In a sense so does Son of Svea. Rather than the cruelty of and romantic obsession with another person, however, Ragnar’s infatuation is with modernity. “The modern age, to his way of thinking, was the epoch in which the human race attained the perfection that has been lying there waiting for it.”

Ragnar’s mother, Svea, never saw or heard from her father after age seven. He left for America and the grandmother with whom Svea and her siblings lived intercepted all of his letters. Svea was able to marry a man who operated a small trucking company, but hers is a life of cooking, cleaning, laundry. When Ragnar “thought about Mother Svea’s childhood he began worshipping the state. He based this on its self-evident superiority to human beings. In the state there was no room for passion or apathy.”

As a young man, Ragnar goes to Spain on vacation, his one trip overseas. It gives him the experience of a foreign society, which reinforces his belief in Sweden’s superiority. In vocational school becomes a skilled woodworker at government expense and lands a job as a woodshop school teacher, rejecting his father’s trucking business. 

His passion for the modern continues unslaked. “The chemists had experimented their way to every conceivable kind of tasty and nourishing food. The powder would be the servant of mankind and the liberator of women. . . Now, even those who could not make potato pancakes, savory cream sauce, or crema catalana could enjoy them on an everyday basis. Its powdered form also made it possible to produce perfect nutritional value.”

He is able to marry and he and his wife have two children, Eric and Elsa. The Johanssons join the government waitlist to move into the newly-built suburbs being erected all over the country changing the character of city life, and they eventually move into their new townhouse, which looks exactly like everyone else’s.

They throw themselves into youth sports—or Ragnar throws the children into them, bicycle racing for Eric; cross-country ski racing for Elsa. They eat family dinners and visit their grandparents. Life is good, certainly for Ragnar when one of the children wins another trophy.

Ragnar, who from birth has been a devoted Democratic Socialist, believes a person must contribute to the society in which he lives, but also that it is prudent to earn the ordinary comfortable life the government offers rather than attempt innovation or greatness or even social advancement. He rejects an offer to become director of studies at the school where he teaches.

He believes after all there is only so much room at the top, and most who try to get there will fail by design. Ragnar sees his mother Svea as a relic of the past, rejecting modern conveniences and constantly cooking, cleaning, and canning. His daughter Elsa represents hope for the future even as she gives up competitive cross-country skiing, a sport she never loved. Ragnar realizes that the world is changing from the paradise of his youth, and it’s getting harder to keep up.

Son of Svea is the story of an ordinary family (assuming such a thing exists) adapting to a constantly evolving world. As Andersson writes, “The country had sped like a javelin through the sixties, and by the seventies it was near the top of every list of national comparisons. It had the most day care places, the lowest income disparity, the greatest film director, the foremost children’s writer, the best slalom skier, tennis player and pop group, the most impressive gender equality, the highest taxes—all of them sources of real pride.” What could go wrong?

Lena Andersson does not argue (in Sarah Death’s expressive translation) that anything has gone wrong exactly. Rather she probes into and occasionally shatters notions of social class, family roles, and what it means to be ordinary in a world that is changing under our feet. Son of Svea is not an ordinary book.

What's happened to the dead mother's newborn baby?

One traditional suggestion writers hear is, “Write what you know.” And that’s where Margaret Mizushima started.

She lives on a small ranch in Colorado, has been married to her veterinarian husband almost forty years. When she decided to write a series, which became the Timber Creek K-9 mysteries, “I knew that one of the characters needed to be a vet. In real life, however, vets may solve medical mysteries, but rarely (or perhaps I should say almost never) are they involved in murder mysteries.  I decided that a veterinarian and a K-9 handler could make an interesting crime fighting duo—trio if you count the dog, and dogs should always be counted.” 

Deputy Mattie Cobb, her German shepherd partner Robo, and veterinarian Cole Walker have now been involved in seven police procedurals in the Colorado high country, the latest being Striking Range.

It opens with two exciting chapters. Mattie and San Diego cold case detective Jim Hauck visit a Colorado prison to interview the man who tried to kill Mattie in an earlier book and who may have killed her father thirty years earlier. When Mattie and Jim Hauck reach the Colorado state prison where they will finally get to interview him, he’s found freshly dead in his cell. There’s one clue: a map leading to Timber Creek and rugged Redstone Ridge. Mattie and Hauck photograph the map with their cell phones.

(Quibbles: What kind of prison needs an interview room with an adjoining viewing room and recording equipment? Would staff be locked inside the room during a prison lockdown? From the outside, yes, with instructions to stay put; but locked inside, no. Finally, no one—not a CO, lawyer, detective, visitor—brings a cell phone into prison. But perhaps they do things differently in Colorado and these pettifogging notes do not diminish the book's enjoyment.)  

While Mattie is visiting prison, Cole is delivering a litter of pups Robo has just sired. The description of the canine c-section is as exciting as anything in the book. 

Left to explore the map’s clue without him, Mattie, Robo, Hauck, and a local rancher journey into the burned forest surrounding Redstone Ridge. But before they can finish their search, however, they’re called to help investigate the death of a young woman found in a campground filled with elk hunters. Identification of the deceased points to her having recently given birth, but the infant is nowhere to be found.

As a deadly storm descends upon the mountains, covering everything with a layer of ice and snow, Mattie and her team search for the missing newborn. The storm batters the area, taking its toll on the team and forcing the sheriff to call in reinforcements. When new evidence surfaces that this is not the only baby to vanish under suspicious circumstances, they decide that finding the woman’s killer will lead them to her baby, making them even more desperate to solve the case.

Then Cole goes missing, stranded alone in the high country with a person that Mattie now suspects is the mastermind behind several murders, including her father’s. She and Robo take to the trail to find Cole–but the killer has a cold-blooded plan that threatens them all.

Among the book’s many pleasures: 

—Robo. He’s a character. He may not be much of a conversationalist, but he communicates clearly.

—The landscape. Mizushima’s descriptions of the high country and small-town life make me want to go there.

—The dogs and their handlers. Robo eventually is not alone, but is joined by K-9 dogs trained to search for drugs, or cadavers, or explosives.

—The relationship between Mattie and Cole and the other characters. Mattie respects and is respected by her boss, the Sheriff, and she works well with a detective who, unlike Mattie, is not native to Timber Creek.

—Finally, Mizushima creatively avoids the cliché of the villain threatening to kill the female cop in the last few pages of the book. 

You do not have to have read the earlier Timber Creek K-9 mysteries to enjoy Striking Range, however it will improve your pleasure if you do read Burning Ridge first. (I reviewed it here.) In fact, the series is entertaining enough, you might start with Killing Trail to see how Mizushima has been able to build and sustain this world and the people in it. 

Charles Johnson explores the way of the writer

Charles Johnson won the National Book Award for The Middle Passage, which is his best-known work of fiction. He’s published four other novels, two story collection, eight books of non-fiction, two books of philosophy, two books of drawings, and two books of children’s fiction. He has a PhD in philosophy, worked as a newspaper reporter after college, and taught creative writing at the University of Washington for more than thirty years. In other words, he’s been around the block—more than one blocks—a couple times.

The Way of the Writer is subtitled Reflections on the Art and Craft of Storytelling. It is a combination memoir and guidebook. The forty-two chapters, some quite short, are organized into six sections: Who Is the Writer? The Process of Writing; What Helps the Writer? The Writer as Teacher; The Writing Life and the Duties of the Writer; Philosophy and the Writer.

The book is based on an email exchange between Johnson and the poet E. Ethelbert Miller who, at the end of 2010, “asked if he could interview me for an entire year.” They discussed Johnson’s interests: literature, meditation, Buddhism, teaching, martial arts, the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King, Jr., contemporary and canonical writers, films, poetry, Sanskrit, my personal habits, American history, technology, sex, race, the state of black America, the love of dogs, science, philosophy the Culture Wars, comic art, fatherhood, and the literary world. The entire exchange is available in a 672-page The Words and Wisdom of Charles Johnson (Dzanc Books, 2015). The Way of the Writer is a 232 distillation of that.

While it is interesting to read how Johnson came to be a writer and to teach writing, aspiring writers will find the book filled with tips and suggestions for further reading. I have made a list of Johnson’s recommendations: Northrop Frye’s The Educated Imagination; E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel; Jean-Paul Sartre’s What is Literature? John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction; Lajos Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing; plus, novels and essays that illustrate his points.

He has stimulating thoughts on the craft. On words: “ . . . a writer with an expansive vocabulary is much like a visual artist with many colors at his command.” 

On sentences: “I’ve always seen the sentence and paragraph of units of energy to be released. So yes, I use long sentences for rhythm and music.” 

On first sentences: they are “as crucial as final or concluding sentences.”

On voice: “In developing a voice what the writer does is transform or personalize the expressive instrument—language—adapting and individuating it to fit his experience, his vision of the world.” 

On scene and dialogue: Ideally, it “should reveal character through the words the speaker uses and the specific cadence of his or her use of language.”

On plot: It is “the storyteller’s equivalent to the philosopher’s argument; its importance lies in it being an interpretation (one based on causation) of why the world works the way it does.”

I made a note of Johnson’s instruction to his writing students: “Determine what their protagonist most feared in the world . . . his or her deepest social fear. The one situation they most dreaded experiencing. The one event they would prefer to die than have to face. Then I told them they should maneuver their protagonist into exactly that situation to see what happens—if, in fact, he or she is destroyed by it, or is change by it and in what ways.” What a great way to think about a story.

Finally, he quotes Agnus Wilson’s “Four Rules” for writers:

1. There are no rules.

2. The first rule is wrong, so pay attention. 

3. You can’t write for an audience; the writer’s first job is to survive.

4. You can make no mistakes, but anything you write can be made better.

I would say those are worth the price of the book, and now I’ve given them to you free. There is, however, much, much more worthwhile in The Way of the Writer.

 

Can an ex-offender go straight in a corrupt world?

 I’ve just read two mysteries back-to-back, one a cozy set in France and Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby, which is more thriller than mystery and set in Virginia. The experience gave me an opportunity to think why I enjoyed Cosby far more than the other.

True, I am comparing kumquats to cherries here. The cozy’s protagonist is a middle-aged English woman who buys a house in France and immediately finds a body in the swimming pool. This leads to an enormously complex puzzle involving feuding families, WWII betrayal, a dead card shark (whose decayed remains the protagonist finds on the house’s property), and a psychopathic villain who has been an innocuous minor character.

Cosby’s protagonist Beauregard (Bug) Montage is a middle-aged black man who spent five of his teen age years in juvenile detention for vehicular manslaughter and several years out of it as a getaway driver. He’s a master mechanic and a peerless driver (as police who tried to catch him could testify). Better even perhaps than his father who had to vanish after a job went sideways.

He’s gone straight. He misses the high of escaping from a job (it’s better than alcohol, better than drugs, better than sex), but he and his cousin are partners in a struggling auto repair shop. He’s married and the father of two sons. 

Unluckily, he’s behind on the shop’s rent which he will lose if he doesn’t raise the cash; his bitter, angry mother will be evicted from the nursing home to live with Beauregard, his wife, and the boys in their doublewide if cannot pay for her support; and his daughter by a teenage girlfriend needs college money. What does a former criminal do in such a situation?

In chapter one, Beauregard and Kevin participate in an illegal street race. Beau wins, but it’s a scam, he loses the $1,000 he brought to bet to fake county deputies, and he’s able to recover—with some violence—only $750. 

The chapter accomplishes several things seamlessly: We learn that Beauregard needs money. He can tell by the sound a car has a bad valve. He’s lightening on wheels. He’s able to recognize a rent-a-cop even with a gun in his face. He knows he’s been scammed. He knows where scammer would go to celebrate. He has no compunction about jamming wrench into the cheater’s mouth like a gag. He retrieves his $750 and doesn’t kill the guy. But now he’s $250 further behind.

Again, what does an ex-offender do in such a situation? One last job.

Beauregard teams up with a small-time white criminal who’s learned of a treasure of uncut, illegal and untraceable diamonds in a suburban jewelry store’s safe. Ronnie’s girlfriend knows how to turn off the alarm and the combination to the safe. Quick and out with Bug waiting in the car as the getaway driver. What can go wrong?

It should not spoil the book to tell you that things do go wrong, but thanks to Beauregard’s planning and exceptional driving skill, they escape unscathed. Ronnie’s fence buys the diamonds. Ronnie gives Beauregard his $80,000 share. He uses the money to satisfy the bank and save his business, to pay the nursing home, and to give his daughter enough cash for a year of college. And they lived happily ever after.

Spoiler alert: They don’t.

Last year, Cosby told a Los Angeles Review of Books interviewer, “I grew up in Mathews County, Virginia, on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay. While the setting of Blacktop Wasteland, Red Hill County, is not Mathews, it shares many of the same features. Red Hill is like a lot of towns in the rural South. Most of the jobs have left town on the first thing smoking. There is an unenforced social segregation. There is a black part of town and a white part. A wealthy part of town and a poor part. But the geographic details are important to the narrative too. Miles and miles of cornfields that separate you from your neighbors. Single-lane gravel roads that connect you to the main part of town like arteries where the light dies quick once the sun goes down. Red Hill is a dying town bleeding people.” This sense of place permeates the book. 

More significantly and what sets the book apart from the cozy are the characters. Cosby said, “I wanted Beauregard to be as fully formed a character as he could be.” He is. “I wanted to show that we are all multifaceted and full of different faces that we show to different people in different situations. Too often I think black characters are forced into supporting roles as either ‘magical’ characters long on wisdom but short on depth, or strong silent types that exist only as plot devices.”

Unlike the cozy in which I felt the author was moving pieces around the board to set up and work out the puzzle, Blacktop Wasteland’s story grows out of the place, the situation, and the characters’ response to their circumstances. The book is filled with violence, which, in my opinion, skirts with overkill, but the violence does grow out of what we know about these people and who they are.

Cosby has won honorable mentions in Best Mystery Stories and an Anthony Award for short fiction. Blacktop Wasteland is an impressive debut novel. I look forward to his next.