Double Whammy Book Review!
K.H. MacLean | Sunday, November 14, 2010 at 10:00AM Bored on a Saturday night with no where to go, so here's a double book review for ya.
Aaaaaand the books are... The Learning Tree (1963) and Mother Night (1961). Both novels happen to be written by two of my favorite human beings to have lived in recent years; Gordon Parks and Kurt Vonnegut Jr., respectively.
I pretty much read The Learning Tree solely based on my love for everything Gordon Parks. He has an amazing life story on top of being a pretty incredible photographer (if you are unfamiliar with his life, I strongly recommend looking into it). After Parks had established himself as a significant artist has his generation, friends started chirpping in his ear telling him he should write a novel. He did (despite having no previous experience as a writer) and 30 something years down the road it was curated into the library of congress, along with everything else he's ever done.
So, I decided to check it out.
It starts off a little slow. I went a week or two without picking up after getting about 50 pages in. But after the first act it picks up. There is an authenticity in the characters and dialogue that gets you invested in the story.
It has a bit of a "high school cirriculum" feel to it, but the story is well written and valuable nonetheless. Parks is able to avoid the dry stretches that hurt the opening chapters as the story gets going and it is very hard to put down in the last 100 pages. I found the ending to be surprisingly down beat, actually, there aren't very many happy moments in this book, but I don't have a problem with this because it is depressing with a point.
The most compelling and important part of The Learning Tree is the glimpse into a kind of Americana rarely explored by 20th Century writers, of any medium. A story that no doubt many people lived but is seldom told.
I almost hate to admit it, but I didn't spend a whole lot of time digesting The Learning Tree because I started reading Mother Night the very next morning.
Vonnegut is undoubtedly my favorite author. The guy is a literary genius. He has a an incredible ability to state the most complex paradox in such simplicity that a 6-year-old could understand it. His simultaneous love of the human spirit and disappointment in human nature is drenched in every sentence. The guy is a fucking legend.
Mother Night is considered one of Vonnegut's best works so you could say I was pretty excited to get started on it.
The story centers around Howard W. Campbell Jr. (who also makes a brief appearance in Vonnegut's Slaughter House Five), a nazi on trial for war crimes in Israel.
The story essentially plays as a type of memoirs for Campbell, an American spy who acted as a propagandist for the nazi party on the radio during the war. He sits in prison because the American government refuses to claim him but, as the story progresses, the reader starts to realize that Campbell is actually right where he would prefer to be.
The story does an excellent job challenging the ideals of nationalism and sparks an interesting debate on whether one should be judged based on the merits of their actions or their character. Vonnegut, for his part, announces the moral of the story (or one of them, anyway) at the opening of the book, "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
My favorite quote from this novel doesn't actually come from the novel at all but the "editor's notes" in which Vonnegut says of the fictional Campbell, "A very good me, the real me, a me made in heaven, is hidden deep inside."
So, there they are then.
If you only had a week left to live and had to read one of these books I would say Mother Night and I don't think I'd have to think about it but both were definitely well worth the time I put into them.
I'm not really sure how to classify this... underrated? They aren't really, but what the hell?
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