“Love Medicine” by Louise Erdrich

Tragically beautiful and hauntingly vivid.

When I was a sophomore here at my university, I took a class on Native American literature. It satisfied a diversity elective, and it was a chance to dedicate my time to reading and writing… a win-win for me. My wonderful professor made sure to emphasize that he was not Native American, and to take his lessons and interpretations with a grain of salt; he could not proclaim to truly understand Native American culture and the literature that comes from it. I went to that class constantly tired due to the late hour, but that class also inspired my love and appreciation for Native American literature.

I grew up being told– as I believe many Americans and especially people my age are– that I had Native American blood in me. Apparently there was Cherokee in my family tree, and I never questioned it. It was something I told people with pride when I was young, and used it as an explanation for my completely straight, thick hair and easily tanned skin. Not until I began my Native American literature class did I realize I didn’t really have a reason to proclaim, “I’m Native American!” I had no proof that I was Native American, and given the Ancestry results I got for Christmas last year, that remains true. I had no right to claim a culture that is not my own, and I am completely accepting of that. All of this, however, doesn’t change my love and appreciation for the culture and literature.

I had never heard of “Love Medicine” before my professor in my advanced fiction writing class recommended the collection. I’m not normally a great fan of short story collections. I do enjoy short stories, but I can only read a few at a time. After reading a collection in a short time span, all the stories tend to get jumbled in my head. Erdrich did something different though. In “Love Medicine,” she follows one family, but jumps through perspectives, time, and place fluidly, only denoting when something changes by a switch of name or an extra large space between paragraphs. A family tree is placed at the front of the book, just so a reader can keep everyone and everything straight. It was easy for me to fall into this story of love and kinship, and all of the problems that come with a family.

Erdrich expertly handles the issues faced in her novel. The characters deal with heartbreak, death, PTSD, alcoholism, mental disorders, and all of it feels extremely real. I could meet one of these characters on the street, and they would be fully fleshed out, as real as I am while I sit here typing this out. There are no characters in her stories that are white knights, and there are no characters in her stories that are complete villains either. Each character is horribly, horribly flawed, and yet beautifully human at the same time. These characters become people you feel for and relate to. I found myself rooting for Lipsha Morrissey when he was faced with discovering who his mother truly was, and I found myself heartbroken when Marie Kashpaw realized her husband’s infidelity.

Above and within all of the stories swirls Erdrich’s beautiful prose. She writes in a way that is dream-like. A scene as simple as a bus pulling into a city terminal becomes indescribably gorgeous:

“The bus came upon the city and the lights grew denser, reflecting up into the cloud cover, a transparent orange-pink that floated over the winking points of signs and low black buildings. The street looked slick, deep green, from the windows of the bus.”

I love the way a wet street looks under a stoplight– the way the red light reflecting on the asphalt makes the whole world feel charged, waiting for a spark to ignite it. This is the way Louise Erdrich writes her stories. Her narratives are charged, coiled dynamite like a rattlesnake, ready to blow a hole through your preconceived notions of the world.

As I’ve said before, even if I am not a part of Native American culture, I greatly admire the beautiful literature that it has produced. From Louise Erdrich to Leslie Marmon Silko, Native American authors are making their voices heard in big ways. Their stories may not always be kind or gentle– in fact, they are often the opposite. Erdrich and Silko especially pull no punches when it comes to their literature, and that may in fact be the most haunting part of their stories. A reader is left with imagery, characters, and narratives that they cannot possibly forget.

If you’d ever like to dream in the daylight, “Love Medicine” will give you a home.

“Childhood’s End” by Arthur C. Clarke

Reaching for the Stars.

As a longtime lover of science-fiction, I can also admit I’m guilty of falling into my niches. I gravitate naturally towards utopian and dystopian worlds, sometimes stories involving androids and robotics, but hardly ever do I go straight towards time travel or aliens. When I was told by my professor that “Childhood’s End” by THE Arthur C. Clarke was going to be my first novel-length foray into an alien story, I was excited.

The novel has been accused of being slow, but I feel that’s hardly a fair accusation to make. For a novel that takes place over centuries, I feel the story moves at an almost break-neck piece. It’s a challenge to get through centuries of evolution and the end of the human race in two-hundred and thirty-seven pages, but Clarke is more than capable. We are so used to stories that take place over only a few days– high-stakes situations are extremely popular in modern media. Look at “The Umbrella Academy” on Netflix. Sure, the show involves multiple jumps through time and perspective shifts, but in the end, the story takes place within an eight-day timeline. The characters have to stop the end of the world, and the end of the world must be a sudden event, right?

Arthur C. Clarke says “wrong.”

“Childhood’s End” is a story broken down into three sections, based on the stages humanity moves through after the Overlords appear. By the end of the novel, the Earth has irrevocably changed. Humanity no longer experiences crime, war, or poverty, but future generations are no longer “human” at this point. The Overlords have changed the fate of the world. The children of mankind begin to change; to develop powers and abilities beyond what can be imagined. The planet is an afterthought, the parents and grandparents of the children are an afterthought. The children of a new race are destined to join the Overmind, and live among the stars. Earth and humanity are inevitably destroyed, the children become part of the Overmind, and the Overlords move on to another planet and another race.

There has been much debate over the ending of “Childhood’s End.” The novel is very British in nature– this is not a story of man versus the world, forging his own path against all odds, which is the definition of the American dream. Think of “Moby Dick,” “Death of a Salesman,” and “The Call of the Wild.” Stories about the individual are America’s bread and butter. “Childhood’s End,” however, is a story about the power of a group, and how together, we can do just about anything we set our minds to. A “we” mindset is an idea that perhaps more of us could embrace in an age of extreme independence.

But is the ending of this story necessarily “happy?”

Millions of people dream of having a chance to someday explore space. They dream of the stars, of faraway galaxies, of stepping on soil that no life force has ever moved on before. They believe the space program deserves all the support it can get, so there can be answers to all of those “what if” questions.

But there are plenty of other people who believe space should be left well-enough alone. We have enough issues on our own planet– why should we bother with trying to live on another one? Shouldn’t we dedicate all of our time and resources to fixing the home we have?

I’m not sure which side of this debate I fall on. I know that Arthur Clarke was a very vocal supporter of the space program, and that shows in the rich ways he describes space in his novel. Clarke is a masterful storyteller, able to draw an audience in and keep them on their toes. Clarke writes of a planet frozen in time at the center of the universe, a planet with such heavy gravity that the only organisms that can survive there must live in two-dimensions, only a fraction of a centimeter in thickness. Most vividly of all, Clarke describes a sun, “too hot to be white, it was a searing ghost at the frontiers of the ultraviolet… It was a star against which Earth’s pale sun would have been as feeble as a glowworm at noon.”

I don’t have any desire to go to space myself– I enjoy the idea of the unknown too much. We spend more than enough of our lives trying to find answers for everything anyway. But Clarke’s descriptions of what could be beyond us are just as beautiful as they are haunting. His imagery does haunt me, because it makes me wonder: should we know? Should we try to see what is now beyond our reach?

I don’t necessarily read Clarke’s ending as “happy.” Perhaps it’s the American in me, but I feel humanity should have a say in how and where we end up. If it’s meant to be, it’s up to me, you know? But if our fate is our decision, then I believe we have a right to try and reach farther and farther out. No one looks at the beauty of a flower and compares it to the beauty of a star– but we haven’t figured out how to hold stars in our hands.

At least, not yet.

“Three Sisters” by Anton Chekov

The Extraordinarily Mundane.

Chekov. A name that fills English majors with equal measures of dread and excitement. Chekov is a behemoth of dramatic literature, right up there with Ibsen and Beckett. Chekov’s most popular work is by far “The Cherry Orchard,” but the work of Chekov that is most near and dear to my heart is “Three Sisters.”

“Three Sisters” is the first work by Chekov that I’ve ever read, and I’ll admit it; my first time through, I was bored. The action of the characters felt stilted and halting, the dialogue overlapped and interrupted in ways that made no sense, and nothing really HAPPENED in the play.

At least, that’s what I thought my first time through.

Chekov is clearly a brilliant man, well-loved by all fans of dramatic literature, so I wondered: what am I missing? Am I missing the Chekov-gene? Am I missing some great symbol that explains the entire work? I needed answers, so I dove back into the text for a second time, and I ended up doing some research along the way.

In “Chekov’s Three Sisters: A Proto-Poststructuralist Experiment” by Sarah Wyman, the first line of the article reads, “In Anton Chekov’s ‘Three Sisters’, the domestic scene may appear estranged, both static and understated, but it becomes increasingly familiar the longer one looks.” Wyman was absolutely right. My second time through “Three Sisters,” I began to see the play the way it was meant to be seen.

In modern media, we have become used to constant action, perfectly timed and witty dialogue, and world-shattering events that can only fall under the fantasy and sci-fi umbrellas. “Three Sisters,” however, is work grounded in kitchen sink realism; it’s so much like reality, we have a hard time reconciling it as a form of entertainment. In real life, people often stand apart, zone out, talk over one another, monologue without realizing, and events that seem small to others can take on enormous gravity to those in the thick of it. This is the world that Chekov has made. As readers or an audience, we are not necessarily supposed to like Olga, Masha, and Irina, but we are meant to root for them because we can see ourselves in them.

So what do these titular three sisters want out of life? It’s fairly simple– they want to live it. They all have dreams, dreams of having successful careers, falling in love, and returning home to Moscow. However, by the end of a play that takes place roughly over four years, the sisters are right back where they started, only with harder hearts. What is it the sisters have to hold onto in the end? Ibsen called it “the life-lie.”

I think I’d prefer to call it hope.

Italo Calvino came up with the idea of lightness, and in her book “100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write,” playwright Sarah Ruhl describes lightness as, “a philosophical choice to temper reality with strangeness, to temper intellect with emotion, and to temper emotion with humor.” Lightness is a victory over heaviness, in that way. Chekov’s play could be read as an extremely heavy work. Olga realizes she has missed her window to fall in love and marry, Masha falls for a man who isn’t her husband whom she must inevitably lose, and Irina’s fiancé dies in the final pages of the play. An audience could leave the theater or a reader could shut the book and think, “My god, how depressing!”

But that is not Chekov’s point.

Olga says, in one of the last lines of play, “Oh, dear sisters, this life of ours is not over yet.” That, in the end, is Chekov’s message. Everyday life can sometimes be crippling, and we are often left at a fork in the road, wondering how we can even begin to lift our feet and take another step. But we live, regardless. Whether for ourselves, for others, or for those yet to come, we do live. Chekov’s “Three Sisters” is a play about the beauty and power to be found in reality, and about the lightness of life– through humor, grace, and hope, I’d say we can do just about anything.

“Watchmen” by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

Heroes of a Different Breed.

As a longtime fan of superhero stories, the name “Watchmen” had long floated in my head without any idea of who it referred to. I only decided to pick up the comic in earnest after an interaction with one of my best friends.

Abigail is an enigmatic soul with a house full of plants and animals. We were in the process of making sunflower-butter sandwiches (yes, really, and I think it tastes better than peanut butter) when I noticed she had gotten a new fish.

I asked what his name was, and she replied, “Rorschach.”

I replied, “Like the ink-blot test?”

“Yes and no,” she answered. “I actually named him after the ‘Watchmen’ character.”

She then proceeded to tell me about a world where a “hero” can attempt rape and still be looked at favorably by many, the line between good and bad is entirely skewed, and a kingdom of glass can be built on a faraway planet. I was hooked, and she handed me her “Watchmen” comic only moments later.

I have a degree of familiarity with comics, but not enough to say I’m an avid comic reader. I’m guilty of speeding through comics to understand only the main action, paying more attention to the graphics as opposed to the million tiny bubbles of text. But I wanted to be able to dedicate myself to this comic, so around nine in the morning, when I had downtime at work– I started to read. I finished the book in two days.

The world built by Moore and Gibbons is complex, spanning generations of heroes and villains. Readers get to see a golden age of heroism, watch as that age dies off, and bear witness to a new, present world that seems to be in desperate need of heroes yet again. The art is stunning, especially on Jon’s planet that he sculpts as his own world. The art can also be particularly gruesome, making me wrinkle up my nose as I watch a bruise on a character’s cheek fade from black, to blue, to sickly green. Pain-staking details can be found in every panel.

The characters, however, are what really invested me in this story, and I feel that’s the most important thing literature can do. If a story has a brilliant world and an exciting plot, that’s great; but what does it matter if there aren’t characters for you to care about?

Edward “Eddie” Blake (The Comedian) is instantly dislikeable, especially due to his heinous actions against women throughout the story, but he also has a perspective of the world that many can sympathize with. Daniel Dreiberg (Nite Owl) is the clean cut “good guy” with a bit of a middle-aged belly on him; but boy, is it exciting when he dons his superhero mantle again. Adrian Veidt (Ozymandias) is a surprising but understandable villain, not dissimilar from the recently popular Thanos from Marvel comics and cinema. Laurel “Laurie” Juspeczyk (Silk Spectre) is a beautiful and vivacious female character with a zest for life and love, and while Jonathan “Jon” Osterman (Doctor Manhattan) has become almost entirely alien, he has moments where all of the sudden, he seems the most human.

But the stand-out character of the entire story is Walter Kovacs, or as he is truly known, Rorschach. Rorschach serves as a grimy guide to the world of “Watchmen.” Readers spend much of the story in his head and his journal, trying to understand the world through his mask-covered eyes. He is clearly human but also completely alien. He is off-putting, at times even repulsive, but he is also the most justice-driven character in the story. He doesn’t just believe that good should be done, he believes that good MUST be done. No crime, even minor drug possession, should go unpunished. He takes his discipline of crimes to the extreme, but all for what he sees as the greater good; and once the audience is given sight into his past, Rorschach becomes a hero you ache for. Can only the broken truly feel the need for good in the world? It’s a scary question, but one that the story makes you ponder.

The “anti-hero” angle has become more and more popular in storytelling. People are beginning to be drawn to the heroes who toe the line, living in the grey area between “hero” and “villain.” Characters such as Jason Todd (DC Comics), Roland Deschain (The Dark Tower series), and Satan (Paradise Lost) are characters you hate to love and love to hate. How do you condone a murderer who kills murderers? How do you accept a man who is willing to kill a child in order to fulfill his destiny? How can you sympathize with Lucifer himself?

The answer seems to be: quite easily.

“Watchmen” is a beautiful story with fascinating layers, from the stories of the heroes and villains themselves, to the everyday lives that circle around a newspaper stand. The art is gorgeously gory, the plot builds without ever losing traction, and the characters are wonderfully flawed. My friend Adrian said that “Watchmen” is “a great piece of American literature.” At the time, I had to do a double-take at his face to make sure he wasn’t joking. Now, however, I can say that I agree with him. “Watchmen” is innovation in the realm of not only comics but storytelling, and it is a work of literature that will confuse, sicken, and inspire generations of readers to come.