Author: Howard Frank Mosher
Dates completed: March 19 & 20, 2011
What I remember:
I read these back-to-back in two days and can't quite separate them. North Country is the product of Howard Frank Mosher's midlife crisis road trip along the US-Canadian border, describing the places, characters, and customs he encountered en route and connecting the pieces of his story-telling life in the process. To call it "midlife crisis" is maybe overly dramatic -- he may not have used the phrase himself -- but the journey did play a role in his coming to terms with middle age. I enjoyed everything about it: travelogue, narrative of a writer's life, mirrored inner and outer journeys, the tone and humor of the author, the landscape itself. I love the northern woods and the anarchic independence of people who are drawn to borderlands; I love liminal spaces of all kinds. It was the first thing I'd read by him, and as soon as it was finished I made a beeline for the nearest of his novels, The Fall of the Year.
It was ... okay. What was most interesting to me about it was knowing that it had been written shortly after North Country, and being able to see how some of his sources came from stories people had told him during the trip. The Fall of the Year, like several of his other novels, follows the townspeople of Kingdom Common, situated in a fictionalized version of the rugged and mountainous Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. I love the landscape, both the reality and as he imagines it. I was disappointed not to love the book, since he is a local author and this is my home territory, in a way. But his fiction style, as represented here and in another novel I've read since (On Kingdom Mountain), just isn't to my taste. It is straightforward but somehow less direct than his nonfiction voice, more "folksy" and almost jocular. It makes sense that the voice would be different, since The Fall of the Year is told from the main character's first-person perspective, but I felt the same way about On Kingdom Mountain, which is in third-person. The style of the language simply doesn't appeal to me. It is intriguing to think about a novelist as participant in his own story, stepping into the guise of a raconteur who, though he does not appear within the story proper, is nonetheless a person belonging to the fictional world in a way that the actual writer himself cannot.
Though I wasn't wild about the novels I have read so far, they haven't put me off trying more of his fiction. On the strength of North Country alone I expect to continue picking up more of his work as I keep reading.
Dates completed: March 19 & 20, 2011
What I remember:
I read these back-to-back in two days and can't quite separate them. North Country is the product of Howard Frank Mosher's midlife crisis road trip along the US-Canadian border, describing the places, characters, and customs he encountered en route and connecting the pieces of his story-telling life in the process. To call it "midlife crisis" is maybe overly dramatic -- he may not have used the phrase himself -- but the journey did play a role in his coming to terms with middle age. I enjoyed everything about it: travelogue, narrative of a writer's life, mirrored inner and outer journeys, the tone and humor of the author, the landscape itself. I love the northern woods and the anarchic independence of people who are drawn to borderlands; I love liminal spaces of all kinds. It was the first thing I'd read by him, and as soon as it was finished I made a beeline for the nearest of his novels, The Fall of the Year.
It was ... okay. What was most interesting to me about it was knowing that it had been written shortly after North Country, and being able to see how some of his sources came from stories people had told him during the trip. The Fall of the Year, like several of his other novels, follows the townspeople of Kingdom Common, situated in a fictionalized version of the rugged and mountainous Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. I love the landscape, both the reality and as he imagines it. I was disappointed not to love the book, since he is a local author and this is my home territory, in a way. But his fiction style, as represented here and in another novel I've read since (On Kingdom Mountain), just isn't to my taste. It is straightforward but somehow less direct than his nonfiction voice, more "folksy" and almost jocular. It makes sense that the voice would be different, since The Fall of the Year is told from the main character's first-person perspective, but I felt the same way about On Kingdom Mountain, which is in third-person. The style of the language simply doesn't appeal to me. It is intriguing to think about a novelist as participant in his own story, stepping into the guise of a raconteur who, though he does not appear within the story proper, is nonetheless a person belonging to the fictional world in a way that the actual writer himself cannot.
Though I wasn't wild about the novels I have read so far, they haven't put me off trying more of his fiction. On the strength of North Country alone I expect to continue picking up more of his work as I keep reading.
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