The South, middle-aged ad executives and other mythical things

[bloodygranuaile]

Paul recently gave me a big bag of books, which was pretty awesome of him. They are not quite the sort of books I usually tend to read, which is also pretty awesome, as it is good to expand my horizons, particularly since I do not now have teachers to make me read things I otherwise wouldn't read. So that is how I wound up reading Christopher Tilghman's Roads of the Heart, which on the surface basically looks like a mash-up of my two least favorite kinds of stories: “literary fiction” as an obfuscatory term for mopey middle-aged male navel-gazing, and stories about guys with solid social, emotional and financial support systems who deliberately make themselves miserable by being giant assholes to everybody and then earn forgiveness and more support from everyone by sheer power of their nebulous inherent goodness or awesomeness or something something I don't know. However, Roads of the Heart avoids actually being either one of That Fuckin' Story Again by having these two guys be different characters, with the the latter guy being an eight-five-year-old stroke victim and the first guy's father. So while Deep Thoughts About Cheating On Your Wife do make up enough of this story to be the only thing pushing it out of short-story length into a stand-alone book, most of the book tells a story about Family Drama And Secrets, and I really do love a good story about Family Drama And Secrets. This story is also mostly a road trip, because apparently Tilghman is trying to write the most American story ever, and nothing says “modern American classic” like a road trip through the South. (Note to self: Write hipster modern American classic about train trip across the North.)

I don't want to give away any of the Family Drama and Secrets, but basically there are a lot of them, and the plot mostly follows Eric (our mopey narrator) and his father Frank (a disgraced former Maryland state senator who had a stroke) and Frank's nurse Adam (who is awesome) through the country as Frank goes to apologize to various family members who he has been terrible to over the years. As the road trip loops around the country they pick up various family members, and Eric, when not figuring out shocking family secrets or translating Frank's stroke-ful speech to the people he is trying to apologize to (this is awkward sometimes), learns that he really needs to stop being so damn mopey and put some effort into not making really stupid mistakes like his father did. And thus he improves his marriage and his advertising company and his relationship with his son and all that. What really impressed me the most about this book is that Eric manages to fix the habits of mistake-making he's fallen into mostly by growing up, deciding to fix his attitude, and helping other people, and yet the tone of the story still stays literary-fictionfully mellow and not self-helpy or preachy at all.

Reading books about the South always make me feel like I am reading some sort of weird fanfiction, specifically weird fanfiction about a series of fantasy books I read as a child, or something. Being a hugely stereotypical Elite North-Eastern Liberal, I kind of do not really believe the South exists. I have never been there, except to a few very specific places in Florida that are the places that North-Easterners sometimes go (specifically: Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, Disneyworld), and some bits of Virginia that are basically still part of the DC metro area. I thought Baltimore was exotically Southern when I went there. So while I found the bits of the book where they were in the South and guys wore things described as “seersucker suits” (WHAT IS A SEERSUCKER SUIT I HAVE NEVER SEEN ONE) to be hugely absorbing, other people might not.

I think I am also somewhat out of the age range of the target market for this book (does literary fiction have target markets? Or is one of their pretensions that they are literary because they are totes universal?), but I cannot tell if that made me enjoy it more or less. On the one hand, because I am too young to have an old marriage or a grown-up child and my parents are not old enough to require caretaking, I found it interesting to see things through the eyes of a narrator who is at a very different place in life than I am. Particularly because he lives in Summit, New Jersey, and I found it interesting to look at life in the place I grew up from the perspective of one of the grown-ups that moves there rather than as a child who grew up there and has a specific “escape” point to work towards. (The Jersey burbs are a fantastic place to be a child, but get small real fast when you hit about 15.) So perhaps if I were older, I would be able to get more out of this book by being able to identify more with Eric and the stuff he is dealing with. Or perhaps I would just be more like “I know all that already; get in the damn car and go uncover some shocking family scandals already”. Probably the latter, considering how quickly I managed to develop hipsterly disdain for hipsterly disdain for suburbs. (And I actually like the post-industrial wasteland I moved to!)

Anyway, can you tell I really don't read much literary fiction and have no idea how to go about writing about it?