ELI THE GOOD BY SILAS HOUSE

Eli the Good by Silas House
Somerville, Mass: Candlewick Press
$16.99 – 295 pages

I remember, I remember
The fir-trees dark and high;
I used to think their slender tops
Were close against the sky:
It was a childish ignorance,
But now ’tis little joy
To know I’m farther off from Heaven
Than when I was a boy
- Thomas Hood

Eli Book, the ten-year-old narrator/protagonist of Silas House’ new novel, Eli the Good, dreams of being a writer. As he secretly records the pains and joys of living in a small town called Refuge during the Bicentennial summer (1976), he quickly learns that both his family and the world are plagued by uncertainty and trouble.

“There was the atom bomb, the Rapture, the possibility
that I might be possessed by the Devil, the threat that
my parents might one day not love each other, or me.”

So, when Eli hears the word “cancer” for the first time, he ponders the way people look when they say it and he intuitively understands that cancer “must be a very bad thing.”He also learns that his beloved Aunt Nell has it.

It soon becomes obvious that Eli “overhears” a lot. He has learned the craft of lurking and moves like a ghost through the Book household taking notes, (he even lies under the porch) listening to his parents’ conversations, eavesdropping on his sister and her boy friend and spying on Edie, his “best friend” (a girl). In his determination to understand his father’s nightmares, he even steals a collection of letters that his father had written to his mother from Vietnam – letters that were hidden in his parents’ bedroom.

As a result, he gradually unearths a tangled knot of family secrets, disappointments and resentments including: the reason for his father’s nightmares; his mother’s secrets regarding her own life and the revelation that his sister Jodie is really his “half-sister;” also there are the consequences of the increasingly bitter family disputes provoked by the Vietnam war and his father’s role in it.

At times, even the weather seems to reflect the changeable emotional climate in the Book household. As languid summer nights are replaced by a series of violent thunderstorms, tempers flare. The simmering conflict between mother and daughter explodes; Eli’s father becomes a “walking time bomb,” as he broods on a day in Boston when two anti-war demonstrators called him a “baby killer” – a condemnation he hears echoed in the opinions voiced by his own family. Even Eli begins to taunts Edie whose parents are divorcing. But, the storms pass, temperate weather returns and Eli continues to record the mounting evidence that his family has the strength to endure all things.


It would be an oversimplification to characterize Eli the Good as simply a “rites of passage” novel since it contains
a number of other significant themes. Not only does Eli change from a callow, self-centered youth; he also develops a growing sense of the intricate web that binds him to both his family and the physical world. There is something of a paradox here since the violent and emotional encounters that threaten to tear Eli’s world apart are also responsible for revealing (and affirming) the family members’ love for each other.

In addition, Eli the Good is a celebration of a time and place – America’s Bicentennial year in a small Southern town. Eli and his family are wrapped in the warmth and security of a decade that is still full of hope and promise. As Eli consumes Zagnuts, drinks Pepsi Cola, and watches “Happy Days” and “The Waltons,” listens to Nina Simone and the Beatles on Aunt Nell’s phonograph, he is increasingly aware that he is living in a magical world where even the trees are sentient spirits (especially willow and beech). As he rides his bike to a communal swimming hole, dances with his mother in the kitchen and reads The Diary of Anne Frank, he becomes the embodiment of a nostalgic dream; he is also the best of what America once was, and hopefully, can be again.

BUTCHER'S CROSSING by John Williams

Butcher’s Crossing by John Williams
New York: New York Review of Books
$14.95 – 274 pages (1960, reissued 2007)

For those of us who truly love books, the greatest pleasures are often derived from discovering the “neglected classics” – remarkable books that somehow manage to pass under our personal radar. In the great deluge of novels that have flooded this country for the past fifty years, it is not surprising to discover that many distinguished works were published with little or no fanfare - they fade quietly, unnoticed by either the critics or the media.

Well, it is gratifying to learn that somebody noticed John Williams and lifted his three novels (Butcher’s Crossing, Stoner and Augustus) from obscurity. (The New York Review of Books is devoted to finding “lost or missed” classics). Although the Denver-based author of Butcher’s Crossing died in 1994, his works are being reevaluated (and critically acclaimed). Almost fifty years after their publication, his works continue to attract attention. Current critics compare Butcher’s Crossing to Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and graduate students are finding the novels of John Williams on their required reading lists.

Butcher’s Crossing is a western. The setting is the 1870’s when Will Andrews arrives in the raw and primitive town of Butcher’s Crossing, Kansas. A Harvard graduate and a fervent admirer of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Andrews is on a spiritual quest. He wants to encounter Nature in its most brutal aspect (“bloody in tooth and claw”) so that he can merge, or “become One” with it.

Essentially, this is the clichéd beginning of a hundred potboilers: the eastern “tenderfoot” confronts a daunting “rites of passage,” but his innate courage and moral principles enables him to survive. He emerges hardened and confident, ready to take his place among the stalwart natives of the rugged west.

However, Will Andrews is destined to encounter a dark and brutal world that bears no resemblance to Emerson’s precepts. His six-month ordeal as a member of a buffalo hunting party not only change his perceptions of the natural world; it also provides him with the dubious opportunity to experience a dark and mindless violence that has much in common with Joseph Conrad’s descent into the heart of darkness.

When Andrews arrives in Butcher’s Crossing, he makes the belated discovery that the great buffalo hunts are virtually over. (The fashion craze in the East for buffalo coats has diminished and customers are complaining about the “smell that they can’t get rid of.”) The surrounding prairie is littered with thousands of bone piles that the local farmers are slowly converting to fertilizer. However, by chance, he meets Miller, a buffalo hunter who tells him of a remote valley in Colorado where an enormous herd grazes peacefully. Using his inheritance, Andrews offers to finance a hunting expedition, on the condition that he is included in the party.

Thus begins a journey into an immense wilderness; yet it is a transitory world that is forever altered by the passage of these men who seem to have a desire to destroy everything they see. In addition to Miller and Andrews, the hunting party includes Charlie Hoge, a one-handed
alcoholic with a penchant for quoting scripture, and Fred Schneider, an angry, taciturn man who glares at world around him with contempt. Hoge is a gifted cook and driver; Schneider is a skinner. Miller promises that they will return with several thousand hides – enough to make
them all wealthy.

The journey is memorable. The author’s ability to describe natural phenomena, a terrifying snow storm, thirst, drought and the immensity of the natural world is remarkable. However, I feel that John Williams’ real purpose is to demolish the “myth of the West.” The author does not describe a primitive world where men are ennobled by travail and hazardous encounters. Instead, he takes his tenderfoot to the brink of an abyss where he glimpses the mindless and destructive violence in his own heart.