by Manuel Gonzales

Our Lady of the Lake: Laura Bush

If you have been keeping up with library news around Texas, specifically that of Austin, then you know that the second annual Texas Book Festival, headed by Our Lady of the Lake, First Lady of Texas, Laura Bush (Honorary Chairman), is set for the first weekend of November, Saturday the first and Sunday the second. Despite what I might say and think of Bush politics, the Book Festival is an event not to be missed. The festival is a fundraiser for Texas Public Libraries (of which we can never have enough) and features book signings, panel discussions, and readings by some of Texas' most well-known authors (Larry McMurtry, Edwin "Bud" Shrake, Naomi Shihab Nye, to mention a few) and others who have used Texas as a background to their literary work, including Carlos Fuentes, who is promoting his newest novel, Chrystal Frontiers.

If you have a lot of money you wish to donate to the Texas Library fund, or if you would just like to hobnob with the hobnobs, don't miss the Texas Book Festival dinner, the first edition Literary Gala black-tie fundraising dinner to be held at the Capitol Mariott on Saturday night.

For more information about the Book Fest or the Literary Gala, call up ol' Laura Bush, or perhaps visit the Texas Book Festival Web page, or call the Texas Book Festival at (512) 477-4055. The event should be fun, the weather should be cool, the festival itself is free, and writers (especially Texas writers) can be very interesting people to meet. Come out and enjoy the books.

Austin Public Libraries

If you know about and appreciate things like the Book Festival, you probably also know about how close Austin came to losing one of its most valuable public resources, the Riverside Drive Branch of the Austin Public Library system. The Riverside Drive Branch provides service to more than 70,000 patrons, acts as one of only two public libraries for the Southeast district of Austin, supports job placement, computer training, bi-lingual teaching and learning, and needs to remain open. We shouldn't forget its importance. I know I may sound melodramatic, it is only one library, but in a world where TV's importance increases by leaps and bounds and the value of the written word loses ground with each year, we cannot add fuel to the fire by closing Texas libraries. So on a lighter note...

Oprah and Rapture of Canaan

Before I say anything else, I will say this: Sheri Reynolds, true author of The Rapture of Canaan, wrote a nice book. Not a brilliant book, but a good one.

It is fascinating and horrifying to know that one woman on daytime television can hold up a book in front of a television studio audience, flash its cover, recommend its worth, and overnight, it will become a bestseller. Inevitably, indubitably a bestseller. Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone, Sheri Reynolds' Rapture of Canaan, Ursula Heig's Stones from the River. Bestsellers. All of them.

Toni Morrison won the New Book Award for Song of Solomon when it was published in 1977, 20 years ago. The hardback edition has been out of print since the early '80s. Penguin had to reprint more. No kidding. After Song of Solomon made its appearance on Oprah, people all over the country walked into bookstores asking for a copy. Clerks happily handed them a nice, new trade paperback. Customers said, "Don't you have it in hardback?"

Song of Solomon is an excellent, beautifully written novel. Gorgeous prose, strong, desperate and hungry characters. It was a bestseller when it was published, as have been most of Toni Morrison's works. It is studied in accredited academies; it can be read from many levels; it can be compared to and complements works by Faulkner and Alice Walker; and Toni Morrison herself is a professor of African American studies at Princeton University. There is no reason why anyone shouldn't read her novel and too many reasons why everyone should, but why, twenty years after its initial publication, is it a bestseller?

Because of Oprah.

In a sense, Oprah is a phenomenon.

First: all of Oprah's books have been written by women, except one. She's Come Undone was written by Wally Lamb and won awards when it was first published (in 1991). It is about a woman and narrated by a woman in a voice critics heralded as so true to its character, so true to a woman's voice, a woman's thoughts, that you had to remind yourself it was written by a man. Also: religion plays some role, intentional or not, in Oprah's titles: Song of Solomon, Rapture of Canaan, Book of Ruth. And third: all of Oprah's Books are Bestsellers.

So: is there method to Oprah's madness, rhythm to her rhyme? And more importantly, are the books featured in Oprah's Book Club worth reading?

I have no answer to the first question. I have no idea what's behind Oprah's new Book Club. But to the second question, I have this to say.

Yes. They are worth reading if only because promoting reading in a society ruled by sound bites and video clips can only be a good thing. And, judging from a brief glance at Oprah's choices, she's picked out a couple of good books.

Rapture of Canaan is a good book. Sheri Reynolds needs an editor, and she has the nasty habit of writing ineffectual dialogue, but...Rapture of Canaan is a mix of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlett Letter and Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina. Reynolds' prose can be lyrical, simple, true. To her characters, to the South, the South she writes of and wants us to visualize, set off from the rest of the world by "God's Almighty Baptizing Wind." Her characters' sermons and outcries to the lord almighty Jesus Christ are powerful, upsetting, riveting. She catches the Southern religious fanatic stereotype -- speaking in tongues, long, passionate hallelujahs, God-fearing sighs, loud amens, tears in your eyes, breath of Jesus pouring down your throat -- perfectly. But then, it all seems so stereotypical. Stereotypical and blown out of the water: sleeping in open graves for drinking, castration for "fornication," walking on pecan shells and strapping barbed wire to your legs and chest. Almost too much.

Reynolds' narrator is 13-year-old Ninah who grows into a 15-, not quite 16-year-old woman who takes her grandfather's religious community and crumbles it to the ground by giving (unwedded) birth to the next Messiah. She begins her narrative:

I've spent a lot of time weaving, but you'd never know it from my hands...With threads, hair, and twisted fabric, I weave in fragments of myself, bits of other people. I weave in lies, and I weave in love, and in the end, it's hard to know if one keeps me warmer than the other.

But rather than continue the story with elegant prose, she decides to tell the tale, much of it anyway, through clumsy, unnatural, over-accentuated dialogue. Ninah, in a constant search for truth in the past, asks her Nanna to tell her stories. Stories about Nanna's childhood, about Grandpa Herman before he became a religious zealot, etc., but Nanna never wants to tell Ninah any stories. Obviously, Nanna realizes just how bad a story teller she is. Nanna couldn't story-tell her way out of a paper sack, not the way Sheri Reynolds writes her.

Dialogue moves. With few words, it gives insight to characters, their actions, what they have done, what they might do. Dialogue adds rhythm, it adds voice, it keeps the story moving. Rarely (if ever, and I say never) should dialogue replace prose. Then dialogue becomes bulky, bland, and forced and loses that which makes dialogue an effective tool for writers.

Where, my friends, have all the editors gone? What happened to the power of language, the value of words? What became of those stories, those novels in which each word served a purpose? Contributed to the story, the setting, the characters? What happened to the rhythm of voice? Somewhere along the way we must have lost it, some of it, anyhow. That rhythm. But it's easy enough to find. In music, at parties, in churches, on the streets, in your own head. Take a step outside, Ms. Reynolds. Listen to how people tell their stories. You've got much to learn.