By David Streitfeld
Sunday, December 13, 1998; Page X15
A couple of months ago, curious about how the various editions of the Starr
Report were selling, I decided to call the bookstore closest to the library of the
president who seemed the furthest in spirit from President Clinton: the
famously plainspoken Harry Truman.
I called a chain store in Independence, Mo. But an assistant manager said there
was no way she could say anything at all about how the Starr Report or any
other book was selling: I'd have to talk to corporate headquarters. At the local
branch of a different chain, I was also met with a blanket refusal.
Finally, I wised up and called the nearest independent, where the owner was
glad to be interviewed. This underlined once again the value of independent
bookstores: They're responsible to no one but themselves.
These are weird times. There are as many books as ever, but fewer
independently owned channels through which they can be accessed. The
independent bookstores' share of the market has fallen roughly by half over
the last few years, replaced by Barnes & Noble, Borders, Amazon.com and,
for the big bestsellers, warehouse clubs. Now Barnes & Noble is trying to buy
Ingram, one of only two book distributors with a national reach. (Amazon is
rumored to be interested in the other one.)
Barnes & Noble insists that all it wants to do is sell as many types of books to
as many people as possible, and that it doesn't seek to control anything. But
when you own such a big slice of the market, control comes naturally. To get
a book through the B&N system, publishers will do whatever they have to --
change the title, change the cover. If B&N is lukewarm, publishers sometimes
decide not to publish a book at all.
The trouble is, no one really knows what customers want. The greatest
successes of the past couple of years took everyone by surprise -- Cold
Mountain, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Memoirs of a Geisha.
B&N reportedly wanted to change the moody cover of Cold Mountain to a
battle scene, because you have to make clear to the Civil War buffs that this is
a Civil War novel. But that would have turned off the millions who had no
interest in a Civil War novel but were lured into reading it anyway.
Many unexpected hits first began to sell because independent booksellers liked
them and touted them to their customers. It wasn't because some conglomerate
said, "We have a huge investment in this, we have to sell as many as possible."
In that sense, the independents -- small, undercapitalized, sometimes cranky --
have acted as a filter on the hype machine. The things they put in the front of
their stores to catch your eye are there because they like them. At a chain
bookstore, they're there because the store was paid by a publisher to put them
there.
Len Riggio, the smart and aggressive head of Barnes & Noble, is fond of
saying that he's not trying to put any other bookstore out of business. This
holiday season, everyone who loves books and cares about their future should
take him at his word, and buy something from Chapters, Vertigo, Politics &
Prose, Olsson's and the other independents. It might be a tiny bit more
inconvenient and expensive, but that's a worthwhile price to pay to ensure
their survival. If too many more of them go out of business, the ultimate price
to readers will be high.
Just Desserts
"Eat or die," said Jim Harrison, although for him it has sometimes seemed as
if the first would naturally result in the second. There was, to give just one
example, a succession of memorable meals with Orson Welles at Ma Maison in
Los Angeles, the last of which involved a half-pound of beluga caviar with a
bottle of Stolichnaya, a salmon in sorrel sauce, sweetbreads en croute, a whole
leg of lamb, five wines, desserts, cheeses and ports. At the end, Harrison
stumbled to the men's room and rested his head in a greasy faint against the
wall. Eat and die.
"The polite word for what my body looks like," the novelist warned me, "is
'burly.' "
Someone handed us menus. This was in the bar of the Stanhope Hotel in New
York, where Harrison was staying during the publication of his new novel.
The Road Home is his first full-length fiction in a decade, a sequel of sorts to
Dalva, considered by many critics his best. The novel and the simultaneous
appearance of his collected poetry in his 60th year are the sort of confluence
that inspires celebration and critical retrospectives. This should finally be
Harrison's moment.
Should be, but the writer has never been a darling of the coastal media.
Although The Road Home is in its fourth printing and has 50,000 copies in
print, national coverage of Harrison has been scant. Why? Charles Frazier, for
one, doesn't quite get it.
"He's one of a very small number of writers whom I immediately buy,
without waiting for reviews, whenever I see a new book," says the author of
Cold Mountain. "There's a largeness to what he's doing, a sense of landscape
and life and also a spiritual scope. He reminds me a lot of Kerouac -- and, like
Kerouac, I feel better after I read him."
The Road Home is the interconnected tale of a half-Sioux patriarch, his son,
granddaughter and great-grandson. It begins like this:
"It is easy to forget that in the main we die only seven times more slowly than
our dogs. The simplicity of this law of proportion came to me early in life,
growing up as I did so remotely that dogs were my closest childhood friends.
It is for this reason I've always been a slow talker, though if my vocal cords
had been otherwise constructed I may have done well at a growl or bark or
howl at scented but unseen dangers beyond the light we think surrounds us,
but more often enshrouds us."
Near the end, a different character is checked for cancer: "Some of the tests
were indeed invasive but the staff and doctors were gracious, so unlike the
often wretched treatment my welfare clients received at hospitals which were
really medical assembly lines. I've always been aware that smiles are available
if you can write the check. This wasn't a bad reflection on places that were the
best in their fields like Sloan-Kettering or Mayo but an ordinary comment on
the nature of the world."
It's that last sentence that's the quinessential Harrison touch, the gentle realism
undercutting the cynicism.
"I feel free and pleasant," he announced at lunch in his customary growl. This
was despite the fact that he had to be in New York, had to go on a dreaded
tour, was forced to use a cane because he had fallen into a hole. "It's like my
gravestone should read, 'He got his work done.' I feel a little autumnal, but I
don't feel troubled by the fact. I have a little unused life yet."
He travels a lot, getting behind the wheel as a cure for depression or source of
inspiration. "I like to collect thickets, really great hiding places," he said.
"There are great lacunae in America, alternative places that people don't
travel into for reasons best known to themselves. They've escaped notice."
One of these places is the Niobrara River in northern Nebraska, where some
of the new novel is set. "Nebraska reminds me of what America was supposed
to look like before it became something else," Harrison wrote once in his
notebooks, noting "the almost unpardonable beauty of desolation" along Route
20.
Another is the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where he has a cabin. It's where
he goes to "puke up the world," as he calls it. "I stay absolutely remote for at
least five days, just wander around with the dog. No radio, no TV, no
newspapers, no nothing. It's a chance to see if I'm still a human being."
Sometimes he's not sure. Late one night he saw the lights of a car in his
driveway, and was so mad he literally leapt out of bed, smashing his head on a
metal chandelier. "I ripped this huge door off and went running into the yard,
howling. I figured it was an assistant professor wanting to talk, or a book
collector."
But it was only lightning. Harrison later figured he had had an attack of
lycanthropy, perhaps related to the wolf he had recently seen in that very
driveway. In any case, his dog avoided him for a couple days.
Plates of food arrived at our table. Harrison had baby chicken, although the
menu called it something much fancier. "Pretty good bar food," he
pronounced, although it was clear this meal wasn't going to be memorable as
the time he and some friends bagged a deer out of season and ate the whole
thing, to destroy the evidence. They threw the bones in the barn, where a
game warden wasn't likely to crawl.
"Could I have some salt, too?" he asked the waitress. Her name, he had
discovered even before the appetizers, was Sam. She was dressed in black and
must have weighed all of a hundred pounds, and showed a tender solicitude
for his welfare. "I know you want me thinner for fierce intercourse, which
I'm not capable of anymore," he joked. "And I only have eight Viagra left!"
I directed his attention back to The Road Home. "I felt when I finished this
novel that I was actually going to die, from exhaustion." It wasn't a new
feeling. "As soon as I finished Dalva I went to the doctor and he said, 'Don't
you know that both your eardrums are broken?' But you get obsessive, and
don't notice."
Like the time he decided he wouldn't eat twice the same food prepared the
same way. It had to be a variation. So he would have chicken piquante, Basque
chicken, Greek style, Provencal, stewed chicken, chicken fricassee, and so on.
And as recently as this summer, he started testing a total of 38 varieties of
Cotes du Rhone.
Testing?
"Well, deciding which one I wanted. I haven't written a screenplay in a couple
years, so I don't have the money for Bordeaux or Burgundy. So I'm down to
Cote du Rhone. It was like a small wine festival. Just me, really. I found out
that the expensive ones were invariably better than the cheaper ones."
You'd think the French would just send him wine for free. He's a minor deity
over there. Thanks to his previous novel, he said, "there's a dozen baby girls
in France named Dalva. I had to have my picture taken with them. They bring
them into bookstores." That must give him a real feeling of fertility. "Not
quite, but some of the mothers are gorgeous." He was shortlisted for the
Medicis Prize, a big deal, for The Road Home.
"I don't have any idea why the French like me," he said. "I would like to think
they have a clearer view, but maybe they don't."
Like Harrison's fiction, his poetry seems to exist outside the U.S. literary
establishment. The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems, just
published in an attractive edition by Copper Canyon, probably won't be
nominated for any major awards -- his verse never is -- but it will likely
outsell all the books that are.
At the end are some new poems, written in the overflow from The Road
Home. My favorite tells how the poet was commanded in a dream "to begin
the epitaphs of thirty-three friends/ without using grand words like love pity
pride/ sacrifice doom honor heaven hell earth."
Among his beginnings: "Forgive me for never answering the phone . . .
Forgive me for sending too much money . . . Pardon me for fishing during
your funeral . . . Pardon me for burning your last book . . . Forgive me for
making love to your widow . . . Pardon me for never mentioning you . . .
Forgive me for not knowing where you're buried . . . Forgive me for keeping
a nude photo of you." Each of them sounds like the beginning of a Jim
Harrison novel.
The wine bottle was empty, the plate bearing the parma ham and asparagus
long ago removed. The chicken was an unrecognizable carcass, the garlic
mashed potatoes and forest mushrooms obliterated. "No dessert for me," the
writer told Sam. "I'm trying to be a male model."
search.washingtonpost.com |
