Perused

On the nightstand: Five Skies

I met Ron Carlson once. It was - oh, jeez - fifteen or twenty years ago, had to be. A poet friend of mine who teaches at a local college had invited him to address his class, and I was on hand from the bookstore to make Carlson’s published work available for nominal sums. I was delighted, as Carlson was and is one of my favorite short story writers. Did we engage in clever and informed banter and trade literary bon mots? You may rest assured that we did not. I don’t generally carry bon mots (not even sure where to buy them, come to think of it), and I was much too overawed and bashful to offer more than a mumbled “really like your work.” Brilliant.

Well, that’s neither here nor there, really. It’s mere background for my declared intention to read Carlson’s latest work, a novel called Five Skies. I haven’t had much luck with new literary fiction for a while now; much of it has seemed thin and uninteresting, and I have been relegated to rereading old favorites like Charles Dickinson and Tobias Wolff. I’m hoping that Carlson can help break the drought.

A taste courtesy of NPR:

They worked into the early dark the first day, but the three men had equipment trouble, and they didn’t drill any postholes. Darwin had stepped off the intervals and marked where to dig, but the tractor didn’t cooperate. The day would prove like so many days at the campsite to be too small a thing for the plans they made. Too often even as the days lengthened through spring and into the high Idaho summer and the two-hour twilight, the irrevocable night would rise up between them in the middle of their workings, Key turning to Darwin for the level and not being able to see him there with the instrument ready. They fell into a pattern then without having to speak about it, retrieving their gear, lifting all the tools off the bare ground into the tractor shovel or laying them on the hood of the Farmall, and a listener would have heard only this certain clanking as the hammers and chisels and crowbars and screwdrivers were gathered against the night.

“Nothing worse in the morning than finding a crescent wrench in the dirt,” Key had told Ronnie Panelli the second or third day, when the young man finally understood what a crescent wrench was, the whole nomenclature of tools coming to him in daily increments, a lesson he resisted only for the moment before he saw that these tools were somehow his too, that he would get to wield them, be expected to, without assistance. He knew the language of only two things before this and one was the street and the other was golf, his life as a caddy. If the weather threatened, the men took the extra time to locate and place the tools in the large waterproof ammo chest by their tent. And so their days ended with this regard for their tools and the days began, as they squinted over coffee, in the exhilarating open air knowing where the shovel was, the chain, the awl.

A small confession: Jealousy is corrosive and ultimately injurious to the self, but the first line of that second graf…

“Nothing worse in the morning than finding a crescent wrench in the dirt,” Key had told Ronnie…

…freighted my heart with envy.

I just hate it when that happens. But what the hell, I’ll read the book anyway.

© 2008 Philip Barron. Monitored by SiteUptime