U.S.A.: Europe's 3rd World Country

As I type this hurricane Sandy is pounding the east coast.  I'm not too worried about it, but earlier today I noticed my Swiss roommate Christa was.  I asked her about what was making her nervous, and she said:  "The shoddy American infrastructure."

That's right Americans, richest country in the world, we have a crumbling (enough) infrastructure that it concerns Europeans who live here.  

I've realized that Christa talks about the U.S. the way I talk about the 3rd world.  I think Latin American and Africa have a kind of spirit and energy that the U.S. lacks.  She thinks the U.S. has a kind of spirit and energy that Switzerland lacks.  I've been taken aback by the disrepair of the infrastructure in the 3rd word.  She's taken aback by the disrepair of the infrastructure in the U.S.

I love living with her.  Mostly because she a fantastic human being, but also because it's interesting to hear a Western European's perspective on America.  

Here's another one:  she told me that if I was in my 19th year of teaching high school in Switzerland, I'd be earning over $150,000.  

Um, that'd be close to THREE TIMES as much as I'm making now.

It's tough living in this 3rd world country.

"Horseman, Pass By" by Larry McMurtry

I think I’m a big Larry McMurtry fan . . . something I’d never thought I’d say.  I’d always seen those covers of Lonesome Dove, with the ornate lettering and the rustic scenery, and figured it was some hack romantic western. 

Little did I know. 

On my wilderness trip in Montana last year one of my instructors said Lonesome Dove was his favorite book.  And since I had sort of a western spirit going that summer I decided pick it up—and within hours was amidst one of the most absorbing reading experiences of my life.

It reminded me of these Wallace Stevens lines:

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.

That kind of merging with a text happened to me only twice before:  with 1984 when I was 17 years old, and then with The Poisonwood Bible when I was 33.  And now I can add Lonesome Dove to the list.  I lived so deeply inside the pages that I found myself running around, trying to find someone who also read it so I could say things like:  “They hung Jake Spoon!  I can’t believe it!  They hung Jake Spoon!!”

Let's say you gave this challenge to any American author:  you have exactly two pages to develop a living, breathing, full-realized character.  Go.  I'd put my money on McMurtry.

So I've concluded McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy are the two best authors of the American west.  Unless there’s another author whose name starts with “Mc” that I can’t think of.

One more great quote that describes my Lonesome Dove reading experience, this time from Jonathan Franzen:

“Here is [a] description of [the] initial engagement with a novel:  ‘I feel a tug.  The chain has settled over the sprockets; there is the feel of meshing, then the forward glide.’”

McMurtry might have a better chance of doing that (for me) than anyone else.

So what about “Horseman, Pass By”? 

Well, it’s very minor McMurtry.  Not too much tugging and gliding.  No serious settling over the sprockets, no summer night becoming the book.  But still some good sentences.  Including this one, which may come haunt me when I’m 80 years old and still unmarried and without property:  

“’It don’t hurt to take a little look around,’ he said.  ‘Just don’t turn into an old loose horse like me.  You’re better off to stop somewhere, even if it ain’t no paradise.  I could have myself, many a time.  I had the chances any man has . . . I guess I was too particular for too long, what’s wrong with me.  I went all over this cow country, looking for the exact right place and the exact right people, so once I got stopped I wouldn’t have to be movin’ agin, like my old man always done.  But that’s going at it wrong.  I shoulda just set down an’ made it right wherever the hell I was.’”

Even in a minor McMurtry novel you get some great passages.  And that's more than enough, as Jonathan Franzen would say:

“Expecting a novel to bear the weight of our whole disturbed society—to help solve our contemporary problems—seems to me a peculiarly American delusion.  To write sentences of such authenticity that refuge can be taken in them:  Isn’t this enough?  Isn’t it a lot?”