FICTION FOR A LAZY SUMMER AFTERNOON
Why do people like a short story or a novel? Basically because the story is interesting. Its plot engages us. Its characters captivate our imagination. We may get an added plus from the novel's unique moral twist. Or we may get insight into a contemporary issue. But the bottom line is simple. Successful writers tell good stories.
Dan Wakefield tells us how Birney, Illinois was fifty years ago in the 1982 novel, Under the Apple Tree (A Novel of the Home Front.)
"In the crisp clear days of October, America was beautiful, just like in the song. Artie had never been "from sea to shining sea," nor had he seen "the purple mountains' majesty" but he knew they were out there, believed in them, and saw every day with his own eyes the beauty of the gentle hills, the creeks and cornfields, the solid old white frame houses and the ancient oaks of Town. He believed, in fact, that God had "shed his grace" on this land, that this grace was tangible, visible, in the arch of rainbows over wet fields, the slant of shed sunlight on the sides of old barns. His pride in his country was sustained by the signs of nature and the symbols of men, not only the bright stars and stripes that flew from public buildings and hung from private porches, but the comforting, everyday emblem of home: Bob's Eats, Joe's Premium, Mail Pouch Tobacco. This was what Roy and all the other boys were fighting to save, preserve, and protect, along with the people who were lucky enough to live in and of it, and all this was sacred, worthy of any sacrifice, including life itself, for without it, life would be hollow and dumb.
Sometimes home seemed so beautiful and right it was hard to believe the War was really going on out there in the fringes of the world, the bleak foreign battlegrounds and alien oceans (p.189-90)."
World War II kept the world free. We knew the good and bad guys. It kept the American dream alive. Under the Apple Tree describes an era many still long for.
Viet Nam was a different story. Bobbie Mason chronicles how this war troubles our souls in the novel, In Country. Mason skillfully tells us what the war did to those who fought it and returned from it, what it did to families who wrestled with it, and what it did to young people who came of age during it.
The political intrigue of war wearies us and the making of war terrifies us. Brian Moore (who died in January) maps out the geography of church -state intrigue. The Color of Blood is a quick and exciting novel set in Communist Eastern Europe. It made my blood rush. So did his suspenseful novel, Lies of Silence. This story, set in troubled Ireland, describes the dilemmas and decisions decent people are forced to make.
Lastly, I recommend The Bridge on the Drina. This novel depicts the suffering history of Bosnia from the late sixteenth century to the beginning of World War I. It earned Ivo Andric (1892-1975) the Nobel Prize for literature in 1961. Its stone bridge spans then and now and connects Birney, Belfast, Bosnia, and Burlington.