Last week I attended the book bloggers convention, which closed out 2011’s BookExpo, and felt like something of an amateur compared to the hordes of genre-specific young people (mainly YA, middle grade and children’s reviewers) who had half a million followers and sophisticated streams of ARCs (advanced reader’s copies) coming in. As readers of this blog know, I review what I like, with an emphasis on literary fiction, writing about writing, and anything to do with Shakespeare.

One set of galleys I did get my hands on was a first novel, A Cupboard Full of Coats by Yvvette Edwards, an accomplished work following Jinx, a woman of West Indian descent living in London as she finally comes to terms with the role she played in the murder of her mother fourteen years earlier. As the novel opens, the murderer has just been released from prison, but it will take Jinx the rest of the novel to similarly liberate herself.

“She was the only child of a poor, uneducated Montserratian land worker and his semi-literate wife,” Jinx writes of her mother. “Everything I know about them I learned from her, and the sum of everything she said was that they could not have worshipped God himself more than they worshipped the ground she walked on. Full stop.

She was too beautiful to make her own way to and from school at a time when every other child in the country was doing it, or to cook or clean or shop or carry, or even to amass a single useful life skill.”

Orphaned at 17, Jinx’s mother is rescued by Mr. Jackson, three times her age, who, “though half-blind from glaucoma . . . still had vision enough to see that my mother was too beautiful to weep broken-hearted, forlorn in her single bed . . . She was too beautiful for anything but the very best, and that was all she had because Mr. Jackson doted on her.”

This vivid passage, laid out early in the novel, encapsulates the complicated blend of anger, envy, love and bereavement that haunts and hampers Jinx. When Mr. Jackson (Jinx’s father) dies early in Jinx’s childhood, Jinx has her mother all to herself until she hits her teens and her mother meets up with the jealous, violent Berris. Jinx’s mother abandons her, first figuratively, in the thrall of passion and violence, and then literally, when she is killed. Having inherited neither her mother’s beauty nor her passivity, Jinx’s road to maturity and motherhood has played out far differently, and her coming to terms with what she has done and who she has become resolves itself in a surprisingly tender conclusion.

Originally published  Friday, June 3, 2011

Many, many years ago, before there was an internet, before there were cell phones, odd people who became obsessed with factlets (a term I’ve invented for facts that interest only you) would, if they lived in New York City, pick up the phone and call the reference number for the New York Public Library. A librarian, a bona fide human being (businesses did not use voice mail in those days) would answer the phone, repeat your query, put you on hold, trot off to who-knew-where, and return with your answer. “The population of Montana is 800,000, ma’am,” a hushed, respectful voice would say. “Do you have any other questions?”

In that age, known to paleontogists as the early 80’s, I was in college and working at a small publishing company which published a newsletter about publishing. So, yes, plenty of oddballs there – who else would agree to the salary? – with lots of questions for the New York Public Library hotline who responded to answers of both the work-related (population, circulation) and of the who-wrote-the-book-of-love variety.

“I know that Hank Williams died in the back seat of a car,” I told one of these saintly librarians one day thirty years ago, the receiver of the phone cradled in my neck while I typed subscription renewal notices on an IBM Selectric I coveted. “But what I want to know is, what kind of car?”

Please hold.

“It was a robin’s egg-blue ’52 Cadillac with a Continental wheel,” the librarian whispered when he came back on the line, with, I thought, a gratifying level of excitement. That was the thing about those librarians. If you asked them something really odd, because you were odd, and a novelist (“Did Egypt have eggplant in Cleopatra’s time?”) they became information detectives: they wanted to know as much as you did.

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to the novel II’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive by Steve Earle. I read it this weekend. I would have read it in one sitting except that circumstances forced me to leave home, to gather food and drink, and to do all the other things that take one away from the urgency of story.

I have a complex relationship with Earle, further tangled by the fact that this relationship exists only in my head. Suffice to say, after much badgering on the part of my friend Linda, I have come to accept him as my own personal troubadour. I really liked his collection of short stories.

And I really like this novel.

We open the life of Doc, a defrocked hophead physician who stitches up the dealers and the johns and takes care of the whores in the slums of San Antonio in 1963. President Kennedy and his wife Yah-Kee (as she is known among the adoring illegal Catholic Mexican population of Texas) are soon to touch down on their way to Dallas.

Doc feels responsible for the death of Hank Williams – was it Doc’s shot of morphine which pushed Hank over the edge? – and then he comes to feel responsible for Graciela, the teenaged Mexican girl who is brought to him for a back-alley abortion and then abandoned and then … well, I can’t tell you.

This novel is fantastically imaginative, compassionate, engaging and American. I think if you read it, you will know what I mean by that, and appreciate it.

Originally published Sunday, June 26, 2011