Raintree County I 1-16-21

Reading Raintree County has surprised me by what I have forgotten from my first reading back in the Seventies.

Here is where I must have first met Freud and Marx and Lincoln's Second Inaugural and the mysticism of the American Union. Here I first read how Reconstruction let down the freedman - long before I read W.E.B. DuBois's Souls of Black Folks. Now I wish I had re-read the novel 30 years ago. I might have understood more. I might have been less intimidated. The protagonist's (John W. Shawnessy) idealism would have clashed with my pragmatism. It may also have prodded me into a more productive life,

I see now Lockridge seeping into my "Chasing Ashes" - albeit also my differences - where I treat Indiana as an abstraction. Here is an example of Lockridge's style and content:

He saw the fabric of his life a moment spread out like a map of interwoven lines. Across this map trailed a single curving line, passing through its many curving intersections. Source and sink, spring and lake existed all at once. One had to pass by the three mounds and the Indian Battleground to arrive at the great south bend. One had to pass by the graveyard ad the vanished town of DanWebster to reach the lake. And one had been hunting the source all one's life. The forgotten and perhaps mythical tree still shed its golden petals by the lake.

Beyond this map, the earth dissolved into a whole republic of such linear nets beaded with human lives. Then all these lines dissolved, and there - without north, south, east, or west -  was the casual republic of the Great Swamp, a nation of flowers black and white, brown and red and yellow.

Then there is what I call the mock heroic narrative pieces.

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[Continued tomorrow]