SPL Reads!

I should have known better when I decided to forge ahead with the Avid Readers’ discussion scheduled for the eve of a major national holiday.  July 3rd is just not the time to get together with your book club.  Odds are that even if you don’t go in for the fireworks, picnics, and John Wayne movie marathons, you still travel or take part in some family gathering.  In a bit of rash thinking last month, I made the call to keep our regular meeting time intact.  Alas, it was not meant to be. 

However, we did read a good book: E. L. Doctorow’s The March.  Since we didn’t actually convene to discuss the novel, the following critique is all mine.  Rest assured, I will get the opinions of the other members and update this post accordingly.  Unless, of course, they all completely agree with everything I say, and let’s face it, the odds of that are slim.

As with Doctorow’s Ragtime, the author’s most celebrated work, The March is made up of a group of entertwining stories that sometimes intersect and/or diverge.  It’s a structural device that is good for conveying the historical sweep and import of the events described, but it’s also one that destroys the possibility of any quick, easy plot summary.  Perhaps the best way to describe the plot of The March is to simply describe some of the characthers found therein.

There is General Sherman himself, the Union general who is leading a prolonged march into the American south.  Sherman is a brilliant military strategist, but is also mentally unstable, and has a hard time reconciling his romantic ideals about war with the reality of the desctruction that his troops cause.

Pearl is a freed slave who leaves her Georgia plantation to follow the troops.  She finds herself disguised as a drummer boy, and eventually ends up assisting the battlefield surgeon Colonel Wrede Sartorious.  The surgeon is a German immigrant who is so deeply invested in his surgical operations that he is detached from the violence around him. 

Will and Arly are Confederate soldiers who find themselves defecting from side to side in order to survive.  Arly is a particularly clownish character who provides much of the comic relief in the novel.  His philosophical discourses seem to be at odds with both sides of the conflict.  Strangely, Arly sees himself as protected by a divine power to carry out great deeds. 

General Kilpatrick is a Union general under Sherman’s command.  Kilpatrick is a crude tactician who has a reputation for behaving recklessly and getting soldiers killed.  He is presented as a psychological foil for Sherman.  Unlike his commander, Kilpatrick has no illusions about the glory of war, and sees each conquered city, town, or plantation as a means to achieve personal gain.

These characters make up the bulk of the narrative, but there are numerous others who litter the landscape of the novel.  Even those characters that are given limited space in the narrative are memorable.  Doctorow offers no one-dimensional stock characters during the course of The March.  And it is this aspect of the novel that sets it apart from many historical fiction novels.  Doctorow presents history as the accumulation of many stories.  Even Sherman himself is presented as only one piece of the historical backdrop, and the lives of even the lowliest social stature have a part to play in the drama.

Doctorow’s style is immensely readable, and although the cast of characters seems unweildy or overwhelming in describing the novel, it never seems so in the reading. 

Next month, we’ll be meeting at a special time.  We’ll get together Thursday, August 21, to discuss Donald Hays’ The Dixie Association.  The author himself will be on hand to read from his novel and take part in our discussion.  This will be a great opportunity to get to know an Arkansas author and his work.  As always, and especially for this event, we welcome visitors and newcomers to take part in the discussion.  Copies of The Dixie Association are available at the Information Desk for checkout.