Overlooked Books Friday: The Dogs of March, by Ernest Hebert

Almost a year ago, I did a post on the novel, The Dogs of March and I’m going to recycle quite a bit of that post here in observance of Patti Abott’s brainchild, Overlooked Books Friday.

Have you ever loved a book or a movie so much, you’ve insisted that a good friend borrow it, hoping they’ll love it as much as you do? Back in the early 80’s I read a book called The Dogs of March. Although the original copy I had was loaned out and never returned, I’ve since bought two or three copies so I could give it away and always be able to read it again any time I had the urge. I’ve probably read this book a half dozen times. It’s an old friend.

Ernest Hebert teaches writing at Dartmouth College. In 1979 he published The Dogs of March, the first in a series of six novels that take place in the fictional town of Darby, New Hampshire. In 2007 I read Spoonwood, the final book in the Darby series. The Old American, published in 2000 was a departure from the contemporary setting of his previous works and takes place during the French and Indian Wars. Kirkus Reviews called it “a brilliant work, destined to be one of the great American historical novels.”

Reviewers have noted that in Darby, Ernest Hebert has created New Hampshire’s own version of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. Howard Elman, the main character in The Dogs of March, and a recurring character in the series is a working man, ignorant in many ways through his near illiteracy. He becomes unemployed early in the story when the factory he’s worked in all his life is sold and the jobs and machinery are moved south. He finds himself in a battle against change and in conflict with the new people moving into the area who have “college degrees and big bank accounts.”

“While Howard watched the Cutter house over the sights of a rifle, Zoe Cutter watched the Elman house through her new sliding glass doors.

Elman was firing his gun. She couldn’t see him, but the shots rang out clear and horrible, like the sound frogs make when you run over them on an August night. She imagined him crouched in the snow for his gunnery practice, the hulks of appliances and automobiles in his yard for targets, grim and angular under their caps of snow. Elman, she decided, was one of those male animals that ought to be castrated for its own good and for the good of other creatures. Cats that dragged themselves home half dead after meaningless territorial encounters; pigs that ate the young they had sired; men who murdered animals in drooling ecstasy – all manifestations of the male ego, that small-dictator part of the brain that was wired directly to the genitals.”

Hebert was probably the first, and may remain the only author to masterfully, elegantly and genuinely write about Granite State natives who are working class people, as complete characters and not just as caricatures of the stereotypical New England Yankee.

I have a special place in my heart for the Darby series. I was born and raised primarily in and around Boston, but I lived in the area of New Hampshire where the story takes place for a brief time and visited my father there for the last 25 or more years of his life.

And also, My Uncle Denis and Aunt Nancy's dog, Rocky was the model for the book cover. Okay, not really, but what a likeness, huh?

When I think about why The Dogs of March has endured for nearly 30 years, why it remains in print and why I find it as true and relevant now as I did when I first read it, I believe it’s because beneath the well drawn characters, the intimate sense of place, and the taut, compelling plot, flowing throughout the story and elevating it to literature is a theme about insiders and outsiders. What has often been called regional fiction isn’t regional at all. This is a universal story.

Ernest Hebert’s website is a wealth of fascinating insight into his writing process and tells the story of how he came to be a fiction writer. One of my favorite pieces is an essay called “How John Gardner Kicked My Ass and Saved My Soul”.

Hebert has been honored with numerous writing awards. United Press International honored him with three journalism awards when he was a reporter for The Keene Sentinel in Keene, New Hampshire. The Dogs of March, was cited for excellence by the Hemingway Foundation. The New Hampshire Writers Project named Mad Boys the best novel by a New Hampshire author in 1993 and the same honor went to The Old American in 2001. In 2002, he received the Sarah Josepha Hale Award for lifetime achievement by a New England author. Spoonwood was the IPPY award winner for Regional fiction in the Northeast in 2005. In September of 2006 The New England Booksellers Association named Hebert their Fiction Author of the Year.

Ernest Hebert is not as widely known as some authors, but he is one of my favorites and may turn out to be one of the best writers you’ve never heard of.

The Lolita Effect at Random Acts of Unkindness

On Wednesday, May 28th, 2008, Dr. Gigi Durham, the author of a new groundbreaking book entitled The Lolita Effect, The Media Sexualization of Young Girls and What we can Do About It, will be at Ello's blog for a Q&A session to talk about her new book. Please make sure to stop and interact with Dr. Durham on a very important issue.

I don’t have daughters, but I have a seven year old grand-daughter. Half the time I don’t answer when I hear the word, “Grandma” because obviously, that can’t be me. I don’t bake, I have a bad habit of swearing (I’m trying to get over it, really), I eat popcorn for dinner if I feel like it and in my head I’m still 30. But apparently the Grandma gene is in me somewhere and I’m on the hunt every Christmas for practical things, like boots, jackets, hats, pajamas and school clothes. It never ceases to amaze me that the clothes for tiny little girls look like miniature versions of something you’d see on a pole dancer.

I’m not sure where the discussion with Dr. Durham will go with regard to the media’s culpability, but I do know that product is marketed and sold to buyers and if people weren’t buying tiny stripper outfits, makeup, nail polish and cell phones for children, nobody would be selling them.

There are two problems I have with the way little girls appear to be marketed and sold to, and this trend isn’t altogether new.

The first is the sexualization of children. Enough said about that. Clearly, it’s hard enough to be a child without the confusion of being in an adult’s costume.

The second is simply the superficiality and the consumerism of raising girls to believe that they have to be pretty and skinny, above all else. When I shop for toys for my granddaughter, I have to sift through all of the dolls, toys and games that are plastered with photos of Hannah Montana and High School Musical. I am the relative who (naturally) stocks the kids with books, but little girls don’t want to read about little girls. They want to read about big girls.

Why isn’t there a role model who is smart, who cares about the environment, who cares about other people and who cares about animals? Isn’t there a character who is trying to find a cure for cancer, solve world hunger or spread peace on earth?

The good news is that I know that not all little girls are like this. I read about kids (mostly here) who want to save the tigers and who recycle and who are kind to other children and it makes me glad that I know all of you. Thanks to those of you who take such care to raise your sons and daughters to have a real sense of who they are of their true worth.

Now don’t forget to stop at Ello’s tomorrow…

First Impressions

“Did you learn nothing from Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing?”

This question, came from a trusted critique partner on chapter one of my WIP. I winced and slammed my forehead onto the table. Among the many sins committed in the first draft, I began the entire story with a weather report. Not only was it one of Leonard’s “10 Rules”, but “Never open a book with weather” was Rule #1. In such a hurry to get the story down, I didn’t give much thought to how I’d begin.

I forgive myself this rookie blunder because there are plenty of reasons to scrap that first chapter and I had to start somewhere to figure out where I was going. When I began thinking about first lines, I recalled a post called, Once Upon a Time on Electric Epiphytes and Electrophoretic Epigrams, by the enigmatic and fabulous Electric Orchid Hunter. The post is a list of memorable first lines.

Most book selections I make are based on recommendations and reviews, so I don’t pay too much attention to first lines and I never make book buying decisions based on reading the start of a book. But I do realize that first lines are crucial, so I’m sitting up and taking notice.

I wondered about the first lines of books I’d especially enjoyed. Rather than cherry pick to find especially good ones, I decided I’d see what the first lines were for a list of books I posted last week. I’ve adopted The Electric Orchid Hunter’s rules and included the second and third sentences, if I think they’re needed to complete a thought. In the case of the Nabokov, I confess, I just wanted to keep going.

1. “The baloney weighed the raven down, and the shopkeeper almost caught him as he whisked out the delicatessen door.”

A Fine and Private Place, by Peter S. Beagle

2. “Afterward, he tried to reduce it to abstract terms, an accident in a world of accidents, the collision of opposing forces – the bumper of his car and the frail scrambling hunched-over form of a dark little man with a wild look in his eye – but he wasn’t very successful.”

The Tortilla Curtain, by T. Coraghessan Boyle

3. “Sometimes when you work in advertising you’ll get a product that’s really garbage and you have to make it seem fantastic, something that is essential to the continued quality of life.”
Dry, by Augusten Burroughs

4. “Teeth, straight teeth. The thought surfaced, but he pushed it back into the depths, for this was early morning, when the mind could do such things.”

The Dogs of March, by Ernest Hebert

5. “I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice – not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.”
A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving

6. “Tonight, I find myself here in a guest house in the city of Salisbury.”
The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro

7. “They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible.”
On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan

8. “The play – for which Briony had designed the posters, programs and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red crepe paper – was written by her in a two-day tempest of composition, causing her to miss a breakfast and a lunch.”
Atonement, by Ian McEwan

9. “Do not set foot in my office. That’s Dad’s rule. But the phone’d run twenty-five times.”
Black Swan Green, by David Mitchell

10. “His first idol was Andrew Jackson. He knew the vertical dart between the brows, the jutting chin, the narrow mouth; he knew the windblown coif that perched atop the great man’s forehead like a bird’s nest on a lonesome crag.”
How the Dead Dream, by Lydia Millet

11. “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul, Lo-lee-ta: the tip of my tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.”
Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov

12. “Here is an account of a few years in the life of Quoyle, born in Brooklyn and raised in a shuffle of dreary upstate towns.”
The Shipping News, by E. Annie Proulx

13. “The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.”
The Secret History, by Donna Tartt

14. “The sweat was lashing oafay Sick Boy; he wis trembling. Ah wis jist sitting thair, focusing oan the telly, tryin no tae notice the cunt. He wis bringing me doon. Ah tried tae keep ma attention oan the Jean-Claude Van Damme video.”
Trainspotting, by Irvine Welsh

15. “Robert Frost made his visit in November of 1960, just a week after the general election.”
Old School, by Tobias Wolff

This wasn’t supposed to be a contest, but my top three favorites on this list are #11, #13 and #5. Of the books listed you haven't read, do any in particular make you want to keep reading?

John Irving wins the best use of punctuation prize for incorporating both em-dashes and a semi-colon. Lydia Millet also wins a prize for using the semi-colon. Rumors of its demise are apparently premature, but if you are unsure about the uses of the semi-colon, please see this excellent post by Shauna Roberts.

“Call me Ishmael” is the only first line that I can ever remember. I don’t seem to recall any others. Do you? How important are first lines to you as a reader? As writers, we all know they’re a make or break if we’re interested in publication. Is your first line as good as you’d like it to be?

Extra points to anyone who cares to share the first line of a WIP in comments!

One last thought: I ran across an ingenious note on a blog this weekend and I’m afraid I can’t find it again to credit the blogger. The note says something like “if you’ve stopped in and don’t have a comment to leave, leave a stone (o) in the comments section so I know you were here.”

I thought that was a lovely thought, so if you’ve stopped in and don’t have anything you really want to add, please leave a stone – like this: (o) – in the comments so I know you stopped in.