Our 2020 Book Recommendations
To gift or to grab
Closing out a year of unprecedented time at home, which has in many ways redefined the way we think about escapism, we gladly offer our end-of-year recommendations for locally written and published titles. Embrace new characters, drown in drawings of coastal wilderness, find out what Faulkner’s family was really like, and learn to make the fanciest grilled cheese you’ve ever attempted. Wishing you the best and safest of holidays this year. We’ll see you on the other side.
The Fear of Everything: Stories
John McNally, University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press
I’m not too proud (or too prudish) to admit that I ordered this book because it was cited as being by the author of The Boy Who Really, Really Wanted to Have Sex: The Memoir of a Fat Kid. This snickering whim served me well; this is one of the best collections of stories I’ve read this year. McNally’s stories skate on the edge of magic realism—the best ones stop just short of the brink, leaving the reader with the same half-startle they might have to a barely-heard noise. The central characters are all lonely and most of them are strange: bereaved, divorced, lost, they run into situations they couldn’t control even if they understood them.
[Read Chris Turner Neal's review of favorite local books from 2019 here.]
The best and longest story, “The Devil in the Details,” explores problems of evil and guilt in an old-West setting. The final scene, a Flannery O’Connor-level shocker, leads one character to muse “…whatever it was that women were made of, it sure wasn’t the rib of man. She had never met a man who would give so much of himself for a woman.” If that doesn’t sell you: a lady gets her hand stuck in a garbage disposal, an old-time gangster inveigles a child into one last heist, and a failed one-night stand turns into an agoraphobic exploration of the root of fear. Read it with a friend and pick your favorites: you’ll learn something about each other.
The Horn Island Logs of Walter Inglis Anderson
Edited and with an Introduction by Redding S. Sugg, Jr., University Press of Mississippi
I will not pretend I didn’t order this book in part because I wanted to have it. I intended to honestly review it, and I am, but this was a further weight I wanted to ask my creaking shelves to bear. I’ve been a devoted museum-goer most of my life. I’ve seen the Dead Sea Scrolls and Lucy’s skeleton and the odd Picasso, and very, very few exhibits have ever blown through my soul the way Walter Anderson’s secret studio did. Very little in this world is a must-do or a must-see; tastes differ too wildly, and we’re all trying to fill eighty-odd years as best we can. The Walter Anderson Museum is an exception. Go see it.
Anderson, a scion of an artistic family who would probably have been fairly eccentric even had he not struggled with serious mental illness, loved to go out to empty or minimally uninhabited islands off the Mississippi Gulf Coast to write, draw, paint, and commune with nature. His journals are presented here complete with drawing and forty plates of watercolors. His pen makes frogs seem wise and horseshoe crabs downright winsome; the whole work is a love story to a sometimes-uncelebrated landscape. Every gentle sentence about the rhythms and treasures of nature is a balm after this jittery year. Give this to a nature lover who needs a hug.
In Faulkner’s Shadow: A Memoir
Lawrence Wells, University Press of Mississippi
Few will be surprised that William Faulkner’s family was (and presumably is) as batty as one would expect, as Lawrence Wells learned when he married the Nobel Laureate’s niece. By page thirteen of this memoir-literary biography-anthropological study, two hot-air balloons have crashed. As the pages turn, we meet “the family nymphomaniac,” two ghosts, and the worst mother this side of Medea. The result is less a narrative than a collection of weapons-grade eccentricity: every time you find yourself saying “well, every family has one” will be matched by “I can’t believe it—and in front of the children!”
This story couldn’t have been told by a Faulkner—and presumably had to wait until some of the family members were dead. The gigantic personalities and even larger senses of entitlement the family produced crash into each other like stegosauruses—leading to feuds, estrangements, exacerbated alcoholism, and hissed admonitions from the sidelines: “You can’t tell a Faulkner what to do!” Even Dean, the late wife of the author and the calmest Faulkner—certainly the only nice one—managed to break a Confederate flag over a stranger’s head on her honeymoon. As time goes by, Wells becomes more and more involved in the Faulkner legacy, working for Yoknapatawpha Press and running a Faulkner parody contest. As he’s slowly encased in Faulkneria like a fly sinking into amber, the lunatics keep coming—Barry Hannah steals Dean’s inscribed copy of her uncle’s Big Woods, and Wells has to go get it back—but the narrator maintains his endearingly bemused everyman status. He was in the Faulkner world, but not of it, and reports back like a researcher embedded with an uncontacted tribe. Buy this for a Faulkner fan or for the relative with whom you complain about the rest of your family.
The Big Door Prize
M. O. Walsh, G. P. Putnam’s Sons
Deerfield, Louisiana, wakes up to find a machine that tells you your future installed in the grocery store—just swab your cheek, drop in your DNA, and wait for the ping, and you will get a redoubt telling you what you should do (or should have done) with your life. Principals become carpenters, housewives find themselves elevated to princesses, and the costume store finds its shelves picked bare as people dress for the jobs they want. Against this backdrop, personal stories play out: is my marriage as happy as I thought? When will I have mourned enough? Is vengeance worth it?
You may never have asked yourself, “What if Louisiana had a warm-hearted Stephen King analogue,” but the literary gods have heard your unarticulated prayer. In other hands, the concept of a mysterious machine appearing one day in a small town, giving mysterious instructions, and causing a wave of bizarre behavior could have been a horror tale or a dagger-tongued parody. M.O. Walsh builds his premise into an unusual but successful book—predominantly light small-town farce, but with a real and effective strain of suspense running through its center. Readers of Walsh’s debut novel My Sunshine Away, which I raved about in these pages a few years ago, will trust him with this balance. Buy this for someone who made a career change, lived in Ville Platte, or is happy just where they are.
Stone Motel: Memoirs of a Cajun Boy
Morris Ardoin, University Press of Mississippi
If I were an acquisitions editor, I’d have a big stamp made that just said YES in huge letters, and I’d only use it for books as good as Stone Motel. I laughed, I cried, I felt guilty about my own incomplete memoir—the only thing that marred my enjoyment of this book was bitter professional jealousy of what Ardoin has achieved.
On the most surface level, Stone Motel fits into a genre you recognize: the memoir of an unconventional childhood, not necessarily in the South (but it helps), full of colorful characters and wacky situations. Ardoin’s story of a childhood and adolescence spent at his family’s Eunice motel would be good if that’s as far as he went, but he explores more deeply, writing frankly about his father’s abuse and the balancing act he must put on to try to seem straight until he can figure it all out. I performed the same balancing act a state west and a generation later, and this is the only time I’ve ever read the story that comes before the coming-out story.
Ardoin also describes 1970s Acadiana so vividly your legs will practically stick to the Naugahyde. He belongs to the first generation of Cajuns to feel bad about not speaking French, the children of those forced into English at school, and one of the treats of the book is to see him thread French more or less thickly through his subjects’ speech. Memere Ortense learns English from the TV; she teaches her beloved grandson sentences, but never fully shares her native language with him.
I could go on and on, but I’d rather spend the time composing the actual fan letter I plan to send Morris Ardoin. Buy this for everyone.
Jay Ducote’s Louisiana Outdoor Cooking
Jay Ducote with Cynthia LeJeune Nobles, LSU Press
An early lesson any consumer of cookbooks learns is that there is no singular Bible. Different chefs, different compilers and writers, even different cuisines have varying strengths—and even Julia Child can stumble, as anyone who has read her dizzyingly complicated boiled egg recipe will understand. Jay Ducote’s new Louisiana Outdoor Cooking does collect good outdoor recipes, but its real strength is as a collection of crowd-pleasers. These are big, satisfying recipes, easy to share and easy to multiply for a big group. Look for especially interesting chapters on game and produce; if you’ve ever been given the fruits of a friend’s hunting trip and found yourself stumped, frog, venison, and rabbit recipes will save the day, while corn maque choux and pear-Havarti grilled cheese sandwiches offer changes of pace. Wisely, Ducote includes recipes for condiments and accompanying drinks and punches, so you can take credit for everything on the table.
Ducote’s coauthor on the book is Cynthia LeJeune Nobles, the mastermind behind The Confederacy of Dunces Cookbook, which I not only reviewed favorably but also vehemently defended from a former roommate who pretended to think it was hers. Buy this for a budding chef—after all, we’ll all be cooking outdoors a bit more for the foreseeable future.