Table of Content
The child is more interested in the caricatures down in the cellar of Gunther's old house. Gunther's old house was a speakeasy, and someone drew colorful portraits of the clandestine drinkers on the plaster wall behind the bar. They look like people in town, says the special child.
A remarkable memoir that is at once a history of a family, a history of mid and late 20th Cent rural Southside Virginia, and a spiritual memoir. It ranges over literature, film, and spirituality, across geographies, and in and out of a man's search for closure, God, and home. Its in many ways the beau ideal of a memoir. Atmospheric and evocative, Richard elicits the sympathy of the reader while maintaining the emotional space that creates the mysterious emotional bond that binds the reader to the author's own search for the known and unknown.
House of Prayer No. 2: A Writer's Journey Home by Richard, Mark
The ones who show up are mostly barefoot and dirty and sleep with their heads on the desk all day. A lot of them have fleas and head lice. Most of them have been up all night tying tobacco sticks, their hands are stained black with nicotine. The company the father works for is clearing the land of trees.
The father and the German have become good friends. Sometimes they do their work way back in the deep country away from company supervisors, and sometimes they walk through empty old houses on land their company has bought for timber rights. In the attics they fi nd rare books, old stamps, Confederate money. One day eating lunch in the bottom of the lake, the father and the German fi gure how much more timber has to be cut before the water will reach the shore.
Preview — House of Prayer No. 2
Might even lift my self-imposed book-buying ban so I don't have to wait for my small-town library to acquire it. This astounding memoir follows this “special child”, growing up in rough-hewn Appalachia, subjected to torments from his peers, going through painful surgeries, to correct his deformed hips and finally landing him in adulthood, aimless and confused. When you're trying to finish, you get a new issue of Entertainment Weekly, where this book is on a list of the 10 best non fiction of 2011. You shake your head, wondering how your opinion can be so vastly different from a critic in a national magazine. In the meantime, you hope that this review helps illustrate your feelings, while expressing that it doesn't even come close to replicating the author's style.
Some of the sentences were especially beautiful in the way the descriptions were written. One of my favorites comes in the story of boys taking a kickball onto an iced over pond and falling through the ice. “Nearby the kickball sat on the ice in the melting sun.” Interesting life. I don't remember who recommended it to me, or when. If I'd know it was written in second person, in present and future tense, I doubt I would've tried it.
About Mark Richard
It sounds strange, even bizarre, but I found it was a wonderful way to ... Written in a choppy, detached style, reminiscent of recipes . Only this time, rather than directions on baking chocolate cake, I received an in depth tutorial on the myriad ways to be an asshole . I get the feeling, whether it was intentional or not, that this was the only way he could get through his history. Full of mental and physical pain, cheating, womanizing, lies, drugs, and drinking, it is a wonder he's alive. I plowed through, however, hoping for redemption, and quite thankfully found it in the very last sentence.
Afterward, there's a lecture on drinking water from the back of the toilet after an atom bomb lands on your town, and everybody practices crawling under tables. For weeks afterward, people stop the child and ask him to do the Kennedy thing until finally somebody shoots Kennedy in Texas and the child doesn't have to perform at beer parties and on the sidewalk in front of the grocery store anymore. Most of the children are bringing in the tobacco harvest.
He had sedated it, he tried to tell people who were nosy along the way. When they got to Texas, there were bugs stuck all in its front teeth like a car grille. When the dog woke completely up, it ran away. At first, first grade makes no sense to the special child. The child wants to get to the books, but the books are for later, the teacher tells him. The special child thought the tobacco children had the right idea, so he put his head on his desk and slept through the As and the Bs and the Cs.
You think to yourself that his way of writing reminds you of Flannery Connor and you are not surprised later in the book to read that she is his favourite writer. You know instinctively that his writing is similar to hers, not because he emulated writing like her, but because they both write from the same place. Mark Richard is the author of two award-winning short story collections, The Ice at the Bottom of the World and Charity, and the novel Fishboy. His short stories and journalism have appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, Vogue, and GQ. He is the recipient of the PEN/Hemingway Award, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Foundation Writer’s Award. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and their three sons.
You exclaim, this is yet another person "saved" by religion (though this one does so after decrying his mother's extreme, err, devout religious behavior). Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course. This is a Southern Gothic memoir, and the first I enjoyed that was written in second person. It was odd at first, but eventually I accepted all the escapades as things I might have done when I was a wild young man.
The mother won't get out of bed except to cry while she makes little clothes on her sewing machine. She keeps losing babies, and her mother still won't let her come home. The father sends for the mother's sister. They pack a Thanksgiving lunch and drive to Appomattox to look at the battlefields. It rains and then snows, and they eat turkey and drink wine in the battlefield parking lot.
There is another new couple in town, a local boy, sort of a black sheep, from country folk, who went away to Southeast Asia to be a flight surgeon and is back with his second or third wife, nobody knows for sure. At the reckless doctor's apartment, they drink beer and do the Twist and listen to Smothers Brothers albums. They burn candles stuck in Chianti bottles.
The "difference" was both the child's precociousness and his malformed hip joints that prevented his disguising that precociousness in the ways bright children generally disguise it from themselves and others---in games, sports, physical antics. Children know that even before they have words. By age five, "the child lies in the cold backyard grass and watches the thousands of starlings swarm Dr. Jim's chimneys, and the child feels like he is dying in an empty world." Amazing and alarming, though dripping at times with the treacle of a personal-redemption memoir. Award-winning essayist, screenwriter and novelist Richard (Charity, 1997, etc.) revisits his life and career, recording how Christianity has played an ever enlarging role.
He has been writer-in-residence at the University of California Irvine, University of Mississippi, Arizona State University, the University of the South, Sewanee, and The Writer’s Voice in New York. His journalism has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, Spin, Esquire, George, Detour, Vogue, The Oxford American, and The Southern Review, and he has been a correspondent for the BBC. He was also screenwriter for the film Stop-Loss.
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