Gods of Howl Mountain

In the mountains of 1950s North Carolina, injured Korean War veteran Rory Docherty lives with his grandmother, Maybelline. She is a former prostitute turned renowned medicine woman, both revered and scorned by the locals; he runs whiskey for a legendary bootlegger in a modified hotrod. The link between them, Rory’s mother has institutionalized, the attack that rendered her mute long ago unspoken of. Rory’s already difficult life gets more complicated when he pursues a preacher’s daughter as both a rival runner and encroaching federal agents threaten to do him in.

Taylor Brown’s hard-bitten Appalachian prose will seem familiar to those well-versed in this genre. His descriptions are rich with atmospheric detail, and his dialogue captures the region’s cadence. While he is not unique in that regard, he has nevertheless carved an identity apart from the region’s well-known voices. Gods of Howl Mountain is less spiritual and contemplative than the works of Ron Rash and Wiley Cash, less emotionally stunted than those of Chris Offutt, and more carnal than all of them.

However, there is more to this book than scenery, sex, and blood. Rory and especially Granny Mae are memorable characters who embody a range of contradictions: vulnerable (a one-legged man and an aging widow) yet strong, right-minded yet on the wrong side of the law, clever yet seemingly outfoxed. The book teases out its central mystery (who attacked Rory’s mother) slowly and throws a few red herrings the audience’s way. This will frustrate those expecting a more straightforward mystery, but for those with greater patience, there is more than enough going on, and the aftereffects of some of Granny’s herbal concoctions even add a splash of dark humor.

Gods of Howl Mountain has more than a whiff of the familiar about it, but it is competently crafted and engaging more times than not.

Educated: A Memoir

In this 2018 account, Tara Westover explores her childhood as the youngest of seven siblings in a Mormon survivalist family in rural Idaho. Public schools and doctors were considered the tools of the devil, and Westover spent the first nine years of her life without a birth certificate. After her older brother, Tyler, left home to go to college, he encouraged Tara to do the same. But even as she worked toward independence by acting in local theater productions and studying for the ACT, family stood in her way: her father did not support her ambitions, and another older brother, “Shawn,” violently bullied and abused her. Against long odds, Westover won a scholarship from Brigham Young University, a fellowship from Harvard, and, finally, a doctorate in history from Cambridge, a process of ongoing education that gave – and cost – her much.

Since its release last year, Educated has garnered praise from the likes of Barack Obama and Bill Gates. It isn’t hard to see why. A raw, messy, yet ultimately inspirational tale, it is at once astonishing and relatable. Not going to the hospital after suffering life-threatening injuries or making it to college without ever having learned what the Holocaust is may seem unfathomable to the great majority of us who did not share Westover’s upbringing. At the same time, balancing affection for family with the need for space, standing up to abuse, battling self-doubt, and trying to find your place in the world are hurdles that many have had to cross, and Westover captures the difficulty of doing so as well has her own often conflicted feelings with clarity and poise. She shows both steel resolve and paralyzing uncertainty as well as a thirst for knowledge and exploration tempered by the lure of the past.

That being said, it is possible that Educated has taken some measure of dramatic license. Westover’s parents have disputed the account, but that can easily be read as living in denial or trying to save face. However, even Tyler, though generally supportive of the memoir, has challenged the depiction of their parents as anti-education (as opposed to merely homeschoolers who disdained public schools). Add to that a 2009 photo of their father that shows none of the facial deformities the book makes clear that he has as well as the author’s admitted haziness regarding some of her own memories, and it is fair to ask what may have been altered to tell the best story.

These concerns do not invalidate the book or make it any less worth reading, nor should it be read for the wrong reasons. Educated is not an indictment of Mormonism or of homeschooling, but rather of the sort of warped mindset that regards rolling up one’s sleeves while working outside in the summer heat as a scandalous affront, BYU as a hotbed of worldly, godless socialism, and being in excruciating pain after narrowly surviving an explosion a divine gift that should be warmly welcomed. The book – and the “Dr.” that now precedes Westover’s name – also affirm that adversity is not destiny, and it is this latter message that is needed now more than ever.

Dead Girls

In her debut essay collection, Alice Bolin examines both America’s cultural preoccupation with dead girls as well as its ongoing mistreatment of living women. In addition to dissecting dead girls as a longstanding literary trope, she casts a critical eye on the narratives surrounding several cultural phenomena. An admirer of Joan Didion, she also traces her own journey from the remote Idaho to bustling Los Angeles and reflects on the path she’s taken.

The relationship between author and subject is sometimes complex and sometimes messy. Some authors eschew the personal while others confront it head-on. Handled artfully, autobiographical digressions can enrich and contextualize a work of nonfiction: Michell McNamara’s excellent I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is a good example thereof. But rather than use personal anecdotes to advance her central point, Bolin seems torn between unpacking the implications “dead girls” and telling her story, and the thematic connections that she attempts to draw between the two seem strained. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, Dead Girls suffers from an identity crisis.

Then again, while hewing more closely to a premise may have resulted in a more coherent book, it would not necessarily have been a more insightful one. That premise is that dead girls in noir fiction serve as male fantasies. Stripped of agency, identity, and life itself, they become little more than a means of ennobling avenging male protagonists. Bolin, who is both well-read and culturally well-versed, finds plenty of supporting examples for this idea in everything from the classic noir of Raymond Chandler (whose femme fatales, like his dead girls, were exaggerated forms of male wish fulfillment) to the contemporary drama of True Detective. She also sees right through the performative faux-feminism of Stieg Larsson (who originally titled The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo “Men who Hate Women”) and calls out the Millennium Trilogy for its cringeworthy sexualization of its heroine and reliance on dated tropes.

Problems arise, however, when Bolin attempts to extend this connection to examples that don’t support it. For instance, she miscasts Gone Girl’s Nick Dunne as a “classic male victim” and thus a successor to the misogynistic male leads of yore even though the novel depicts him as culpable and compromised in ways that his forebears were not. Even when discussing the potential for toxicity in close relationships between women, Bolin can’t help but dip into the same well, framing the hurt that women inflict upon one another as a product of a sexist society. Given that Bolin discusses her own such mistreatment of a former close friend, this comes across as all too conveniently exculpatory. And given how many straws Bolin is grasping it in some cases (puzzling, as there are many more relevant examples that would have fit), it is perhaps for the best that the book did not stay on-point the entire way through.

The book’s off-topic segments range from insightful to insufferable. Bolin successfully draws attention to the gaps between perception in reality in everything from Britney Spears’ artistry and breakdown to the Bling Ring case. She also captures the desolation of her home state and the violence (in this case, the Ruby Ridge standoff). And while she lays on her Didion-worship a bit too thick, she does a reasonably imitation, presenting a young life in flux in L.A.. On the other hand, Bolin sometimes comes across as unbearably selfish, whether it is her condescending speculation about where her father fits on the autistic spectrum or her decision to steal a date’s hat and cut off contact because she enjoyed the feeling of finality. Annoyingly, Bolin writes of the privileged place afforded to white women yet never gets around to realizing her own (relative to the larger issues the rest of the book addresses) lack of importance.

As cultural criticism, Dead Girls offers both hits and misses, pointing to a troubling trend while also painting with too wide a brush. As a memoir, it is occasionally evocative though often vapid and alienating. Bolin shows flashes of intelligent, perceptive writing, but that ability begs to be liberated from her self-aggrandizing focus.