Two More Books

I've read two more books in recent days: The Ox Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, and The Natural by Bernard Malamud. I guess both have been made into movies but I haven't seen either of them. Both in different ways are about the inadequacy of simple decency in moral crisis. ... or at least, that is something I got out of both of them.

I loved The Ox Bow Incident. It had everything -- pace, power, characterization, serious theme. And it's set somewhere just over the Sierra mountains from us (in Nevada). Every scene and detail builds cumulatively.

Van Tilburg Clark wrote in the introduction to this edition of the book (a reader asked if the lynchings were intended to be symbolic of the three crosses) that he would be glad if the situation evoked the shadow of Golgotha, yet a rope is not a cross and the Sierra Nevadas are not Judea. This I thought a very sensible answer, much in the line of what Tolkien would say when asked if this or that element of Lord of the Rings was meant to be representative of this or that religious truth.

The Natural, I am still thinking about. The main character had sort of a space around him, and there was a similar diffuse feeling to the incidents, though the main trajectory of the plot was just as remorseless as in the OxBow Incident. Though the book does go into the main character's mind, it does not really "discover" him as an individual. The focus seemed to be on how fame, American fandom and baseball luck interact with each other. Some of the scenes, for example the love scenes and the eating scenes (!), seemed to be more random and disconnected than not, but perhaps that was the point. I supposed both expressed a kind of hunger and craving, as indeed the other details of the story did as well.

The OxBow Incident had a first person narrator, but there was a space left between him and the reader, too. He would describe people and actions and speech, but his "presence" was sort of neutral, it seemed. Perhaps this was in order to allow for the "it could be me" feeling that you get as it goes on.

Both had sort of a legendary, iconic American setting -- I guess because one was a western and the other was set on the Field of Dreams, so to speak. This made each incident and detail in both books seem to cast a big shadow of meaning.

Just a few notes... I wanted to put them down while the stories were still on my mind.