I Am the Light of This World by Michael Parker

Published by Algonquin Books on November 15, 2022

A librarian tells Earl Boudreaux that her mother would like Earl because strange things come out of his mouth. I like I Am the Light of This World for the same reason. Earl is not well educated. He’s not a conventionally deep thinker. He prefers simplicity and yields to uncertainty. He seems to occupy an otherworldly place as an observer who is powerless to affect the course of his drifting life. Yet Earl’s thoughts, which tend to begin with and come back to pedal steel and lessons he finds in Lead Belly’s biography, lead him to ask intriguing questions and make insightful connections.

The story is told in two parts, separated by “the in-between” that spans all the presidents between Carter and Trump. Most of the events described in the first part occur over the course of a few days. Earl is 17, living in Stovall, Texas. His older twin brothers are troublemakers. He has friends with names like Sleepy and Moon, but Earl spends most of his time alone. He likes to sit in the woods and read about Lead Belly. That’s what he’s doing when he meets Tina. She quickly becomes his girlfriend, or at least his sex partner. Tina persuades Earl to drive her to Austin. She says she wants to visit her mother, who has been committed to a psychiatric hospital. As soon as they reach Austin, however, Tina changes the plan. Earl tags along, enjoying the weed that Tina’s friend provides. It's much better than the ditch weed he steals from his brothers.

Unhappy with what he sees Tina doing with the weed supplier, Earl decides to walk to a park that has a swimming pool resembling a pond. He hooks up with two girls who are about his age and with a guy in his mid-twenties named Tom, a man who makes his living selling meth and coke and ludes and weed. The girls are happy to provide sexual favors in exchange for the drugs. Earl finds himself doing the same, although he’s so high after sampling all the drugs he doesn’t quite understand what he’s doing or why he’s doing it. Earl spends the next couple of days and nights in a haze that is fueled by drugs and the absence of sleep.

Earl is at the center of a dramatic event. As he drives back to Stovall, fueled by meth, Earl is arrested and charged with murder. He can’t give a coherent account of his time, although his memories return over the next few days. His lawyer isn’t a legal whiz but he’s a nice guy who understands the odds of a teen with no money or social connections getting a fair trial in East Texas. The prosecutor injects a doubt about Earl’s sexuality to assure that his trial isn’t fair.

In the novel’s second part, the in-between has passed and Earl is drifting again. He makes his way to Oregon, getting off the bus when the moment seems right, and starts a new life in Cliffside. He’s befriended by a librarian and by the librarian’s mother, who rents him a room above her garage. He’s befriended by a swimming instructor who becomes the first person in Stovall to guess some details of his past. He eventually agrees to work on a farm operated by the librarian’s son-in-law. Life is simple but good, the kind of life Earl wants. He seems content, if not happy.

Earl doesn’t want to blame anyone else for his troubles and wonders how he can prepare himself to die if he doesn’t blame himself. Earl has spent decades thinking of himself as a horrible person. The novel’s dramatic question is whether, with the help of supportive people who don’t treat him like trash, he can overcome that self-punishment and achieve a measure of contentment.

While the plot is engaging, the novel’s strength lies in its details. Earl is obsessed by memories of the long telephone cord on his mother’s phone, the transistor radio his father gave him, turnstiles and the negative adjectival. He rambles about those topics when he’s high, yet music is the only subject that Earl can comfortably discuss when he’s straight. He’s not keen on defending the South (Earl is offended by racism), but it’s the only place he’s known until he takes a bus to Oregon. In a discussion of music, he makes the point that jazz, blues, and country music originated in the South. (Rock was certainly influenced by Southern musicians, but Earl probably pushes the argument too far when he claims that rock also originated in the South.) There are so many references to songs I love that the novel seems to come with a soundtrack.

Earl's conversations about music with his lawyer before and during the in-between are one of the few sources of joy in his life. Earl feels his life moving in the syncopated time of music, draped in pedal steel: “There goes your heart, struggling to stay in rhythm and about to bust out all at once.”

I Am the Light of This World is told in the third person, but the narrative voice tracks the kind of language that would be natural to Earl. The narration takes on the rhythm of Earl’s life. For example, “it was hard to say what he was feeling because people did not understand him when he tried. He would say he felt like pedal steel and draw blank faces. He’d say he felt like a midnight train with two lights on behind and the red light was his mind and they would just study his mouth.”

While the story is fundamentally bleak from start to finish, it encourages the reader to root for Earl. Michael Parker makes it possible to understand Earl and even to care about him. Earl has little control over the events that shape his life. He’s not equipped to make good choices. He is nevertheless a compelling character, a young (and then an old) man with whom the reader can easily sympathize. The story seems to offer the hope that new friendships near the end of a life can turn that life around. Although he likely knows that redemptive endings are what book clubs crave, Parker avoids the temptation of a feel-good ending. He tells the story with honesty, compassion, and a good dose of pedal steel.

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Prairie Fever by Michael Parker

Published by Algonquin Books on May 21, 2019

Prairie Fever begins in Lone Wolf, Oklahoma in 1917. Elise and Lorena had two brothers who died of typhoid, deaths their father blamed on prairie fever, a phrase Elise associates with life, not death: prairie dog villages; the way the prairie wind “makes everything slap and creak and whistle.” When the novel begins, Elise is 15 and Lorena is a year older. Both sisters are precocious and improbably eloquent, resulting in entertaining dialog as they try to one-up each other during the ride to school on a horse named Sandy. Elise seems to live in her imagination (she is certain that Sandy knows the way to all destinations and often travels along ocean beaches). Lorena purports to be reality based, although she doesn’t “believe that some things have to be real and that makes them not real.”

Each day when the sisters arrive at school, they are unpinned from their blanket by their teacher. Gus McQueen is 19, a new arrival in Lone Wolf. He was raised by his aunt in North Carolina and was recommended for the teaching job by his own teacher, thanks to McQueen’s talent for memorization.

Prairie Fever’s first dramatic moment occurs when Elise, in reaction to Lorena’s cruel comment, decides to leave class and ride Sandy to a neighboring town in a blizzard. Searching for Elise with Lorena clinging to his back, McQueen is transformed by a combination of love and desire, and perhaps a kind of spiritual awakening. Elise is also changed by the experience, losing some fingers and toes and part of her nose.

McQueen believes that his life repeatedly forces him to select “the lesser of two bad choices,” but sometimes he feels guided (in a literal sense) by his dead brother. McQueen’s choice between the Stewart sisters drives the novel’s plot. The girls are much alike but different in key aspects. Gus loves them both but realizes that he only hears the “true cry” of one sister.

Prairie Fever is not a modernized Lolita. Even today, the age of consent in Oklahoma is 16 and McQueen does not pursue either sister while she is still in school. He is only a few years older than the girls, and given the time frame in which the story unfolds, there is nothing creepy about his intentions. McQueen is, in fact, quite proper and something of a sweet bumbler in his courtship.

One sister eventually goes to Texas and the other to Wyoming, both described as dismal places albeit for different reasons. The novel’s second part consists of letters that the sisters write to each other while pretending to write to someone else. The letters are filled with subtle and (in Lorena’s case) biting humor, making them a joy to read.

The last part jumps ahead a couple of decades, allowing the reader to see what has become of Gus and the two sisters. The story’s drama initially concerns the triangular relationship among the sisters and Gus. After both sisters settle into life, the drama concerns the rift that develops between the sisters and whether they will be able to restore their bond. A story of that nature could easily become a soap opera, but there is no melodrama here. Prairie Fever is instead an honest portrayal of complex characters living simple but meaningful lives. Their approaches to a difficult (and perhaps impossible) reconciliation are based on a true understanding of the conflict between love and pride.

While the story is always interesting, it is the prose and the characters that captured by attention. The writing is of award-winning quality. McQueen is a decent man, as is a rancher who later enters the story as the husband of one of the sisters. Growing up with “prairie stretching to the horizon,” unbounded by conventions, has given the sisters the gift of free thought. Yet they both struggle with their imaginations as they question whether and when it is best to replace knowing with pretending.

Few books make me fall in love with characters, but the frankness, eloquence, and imaginations of both Lorena and Elise make the characters memorable. They are spirited and stubborn but mostly motivated by wisdom and kindness. I understand Gus’ dilemma in trying to decide which sister to wed. I loved them both.

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All I Have in this World by Michael Parker

Published by Algonquin Books on March 25, 2014

The literary device that binds the characters in All I Have in this World is a Buick Electra. The reader first encounters it at an assembly plant in 1983. A year later, the first black car salesman hired by a Cleveland dealership sells it to a math teacher. Subsequent owners include a doctor in Kansas whose son drives it to Austin and a rancher's widow. Slices from the life of each car owner (as well as an assembly plant worker and the used car dealer who sells it last) are dispersed throughout the novel. The book's structure -- the use of the Buick to tie together lives of disparate people who share universal traits -- is part of its appeal.

Twenty years after it drives off the Cleveland lot, the Buick ends up in Pinto Canyon, Texas, where it brings together Maria and Marcus, the novel's principle characters, each of whom is embroiled in a family drama. Although the novel bounces around in time, it begins in 1994, when 17-year-old Maria enters adulthood in the wake of a tragic experience (for which she is unfairly blamed) that solidifies her desire to leave Pinto Canyon. She does not come back for her father's funeral but returns to Pinto Canyon in 2004. Her mother, with whom she has rarely had contact, has inherited a motel and claims she is too tired to run it by herself -- a claim that Maria credits, given that her mother took care of her dying husband and her dying lover before finding herself alone.

Marcus, having discovered that there is no profit in founding a nonprofit educational center dedicated to flytraps and having lost the land he owned jointly with his sister, packs everything he owns into a pickup truck and drives until he reaches Pinto Canyon, where his truck is stolen while he's hiking near the Mexican border. From then on he is (Maria thinks) trying to find "a way to live his life with somewhat less shame."

In part, All I Have in this World is about people who try to get back the things they once had -- love, family, self-respect -- but never the Buick, although it does help Marcus and Maria recover some things they were missing. In part, the story is about the need to put the past in the past, and the difficulty of reconciling the past with the present. Maria knows she did the right thing at seventeen but still has trouble living with it, while Marcus, knowing he did the wrong thing in his recent past, has the same problem. In part, the novel is about the difficulty of forgiveness (choosing not to forgive makes the world smaller and easier to understand) and of learning to live without it. And in part, the novel is about the difficulty of sharing (a car, a life, a lover).

As you might expect, the novel's larger theme is reflected in its title. Nearly everything Marcus owned is lost. Maria's losses are less tangible but just as real. All they have in the world isn't much. But the point of All I Have in this World, as seen in the story of Maria and Marcus and in some of the lives of the Buick owners, is that making a list of your losses is not the best way to measure what you have in this world. That isn't a new idea but it is illustrated here in an engaging story that avoids moving in an obvious direction. The story combines subtle humor with low-key drama and treats the reader to a convincing portrayal of damaged characters who are looking for a way to live with less shame.

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