dual personalities

I finished re-reading The Trees by Conrad Richter over the weekend.  It is such a great book. So underrated.  He reminds me of Willa Cather, who also worked hard at her craft, getting it right. Richter also put so much into his books, so much research, and they are spare and perfect–no extraneous showing off.

“There is great tenderness in his stories,” wrote David McCullough about Richter, “Much that is raw and earthy, much that is funny, and not a little cold-blooded violence. The land is never merely the setting; it is elemental to the story, vast and full of power and mystery. His characters do not merely move across the landscape; it is part of them and they are part of it…In the trilogy [The Trees, The Fields, The Town] it is the ancient trees, ‘a race of giants,’ that shut out the light.”

There they stood [Sayward Luckett reflects] with their feet deep in the guts of the earth and their heads in the sky, never even looking at you or letting on you were there. This was their country. Here they had lived and died since back in heathen times. Even the Lord, it seemed, couldn’t do much with them. For every one He blew down, a hundred tried to grow up in its place.

“The underlying values expressed in the trilogy,” McCullough continues, “in all the novels, are the old-fashioned primary values–courage, respect for one’s fellow man, self-reliance, courtesy, devotion to the truth, a loathing of hypocrisy, the power in simple goodness. He called them “the old verities” and he was sure they were vanishing from  American life. He had no patience with such expressions as “the Puritan ethic.” He thought most of those who used that expression never bothered to understand what the Puritans were all about.”

So, if you are looking for something to read, try Conrad Richter! I am going on with the trilogy.

On another note, I must say, there is nothing more gratifying than seeing the wee babes “reading” books.

“You can be too rich and too thin, but you can never be too well read or too curious about the world.”
― Tim Gunn, Gunn’s Golden Rules: Life’s Little Lessons for Making It Work