Crabgrass Frontier

I've been seeking a book to explain the development of the American landscape as it is now and have found it in Kenneth Jackson's "Crabgrass Frontier". I believe the book is classified under urban development but it is as much a book about American History as it is about suburbanization. Beginning with Brooklyn and Brookline and covering the entire country with only a handful of exceptions, the book addresses the American need to get out of the city and into the "country", the need for space (freedom), and those who suffered to create it. What I found most interesting about the study is the development of municipalities, how new towns were connected to the cities that spawned them and that the poorer classes left in the cities were now paying for sewage, water and electricity in these new, extravagent towns. Jackson shows how race, poverty, disease, industry, wealth, and the automobile built the America(n) we see now, one that is isolated rather than part of a community. Or at least the America we saw in 1985. At that time, I walked most places. Now, the lenght of those walks to the store is about the length of a Target. Recently I visited Manchester, Vermont and saw how they had spread their mall throughout the town, so that chain stores were run out of Cape style cottages and neatly paved sidewalks where local restaurants, offices, and trade shops also operated. I'm not sure if this is better or worse, but it seems that the town should have a say in how these businesses appear, no matter the dangers and comforts that lurk inside.

Mo Yan and Ma Jian

"Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out", where did you come from? I haven't read a work of literary fiction with such excitement since first reading "The Power and the Glory" by Graham Greene, and as with Greene, I went and found Mo Yan's (pictured left) other works. His epic "Big Breasts and Wide Hips", although far too long, was equally captivating, mixing humor with horror.

"Stick Out Your Tongue", a short book of stories, the last like sketches for the monumental "Red Dust", a searching for some sense of purity in land under Buddha, grabbed me as it would

any traveler who expects the journey to be linked with the spirit, and instead becomes disillusioned by what is seen. Spirit-killer. Not all journeys, but the ones planned. And though never on the run, never hiding, lost in America, crossing state lines, when they ask "where are you from?" that place is another country, with its own people and customs and rituals, its history is short and wide, no way to dig into the graves and pry out the memories of the dead. "Red Dust" is truth, as best it can be told by an individual of a place and a time past, its history still seething somewhere underneath.

I have been enjoying the recent introduction to Chinese authors, and herald the unreal translations by Howard Goldblatt (a professor at Notre Dame) of Mo Yan's incredibly complex works, Zhu Wen's gritty and humorous "I Love Dollars", Leslie T. Chang's "Factory Girls", and to reach back to the brilliant "Soul Mountain", a book I pick up at random when the written word becomes a heavy load. But I have been dissapointed by two recent, epic novels out of China: Yu Hua's "Brothers", which I believe suffers from a tired translation and a lack of necessary editing (There are only so many times in a book that boys can peep at the female haunch), the other being Jian's most recent work "Beijing Coma". I must come back to this book because its subject implores me to, but I was lost by the he said she said dialouge to open the novel, reading much like reportage, stunted, its details at times uninteresting, though I trust he is leading me somewhere because he has before.

Books recommended here: Zhu Wen's "I Love Dollars"; Ma Jian's "Red Dust"; Mo Yan's "Big Breasts and Wide Hips" and "Life and Death are Wearing Me Out"; Gao Xingjian's "Soul Mountain".