It's the first of October, and the closing image of Thomas H. Cook's The City When It Rains, which I reviewed recently, comes again to mind and lingers. The protagonist sees emptiness above him and emptiness below, but asserts that he's still standing. It is an existential paragraph, a conscious thought, tentative yet positive, with a note of grace. Thankful for this. Transcendental.
October's yellow light is a fading light, the year is dying. We hate to see that evening sun go down, but the awareness of approaching Death makes us reject empty materialism and want to get back to what's really important. It makes us more appreciative of the time we have left, here and now, in this paradise. We want to spend this time with those we love.
This morning we're listening to that recording of James Taylor's voice, as he sings his song, October Road. The sun going down symbolizes death, the moon suggests the collective unconscious, and the pine represents the evergreen, the eternal.
Taylor's voice sounds like the natural harmonica of the season. We're thankful for this too. I remixed it myself on a homemade CD several Octobers ago. It stands the test of time:
Well I'm-a going back down maybe one more time,
deep down home,
October road.
And I might like to see that little friend of mine
that I left behind
once upon a time.
Oh, promised land
and me still standing,
it's a test of time,
it's a real good sign.
Let the sun run down right behind the hill,
I know how to stand there still
till the moon rise up right behind the pine,
oh, Lord,
October road.
It's the big-time life that I can't abide,
raise my rent, tan my hide.
Sweet call
of the countryside,
go down slow,
open wide.
Oh, promised land,
and me still standing.
It's a test of time.
It's a real good sign.
Last week I recommended Thomas H. Cook's The City When It Rains (1991) and Red Leaves (2005), but it appears that I didn't tell enough about them for some. The mystery in the former involves a young woman who has fallen or jumped off a high building in a white dress, apparently after throwing her doll off first. The protagonist is a free-lance photographer. He tries to sort out the real story of the fall, doing his best to make ends meet while raising his nine-year-old daughter:
"On Saturday morning Corman spent several hours arguing intermittently with Lucy over what movie they'd see that afternoon. Lucy sat cross-legged on the floor, carefully going over the entertainment section of the Times. She preferred movies that edged cautiously into the forbidden zone of sex and violence, but Corman suspected that this had less to do with the actual film than with her need to feel grown-up. It was the sort of attitude that could become a way of living, so that in the end you grew to adolescence hating childhood, then to adulthood hating adolescence, went all the way to death, hating life."
It is a smart, unconventional, philosophical novel, in which the hunt for and the surprising answer to the mystery affects the protagonist in ways that neither he nor the readers watching him can forsee. Different characters in the novel espouse their own different philosophies, but readers are allowed to make up their own minds about these things.
The novel is rich in atmosphere with a feeling for New York City's hidden history, gritty in places while either rainy or overcast from start to finish. The ending of the mystery turns compassionate rather than noir, and the last page finds the photographer determinedly philosophical, tentatively upbeat without being maudlin.
Don't miss The City When It Rains. I hope I didn't give too much away now.
As for Red Leaves, it is a missing child novel which plays well into the modern fears for children around Halloween, given the slasher mentality of our movies, the urban legends of razor blades in apples, and the real life abductions featured in the news almost every day. I'll leave it to the blurbs on the first-edition dustjacket for providing additional info:
