Bilerico has a thread on Time Magazine’s List of the 100 Best Modern Novels as did Torpor Indy about a month ago. I’m feeling like a sheep today, so I thought I’d follow the herd and do likewise.
Looks like I’ve read 16 of them:
1. Animal Farm (Great)
2. Are you there God, it’s Me Margaret (it was my sister’s book, I swear!) (Neutral)
3. Beloved (Neutral)
4. The Catcher in the Rye (Bad)
5. A Clockwork Orange (Good)
6. The Grapes of Wrath (Great)
7. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (Good)
8. Lord of the Flies (Good)
9. The Lord of the Rings (Great)
10. Neuromancer (Good)
11. 1984 (Great)
12. Snow Crash (Good)
13. The Sound & the Fury (Awful)
14. The Sun Also Rises (Neutral)
15. To Kill a Mockingbird (Great)
16. Watchmen (Great)
I was really surprised to see Alan Moore’s “Watchmen” on the list since, after all, it’s a comic book. But, I really enjoyed it.
‘Jesus Land’: Her Brother’s Keeper
By ALISON SMITH
Published: November 13, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/13/books/review/13smith.html
When they were young, Julia Scheeres and her brother David would sneak into their father’s study in the family home in rural Indiana to watch “The Brady Bunch.” David loved this show, and saw his family as an 80’s version of it. But while both families have three boys and three girls, the Scheereses are about as far from the simple harmonies of the Brady family as you can get.
Tim Rose
Julia Scheeres.
JESUS LAND
A Memoir.
By Julia Scheeres.
356 pp. Counterpoint. $23.
Julia’s parents are guilt-tripped into adopting David – a neglected 3-year old black child – when there are no white kids left at the adoption agency. Holier-than-thou Christian fundamentalists, they teach David about Jesus and save his soul, but they stop short of loving him. It’s a stingy, brutal world that they’ve brought the child into, and you begin to wonder if David wouldn’t have been better off taking his chances in the foster care system. But David, a sweet-natured boy in thick glasses, does get one break. His new sister Julia, who is the same age, loves him almost instantly. They become constant companions, and this sibling bond is at the core of “Jesus Land,” Scheeres’s gritty, heart-wrenching memoir.
The first time Mrs. Scheeres touched David she feared “the black would rub off on her hands.” A parsimonious Jesus addict, she pipes Rejoice Radio (the local Christian pop station) through the intercom system of their ranch home, and feeds her children plate scrapings and scraps for supper. This would not be such a bitter pill if they were actually poor. But their father is a surgeon at a Lafayette surgical clinic. He drives a Porsche.
The parents adopt another black child, Jerome, thinking that David needs “one of his own kind” to keep him company. They relegate the two boys to a basement room while their “real” children are given bedrooms in the house proper. When the kids misbehave, David and Jerome are beaten. The other children are merely grounded. Outside the home, things aren’t much better. The inseparable Julia and David are subject to all manner of scrutiny. Barraged with racial epithets, they are chased out of public pools and refused service in restaurants.
After Mr. Scheeres beats him with a two-by-four and breaks his arm, David makes a half-hearted attempt to take his life. His parents see this as the perfect excuse to ship him off to a Christian reform school in the Dominican Republic. As soon as he’s gone, their mother clears out his belongings and scrubs his room with Lysol, “scouring away the remaining traces of his existence.” When Julia asks what she’s done with David’s stuff, her mother replies, “He doesn’t live here anymore.”
Once David’s gone, there’s nothing tying Julia to home. She runs away and is arrested after breaking into a car and violating her curfew. The judge is willing to drop the charges and release her into her parents’ custody, but Julia refuses to return home. She’s left with three choices: she can become an emancipated minor, she can run away with her boyfriend (he’s more than willing), or she can follow her brother to reform school. Scheeres chooses the hardest of these paths: “I’ll go to the Dominican Republic,” Scheeres writes. “I will go to David and be family to him.”
When she arrives, she discovers that the supervisors of the school have censored her brother’s letters, that barbed wire rings the encampment, and that the children are subjected to physical and mental abuse.
Scheeres is certainly not lacking for material. The list of wrongs perpetrated against her and her brother is staggering. A lesser writer would have buckled under the weight of this story. Scheeres does occasionally fumble. The first third of the book is diffuse. As she shuttles between life at home, life at school and life at church, Scheeres seems uncertain which devastating details are essential and which will only distract from the story she wants to tell. Once she is in the concentrated world of the reform school, however, her narrative comes sharply into focus and the book becomes a page turner. Her depictions of life there – the punishing system of checks and balances, the midnight brainwashing sessions, the grueling physical demands – are heart-stopping and enraging.
As the story gains momentum, it becomes clear that Scheeres is driven by two things: the fierce love she feels for her brother and the rising anger she experiences as she witnesses the injustices he endures. There is much praise, these days, for the detached, quietly elegant narrative. But there is little mention of the power a well-tended rage can bring to a good story. It is Scheeres’s high emotion and her tight control of her narrative within that emotion that is most striking. Her anger serves her well: it is focused, justified and without a trace of self-pity.
When they are finally sprung from the reform school, David and Julia are given one day together on the beach. It’s an all-too-brief moment shot through with poignancy and with the conviction that all of it – the years of deprivation and racial slurs, the months in the reform school – was worth it, for these two to have just one day at the beach. It may not be “The Brady Bunch,” but in Julia, David found his true family.
Alison Smith is the author of “Name All the Animals,” a memoir.