It's so odd with her. "Ship of Fools" was her first novel, after several decades of highly lauded work. It was so highly anticipated, even by haughty critic types, that it became the best selling book of 1962. And critics seem to agree: "Ship of Fools" is probably one of the worst novels ever published—Katherine Anne Porter has this weird habit of producing astonishing work and then, just when goodwill reaches its highest point, just completely shitting the bed. Aside from the very last pages, she actually doesn't do that here: I thought these highly unusual, winding stories were all really quite good—even when you're spending page after page sort of lost in the brambles, when you arrive at the clearing you usually find that oddly drawn path was actually well worth it. I thought "The Old Order," about a southern family that straddled emancipation, was probably one of the best short stories I've ever read. "Holiday," about a very traditional large German farm family in Texas, started out like an anthropological study and ended with a very affecting human truth. "The Leaning Tower," about a young American painter in Berlin, had one of the better drawn "drunk scenes" I've come across. "The Downward Path to Wisdom," about a confused little boy battered by swirling family drama, was written in a way that took you back to your own young, confused state. And "A Day's Work," about an unhappy Irish couple living in New York City, was a great urban story about screwing over and being screwed—the stories go all over the place and highlight very different people and yet, until the final pages, you never really sense an odd-sounding note. If there was someone who just absolutely nailed the nuts-and-bolts craft of writing better than anyone, I'd say it's Katherine Anne Porter. It's weird that we've largely forgotten her. But I guess it's easy to overlook someone who knows how to, say, construct a solidly built table in favor of someone who had the sense of showmanship to build a bigger, flashier, more ornate one. It's too bad, really. Five stars.
"Ship of Fools" by Katherine Anne Porter (1962)
In my opinion, Katherine Anne Porter is one of the best writers America ever produced, why she doesn't get brought up more often is beyond me. She also, in my experience, has the habit of sometimes producing work that's stunningly bad. And this, her only novel, was, by many credible accounts, supposed to be particularly stinky. By its critical reputation you wouldn't know that it was the number-one selling book in the year of its release, or that they turned it into Vivien Leigh's final big screen appearance, or even that it had been eagerly anticipated: Porter spent twenty years teasing a forthcoming novel after publishing very highly regarded short stories and novellas in the 30s and 40s, only to drop a 500-page brick in everyone's laps one year before Thomas Pynchon published his first book. So is it really that bad? Well, if you consider that the book juggles 49 characters (according to the opening list), that none of them are particularly pleasant (which is a bit of an understatement—the only instance of a main character behaving positively happened on page 312, I noted), that the opening exposition didn't seem to end until you were nearly 200 pages in, that the disorienting, episodic style and the density of the prose can make you feel like you actually were facing only day 3 of a crawling, interminable 30-day boat trip across the Atlantic, then it's a small wonder that I didn't think the book was really all that foul: the first two chapters (pp. 1-360) actually take you to a pretty thrilling place—at some point in the middle of the book you learn that most of the German passengers are anti-Semites, and there are only two passengers on board with strong Jewish ties. In fact, I thought the book's many-colored threads were forming an intriguing (nasty, bitter, trembling) harmony as they were being pulled taut, and that I might actually be reading some sort of overlooked classic. It's in the final, third chapter where the fragmented structure starts to feel more like a soap opera, the experimental thrill starts to feel like cheap tricks, the empathetic, complex, maddening characters start to feel more like flat, baffling cartoons, the meticulous arrangement of the sprawling cast starts to feel sloppy, and the events start to feel contrived. Even the big, climactic gala lands like an undercooked farce. If you got the sense that any of the race, class, moral, romantic, political, religious, or societal issues explored were ratcheting up into something worthwhile, they never do. And if you wanted to witness the kind of well wrung brilliance you saw in Porter's earlier work, you only get it here in scattered patches. Really, what you're left with is less of a novel and more of a 500-page encyclopedia cataloging vile and sundry human cruelty. In that sense, I can recommend it, but unfortunately only in that sense. Two-thirds of a great novel is, sadly, a bad novel. Two stars.
"Pale Horse, Pale Rider" by Katherine Anne Porter (1939)
It's three short novels (Porter hated the term "novella" and, much like the kinds of people who are particular about these sorts of things, was apparently a huge jerk in real life) give or take 40 pages each. The first was this fascinating indictment/celebration of storytelling itself, about how stories, which in current times tend to be hailed and exalted as some sort of magical enlightenment elixir, are in reality very very very very effective tools of delusion and deceit, in its cloaking way almost a celebration of decay, even as we can't help but rely on the lies stories feed us as a means of managing to continue trudging through life day by heavy plodding heavy plodding day. The second was an unheralded classic, such a richly woven, complex exploration of morality, responsibility, sin, laziness, and all their inherent confusions, contradictions, blessings, benedictions, and rationalizations, and about the almost inherently fatalistic way us human beings, having been granted limited intelligence, believe we can possibly, reasonably cogitate our ways through all this, because on some level we all—every last one of us!—believe our existence on Earth must (MUST!) be linked to some sort of intrinsic, universal good, even while we all secretly suspect we may actually be nothing more than spiritual orphans, abandoned, leftovers, to our own mercurial wiles, that it's a marvel the whole thing manages to hold together so extraordinarily well. These two stories, "Old Mortality" and "Noon Wine", explored enormously complex things you NEVER saw writers of this time explore in short, 40-page works, and did it in a way that was richly compelling and unsettlingly rewarding. And then the final story lands like this enormous, overwrought, sentimental, adolescent butt-turd. You'd think it wouldn't, because it's the title story, because it's an early story about a single female urban professional, because it's about the 1918 pandemic, considering what we all just went through. But it's sooooooooo boring (there are numerous dream sequences) it kills what could have been an extraordinary collection of work. I suppose the overall effect is akin to watching all three Godfather movies in one sitting. It's a god damn shame. Apparently, her entire career is just like this: wildly, frustratingly uneven. Sadly, kind of like how life is. Two stars.
"Flowering Judas and Other Stories" by Katherine Anne Porter (1935)
It seems like every time I'm about to proclaim Katherine Anne Porter the best writer of her era, I stumble upon one of her enormous, stinking turds. Not like the stories here, among her earliest, should be stamped in gold or something, but the way she draws her characters is nothing short of exquisite—a frustrated artist, a dying woman, an Irish (County Sligo) immigrant living in Connecticut, a Mexican bride-turned-murderer, a 15-year-old Mexican girl who's never been kissed, a Mexican revolutionary's female confidant, a husband and wife who get into an enormous fight after he randomly decides to buy rope—the people and their relationships are all so finely detailed, densely woven, and true-to-life they carry you through some rather thin narratives. I'd imagine a writer, like any craftsman, who masters the basics would become eager to take bigger and bigger swings. And here her big swing is a huge whiff, a convoluted, overcrowded story about Russian filmmakers from California working in Mexico that pretty much bored me to tears (for the record, her later enormous swings in "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" knock it out clear of the park.) I guess I can't in good faith say you should all run out and read this book, unless you happen to want to study the characterization techniques of someone who probably did it better than anyone. So, yes, that’s right, most of the stories here feel like little more than character sketches but, I gotta say, they're pretty god damn great sketches. Three stars.