A lazy day

I had ambitious plans for Saturday. I was going to drive up to Owosso and go to the opening day of this group's railroad museum. What happened instead is that I slept late, and once I finally dragged my lazy self out of bed, I decided to spend the day reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn instead. So I'll just have to check out the railroad museum at some later time. These upcoming "opportunities" look a little too expensive. Not to mention that paying good money to be fireman, i.e., shovel several tons of coal by hand, sounds just a bit too much like a certain famous literary prank. Fortunately, they seem to have a steam-powered excursion scheduled for later in the summer, when I'll have more time.

I started reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn after it was recommended to me by a student worker at "Huron State". I'd heard of the book for years, of course, but never got around to reading it. It was a pleasant surprise.

The book really doesn't have much of a plot. There's no obvious didactic point to it, nor does it follow the standard rising-to-a-climax and falling-to-denoument pattern that most of us learned about in school. It meanders slowly from one chapter to the next, with a substantial part of the middle of the book being told out of chronological order. It begins with Francie, the central character, at the age of eleven, but then digresses into a lengthy account of her parent's lives and her earlier life. One major character's death "before the age of thirty" is asserted by the author long before she ever gets around to recounting that portion of the character's life. Exciting action and plot development are not good reasons to read this book; however, it has an incredible wealth of character development and detailed observation of life in the Brooklyn tenements in the early twentieth century. Stephen Crane turned a much more withering gaze on those same tenements in his short, bitter Maggie : a Girl of the Streets. Smith's book is a bit gentler in tone, but the same hazards are present.

The whole book reads as if the author had turned a microscope onto the lives of her characters in order to examine their lives and characters in a leisurely fashion, and it's somewhat to the reader's surprise that such ordinary people turn out to be so interesting. A good book to read on a slow, lazy Saturday. But may all the gods there be protect me and all others who toil in the stacks from becoming like the librarian in the book:

Each week Francie made the same request and each week the librarian asked the same question. A name on a card meant nothing to her and since she never looked up into a child's face, she never did get to know the little girl who took a book out every day and two on Saturday. A smile would have meant a lot to Francie and a friendly comment would have made her so happy. She loved the library and was anxious to worship the lady in charge. But the librarian had other things on her mind. She hated children anyhow. (p. 24)

Later in the day, some co-workers drafted me to go see the current iteration of The Stepford Wives. More on that tomorrow.