Years ago, I tried my hand at a few book reviews. Here is one of them, because I think it still has merit, and because I need some content to test the function of this web site I’m building. This was previously published at an old site of mine, BookishThoughts.com.
[/toggle]Hardback: 401 pp. New York: Warner Books, 2000. ISBN: 0446527165.
When I was in the fourth grade, my family moved from Boulder, Colorado, to a small, unincorporated farm town in Idaho, which had a post office but no traffic lights. I was a city kid, so my immediate sense of its smallness was based on the absence of public transportation not only in my new hometown, but also in the small nearby city and the larger cities up and down the interstate.
But size wasn’t the biggest shock. In the mid-1970s Boulder was trying desperately to be Berkeley, California. I was probably wrong, but my impression then was that there were very few people in southeastern Idaho who were even aware that there was any world at all outside the borders of Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming.
The children at school and at church were not accustomed to newcomers. They greeted my arrival with countless petty persecutions. It didn’t help that I instantly found myself well ahead of all the other students in every subject I had already studied at Aurora 7 Elementary – except orchestra, because my new school didn’t have one.
I came near the beginning of a wave of immigrants from out of state, so I suppose my classmates were experiencing their own version of culture shock. At the time, however, I only noticed my own.
At length, my new milieu and I became accustomed to each other. I found some friends at school. Before and after school, and during summer vacation, I tended half an acre of vegetable garden and worked on nearby farms. Somehow, in the process, I came to appreciate the land and its people, to see the quiet goodness that often concealed itself behind bad grammar and dirty overalls.
We were 60 miles from where my mother grew up, though not so distant, culturally. So when David Baldacci announces in his introduction that he is offering a sort of history of “both where and how my mother grew up,” he has met me on familiar territory.
Lou (“don’t call me Louisa Mae”) Cardinal is twelve years old, the tomboy daughter of a struggling, gifted writer, Jack Cardinal, and Amanda, his gentle, insightful wife. Little brother Oz (for Oscar, after Oscar Wilde) is seven. On the way home to New York City from an outing in a borrowed car, there is an accident. Jack is killed, Amanda is left a vegetable, and mother and children are launched on an unexpected journey from New York City to the mountains of Virginia, where the children will grow up in the care of their great-grandmother, who is also named Louisa Mae Cardinal.
My own culture shock pales next to Lou’s, and the minor trauma of my father’s unemployment hardly compares to a father’s tragic death as a motivation to emigrate. Nor were my rural persecutors as vicious as Lou’s. But as I read this gentle, moving novel, two parallel plots unfolded in my mind: the fictional saga of Lou and Oz in a strange, new world; and my own, very similar memories of childhood.
The two plots – mine and Baldacci’s – have many common details. Lou and Oz find themselves far ahead in their new country school. They plant corn. They discover manure’s rich potential for pranks. Eventually, their chores, once unimaginably strange, become “as natural as breathing.” They find friends and protectors. They find a kindred spirit in attorney Cotton Longfellow, the great-great-great-grandson of the famous author, who lives in rural Virginia because it is as far from literary Boston as one can possibly be.
In the beginning, when they discover that nature itself is far bigger than New York City, Lou and Oz are frightened and intimidated. As time passes, their awe is undiminished, but they begin to feel almost at home in the daily battle to hold back the encroaching wilderness, as did I. Still, at least until the epilogue, they are destined to remain outsiders (albeit sympathetic outsiders) in the alien world where Jack Cardinal grew up, but where his literary gift and the culture that appreciated it mean nothing.
I indulge my personal reflections here to make two points. First, my personal response to Wish You Well is so rooted in my own experience that my objectivity is in doubt. (I don’t apologize for this.) Second, and more significantly, David Baldacci has succeeded in creating what his fictional Jack Cardinal achieved: “vivid landscapes densely populated with flawed characters who, with each turn of the page, seemed more real than one’s family.”
Since we tend to caricature our own family members, and because we are prone to look forward, not behind us, such a book has merit far beyond entertainment. It can cause us to see those around us and our past with new eyes.
Obviously, this is not a Baldacci thriller. There is some legal drama, but it is more in the spirit of To Kill a Mockingbird than of modern legal thrillers. There is the occasional auto accident or explosion, even arson, but they are realistic and believable, not sparks in a turbo-charged engine invented to drive the plot at a frenzied pace.
The heroes and villains are not the stock characters of thrillers. Rather than a brilliant, ruthless, megalomaniac billionaire or a corrupt politician, the villains here are a cruel farmer who starves his wife and children, and a gas company. Even the latter evil is less that of a corporation than of the men who work for it, who think they can buy whatever they want.
The heroes are quiet, reflective children, not daring, desperate, resourceful, beautiful adults. The people around them are not the bright lights of business and politics, but the good people of the mountain, mostly illiterate but not stupid. Where in a thriller great battles might be won or great crimes committed, here there is a schoolyard brawl and a triumphant barn-raising.
In short, Wish You Well is much nearer to everyday life than the conventional best-selling thriller. Metaphorically, it is Simon Birch or Forrest Gump, not Air Force One.
As days and years pass, Lou deliberately learns a great deal about her father, who, though deceased, is very much present throughout the novel. The children live with the woman who raised him, in the house where he was raised, in the world about which he wrote his books. They read his schoolbooks and attend his school. He is more of a presence than Amanda, who remains alive in the next room, but unresponsive.
In the economy of novels, Baldacci would probably have killed Amanda, too, if she were not meant finally to come back to life. I wondered how he would pull it off, and whether it would be believable. Perhaps this means the device is a bit too obvious for so artful a novel.
I won’t spoil the suspense, though, except to note that I’m not sure miracles have to be believable. Maybe they are not, by definition. Perhaps, like life, so humane and realistic a tale of faith and family and sacrifice would be incomplete without miracle. At least the concluding miracle here is more plausible than the plots of most thrillers.
Some Tom Clancy fans complained when, after two novels, he began to devote more pages to his characters and fewer to high-tech weaponry. Perhaps some Baldacci fans will protest that love, faith, sacrifice, and everyday villainy are a poor substitute for high adventure, romance, and evil in high places. Not I.
In terms of his language, Baldacci here is still very much the author of the page-turning thriller. His artistry is in the tale he tells, not the words and sentences he used to tell it. One does not pause to savor his prose, as one must, for example, when reading Annie Dillard. Still, this is a good story, told well enough to keep me turning pages.
I get Baldacci’s thrillers at the library or buy them in paperback, enjoy them, and pass them on. I bought Wish You Well in hardback, and I’m glad. This one I’ll keep. I’ve recommended it to friends. I may even read it to my children. This is his best work to date, but I hope it doesn’t remain so. I’ll keep reading his thrillers, if he’ll keep writing them, but I hope he has another novel or two in him like Wish You Well – or even better.