Whenever there's a crisis in America, writers spring up to try to make sense out of it, to turn tragedy into art. For a few years, everyone is too close. What comes out is agitprop, or sentimental slop, or some sort of placeholder that takes up the space until another writer has the time and wisdom to turn the incomprehensible into a story that both encapsulates the crisis and, somehow, doesn't need the crisis to be a work of art. It took John Steinbeck to make The Grapes of Wrath out of the Dust Bowl and the Depression, Michael Herr to synthesize the Vietnam experience into Dispatches, Tony Kushner to forge Angels in America out of the devastation of AIDS.
It took Patty Friedmann less than two years to produce A Little Bit Ruined, which is one of the earliest in a raft of novels about Hurricane Katrina, but I think it will end up being remembered as one of the first and best. I finished it last night and am still blown away by Friedmann's storytelling and sense of humor. Not sure yet if it's her best novel (that may be Side Effects), but there are characters and passages in there that are both universal and so Katrina-specific that they're indelible. Like this one, in which the delusional narrator, Eleanor Rushing, finds herself in Houston and can think of nothing but going home:
And from all I sense, people from New Orleans now are citizens of everywhere and should have hermit crab sorts of privileges. If we burrow in somewhere, we're home, and no one should take anything away from us....
Houston is hundreds of square miles of nothing but Metairie. A warehouse for extremely comfortable people. Their homes probably don't have grease in the kitchens or dirt on the baseboards, they park in their driveways, for Chrissakes. And I've never seen so many supermarkets. One supermarket has a Barnes & Noble next door. Every franchise in the world has an outlet every ten blocks here. No one needs to worry about imagining anything because whatever they see on TV is available, and they don't have to make anything up. If they see an infomercial and want that stuff that sprays on carpets and eliminates pet odors, it's in a store nearby. If their kid sees the XBox360 at a friend's house, it's in six Houston stores when it's not anywhere else.
I heard Richard's little girls turning into Houstonians in Radio Shack that day. Too much comfort here. I haven't seen one bumper sticker. This is a terrible excuse for a city because it is just a giant suburb, and people with character shouldn't live here.
Richard can leave Tina and his children here, but he needs to go back to New Orleans. He can do reconstructive surgery. There will always be damage.
Comments