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Dicey's Song (Voigt)
Nth reread. I have posts on Thick as Thieves, All the Birds in the Sky, and Carry On, Mr. Bowditch in the queue, but then ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mildred_of_midgard found several interesting cross-references between The Runner and Seventeen Against the Dealer (thank you for telling me about these!) and one thing led to another and now I'm in the throes of a massive Tillerman reread. Maybe I'll even get through Homecoming this time, although so far it's not looking promising… I have a plan, though!
In my reading Dicey's Song this time around, the theme of holding on and letting go is even more explicitly prominent than I remembered — but, you know, now that I think about it, this theme echoes and re-echoes throughout the cycle. In Runner, in Come a Stranger, in Sons from Afar… all of the books, I think, really, are about letting go of the things you have to, and holding on to the things you love, and how those things are tangled up together and sometimes are the same thing.
And I noticed on my last reread that the cycle's overarching theme (or one of them) is family, and this book is about the family that figures itself out, how it figures itself out, and is the one most explicitly about what it means to be a family.
I think this book is in many ways the thesis statement for the entire cycle.
And oh my goodness the resonances… I think Voigt must have had all these characters fully realized in her head from the very beginning. Jeff cites his father quoting Tolstoy about how unhappy families are all unhappy in their own way… setting up that exploration of family. And the Chesapeake Bay, which is its own character who really comes into its own in Solitary Blue. And the farm, which emerges as a character (asmildred_of_midgard noted).
And boats and music, both as motifs and representative of… what is the boat representative of? Freedom? Independence? Connection? I think all those things at one time or another. Boats are… a really big deal in this cycle. I think every book has a boat playing a somewhat central role. Oh no, wait, not Come a Stranger, I think? Which may mean something as well... Anyway. This book begins with Dicey sinking a boat (…Bullet's old boat, right? So it's its own character too?), then the rest of the book involves her working on it, and what it means that she's able to or not able to work on it. Interestingly, where Dicey is concerned it seems to be the process that symbolizes to us what's going on, not the result (as it might be in the hands of another writer). Dicey doesn't finish the boat, and that means something because the reason she doesn't finish it is because she' busy holding on. (HM. Bullet finished his boat. He was letting go, and not holding on to anything. HMM. Runner is probably the key to this whole cycle.) And then there's the failure in Seventeen… I think it will be much more interesting to look at that, this time out.
I don't know what music means exactly in these books, except that it's a way throughout the cycle that people are drawn together, that people in these books strengthen families and create found families. Interestingly… I think (?) the only book devoid of music entirely is The Runner, and even that one has poetry as a way to (sort of) connect.
And other things… Gram gets a phone. The same phone she threw at the phone company in Runner, when she became for all intents and purposes alone, and liked it that way (well, I guess, at least after her husband died; I don't imagine it was very comfortable until then, but from what she says in this book, she might have found her own meaning in that as well). She gets it explicitly because she has children in the house. So the phone, itself a means of communication, becomes representative of Gram's willingness to communicate, her connection, her reaching out.
(Geez, I want more fic about Gram. She learned all these lessons, slowly and painfully, that she's telling to Dicey in this book. What was it like for her?)
And the scene in the wood shop never fails to break me down. I'm just always a crying mess after reading that one.
mildred_of_midgard found several interesting cross-references between The Runner and Seventeen Against the Dealer (thank you for telling me about these!) and one thing led to another and now I'm in the throes of a massive Tillerman reread. Maybe I'll even get through Homecoming this time, although so far it's not looking promising… I have a plan, though!In my reading Dicey's Song this time around, the theme of holding on and letting go is even more explicitly prominent than I remembered — but, you know, now that I think about it, this theme echoes and re-echoes throughout the cycle. In Runner, in Come a Stranger, in Sons from Afar… all of the books, I think, really, are about letting go of the things you have to, and holding on to the things you love, and how those things are tangled up together and sometimes are the same thing.
And I noticed on my last reread that the cycle's overarching theme (or one of them) is family, and this book is about the family that figures itself out, how it figures itself out, and is the one most explicitly about what it means to be a family.
I think this book is in many ways the thesis statement for the entire cycle.
And oh my goodness the resonances… I think Voigt must have had all these characters fully realized in her head from the very beginning. Jeff cites his father quoting Tolstoy about how unhappy families are all unhappy in their own way… setting up that exploration of family. And the Chesapeake Bay, which is its own character who really comes into its own in Solitary Blue. And the farm, which emerges as a character (as
mildred_of_midgard noted). And boats and music, both as motifs and representative of… what is the boat representative of? Freedom? Independence? Connection? I think all those things at one time or another. Boats are… a really big deal in this cycle. I think every book has a boat playing a somewhat central role. Oh no, wait, not Come a Stranger, I think? Which may mean something as well... Anyway. This book begins with Dicey sinking a boat (…Bullet's old boat, right? So it's its own character too?), then the rest of the book involves her working on it, and what it means that she's able to or not able to work on it. Interestingly, where Dicey is concerned it seems to be the process that symbolizes to us what's going on, not the result (as it might be in the hands of another writer). Dicey doesn't finish the boat, and that means something because the reason she doesn't finish it is because she' busy holding on. (HM. Bullet finished his boat. He was letting go, and not holding on to anything. HMM. Runner is probably the key to this whole cycle.) And then there's the failure in Seventeen… I think it will be much more interesting to look at that, this time out.
I don't know what music means exactly in these books, except that it's a way throughout the cycle that people are drawn together, that people in these books strengthen families and create found families. Interestingly… I think (?) the only book devoid of music entirely is The Runner, and even that one has poetry as a way to (sort of) connect.
And other things… Gram gets a phone. The same phone she threw at the phone company in Runner, when she became for all intents and purposes alone, and liked it that way (well, I guess, at least after her husband died; I don't imagine it was very comfortable until then, but from what she says in this book, she might have found her own meaning in that as well). She gets it explicitly because she has children in the house. So the phone, itself a means of communication, becomes representative of Gram's willingness to communicate, her connection, her reaching out.
(Geez, I want more fic about Gram. She learned all these lessons, slowly and painfully, that she's telling to Dicey in this book. What was it like for her?)
And the scene in the wood shop never fails to break me down. I'm just always a crying mess after reading that one.
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Omg, a Tillerman fan! You have no idea how much I'm enjoying this.
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And oh my goodness the resonances… I think Voigt must have had all these characters fully realized in her head from the very beginning.
Omg, yes, this! I've been thinking this since we started having our Tillerman discussions. The only way I can achieve anything like any kind of interweaving is to go back and forth through the different parts and insert and delete references and smooth them out. I can't just start at part one and work my through a series and have echoes and foreshadowing and different perspectives.
She must have had a *lot* of this worked out, in her head if not on paper, before publication.
This book begins with Dicey sinking a boat (…Bullet's old boat, right? So it's its own character too?)...Bullet finished his boat. He was letting go, and not holding on to anything.
Johnny's boat, actually. So there are two boats (it took me rereading Runner to get this straight:
A sailboat that Johnny built, that Gram uses to sail into town, and it's slow, and not going to hold out much longer. Huh, I think it may be a counterpart of the farm.
And a motor boat, which Patrice is salvaging throughout the course of Runner, and which he paints red because he knows Bullet is going to want it, and Bullet likes fire engine red (see also: his sweater, which Dicey inherits). Bullet uses the money he's been earning to buy the motor boat for his mother, so she can be more independent and not have to rely on a slow sailboat that won't last forever.
Bullet's motor boat is the one we see getting active use when the grandkids show up; Johnny's sailboat is the one Dicey and Sammy rebuild.
Johnny's the one Bullet remembers as always working off his anger in wood. He's also the one who built the tree house for Liza, as Bullet remembers after Johnny leaves, and Gram remembers at Liza's death bed.
Runner has a theme of builders and breakers, and Johnny is a builder in this classification scheme. Bullet and his mother are breakers. (Sammy the younger as builder, hmm.)
I totally agree about Bullet letting go. I feel like Runner is a story of him learning to reach out, and it's Patrice who leads him to the epiphany.
There's some ring composition around Bullet letting go of the farm:
From a few pages in:
He knew he could allow no weakness in himself if he was going to win free. He could feel the danger of his father’s will closing in around him, and he could feel his own strength too. It would cost him, but what didn’t cost something? Nothing, that was what. It would cost him this farm that ran acres wide under his feet, that ran acres deep and fertile underneath him.
And then the last paragraph where he's still alive, which I've quoted to you before:
The fields stretched away on either side of him, and he stopped at the end of the driveway to look back at them. He’d new-harrowed the fields, and they were ready now to take the crops he wouldn’t harvest from them. Tough luck, and he had known what it would cost. But he let his eyes run over them, over the lumpy surface of them. He wanted to keep connected to himself as much as he could; he wanted to be sure he could take with him whatever memory could carry.
Oh, that's interesting. Because the lines immediately preceding the first quote are:
Bullet shook his head to clear the image out of it. He’d learned not to make dreams up for himself, that was part of growing up. Growing up meant you knew what you wanted and you worked for it, and you didn’t let yourself get in your own way. Not dreams, not memories—he knew he could allow no weakness in himself if he was going to win free.
So now he's learned to value memory, to hold on. Just like he reached out by ploughing before he left, preparing for a harvest he knew he'd never get to see.
OH. Wow, and *that* reminds me of near the end of Homecoming, when the kids are giving Gram one suggestion after another for making the farm financially solvent:
James said, “With inflation, and if you’re on fixed income— you could lose the farm if you can’t pay taxes.”
“Could you?” Dicey asked. “Could that happen?”
“What’s that to you?” her grandmother demanded.
“I guess nothing. But if we can’t be there I want you to be. So it matters something. And you can’t change that.”
Wow, I don't think anyone had to teach Dicey to reach out.
This book begins with Dicey sinking a boat
Oh, right, and Jeff of course has his iconic moment of sinking the boat. Dicey is sinking to rebuild, though. And now I remember Gram at the beginning of Dicey's Song:
“Let the wood soak up water, to swell up again. I knew that once, but I forgot."
She did know that, because it's in Runner!
Johnny’s boat was still there, still afloat. He wondered how many years it would be before the wood gave out to the weather and the thing just sank. His mother was the only one who ever took it out, and she bailed it too and scraped as much of the bottom as she could get to standing beside it in the shallow water. But she couldn’t get it out of the water for the winter, didn’t have time to caulk and paint the hull, never had any money, so she couldn’t have it hauled at one of the boatyards. Too bad. Too bad the old man wouldn’t let her get a driver’s license either, because that meant the only way she could get around on her own was this sailboat. Which would, someday, sooner or later, just rot away.
Which is why he gives her the motor boat (instead of buying himself a gun like he originally planned).
I don't know what music means exactly in these books, except that it's a way throughout the cycle that people are drawn together, that people in these books strengthen families and create found families.
Yes! The passages that come to mind are:
“So bravery is one of the things you choose by?” Mina asked.
“Sure,” Dicey said.
“And music.”
“Music’s not a quality,” Mina protested.
Dicey noticed that Mina had them talking about Dicey again. She made a mental note to ask Mina what she chose by, but was too interested in her own ideas to do that right then. “It is too,” Dicey insisted.
“You can’t be music,” Mina argued.
“But you have it, don’t you?” Dicey asked. “Don’t you?”
And Jeff with Dicey:
He had seen the way the music coiled around her and drew her to him, in her eyes, seen something helpless in her against music and melody...He played a couple of chords so the thread of music wouldn’t be broken between them.
And with Maybeth:
At first she was shy and silent but, like Dicey, she could be looped in with music. He watched the way the songs and the singing won her over slowly.
Interestingly… I think (?) the only book devoid of music entirely is The Runner, and even that one has poetry as a way to (sort of) connect.
Even that has Bullet remembering Liza singing, constantly. Neither he nor his mother can produce music, but they both seem emotionally connected to it. And there is the scene where Bullet enjoys square dancing. So it's there a little bit.
I do think you're right about there not being a boat in Come a Stranger. I'll have to think about that.
She gets it explicitly because she has children in the house. So the phone, itself a means of communication, becomes representative of Gram's willingness to communicate, her connection, her reaching out.
YES. This.
Incidentally, I notice that her husband can hold on, but nothing else:
His old man was a nothing, nothing but right answers and holding on to his precious farm.
You can see Gram's lesson on how all three are important--holding on, letting go, and reaching out--are important.
(Geez, I want more fic about Gram. She learned all these lessons, slowly and painfully, that she's telling to Dicey in this book. What was it like for her?)
I know, I was thinking of that when reading Runner--you get a glimpse of what she was going through (and that's abuse), but we rarely get her POV.
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