Date: 2017-06-30 12:58 am (UTC)
mildred_of_midgard: (Default)
Omg, I just finished Sons, and get this. This is the bar scene where everyone who knew Frankie is telling James and Sammy about him.

“He said Fiji is like heaven,” Alex interrupted to tell Sammy. “He said of all the oceans, the Pacific is the best, and in all the Pacific, Fiji is the best. Like heaven is the best.”

"Frankie always said he’d like to settle down there. Because of the beaches, and how happy life is,” he explained to the chief. “And the girls, too.”


It's him. That's it. Up until now, it could have been accidental self-plagiarism (I've done it), but as the Steerswomen say, it takes three to know.

Welp. Time to reread.

Also, now that I've reread the bar scene where Sammy and James get beaten up by a bunch of guys who Frankie owes money...no wonder he comes back under an assumed name! I mean, I have to assume he looked Dicey up out of curiosity and doesn't want her to know who he is, and also he's always changing his name (and now I see why!), but here's another reason if we needed one.

Here's another interesting passage I came across. This is Sammy talking about his father:

“He must have been something, our father. I mean, however bad he was, he went his own way. Nobody could make him do anything. So whatever else you have to say about him, you have to admit that.”

Compare that to Frank talking to Bullet about Liza:

"Say what you will about Liza, sharp she isn’t...and she’s a looker, whatever else you say about her...Say what you will about her, she’s got a heart of gold.”

Those are all on a single page, two of them from the same paragraph.

Now, in order to make something of it, I'd have to see how often the phrasing is used by other characters and in other contexts--maybe it's just a quirk of the author's voice--but Frank using it three times in one page about the same person jumped out at me.

I keep being astonished how much Voigt keeps showing anything and everything from different perspectives. Runner in particular is one thing after another that shows up in later books: the sailboat Johnny built that Dicey later restores, and the motor boat Bullet buys his mother; the Indians Liza painted on Bullet's wardrobe that show up in Homecoming (you probably didn't make it this far)...

Dicey crossed her ankles again, containing her impatience. She was wearing jeans and one of the rough old boys’ sweaters, a bright red one that hung loose about her torso. She had chosen it because it seemed like the kind of color her Momma’s brother Bullet would have liked, if she was right about the kind of person he had been.

And of course, Bullet in Runner:

At the oval track he put down his lunch bag and stripped off his sweater and jeans. He folded them into a little pile, the bright red sweater on the brown earth.

Frank talking to Bullet:

"I worked with one guy, he had a scar right across his waist, just above the navel— a real scar, like some leather belt. He got caught by a boiler blowout."

Then James and Sammy meet the guy in Sons:

He unbuttoned the rest of the buttons on his shirt, and pulled it out of his trousers. He leaned back to show them both a thick scar, circling his waist like a bullwhip.

“That’s some scar,” Sammy said.

“Boiler blowout,” the chief told him, buttoning his shirt again, tucking it in.


It's one thing after another!

Ha, as you can see, I can detach and analyze *anything*. It's why I have so many published Tolkien articles. The more I love something, the more I cross-reference the different parts. The only reason I don't have Homeric publications is that Homeric scholarship has been going on for two and half millennia, and it's hard to come up with an original idea worth publishing. Whereas I seem to have been, for instance, the first person to notice that Tolkien encoded certain opinions about literary criticism into Lord of the Rings--he uses the same *language* to express the same opinions--or that Boromir was not in fact responsible for the breaking of the Fellowship. Okay, maybe I would have caught on about Cisco eventually, especially with *three* references to the Pacific.

I honestly don't know why I have an abandonment squick. It doesn't make any sense to me. My parents didn't ever abandon me; if anything they are way too much up in my business, even now that I'm an adult. But there it is.

Some things are random. My partner wasn't left on the streets like the Tillermans, but she was passed around from relative to relative and always lived in fear that no one would take her in and she would end up on the streets, so hers is clearly not random. Maybe yours is.

...what do you think of the different Tillerman kids? James is my favorite (he is, I think, the closest character to me -- and I think I see why you might not like him as much, because there's a certain, er, fluidity to his character that resonates with me but that would probably leave you cold

Ahaha, it's complicated. Obviously, I relate to James' intelligence and intellectual curiosity, and I think because of that, I'm more critical of him. I've long noticed that the more I can put myself in a fictional character's shoes, the more impatient I get with their life choices, and the more I tend to find myself thinking, "Well, I wouldn't have made any of these choices, so all your problems are of your own making, and I have no sympathy." And that kills most stories dead for me.

The Tillerman Cycle is one of the *only* modern-day, non-speculative stories I can read. Almost everything I read otherwise is fantasy, sci-fi, historical, or dystopian. Put me in a situation where I can tell you what I would do and there's an easy, obvious (to me) answer, and there's a 99% chance I won't like the book. The reason I can stand reading the Tillerman Cycle is that I got hooked on Dicey, who makes what I think are good enough choices, better than I could have done at her age.

Dicey's my hands-down favorite, because honey badger don't give a shit, and I have no problem putting myself in her head, even though we are different in every respect except that.

After that, maybe Sammy? I tend to go for jocks/warriors in literature, probably because they are so completely opposite me that I don't criticize their choices, and I allow them to have completely different personalities from me. It's almost like a guilty pleasure, like I'm thinking, "You go do the things I would never do, and I'll get to enjoy imagining myself doing those things, which I will never ever experience."

Sammy obviously also has the not-giving-a-shit that I value, as does Bullet, who is my second favorite character in the Tillerman series (see, jocks!).

But I like James when we're not in his POV! My favorite line from him is from Homecoming, when Dicey is asking him if he's really willing to give up the awesome Catholic school he's in:

It’s me that makes the school so good, my brain. Other kids don’t like it as much as I do. So, there are books all over the world, in libraries. The fathers help me, an awful lot— but there must be other schools with good teachers. Even if there aren’t, I’ll always be me.”

Then we spend page after page of him wallowing in not being him and caring what other people think to the point of going out for baseball precisely because he hates it. I'm glad he gets his epiphany (although I'm with Sammy, "What was so great about not being important at all? Sammy was pretty important to himself."), and I'm sure this book is great for people who still need to have that epiphany, but for me it feels like a gratuitous slog through stuff I already know.

For what it's worth, I hold fictional characters to a standard of entertaining me, which I do not hold real people to. A real person with a childhood like James' and those insecurity issues would get a lot more sympathy from me, but fictional James is just not giving me anything I want out of reading a book.

See, when I consume media, I want to imagine having something I don't already have. Maybe that's being an athlete, maybe it's being brave, or in charge, or just having different experiences in a different culture...something that supplements my real-life existence with something that I find enjoyment in imagining myself in (even if the character is suffering and I too would be suffering in real life). If the character is going to be an emotionally fucked up individual whose outstanding trait is his brain, he'd better be freaking Will Hunting, then I get something out of imagining myself solving other people's equations. If it's a kid who has no more book smarts and a lot less emotional smarts than I had at the same age...meh. What do I get out of reading this?

Which is extremely unique to me and says nothing about the quality of the book or the character. It's just another example why I almost exclusively read stories in a very distant universe or time.

Five of the Tillerman books I love: Homecoming the best, then probably Runner, Dicey's Song, Solitary Blue, and Come a Stranger, in that order. Although Come a Stranger is still really great! Seventeen I always found boring, but we'll see what I think now that I can appreciate it properly! And Sons leaves me cold for reasons discussed.

Oh, and *also*. I strongly dislike the trope of going looking up your biological parent(s). Because I do not value blood relations, not even a little, and in the same position, I pride myself on not having looked up my biological father, even though it would have been way easier (and I think my mother wanted us to have a relationship, which both of us were indifferent to). The only value I see (and again, this is me applying my standards to literature, not other people's real lives) is medical history. After that, I take people as individuals and judge them by their personalities and behavior, and percent DNA shared with me is irrelevant.

So Sons had that strike against it too. Oh, and I'd forgotten the fat-shaming. So much fat-shaming. /o\

Back to the Tillerman kids, I do love Maybeth. I think James is wrong, I suspect (as best I can without examining her) it's dyslexia*. I cannot reread the scene where Dicey tries explaining fractions to her, because I get the urge to start trying different ways of explaining fractions, and because she's fictional, that's an itch I can't scratch. And I know that's a weird way of having feelings for a character, but that's me. But aside from that! I'm super glad for Maybeth that her family worked out better than poor Liza's. It makes me really curious to wonder how she turns out as an adult.

* You will be unsurprised to learn that I diagnosed my mother's dyslexia after 50 years of everyone else missing that she had a reading disorder. I count it as one of my great diagnostic successes, even if not as life-saving as Rachel's.

And I'll end there. Don't be surprised if you get more cross-referencing from me!
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