The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap: A Memoir of Friendship, Community, and the Uncommon Pleasure of a Good Book

by Wendy Welch

  “When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you’ll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”

  For anyone who loves to write, those words are a constant challenge. And for anyone who believes in accountability at the end of mortal life, what does this mean? Whose voices do we speak with if not our own, and why? How do we learn to become ourselves? And to whom do we owe fealty, devotion, love?

  Vanity Fair

  People are fascinating, and from the time Becky hurls the dictionary out the carriage window until she brings about the marriage of her enemy-friend, she demands attention. Women who have enjoyed complicated relationships with friends—or with themselves—will recognize, perhaps even celebrate, her character. After ensuring her “friend” Amelia’s marriage to a man who has been slavishly devoted to her, Becky arranges in cold blood her own marriage to Amelia’s rich brother. William Makepeace Thackeray brings to life the motivations and machinations of two very different women without moralizing, or even at times being very clear about what did or didn’t take place. He leaves the reader to draw conclusions, never being too overt, too pushy in his nuanced presentation.

  Thackeray subtitled his work A Novel Without a Hero and it has one of the most layered and enigmatic casts of characters—not to mention unsatisfying endings—in classicdom. Becky is such a confusing mass of motives, Amelia such an annoying lump of passivity, and the men so rampant and roughshod in their thoughts and actions that you want to chuck your hands in the air and pray for a good BBC adaptation—which there was, along with some pretty bad movies that gave the whole thing an alternate happy ending. Happiness isn’t really the point of this book.

  If you want to learn to write good characters without insulting your readers’ intelligence, this is the novel to study. Populated as it is with schemers and dreamers, as well as brokenhearted losers spurred to action by pride and fear (mostly of poverty) it’s hard to identify a hero, easy to find someone with whom to identify.

  The title comes from yet another classic, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, where Vanity is a town with a never-ending street fair full of worldly delights to tempt Pilgrim from his path. It’s also the name of a magazine, which kinda makes you wonder who thought that was a good selling point, or if they’d read either book.

  So if people in the shop ask me for my all-time favorites, those are the books I am most likely to evangelize for, but I can’t leave this list without adding two short stories by favorite authors.

  “Xingu”

  A word of advice: do not read this while drinking a carbonated beverage, because you will snort it up your nose laughing. Edith Wharton’s 1911 short story about women having an intellectual club of culture is a hilarious study of pseudo-smarts on display. Mrs. Roby, the woman who doesn’t quite fit in because she doesn’t see why she should try to, could be the hero or the villain, depending on how you take this tale. Is she making fun of the other women or saving them when she introduces the mysterious topic of “Xingu” at the luncheon where the snobbish authoress disdains their company?

  The language of the story is itself so stiff and thick it reminds one of the brocaded cushions and horsehair sofas on which the ladies sit in their perfect parlor, trying to score intellectual points off one another. We’ve all known such women: the Pillars of Society that are Mrs. Plinth and Mrs. Ballinger, the meek little Mrs. Leveret, the enthusiastic airhead Miss Glyde, and confident, self-possessed Mrs. Roby, who really isn’t very nice but is very real—which is more than can be said for the other ladies.

  “‘We have a standard,’ said Mrs. Plinth, feeling herself suddenly secure on the vast expanse of a generalization: and Mrs. Leveret, thinking there must be room for more than one in so broad a statement, took courage to murmur: ‘Oh, certainly; we have a standard.’”

  Since when was modern writing ever so subtle, so sarcastic, so rapier-sharp-robed-in-velvet-brocade in depicting how women talk to each other? I like Ms. Wharton’s other books, too—Ethan Frome left me in a week-long depressed daze—but I don’t know that I have ever read anything funnier than “Xingu.” Actually, I think it should be required reading for all academics once a year. Nothing helps communication like a little humility.

  “The Garden Lodge”

  Willa Cather published this masterpiece in 1905. Her protagonist Caroline Noble’s nonaffair with a great opera singer precipitates an unexpected and unwelcome self-examination. Caroline’s even-mindedness, her ability to manage everything about her life and those around her so beautifully, stems from childhood hardship and a passionate need to have no passions. She is as self-possessed as a statue—except she isn’t. Inside her is the woman she’s denied herself the possibility of being, and when for one brief moment this other Caroline appears, even her husband can’t believe it’s really her. Among the literary examinations of the mazes that make up women’s hearts, with their twists of motive, secret passages and sudden reversals, I’ve never read one that rings so true as the story of Caroline Noble’s stormy night in her garden lodge. Bruce Springsteen sang about the secret gardens in women’s hearts almost a hundred years later, but it was Cather’s story that first explored them with such a nuanced touch.

  Do you know what is ironic, though? I don’t get the same pleasure from Cather’s other, bigger works: O Pioneers! or My Ántonia, which examine themes of passion and duty very like “The Garden Lodge.” Exploring the same ideas in these novels, later and at greater length, didn’t really reveal any better observations. She hit the mark in Caroline Noble’s single sleepless summer night.

  When I was working on this book about the bookstore, the monthly writing group that meets there reviewed most of my musings. The list of books I loved elicited a not entirely surprising comment from Jenny. Within our first months of meeting it became evident that we had very dissimilar tastes in fiction, so when she said, “I never could get into Edith Wharton,” I just laughed. We had long ago accepted our different tastes. But of course the discussion turned to each person’s personal favorites, and James named Robert Service (the Yukon bard who penned, among other famous narrative poems, “The Cremation of Sam McGee”).

  “Really?” I barked with a laugh before I could even think. “I hated his stuff in high school!”

  “Well,” huffed James, “if I recall correctly, you’re the one who’s always talking about a bookstore teaching you to never comment on anyone else’s tastes. And you also said you hated Moby-Dick. I question the good sense of any person who could dislike such a great book.”

  Jenny jumped in. “Hey! I hate Melville, too!”

  Mike rolled his eyes. Although he didn’t say it, I could hear him thinking “women.” Aloud, he said only, “I loved Dracula.” (Mike has always been the diplomat in our group.)

  “Twilight was better,” Jenny said, but James and I could see the sparkle in her eye, and knew she was trying to get a rise out of even-tempered Mike, just this once.

  “Okay,” Mike challenged, with a wry smile. “Let’s just lay this on the table. Everybody go around and name a book you hate.” That was all we wrote; abandoning our evening plans, we tore into the subject with relish.

  De gustibus non est disputandum (there’s no disputing taste). Works that have changed the lives of some people reading this—possibly even for the better—are no doubt listed below. Huzzah, and we here at the Big Stone Gap Writing Group are very happy for you. Now, without apology or humility, recognizing that a book snob bobs not far below the surface of all literate hearts, we present our individual choices for the Top Ten Classics That Shouldn’t Be:

  Anna Karenina

  As Mike, remembering “Intro to Russian Literature,” comm
ented on Leo Tolstoy’s novel of aristocratic adultery, “It could be shorter. Three pages would do very well.” None of the rest of us tried to save this one, although Jenny did murmur, “But I like Tolstoy overall.”

  So did the rest of us, just not li’l Annie.

  Beowulf

  Disarmament theme notwithstanding, this is such disDaneful writing. A monster terrorizes a village until a boatload of tough guys show up to take him out. That’s not a literary classic; it’s Showtime Feature Film of the Week. Even the fight scenes drag. No wonder the author(s) decided to remain anonymous.

  James challenged my diatribe; he likes action and thrills, and when the group penned (just for fun, mind you) a medieval romance one year, each taking a chapter in turn, he made sure he got to write all the swordfights and assassination attempts.

  “It’s a guy thing,” I smirked.

  “Ahem,” Jenny said. “I just adore Ken Follett.”

  We let that pass.

  Clarissa

  Jenny hates this book with the passion of a thousand flaming suns. “By a third of the way in, I was hoping she would kill herself. Living in a whorehouse without knowing it? She’s so stupid she deserves to die. Die, bitch, die!” Thus spake the gentle Southern belle we have seen cry over little frozen birds in the snow. Again, no one tried to save this novel, one of the longest in the English language. Instead, we asked why Samuel Richardson wrote it in the first place. None of us knew for sure, but when someone snidely suggested he was getting paid by the word, we figured that had something to do with it.

  The Jungle

  We realize we’re on shaky ground, as Upton Sinclair’s work is often hailed as one of the Great American Novels, but the group was pretty unified on this one as well. The sad thing is, we might have appreciated Sinclair’s opus if not for the many bad book reports we all heard in high school.

  Mike spoke for all of us: “They stood in front of the class clutching their paper and read, ‘The Jungle is about a poor Lithuanian immigrant who…’ Tell us something we don’t know, already!” Like why grossing people out is considered artistic. (We also guffawed at the snarky comment James made, that a Great American Novel would naturally have a lot of hamburger in it, but perhaps Lewis needed an apple pie as well. A little sweetness would have helped us stomach all that red meat.)

  Moby-Dick

  I don’t care what the guys say; this is my opinion and I’m sticking to it. Remember high school English, when your teachers taught you about economy of words, making meanings clear, using adverbs sparingly? Neither did Herman Melville. Way to stretch a metaphor, Herm. That whole allegorical epic of obsession and power thing—never seen that before! Using a leviathan for your symbol doesn’t make it better, you know, just bigger. Size doesn’t matter; it’s what you do with it that counts. Of course, given the masculinity of your work, you probably didn’t date enough to learn that, either. Don’t call me, Ishmael.

  The Pillars of the Earth

  Mike might have put his finger on the pulse of what was wrong with this book when he said, “If the movie version of your book flows better than the book itself, you’re in trouble.”

  Even Jenny agreed that this particular title might be “below the standard” of his espionage thrillers. Ken Follett’s twelfth-century saga holds advice for aspiring historic fiction writers: never let the facts get in the way of a good story; never let anachronistic thoughts or behaviors bother you as a writer; always assume your reader is less well read than you; and if a coronation, or an assassination, or a war would be more conveniently located in a different part of the timeline than reality, no problem. After all, writers are allowed to play historian anytime they want to. Philippa Gregory paved that road to hell years ago, and now that schools and universities are so poorly funded, who’s gonna know anyway?

  Truth be told, Follett’s masterpiece does have one thing going for it; in the paperback version, it is almost as thick as it is tall, and thus has a most satisfying heft when hurled across the backyard.

  A Prayer for Owen Meany

  Lonely is the voice of truth. I started in on this book that I love to hate with my usual combination of sarcasm and confidence: Say wha-a-a-a-a-at? A boy with a voice like strangling mice, a father who can’t remember having sex, and taking out Mom with a baseball combine to make art? No, actually, they don’t. They just make one convoluted mess written in elegiac prose. Couldn’t you have found something else to do with your talent, Mr. Irving? I’d rather swallow broken glass than read Owen Meany again. And by the way, readers, don’t look too closely or you might realize you’re getting The World According to Garp with different characters.

  Then I sat back, confident of collusion—and heard silence. James and Michael avoided my eyes, while Jenny fiddled with her pen. “I really love John Irving’s writing,” was all she said, and James, stroking Beulah on the chair beside him, gave a small nod. It seemed prudent to move on.

  But so desperate was I for backup that after the group went home, I called one of my oldest friends, now living in Seattle, and told her the whole story. Cami and I encouraged each other through writing our first books, went on annual creativity retreats together, even owned the same model of laptop. She would understand. Reiterating my diatribe on Meany, I ended with the breathless laughter of one who knows she’s talking to a soul mate.

  After a brief pause, Cami’s voice came, measured and even, across the miles. “I. Absolutely. Adore. Owen. Meany. How can anyone with an ounce of compassion in her soul hate A Prayer for Owen Meany? And you have the gall to call yourself a humanitarian?” Click.

  Tropic of Cancer

  Jenny and I were the only ones in the writing group who had read this book by Henry Miller, and we shared the same disdain. Look, you wanna read porn, read porn. You wanna read erotica, read erotica. You wanna read surreal sentences chopped into hard-to-follow sections, read Jonathan Safran Foer. But for crying out loud, don’t bind them all together into a first novel and label it a classic.

  Just because no one understands you doesn’t mean you’re an artist, and writing about sex doesn’t automatically make you interesting.

  The Virginian

  In the succinct words of our poet James, “Nobody acts like that.” The rest of us agreed with this perfect four-word dismissal of Owen Wister’s “classic.”

  “Young Goodman Brown”

  Jenny is of the firm opinion that this high school classic (aka “piece of crap”) has made massive contributions to the demise of reading for pleasure among Advanced Placement American Literature students everywhere. Poor Nathaniel Hawthorne. There are pills for depression now. Perhaps teachers do consider this short story a way to help pupils wade into both history and literature, but the mind-numbed, crushed students think the rest of the term is going to look like “Brown.” They think there aren’t any better short stories out there. They think all Puritans were tormented schizophrenics. By the time The Crucible shows up, they see “Goodman” on the page, their eyes glaze over and they skim the CliffsNotes. They miss the joy of discovering that The Scarlet Letter is both interesting and about sex.

  Let me reiterate: one reader’s life-altering, truth-revealing milestone-marking classic is another reader’s forced term paper. Live and let live. If you come to my establishment and ask for a copy of A Prayer for Owen Meany, I’m not going to refuse to sell it to you. (But I might also suggest you try a Rosina Lippi.)

  CHAPTER 26

  Citizen Jack

  “A good man is a nobler object of contemplation than a great author.”

  —Ross Perot

  FIVE YEARS AFTER WE OPENED our shop, Jack came in from collecting the mail one afternoon and said, “I think I’ll become an American citizen.” Then he began opening the day’s book packages.

  I can’t say that I was gobsmacked, but it was a bit startling. “Why do you want to be a citizen?” I asked as he scrunched up the advertising circulars and tossed them into the bin.

  Jack paused, then said
, “I guess I didn’t tell you this before, but last year, when I came back here from my Scottish tour, it was the first time it felt like coming home instead of just returning to our home.”

  As I mentioned before, Jack leads annual tours to Scotland and Ireland for no more than a dozen people, taking them to folklore and heritage sites and generally showing them a good time on the traditional music and general tourism scenes. The tour he was talking about would have been his fourth, in our sixth year of living in the States.

  The tours were something he enjoyed doing, a way for him to stay connected with his friends on the music circuit back in the Old World. Secretly I’d always thought it a nice way for him to excise the homesickness that builds up when you live long-term outside your homeland.

  “No, you didn’t mention that before, but, really, wow, that’s great if it’s what you want to do. Become an American?”

  Jack laughed. “Become an American citizen, anyway, someone who has a vote and a say in what happens next over here. And…” He paused, then sat down at the front room table. “You know how you and I often talk about the community that’s gathered around the shop, the friends and the regular customers, and the way we’ve grown into the town. People come in and say how wonderful it is, all we do here, that we’re a community center, a hub for activity.

  “And I always say how grateful I am to have been made so welcome. Not in a smarmy, lovefest way, but just that people have made space for us. And the truth is—” He laughed. “The truth is, that’s true. I think people believe it’s Southern politeness, just something to say. But I want to give back. By being a citizen, I can take a more active role in helping out about the town, stand for council someday, perhaps, but meantime just…” His hands lifted, then fell back to his lap. “Be a part of it all.”