. Spinning .

Not thrilled with the writing style the book has taken; it appears to be a lot of telling to inform the reader of the past and to make some progress in the timeline for the characters. There is little of import happening and it appears that life for the Dogtown residents just goes on. For example, the affair between Judy Rhines and Cornelius Finson has died because of warnings made to Cornelius, though Judy doesn’t know of them. He keeps an eye on her from afar, and Judy’s feelings for him eventually fade into the past. But Diamant merely tells us this, how her characters are feeling, how they’re getting on with their lives, whereas I would think a confrontation of sorts would intensify and reveal in a much more interesting way.

So it’s been a bit draggy, but here’s something that caught my interest:

Numbers were forthright, definite, and reassuring, entirely unlike words, which were slippery and sharp. To Cornelius, language had come to seem untrustworthy, double-edged as a plow that could just as easily sever a foot as cut through sod.”  (p. 175)

It is a bit surprising that Diamant chooses to have Cornelius think this way; no one has really been dishonest with him and I don’t feel that the solace he finds in numbers is as readily apparent in his behavior. Judy has been open with her love, and the racists in town have been just as honest in their feelings towards Cornelius. His withdrawal from human communication is of his own choice–aside from his protection of Judy Rhines.

He had quit reading some years back, dismayed by the half-truths and contradictions he found in print. One volume argued for the power of faith, another claimed that the works of man were ascendant. One newspaper article claimed the governor was a great man; another on the very next page called him a thief. The Bible was the worst of all, riddled with impossibilities, opposing accounts of the same story, and hideous acts of cruelty. If the Bible had been at all mathematical, he might have become a Christian.”  (p. 176)

Odd, to make a statement that had X been Y, then the character would have been an X-er (or a Y-er?). That is an improbable and unreasonable scenario since X is X and not Y. So why would a supposedly logical man make a claim that is based on illogical assumption?

At any rate, the characters are still interesting because Diamant has made them so in the beginning. While I understand that this novel is also to be considered a historical novel so that the passage of time and changes to the community would be vital details, it just doesn’t have the strong writing style and compelling events that Diamant had employed to pace the story to this point.

And, I suppose, imagery through language choice, or diction. Diamant seems to use a blend of plain talk with some lovely description:

When she first arrived in Gloucester, Ruth had asked a boy how to get to Brimfield farm. Following his directions, she’d taken an old walled road, past weedy fields and stunted trees and through a swamp that seemed to suck the color out of the sky and the song out of the birds. The air was so hot and thick, Ruth felt like she’d stepped into an oven. A parched, abandoned landscape where lightning or carelessness had scorched the trees and only the grasses seemed confident of the future, it was the most desolate place she’d ever seen.  (p. 61)

The simplicity of “old walled road” and the image of “weedy fields” rather than “field of weeds” are proof of the thought put into the word structure. I love the swamp, a muddy, mucky waterhole that we’ve all seen likened to the purity of a woodsy pond as a mirror image, yet instead of reflecting the beauty of the sky and nature, steals and dulls it. Who could doubt the fresh newness of the grass when described as “confident of the future.”

Diamant doesn’t overdo it. She understands her object, perhaps has studied and experienced it, and has decided what it is capable of being. All together, we get the whole picture of the scene.