Back in the day, I used to travel. I traveled throughout the United States. I traveled around the world. I traveled in space (a trip to Huntsville, Alabama’s Space and Rocket Center and the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum counts as space, doesn’t it?). It should come as no surprise then that I tend to perk up when I read passages which treat a city, a town, a state as a character in the book. Still, I had no idea how much I gravitated towards those passages until I re-read several of my “Superb Blurb” collections and saw the theme running throughout. Invariably, the quotes I selected from the novels I read involved geography, the denizens of the locale, the highlights and lowlights of the setting. That, or food. Check it:
Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon
She had never liked the Bay Area, with its irresolute and timid weather, the tendency of its skies in any season to bleed gray, the way it had arranged its hills and vistas like a diva setting up chairs around her to ensure the admiration of visitors. The people around here were fetishists and cultists, prone to schism and mania, liable to invest all their hope of heaven in the taste of an egg laid in the backyard by a heritage-breed chicken.
The Passage by Justin Cronin
Special Agent Brad Wolgast hated Texas. He hated everything about it. He hated the weather, which was hot as an oven one minute and freezing the next, the air so damp it felt like a wet towel over your head. He hated the look of the place, beginning with the trees, which were scrawny and pathetic, their limbs all gnarled up like something out of Dr. Seuss, and the flat, windblown nothingness of it. He hated the billboards and the freeways and the faceless subdivisions and the Texas flag, which flew over everything, always as big as a circus tent; he hated the giant pickup trucks everybody drove, no matter that gas was thirteen bucks a gallon and the world was slowly seaming itself to death like a package of peas in a microwave. He hated the boots and the belts and the way people talked, ya’ll this and ya’ll that, as if they spent the day ropin’ and ridin’, not cleaning teeth and selling insurance and doing the books, like people did everywhere.
Where’d You Go, Bernadette: A Novel by Maria Semple
From: Bernadette Fox
To: Manjula Kapoor
One of the reasons I don’t like leaving the house is because I might find myself face-to-face with a Canadian. Seattle is crawling with them. You probably think, U.S./Canada, they’re interchangeable because they’re both filled with English-speaking, morbidly obese white people. Well, Manjula, you couldn’t be more mistaken.
Americans are pushy, obnoxious, neurotic, crass – anything and everything – the full catastrophe as our friend Zorba might say. Canadians are none of that. The way you might fear a cow sitting down in the middle of the street during rush hour, that’s how I fear Canadians. To Canadians, everyone is equal. Joni Mitchell is interchangeable with a secretary at open-mic night. Frank Gehry is no greater than a hack pumping out McMansions on AutoCAD. John Candy is no funnier than Uncle Lou when he gets a couple of beers in him. No wonder the only Canadians anyone’s ever heard of are the ones who have gotten the hell out. Anyone with talent who stayed would be flattened under an avalanche of equality. The thing Canadians don’t understand is that some people are extraordinary and should be treated as such.
Gone Girl: A Novel by Gillian Flynn
It was Hannibal, Missouri, boyhood home of Mark Twain, where I’d worked summers growing up, where I’d wandered the town dressed as Huck Finn, in an old straw hat and faux-ragged pants, smiling scampishly while urging people to visit the Ice Cream Shoppe. It was one of those stories you dine out on, at least in New York, because no one else could match it. No one could ever say: Oh yeah, me too.
Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin
Isaac Penn and the police exchange frantic telegrams in their search for Beverly:
BEVERLY MISSING STOP JAYGA SAYS ELOPED WITH SEER STOP ADVISE STOP
WHAT QUESTION MARK EXCLAMATION POINT FIND HER STOP CHECK THE ROOF STOP LOOK EVERYWHERE STOP
EVERYONE LOOKING EVERYWHERE STOP CANNOT FIND HER STOP ADVISE STOP
LOOK HARDER STOP
STILL CANNOT FIND BEVERLY STOP
LOOK EVERYWHERE STOP
WHERE IS EVERYWHERE QUESTION MARK STOP
DO YOU WANT SPECIFICS QUESTION MARK STOP
YES STOP
HOSPITALS HOTELS WAREHOUSES RESTAURANTS BAKERIES ROPEWALKS STABLES CARGO VESSELS DAIRY BARNS PRODUCE TERMINALS BREWERIES GREENHOUSES ABATTOIRS BATHS POULTRY MARKETS GOVERNMENT OFFICES RETAIL ESTABLISHMENTS WELDING LOFTS INDUSTRIAL GARAGES GYMNASIUMS FORGES SCHOOLS ART STUDIOS HIRING HALLS DANCE PALACES LIBRARIES THEATERS OYSTER BARS POTTERY BARNS SQUASH COURTS PRINTING HOUSES AUCTION PLACES LABORATORIES TELEPHONE EXCHANGES RAILROAD STATIONS BEAUTY PARLORS MORGUES PIERS ARMORIES COFFEE SHOPS CLUBS KILNS MUSEUMS POLICE STATIONS BICYCLE TRACKS TANNERIES JAILS BARBERSHOPS REHEARSAL ROOMS BANKS BARS CONVENTS MONASTERIES SALAD KITCHENS STEAMSHIP TERMINALS CHURCHES GALLERIES CONFERENCE CENTERS WHOREHOUSES MUSIC SCHOOLS AEROPLANE HANGARS AND OBSERVATION TOWERS STOP DID YOU LOOK IN THE BASEMENT STOP
YES STOP
The Lacuna: A Novel by Barbara Kingsolver
In the afternoon when the sun lights the stucco buildings across the street, it’s possible to count a dozen different colors of paint, all fading together on the highest parts of the wall: yellow, ochre, brick, blood, cobalt, turquoise. The national color of Mexico. And the scent of Mexico is a similar blend: jasmine, dog piss, cilantro, lime. Mexico admits you through an arched stone orifice into the tree-filled courtyard of its heart, where a dog pisses against a wall and a waiter hustles through a curtain of jasmine to bring a bowl of tortilla soup, steaming with cilantro and lime. Cats stalk lizards among the clay pots around the fountain, doves settle into the flowering vines and coo their prayers, thankful for the existence of lizards. The potted plants silently exhale, outgrowing their clay pots. Like Mexico’s children they stand pinched and patient in last year’s too-small shoes. The pebble thrown into the canyon bumps and tumbles downhill.
Here life is strong-scented, overpowering. Even the words. Just ordering breakfast requires some word like toronja, a triplet of muscular syllables full of lust and tears, a squirt in the eye. Nothing like the effete “grapefruit,” which does not even mean what it says.
What It Was by George Pelecanos
The story takes place in June, 1972 but not much has changed in forty years…
MAYBELLINE WALKER lived in one of the apartment houses that lined 15th Street along the green of Meridian Hill, which many in the city now called Malcolm X Park. Drugged-out-looking whites, brothers and sisters with big naturals, and Spanish of indeterminate origin, some of the dudes wearing Carlos Santana–inspired headbands, streamed in and out of the park’s entrances. A person could kick a soccer ball around, pay for a hand job or get one free, or score something for his head at Malcolm X, depending on the time of day. Its makeup had changed these past few years, but it remained one of the most beautiful open-to-the-public spots in the city.
Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore’s Eastern District by Peter Moskos.
An examination of the disconnect between patrol officers on the street and the Office of the State’s Attorney in its ivory towers yielded this bit:
One police officer described her observations of drug corner: “I saw a [white] suspect slow his car down [in an African American neighborhood]. Somebody approached the car. After a brief moment I saw a hand-to-hand [drug] transaction.” When the car pulled away, the officer stopped the car and told the driver what she saw. The driver consented to a search and the drugs were found. The man was arrested.
The liaison for the state’s attorney invalidated the arrest stating that the officer did not have reasonable suspicion to stop the car. The officer explained that she saw a drug transaction on a drug corner. The liaison asked the officer, “How do you know it was drugs? How do you know it wasn’t an Oreo cookie?” The officer, disgusted at the events, told me, “They sit here in the C.B.I.F. [the state’s attorney’s court liaison office at Central Booking] and tell me I don’t know a drug transaction? I’m sitting out there watching this damn thing for hours and make a good lockup. An Oreo cookie!? If only it were. Then at least I’d get something out of this. I could eat the damn cookie! As it is now, I’ve still got these damn drugs to submit.”
44 Scotland Street: A 44 Scotland Street Novel (1) by Alexander McCall Smith and Iain McIntosh
“Mind you,” she went on, “there are lots of people who say that Florence is ruined. They say that there are now so many visitors that you have to queue more or less all morning to get into the Uffizi in the afternoon. Can you believe that? Standing there with all those Germans and what-not with their backpacks? All morning. No thank you! Ramsey and I just wouldn’t do that.
“But I suppose if you are an Edinburgh schoolgirl and you’re young and fit, then it’s fine to stand about and wait for the Uffizi to open.”
97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement by Jane Ziegelman
The Chapter on the Gumpertz Family (what a name!) includes a bit from a dinner guest observing that a wealthy Jew’s spread included ham and attempting to get the host to reconcile that fact with the traditional kosher rules and regs.
“Well,” said the host, “I belong to that portion of the people of Israel who are changing the customs of our fathers to conform to the times and country in which we live. We make a distinction between what is moral in the law, and, of course, binding, and what is sanitary. The pork of Palestine was diseased and unwholesome. It was not fit to be eaten, and therefore was prohibited. But Moses never tasted a slice of Cincinnati ham. Had he done so, he would have commanded it to be eaten.”
Bajira! 