The Dust Bowl

Karen Hesse, Out of the Dust

Lily read this book recently and left it on the coffee table. (Speaking of which, has any name for furniture ever been designed which conveys such a sense of hope and optimism and perfection as that of the coffee table?  Seriously, think about it.  A table which presumably once was designed for coffee (and what could be a nobler origin than that?) has become ubiquitous, even in the homes of those benighted souls who drink no coffee (suspect persons to say the least).  And, not only does this table carry the name of the world's most perfect beverage, but there was a subsequent invention, so ingenious in concept that it must have been born of Divine Inspiration--the Coffee Table Book.  What other piece of mere furniture has an entire class of book named after it?  What other piece of furniture can be said to have been designed to hold both coffee and books?  Why has nobody ever written a great hymn to coffee tables?)

But, I digress.

Lily read this book recently and left it on the coffee table.  I picked it up to see what she read, and immediately noticed a curiosity.  It is a novel (it says so on the cover), but it looks like a book of poetry.  The whole novel is composed to a series of poems--short poems for the most part--about one or two pages each.  It is also a children's book--a Newbury award winner--it also says that on the cover.  (The cover in other words is designed to make sure you know this isn't a book of, you know, poetry, and so, like, you might actually, like, want to, you know, read it.  "It's OK," the cover screams, "I am not really a book of poetry.")

The concept intrigued me, so I read it.  It works.  The poetry is pretty lousy on the whole--modern-style free verse (of course (we wouldn't want the poetry to be, you know, poetic or anything)).  But, the sense of a novel conveyed not through a flowing narrative, but through brief snapshots of life and mood as the plot develops is nicely done.  The story is pretty simple--it is children's literature after all.  It's about a young girl in the Dust Bowl (Oklahoma in the1930s); a terrible accident kills her mother and yet-to-be-born brother.  Our heroine has a hard time with life.  Everything ends happily ever after.  Not much of a plot, lousy verse, but despite all that, the execution is clever enough to make it worth reading.

And not a bad book to hand to kids either--certainly much better than The Grapes of Wrath.  Curiously, other than Steinbeck's novel--which isn't actually about the Dust Bowl anyway--I can't think of another novel set in this time.  One thing that was really clear from Hesse's novel is that there are some really interesting literary possibilities here.  If I were a novel writer, I'd start in on a Dust Bowl novel.