The Last Stand By NATHANIEL PHILBRICK

The Last Stand By NATHANIEL PHILBRICK

     Americans have lived with the familiar images of the “Old West” for more than two centuries. But for those who actually participated in the events of that past, the West was dynamic, unpredictable, and startlingly new. Native horse culture was only a few generations old by the time Lewis and Clark ventured west in 1804, and ever-building pressure from the East meant that the tribes’ territories and alliances remained in near-constant flux throughout the nineteenth century.

     The legends notwithstanding, Custer’s regiment in 1876 was anything but an assemblage of craggy-faced Marlboro men. Forty percent of the soldiers in Custer’s Seventh Cavalry had been born outside the United States in countries like Ireland, England, Germany, and Italy; of the Americans, almost all of them had grown up east of the Mississippi River. For this decidedly international collection of soldiers, the Plains were as strange and unworldly as the surface of the moon.

     Most of us were taught that the American frontier crept west like an inevitable tide. Instead of a line, the frontier was an ever-constricting zone: a region of convulsive, often unpredictable change across which the American people, aided and abetted by the military, lurched and leapt into new and potentially profitable lands.

     In 1876, there were no farms, ranches, towns, or even military bases in central and eastern Montana. For all practical and legal purposes, this was Indian territory. Just two years before, however, gold had been discovered in the nearby Black Hills by an expedition led by none other than George Custer. As prospectors flooded into the region, the U.S. government decided that it had no choice but to acquire the hills — by force if necessary — from the Indians. Instead of an effort to defend innocent American pioneers from Indian attack, the campaign against the Sioux and Cheyenne in the spring of 1876 was an unprovoked military invasion of an independent nation that already happened to exist within what came to be declared the United States.

      America was not the only place in the world where Western and indigenous peoples were coming into conflict in the late nineteenth century. Little Bighorn–like battles had been or were about to be fought in India, the Middle East, and Africa — most spectacularly, perhaps, at Isandlwana in 1879, when twenty-four thousand Zulus annihilated a British force of more than thirteen hundred men. And yet, there is something different about the American version of colonialism. Since the battles were not fought on a distant and colonized continent but within our own interior, we are living with the consequences every day. After four years of research and several trips to the battlefield, along with a memorable visit to the site of Sitting Bull’s cabin, I now know that nothing ended at the Little Bighorn.

     As a writer and a sailor, I have long been interested in what occurs within the behavioral laboratory of a ship at sea. The isolation, unpredictability, and inherent danger of life aboard a sailing vessel have a tendency to heighten the intensity of social interaction, particularly when it comes to the issue of leadership. So it was, I have since discovered, with both a regiment of cavalry and a nomadic Indian village on the northern plains in 1876 — two self-contained and highly structured communities under enormous stress.

     Sitting Bull had never seen the ocean, but as tensions mounted during the spring of 1876, he described his people in terms to which any mariner could relate. “We are,” he said, “an island of Indians in a lake of whites.” Late in life, one of George Custer’s officers, Frederick Benteen, also looked to the water when considering his often contentious relationship with his former commander. “There are many excellent ways of finding out the disposition and nature of a man,” Benteen wrote. “I know of no better way than having to live on shipboard with one for a series of years. . . . Next, in default of salt-water facilities . . . , campaign with a man in the cavalry, for say 10 or 20 years. . . . Thus I became acquainted with General Custer.”

     The fluidity of the sea, not the rigidity of irresistible law, characterizes human conduct, especially in the midst of a calamity. Even when people are bound by strict codes of behavior, their distinctive personalities have a way of asserting themselves. Instead of a faceless “clash of cultures,” the Battle of the Little Bighorn was fought by individual soldiers and warriors, each with his own story to tell. In the pages that follow I have attempted to do justice to those stories even as I tell the larger, ultimately tragic story of how two leaders and their followers embarked on two converging voyages across the river-ribbed interior of North America.

     The collision that occurred on June 25, 1876, resulted in three different battles with Sitting Bull’s village of Sioux and Cheyenne: one fought by Custer; another fought by his second-in-command, Major Marcus Reno; and yet another fought, for all intents and purposes, by Captain Frederick Benteen. Reno, Benteen, and a significant portion of their commands survived. Custer and every one of his officers and men were killed.

     Even before the battles were over, Reno and Benteen had begun to calculate how to put their actions in the best possible light. Perhaps not surprisingly, a subsequent court of inquiry only compounded the prevarications. Problems of evidence also plagued Native accounts. In the years after the battle, warriors were concerned that they might suffer some form of retribution if they didn’t tell their white inquisitors what they wanted to hear. Then there were the problems associated with the interpreters, many of whom had their own agendas.

     At times during my research, it seemed as if I had entered a hall of mirrors. Everywhere I turned there was yet another, fatally distorted account of the battle. Like Custer struggling to find a peak from which he could finally see around him, I searched desperately for a way to rise above the confusing welter of conflicting points of view and identify what really happened.

     During my third visit to the battlefield, in the summer of 2009, as I followed a winding, steep-sided ravine toward the Little Bighorn, I realized my mistake. It was not a question of rising above the evidence; it was a question of burrowing into the mystery.
      Custer and his men were last seen by their comrades galloping across a ridge before they disappeared into the seductive green hills. Not until two days later did the surviving members of the regiment find them: more than two hundred dead bodies, many of them hacked to pieces and bristling with arrows, putrefying in the summer sun. Amid this “scene of sickening, ghastly horror,” they found Custer lying face up across two of his men with, Private Thomas Coleman wrote, “a smile on his face.” Custer’s smile is the ultimate mystery of this story, the story of how America, the land of liberty and justice for all, became in its centennial year the nation of the Last Stand.

Reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from The Last Stand Copyright © Nathaniel Philbrick, 2010

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/04/books/excerpt-the-last-stand.html?ref=review&pagewanted=print

Men on Horseback By BRUCE BARCOTT

Men on Horseback

By BRUCE BARCOTT

THE LAST STAND

Custer, Sitting Bull and the Battle of the Little Bighorn

By Nathaniel Philbrick

Illustrated. 459 pages. Doubleday. $28.95.

EMPIRE OF THE SUMMER MOON

Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History

By S. C. Gwynne

Illustrated. 371 pp. Scribner. $27.50.

     Why does Custer persist? Nearly 134 years after his last stand, a military debacle that cost the lives of all 210 men under his immediate command, George Armstrong Custer remains such an iconic figure in the American pageant that mere mention of his name evokes an entirely overromanticized era in the American West. By all rights he should be a footnote. That he enjoys the glory of single-name recognition is a testament to the power of personality, show business and savvy public relations. Custer wasn’t just an Indian fighter. He was one of the first self-made American celebrities.

In “The Last Stand,” Nathaniel Phil­brick, the author of the popular histories “My Flower” and “In the Heart of the Sea,” offers an account of the Battle of the Little Bighorn that gives appropriate space to Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Maj. Marcus Reno and others who fought that day. But really, Custer steals the show.

     How could he not? The man was a spectacular piece of work. Ambitious and charismatic, he graduated last in his West Point class but first in socializing. During the Civil War, he emerged as one of the best cavalry officers in the Union Army. His gallant Gettysburg charge (“Come on, you Wolverines!” he shouted to his Michigan volunteers) helped change the course of the battle that turned the tide of the war.

     Even as a young officer Custer cultivated a flamboyant public persona. He fought at Gettysburg in a black velvet uniform (of his own design) embroidered with gaudy gold lace coils. After the war, when he turned his energies to fighting Indians on the Great Plains, he outfitted himself in fringed white buckskin and wore his hair long.

     He was a gambler, a probable adulterer, a braggart, a petulant boss and an impulsive blabbermouth. His eccentricity tilted toward stupidity. He once divided up his regiment according to color. Horse color. As you might expect, he wasn’t especially beloved by the troops. “I had known General Custer . . . for a long time,” one of his officers once testified, “and I had no confidence in his ability as a soldier.”

     What he did have was boldness and fortune on his side, up to a point. A force of fate that he himself called “Custer luck” propelled him up the ranks, and his risk-taking strategies secured an important victory over the Cheyenne in 1868. Custer imagined the 1876 campaign against Sitting Bull’s Lakota Sioux as the capstone to his brilliant military career. If all went well he hoped to ride back East as the hero Indian fighter in time for the nation’s July 4, 1876, centennial celebration and a scheduled lecture tour. Custer, then 36, entertained serious notions of running for president one day. Given his personal charisma and genius for publicity, he might well have won.

     All did not go well, of course. The Lakota conflict began with an old-fashioned land grab inflamed by Custer himself. The Black Hills in present-day South Dakota were declared Indian land in the late 1860s, but white settlers began encroaching by the early 1870s. Custer, sent to investigate, instead escalated things by discovering gold in the Black Hills. News of his find flooded the region with 15,000 white prospectors. At this point, “Custer luck” starts to look more like “Clouseau luck,” and it’s hard not to imagine the commander in chief, President Ulysses S. Grant,  going all eye-twitchy like Herbert Lom in the old Pink Panther movies.

     Grant tried to defuse the situation by offering to buy the Black Hills from the Lakota, but Sitting Bull wouldn’t sell. Faced with a choice between the Indians or the miners, Grant chose to drive off the Indians. And — cue the eye twitch — he sent Custer to help carry out the job.

     Many books have been written about battlefield strategy at Little Big Horn, a grassland of shallow folding ravines in southeastern Montana, but it boils down to this: Custer was overwhelmingly outnumbered and chose recklessness over prudence. The paradox is that moments before the first shot was fired, Sitting Bull was ready to make peace. He and his followers escaped into Canada a few months after the battle, and ultimately returned to live on the Standing Rock reservation in South Dakota.

     Custer’s defeat shocked the nation, and there was little doubt even in 1876 that Little Big Horn represented an ignoble moment in American military history. So how did a monumental disaster turn into a courageous “last stand”?

     Philbrick’s answer: A widow’s spin and show business. After her husband’s death, Elizabeth Custer, known as Libbie, embarked on a one-woman crusade to rehabilitate her beloved’s reputation through books and speaking engagements. Buffalo Bill Cody took the myth nationwide by ending his wildly popular Wild West Show with a Little Big Horn re-enactment and a call to avenge Custer’s glorious death. But really there was nothing to avenge but the poor judgment of a dangerously ambitious officer. The Battle of the Little Bighorn — the military engagement — was a foolish and entirely avoidable defeat. Custer’s last stand — the myth — was simply good show business.

     If Custer illustrates how the spotlight of history sometimes shines on the wrong actor, Quanah Parker exemplifies the more deserving who get left in the shadows. One hopes a better fate awaits “Empire of the Summer Moon,” S. C. ­Gwynne’s transcendent history of Parker and the Comanche nation he led in the mid- to late 1800s.

     Born the son of an Indian warrior and his white wife (who had been captured at the age of 9 during a raid on a Texas ranch), Parker grew up to become the last and greatest chief of the Comanche, the tribe that ruled the Great Plains for most of the 19th century. That’s his one-sentence biography. The deeper, richer story that unfolds in “Empire of the Summer Moon” is nothing short of a revelation. Gwynne, a former editor at Time and Texas Monthly, doesn’t merely retell the story of Parker’s life. He pulls his readers through an American frontier roiling with extreme violence, political intrigue, bravery, anguish, corruption, love, knives, rifles and arrows. Lots and lots of arrows. This book will leave dust and blood on your jeans.

     Gwynne opens with the May 1836 Comanche raid on the Parker homestead. The Parkers were a clan of Illinois pioneers working 16,100 acres near present-day Dallas. In 1836 they represented the leading edge of white westward expansion into Comanche territory, which the tribe didn’t like one bit. They expressed their displeasure by killing the Parker men (though a few escaped) and taking two women and three children captive.

     The term “Indian raid” glosses over the atrocities. Men and babies were killed as a matter of course. Mutilation, rape and torture were common. The lucky died quickly. “This was the actual, and often quite grim, reality of the frontier,” Gwynne writes. “This treatment was not reserved for whites or Mexicans; it was practiced just as energetically on rival Indian tribes.”

     The Comanche weren’t merely one of many tribes steamrolled by Manifest Destiny. They were a Native American superpower, a thesis put forth in Pekka Hamalainen’s Bancroft Prize-winning study, “The Comanche Empire,” oddly not cited here. Gwynne presents the Great Plains wars of the mid-19th century as the clash of three empires: the United States, Mexico and the Comanche nation, which controlled most of modern-day Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas and Oklahoma.

     “They held sway over some 20 different tribes who had been either conquered, driven off or reduced to vassal status,” Gwynne writes. “Such imperial dominance was no accident of geography. It was the product of over 150 years of deliberate, sustained combat against a series of enemies over a singular piece of land that contained the country’s largest buffalo herds.” At the height of their power in the late 1830s, the Comanche contemplated a full-scale invasion of Texas and Mexico.

     Native American tribes weren’t — and still aren’t — static entities. They waxed, they waned. Some gained power and territory, others lost it. The rise of the Comanche was the kind of case study of timing and technology that Jared Diamond described in “Guns, Germs, and Steel.” They came from Wyoming; short, squat-legged, with little of the social or cultural development of neighboring tribes. Then everything changed. “What happened to the tribe between roughly 1625 and 1750 was one of the great social and military transformations in history,” Gwynne writes.

     What happened was the horse. Spanish conquistadors introduced the animals to Mexico in the 16th century, and they quickly dispersed northward. The Comanche adapted to this transformative technology more quickly and completely than any other Plains tribe. “No one could outride them or outshoot them from the back of a horse,” Gwynne relates. The key was a Comanche warrior’s ability to attack and shoot arrows while at full gallop, a skill few others could master. On the Great Plains this was the equivalent of attacking from tanks, and the Comanche used their military advantage to become wealthy traders in horses and buffalo hides.

     Which brings us back to the raid on the Parker ranch. The Comanche didn’t raid for sport. They had specific political and economic ends in mind. The political goal was to drive the white settlers (squatters and land thieves, from the tribe’s point of view) out of Comanche territory. To that end, death, terror and torture proved to be effective. By the 1860s the Comanche were actually rolling the frontier backward in Texas. The economics of raiding were equally straightforward. Young Cynthia Ann Parker was captured and not killed partly because the Comanche needed women to keep their buffalo economy humming. The men killed the bison, but the women, Gwynne writes, “did all the value-added work: preparing the hides and decorating the robes.” The more captives and wives — as with Cynthia Parker, the former sometimes became the latter — the more product a man could produce.

     Parker had a son named Quanah. Quanah grew up quickly. When he was 12, his father was killed in battle and his mother was captured by white troops. (They saw it as a rescue, but Parker was forever trying to escape back to the Comanche.) A vengeful Quanah began raiding white settlements. He was good at it, too. But skill in battle wasn’t his problem. Timing was. He happened to rise as a leader just as the whites acquired their own transformative technology: the railroad and the repeating firearm. The railroad could cheaply transport valuable buffalo hides to Eastern markets, which made it profitable for men like Buffalo Bill to massacre the great herds. Between 1868 and 1881, 31 million buffalo were slaughtered, destroying the source of Comanche wealth and food. Meanwhile, the nimble Colt revolver and the powerful Sharps .50-caliber rifle countered the Comanche’s once-superior weaponry. The empire crumbled.

     Quanah Parker’s second act was, if anything, more remarkable than his first. Resigned to reservation life, he transformed himself from a death-dealing warrior to a prosperous cattleman and a hard-bargaining politician who earned the respect and friendship of Teddy Roosevelt. He played a leading role in establishing the Native American Church and its practice of peyotism, the use of hallucinogenic peyote cactus in religious ritual. “The white man goes into his church and talks about Jesus,” Parker once said, “but the Indian goes into his tipi and talks to Jesus.” In a 370-page biography, Gwynne devotes but a single paragraph to Parker and peyote. There are simply too many other good stories to tell.

     We may never shake Custer’s place in the American story. He’s just too colorful a character, and “The Last Stand” will introduce him to a generation too young to have encountered him in Evan S. Connell’s classic biography, “Son of the Morning Star,” or the movie “Little Big Man.” But thanks to Gwynne, the story of Quanah Parker may assume a more fittingly prominent role in the history of the American West. “Empire of the Summer Moon” isn’t just a biography. It’s a forceful argument about the place of Native American tribes in geopolitical history. The word “nation” is sometimes used today to refer to a specific tribe, and it can be confusing to non-Indians. Does it mean a belonging, like Red Sox nation? Or state power, like Germany? The Comanche of the 1800s were truly a nation more like Germany. And you crossed them at your peril.

Bruce Barcott, author of “The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw,” is writing a book about the battle over salmon and Indian treaties in the Pacific Northwest.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/books/review/Barcottt.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema1&pagewanted=print

The Same River Twice by Ted Mooney – Excerpt

The Same River Twice by Ted Mooney – Excerpt

Chapter 1

     THE PALE RUSSIAN youth whom Odile had engaged as her driver displayed neither fear nor pity as he sent his battered panel truck hurtling through the streets of north Moscow, and he now assailed her additionally with the plot development of a movie in which he seemed to be inviting her to invest. Odile spoke no Russian and he no French, so he framed these imaginings in an imperfect English that from time to time required him to take both hands off the wheel and, for her benefit, shape the vectors of his desire in the air before them. It was a slate-gray afternoon in March that threatened snow.

     Odile, having been in Moscow for three days, found herself quite ready to leave. Assuming the success of the present outing, her fifth of the day, she and her partner, Thierry Colin, would in less than three hours be boarding the train that would return them to Paris. Though she had no regrets about agreeing to this venture, all was not well at home, and only her driver’s studied recklessness kept her from brooding over her troubles.

     In due course, they arrived intact at an open cobblestone square off Tsvetnoy Bulvar, not far from the Circus and the old Central Market, now padlocked. Along the square’s eastern periphery ran a row of dilapidated kiosks, only one of which, lit feebly within, might conceivably be open for commerce. Her driver stopped a short distance away, executed a brisk three-point turn, and backed his vehicle up to the mouth of the scorched-looking structure. The day’s business had taught them that it was impolitic to leave the engine running, as prudence might otherwise dictate, and he hastened now to shut it off.

     After taking a moment to collect herself, Odile got out of the truck and headed with as much aplomb as she could muster to a spot behind the kiosk where three men stood smoking in the frigid air. They didn’t look particularly surprised or happy to see her.

     “Good afternoon,” she said in English. “I am told you are well stocked with the merchandise I require today. Perhaps we can discuss it.”

     The spokesman for the group, a compact, muscular youth barely out of his teens, considered her carefully. “You like drugs, sweet-pie? Hash from Afghanistan?” He smiled accommodatingly. “Or maybe you like big American refrigerator? Anything you need, gorgeous, we fix you up.”

     Odile had left Paris somewhat impulsively and hadn’t thought to pack for the weather. She had been cold since Warsaw, her pleated plaid overcoat was self-evidently French, and the offer of refrigerators struck her as an insult of some kind. She shrugged and said nothing.

     As if they had been waiting for just this signal, the other two men approached a steel storage bin appended to the kiosk. One produced a key and, cursing immoderately, set about unlocking it.

     “We have also souvenirs, patriotic mementos. Maybe this is what you come for? Very good merchandise. Kick-ass.”

     In fact it was what she’d come for, and she was annoyed to realize that the men had known this from the start. Russia more and more impressed her as a place of thundering redundancies, and in the spirit of this recognition she had learned to state her purpose clearly.

     “I’m looking for May Day flags of the Soviet years. If they are the right kind, I will buy them all from you immediately in dollars.” She waited a beat while they inspected her person thoughtfully. “The money is in the truck with my driver. If I like them, he will pay you. He has a gun.”

     These words had an instant and enlivening effect, and shortly four grandly oversized Soviet banners, perhaps nine feet on their longer side and made of red velvet, lay spread out on the cobblestones for Odile’s consideration. Fringed extravagantly with fine gold braid, they bore across their faces, along with the lately defunct hammer and sickle, a multitude of meticulously appliquéd decorations in satin, cotton, and lightweight wool. Each flag was unique, depicting the several architects and contractors of Soviet communism grouped together in attitudes of slightly pained farsightedness. Different periods were represented, and the personnel varied accordingly. One flag featured a likeness of Stalin, who, by a quirk of handicraft, gazed slyly at the viewer with an expression of robust good humor. He seemed to be sharing a joke.

     “Very interesting,” she said after examining the merchandise. “How do I know they’re real?”

     A small silence ensued as all present pondered the question.

     “I will tell you,” her interlocutor finally said. “Straight up, no [expletive]. In all of Moscow you do not find flags like these. Handmade by Russian factory workers to be entered in May Day competition for whole Soviet Union. These are objects of . . .” He turned to the man who had unlocked the bin. “What is English word, Leonya? Cultural . . .”

     “Patrimony,” the man pronounced with satisfaction. “Highly illegal.”

     “To take them out of Russia is a crime, but we do not take them out of Russia because we are not criminals. Our business is business — this is obvious to everyone. So enough stupidities.” He blew into his fists a couple of times for warmth and calculated. “I will sell you these four very fine artistical objects at the price of” — his ice-blue eyes scanning the sky for ?counsel — “at the exclusive price of eighteen hundred American dollars cash, no tax. Almost a gift.”

     Odile sniffed. As it happened, she’d been given standing instructions to pay whatever was asked, and though mildly shocked by such intemperance she had purchased twenty-six flags over the past three days, never parting with more than three thousand for any single one. Her employer had given her a fifty-thousand-dollar stake to work with, and this would be the last of it. “Okay,” she said at last. “Pack them up, and we have a deal.”
  

  BACK AT THE HOTEL, Thierry Colin was pacing the parquet floors in a state of some perturbation. A girl he’d met in the bar downstairs had contrived to separate him from his wallet and what remained of his hard currency while keeping up her end of a lively conversation about Russian literature. Thierry was an assistant professor at the Sorbonne.

     “It’s the unreality of the place that offends me,” he said. “Nothing here is what it seems. A thief’s not a thief, the police aren’t police.”

     “At least the girl was a girl, I hope,” Odile said, checking her watch.

     Open on the bed lay the five suitcases in which they intended to transport the flags, now piled against a wall in smoldering array. It was apparent at a glance that space would be a problem.

     Thierry ran a hand vexedly through his hair. “I wonder,” he mused. “Do we try to conceal them, or just stuff them in?”

     “I’m sure it makes no difference.” She shook out one of the flags. “Here, help me.”

     Odile had been put in touch with Thierry by the friend of someone she didn’t really know, a social acquaintance who’d guessed or been told about her current situation. Thierry, for his part, had been brought in by a cousin who happened to play squash with the scheme’s American sponsor, an appraiser for the Paris office of a celebrated auction house. Since Odile and Thierry would each be paid thirty thousand francs on delivery of the contraband flags, it seemed safe to infer that the American intended to make a good deal of money.

     “What’s our plan for customs?” she asked as they packed the flags.

     “I told you: our employer’s taken care of all the details. When we get to Brest, we just give customs our declaration forms and passports, then merci, bon voyage, we’re on our way.”

     “Let’s hope so. With your money gone we have almost nothing left for bribes, fines, whatever they call them. Do we even have a clue what the penalty is for what we’re doing?”

     “You don’t want to know, Odile. What’s more, it’s irrelevant. Customs has been paid to take our interests to heart.”

     At the train station, a massive beaux arts fortress painted verdigris and cream, Odile ran ahead to claim their compartment and Thierry followed with the baggage cart. All westbound trains originated or terminated here, and as the passengers jostled past one another, conferring in the languages of Europe, Odile felt her spirits lift. She located their assigned compartment without difficulty — a two-berth cabin just far enough from the overburdened toilet — and when Thierry appeared on the platform outside, she threw the window open and took the suitcases from him. Ten minutes later he settled into the seat opposite her, and the train pulled off into an occluded sunset.
     THE FROZEN RIVER, the enclosing highway, suburban housing blocks of unfaced concrete, ranks of rental garages built into the railroad embankment and guarded by dogs: they watched the landscape unspool until darkness was complete and nothing could be seen at the window except their own reflections.

     “It’s a catastrophe, this country,” Thierry said.

     Odile shrugged. There was no disputing his assessment.

     The train picked up speed, its horn erupting at intervals that suggested frustrations incompletely contained. Balalaika music issued from unseen speakers, and after awhile Odile recognized it as an American pop song that had been popular when she was at lycée.

     “When we first arrived,” she said, “I expected something marvelous. Something you could see on people’s faces, a wakefulness after all those years. It was unfair of me, but I thought they would be drunk with freedom.”

     Thierry was unimpressed. “Drunk, yes. But not with freedom.”

     “Now what seems strange is that I had any expectations at all. My ideas about this place came from nowhere, really. They weren’t even ideas.”

     Watching her, Thierry took a cigarette from his coat pocket. “You say expectations, but that’s not what you mean.”

     “Isn’t it?” she said. And then, with sudden irritation, “I wonder why not.”

     From the corridor came a smell of socks, sweat, and pickled cabbage. The provodnitsa, an imperious, moon-faced woman in her late twenties, had locked all the windows before departure, and the air in the carriage had quickly gone stale.

     “You’re describing longings, not expectations,” Thierry said. “And you’re hardly the only one. People want to believe a new life is possible, even if not for them. They still have faith in the fresh approach, the original act, all that. Yet this is a world in which everything of consequence is already known.” He frowned, turning the cigarette slowly over in his fingers as if examining it for fine print. “What to do in this painful situation?”

     She pulled her sweater close about her shoulders. “I really don’t want to hear this, Thierry.”

     “No?”

     “And you can’t smoke that in here.” Rummaging through her bag, she produced a brush and ran it repeatedly through her auburn hair.

     Thierry watched and said, after awhile, in a different voice, “Don’t worry. I know you’re a serious woman.”

     In the dining car they had to wait for a table, clinging to the safety rail as the carriage shimmied and bucked. Most of their fellow passengers had changed into loose-fitting clothes for the trip — sweatsuits, gym shoes that were more like slippers — and the mood was markedly more festive than it had been five days ago, traveling in the other direction.

     They shared their table with an American student who’d come to Moscow from Beijing. The boy had changed all his yuan — five hundred dollars’ worth — into rubles on entry and had just now discovered that the rubles, which couldn’t be taken out of the country, could only be changed back into yuan, of which there were naturally none to be had. Rather than surrender his net worth at the border, he had decided to spend it all at the next stop with worthwhile goods for sale. Odile was worried by this boy — he would arrive in Paris without any money at all — but the thought brought with it a kind of pique. Someone else would have to take care of him.

     After dinner, Thierry stayed behind to play chess with a Pole he’d be?friended and Odile returned to their compartment alone. She rented sheets and blankets from the provodnitsa, made up both couchettes, and lay down without undressing. The music program had been changed to Tchai?kovsky. Moonlight fell intermittently into the compartment. The rails chat?tered.

     Odile hadn’t considered herself committed to this trip until Thierry received their train tickets from the American, an hour before departure, and in her rush to reach the Gare du Nord a number of practical matters had gone untended. In particular, she’d failed to get a phone call through to her husband, Max, who was in New York visiting his daughter from his first marriage. After trying twice to phone him from Paris, she realized that her return ticket would get her home before Max anyway, and she set aside the idea of the call without ever quite meaning to abandon it. This lapse now unnerved her. Although it was not their habit to give daily account of themselves, Odile was troubled by her negligence, and she wondered what it might portend. At a time like this, she told herself, I can’t take anything for granted.

     She woke hours later to the sound of Russian voices raised in song. When she switched on her reading lamp, she saw that Thierry’s berth was undisturbed, and after a moment’s thought she got up and left the compartment.

     Their dinner companion had succeeded in spending his rubles at the Smolensk station and now, at one end of the carriage, spilling into the corridor, a party was in progress. Open cases of vodka and Georgian champagne, jars of Caspian caviar, smoked sturgeon in folds of brown paper: the boy had resolved that if he was to arrive in Paris destitute he might as well make the most of it. Half a dozen passengers had joined him in a mood of dutiful excess.

     She found Thierry sequestered between cars, a champagne bottle in one hand, a cigarette in the other. There was a glow about him, a halation that went beyond the ordinary flush of someone drinking alone on a homebound train. Fleetingly, Odile was confused. This very scene, she realized, had played out before her eyes on some other occasion, in some other place.

Continues...

     Excerpted from The Same River Twice by Ted Mooney Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/books/excerpt-the-same-river twice.html?ref=review&pagewanted=print

Worlds of Trouble By DANIELLE TRUSSONI

Worlds of Trouble

By DANIELLE TRUSSONI

THE SAME RIVER TWICE

By Ted Mooney

362 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95

     To shape the everyday happenings of the world into a good story — isn’t that what novelists are supposed to do best? Yet readers must often choose between “literary fiction,” understood to be works of well-written but meandering prose about the “real world” of human relationships, and “commercial fiction,” fast-paced novels in which plot is everything. The literary is assumed to be cerebral and artistic, the commercial mindless and entertaining. One suspects that nobody is completely happy with this divide. So it is a joy to discover, every once in a while, a writer whose prose and plotting take something from both camps. As Ted Mooney proves in his nuanced literary thriller “The Same River Twice,” it is perfectly possible to find a novel that has it all.

     Mooney’s tale begins when Odile, a Parisian clothing designer happily married to an art-film auteur, agrees to acquire Soviet-­era May Day banners with a partner and courier them out of Russia for a significant fee. Instructed to “pay whatever was asked” for the flags, Odile buys 30 of them for $50,000. After completing the mission and boarding their train back to Paris, Odile’s partner, an assistant professor at the Sorbonne, disappears. Odile returns to Paris alone, takes the flags to the American dealer who has orchestrated the entire affair and hurries home, only to find her 13th Arrondissement apartment ransacked.

     Her husband, Max, meanwhile, is having a mid-career crisis that inspires him to ditch his current project — a bankable film with the starlet Isabelle H. attached — to experiment with his own version of cinéma vérité. In the next days, Odile and Max become entangled in a web of intrigues that endanger their marriage and their lives. Enter a cut-throat Russian businessman, two ruthlessly ambitious and beautiful young women and a scheme to make unlimited amounts of cash — and voilà, you’re caught up in the momentum of a great story.

     “The money is in the truck with my driver,” Odile says with gun moll aplomb as she buys the May Day flags from a band of black-market merchants. “If I like them, he will pay you. He has a gun.” Odile is “a cool customer,” but she is also the kind of woman who is subject to recurrent dreams, intuitions, episodes of déjà vu and “esoteric synaptic events.” Although religion holds no interest for her and she doesn’t consider self-denial a virtue, there is something of the mystic in Odile. She holds a private conviction that “she would renounce the world and its ten thousand excruciations” to “retreat into solitude and live her life as an ascetic,” even as she doubts her “own freedom to make such decisions.” Yet Odile is enraptured by the physical beauty of her surroundings. Standing before the Opéra Bastille, she perceives that “a veil had been lifted to reveal a scene completely new to her, one in which every particular was strange and without precedent. She knew where she was, but each thing she saw was the first of its kind: the first bicyclist, the first wine carafe, the first woman to tie a sweater around her waist by the arms.” The conventional thriller dame of the first Odile meets the sensitive introvert of the second, creating a wonderful frisson. The contrast makes Odile a magnificent character.

     Mooney’s passion for detail lies behind this, of course. He has an artist’s eye for color and texture. A figure in a Giacometti drawing is “shimmering into being of its own accord” in a way that is “bewitching and troubling in equal measure.” The May Day flags are “piled against a wall in smoldering array.” Such descriptive richness might be expected from a writer who was senior editor at Art in America magazine for more than 30 years. In fact, Mooney’s art-world descriptions are so enchanting that one fully believes that a savvy American art dealer would hire an inexperienced, non-Russian-speaking Parisian clothing designer to travel thousands of kilometers by train to hunt down Soviet-era artifacts from street markets in Moscow and smuggle them back to Paris.

     Perhaps that is why, when the details feel off, the effect is disorienting. Odile goes to Moscow sometime in the late 1990s, yet the Russia Mooney describes has a distinctly cold war ambience. A fellow passenger on the train from Moscow to Paris, an American student traveling from Beijing, had changed his renminbi into rubles on entry, only to discover that the rubles “couldn’t be taken out of the country” upon departure. Rather than have it confiscated, he spends all of his money on Caspian caviar and Georgian champagne. It’s a small detail, but in 1998 it was legal to bring rubles out of Russia. Whether the ruble was worth much in 1998 — it crashed that year — is another question. A more glaring distortion involves the repercussions of taking the May Day flags through border control. Just before he disappears, Odile’s partner offers to bring the flags through customs at Brest alone, warning Odile that if “something goes wrong, they have only one of us to execute.” Execution of French citizens for bringing flags out of Russia? Fifty years earlier, one might have ended up in Siberia, but in the 1990s the punishment would have been considerably less harsh than the firing squad.

     Most likely, Mooney played up cold-war-era menace in the service of creating dramatic tension, and in this respect, Russia functions as it was meant to. One is too wrapped up in the drama to bother with Google. Indeed, when a truly frightening nemesis arrives in the person of Kolya ­Kukushkin, a Russian banker who will torture and kill to get what he wants, all thought of life-­threatening customs agents disappears. Kukush­kin is a classic villain, both charming and terrifying, whose influence is more pervasive than Odile and Max realize.

     At one point, feeling adrift, Odile buys a ticket to John Huston’s “Maltese Falcon,” the classic film-noir adaptation of Dashiell Hammet’s detective novel. She takes a “third-row center seat in the darkened theater, and delivers herself gratefully” into the brilliant distraction of the story. “A hundred minutes later she emerged refreshed. The world depicted in the film, for all its duplicity, innuendo and fruitless striving, resembled the real world only in part. Why she should draw strength from this utterly ordinary observation, available to virtually anyone on earth for the price of a movie ticket, was beyond her, but as she started east on Boulevard St.-Germain she felt its power in every step she took.” Whether Odile’s experience is one of artistic communion or pure escapism, a cerebral appreciation of film noir or her own private guilty pleasure, it is impossible to tell. In the end, if one is mesmerized by a storyteller’s gifts, what does it matter?

Danielle Trussoni’s most recent book is the novel “Angelology.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/books/review/Trussonit.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3&pagewanted=print

Hello to All That By JAY McINERNEY

Hello to All That

By JAY McINERNEY

Ann Beattie

WALKS WITH MEN

By Ann Beattie

102 pp. Scribner. Cloth, $17. Paper, $10

     When I arrived in New York in 1980, Ann Beattie  was, for many young aspiring fictionists, one of the two most influential writers in the country, the other one being Raymond Carver. Beattie’s influence, and her rumored proximity, seemed pervasive, a part of the cultural landscape. Her stories were appearing regularly in The New Yorker. Beattie’s feckless middle-class postgraduates, still mourning the demise of the ’60s, seemed like older versions of me and my friends, albeit with better taste. As clueless as her characters sometimes seemed, they were terribly clued-in, worldly and semiotically correct. Just as an earlier generation used to read Hemingway in part to learn what to drink and where to travel, we read Beattie in part to learn what to listen to and read and what to wear. It seems to me that it was a Beattie story that first alerted me to the existence of Billie Holiday.

     Set in the early ’80s, Beattie’s latest novel (or novella), I was fascinated to discover, is the story of an older man teaching a young literarily inclined woman how to be clued-in, teaching her the kind of inside dope we once read Ann Beattie in order to learn. “In 1980, in New York,” the book begins, “I met a man who promised me he would change my life, if only I’d let him. The deal was this: he’d tell me anything, anything, as long as the information went unattributed.” The very first thing this mentor-lover, Neil, does is to buy his young protégée a Barbour jacket. “He expressed shock that I, a person of such good taste, didn’t already have one.” This gift is quickly followed by a Burberry scarf. More than fashion advice, Neil promises to share his wisdom about men and the ways of the world with the narrator. And, reader, she buys it.

     One of the beguiling things about this setup is the way in which Beattie reminds us how unworldly we all feel in our early 20s, how we suspect there are codes in which we are unversed, keys to understanding the world around us that are unrelated to our Phi Beta Kappa keys. But this Harvard summa cum laude seems inordinately, even spectacularly gullible. The maddening thing about this story is that you want to tell the narrator that matters of taste should not be confused with laws of nature. No, actually, the maddening thing is, you want to say to her, Hey, can’t you see this guy is full of it.   No, wait, the maddening thing is that the narrator begins to see through her Henry Higgins early on, and is certainly wised-up to him as her narrating older self, and yet still allows herself to be Svengalied.

     It’s difficult to resist mining for fragments of an autobiography here, though in fact the narrator, who sometimes calls herself Jane, sounds more like Joyce Maynard than Ann Beattie. “I became something of an overnight sensation, when I was 21, for an interview I gave The New York Times, in which I — one of that year’s summa cum laude Harvard graduates — disparaged my Ivy League education, at graduation, in the presence of President Jimmy Carter, and stated my intentions to drop out and move to a farm in Vermont.”

     Neil interviews Jane and later seduces her when, after a year in Vermont with her goat-milking, bass-playing boyfriend, she comes down to the city for a medical procedure. One can easily imagine that Neil’s smug worldliness is a pleasant antidote to the boyfriend’s rural hippie meliorism, though the promised nuggets of wisdom for which Jane trades her body and her independence are pretty paltry and superficial, as opposed to life-changing. “Never trust a hotel that’s been renovated until the second year.” Or even inane: “Don’t use hair conditioner. Electricity is sexy. When your hair falls forward, it reaches out. It lets me know some part of you wants something.” He also advises her to avoid cocktail napkins because they stick to the bottom of the glass. And she never forgets it.

     Jane and Neil move into an apartment in not-yet-fashionable Chelsea; she does research at the New York Public Library about birds in the South to help Neil for a book he is supposedly writing. When she discovers he’s married she manages to summon enough will to get herself out the door and sleep on a friend’s floor for a couple of weeks, but one night after too much chardonnay she returns to him, wearing a raincoat — a Burberry, one presumes — over her nightgown and in the next sentence they’re married.

     Beattie has always been the queen of ellipsis, of the pregnant blank space and the vertiginous jump-cut, and in fact she does backtrack to explain the negotiations for a prenuptial agreement that will leave Jane very comfortable no matter what happens to their marriage. She doesn’t allow us to see beneath the surface, to show us the kinds of emotional calculation behind her decision. Ironically, perhaps, she is now wised-up to the man who wished to educate her, and hip to his manipulations, and yet she seems relatively happy. She even adopts his phony aphoristic bent, if only to mock it: “In the afterlife,” she tells him, “there are only pencils, no pens. And every pencil has an eraser.”

     Given Jane’s passivity and her reluctance to look deeply into her own heart, it is disappointing not to get more of the kind of surface topography in which Beattie specializes. Beattie’s short stories can be richly textured and studded with cultural detritus, but here, except a cameo by Rollerina, or a Champagne-drenched book party that Woody Allen almost attends and Harold Brodkey leaves after a brief appearance, we get a kind of generalized 1980s New York. “Carter was committing adultery in his heart and not getting the hostages freed from Iran, and everyone felt unsettled.”

     Beattie’s refusal to overdetermine her characters, her reluctance to explain their behavior, is a hallmark of her style, and one of the reasons she came to be identified as a minimalist in the early ’80s. It was part of what made her fiction seem so knowing and hip. Stuff happens. And it’s not always explicable. Let’s not make too big a deal about it. In “Walks With Men” (a title I am still scratching my head over), we are pretty much living in a universe of accidents and unexplained events; Beattie’s unwillingness to explain or connect seems almost perverse. Jane’s old hippie boyfriend from Vermont, now known as Goodness, comes to the city and visits her, only to be pushed under the wheels of a subway train. Jane learns of his grisly death when she’s watching the evening news. I will not divulge Neil’s fate, except to say that I suspect it will leave most readers as mystified and unsatisfied as I was.

     Ann Beattie is a national treasure, the author of short stories that will endure and continue to inspire. This slim novel will ultimately be reckoned as a minor part of her oeuvre.

Jay McInerney’s most recent book is “How It Ended: New and Collected Stories.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/books/review/McInerneyt.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3&pagewanted=print