Reviews of the Book News of the World
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Review: In 'News of the Earth,' Unlikely Companions Bond on a Perilous Journeying
Paulette Jiles was a poet before she became a novelist. And information technology certainly shows. Her new novel, the 2016 National Volume Award nominee "News of the Earth," has invited comparisons with both Charles Portis'southward "True Grit" (because it involves a girl on a long journey with an older homo) and John Ford's film "The Searchers" (because it involves a human'south journey to "rescue" a white daughter who has been kidnapped by Indians, and also involves a long journey). But it's more like Ms. Jiles's own "Enemy Women," an exquisitely written Civil War epic about a woman's long march to observe her lover, or any fiction by Ron Rash, another poet who chooses each give-and-take with expert precision.
Like Mr. Rash, Ms. Jiles writes books that bring the natural world to life and are besides agonizingly eventful. Her story in "News of the World" is painfully simple. An old man, Capt. Jefferson Kyle Kidd, is content to make his living as an itinerant news reader in Texas until he is charged with a much more difficult mission. A white girl, about 10, has been "rescued" from the Kiowa Indians who kidnapped her and killed her immediate family unit four years earlier. Would he please take her down to the San Antonio region and return her to her closest living relatives, an aunt and uncle?
This comes at a very bad fourth dimension for Captain Kidd. It is the winter of 1870, and he is decorated spreading the news that the 15th Amendment has just been ratified, extending the right to vote to all men without regard to race or previous condition of servitude. "That means colored gentlemen," he tells his audiences. "Let u.s.a. take no vaporings or girlish shrieks." He would much rather go along with this than take a foreign petty girl on a long journeying. "I am astonished," he says, looking at her. "The child seems artificial every bit well equally malign."
Still, Kidd is an honorable man, and there is no 1 else who can or will aid this daughter. And so he agrees to take her, even though she is a hellion at the outset. To prepare for the journey, a group of Wichita Falls whores tries to bathe and dress her. (At the terminate of the bathroom, the tub is on its side, dripping water onto the red flocked wallpaper in their receiving parlor.) She will not answer to Johanna, the name Kidd gives her. He can't exit her by herself, and he tin't take her anywhere. "God in a higher place knew what she would exercise if presented with dinner on a plate," Kidd thinks to himself.
Equally she did with "Enemy Women," Ms. Jiles seems to have backed up her volume with substantial research. She is very interested in what happened to children similar Johanna, who wound upward suffering a kind of postal service-traumatic stress disorder and, co-ordinate to the writer, "always" wanted to return to the Indians who had kidnapped them, no thing how brief the period of abduction. As one of the book'south characters says nigh children separated from their parents and later returned to their families: "In their minds they went. When they came back they were unfinished. They are forever falling."
Then in that location is persistent suspense throughout "News of the Earth" virtually what volition happen to Johanna when she and Kidd accomplish their destination. It goes without maxim that the young girl and the older man, a veteran of three wars, will develop an ever closer bond. They will learn to trust each other, though non in a hokey way; Ms. Jiles is much too good to let her volume sink into sentimentality. Only they both know that a happy ending is an impossibility and that the earth in which they live volition not permit them stay together. The most information technology volition let them is the series of heated attacks and adventures that animate "News of the Earth" and allow it to live up to its title for both of them. Neither has had much feel with the kinds of peril the plot throws their way.
"News of the Globe" is a narrow but exquisite book about the joys of freedom (experienced even by a raging river threatening to overrun its banks); the discovery of unexpected, proprietary love betwixt two people who have never experienced anything like it; pure risk in the wilds of an untamed Texas; and the reconciling of vastly different cultures (as when Kidd has to explain to Johanna, who is all set to collect a white homo'due south scalp, that this "is considered very boorish" and simply isn't done). That'south a lot to pack into a short (213 pages), vigorous volume, but Ms. Jiles is capable of saying a lot in few words.
It'due south too about a precious, long-gone time when the news was a rare article and an expert reader like Captain Kidd could both inform and entertain eager crowds. Scenes in which he notifies towns most what has happened in the wider world are among the book'due south most stirring, since they seem then quaint. When he gets to the Gulf Coast, where newspapers are shipped in and easily accessible, he can foresee the end of his profession.
Merely Kidd loves to cull and aggregate articles, loves the gasps of surprise he hears, loves the power of information. During the hours y'all spend reading "News of the Globe," that power is magically restored.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/13/books/news-of-the-world-paulette-jiles.html
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