God’s Liar by Thom Satterlee
Slant Books, 2020; 176 pp.; $18.00

Review by Katy Carl

After such a strikingly brutal year, it feels only natural to be experiencing a thirst for perspective. Paradoxically, perspective can flower from the dirt that is the nightmare of history (whose demise has been much exaggerated). As this year’s litany of cancellations—due to ideology, epidemiology, or both—rolls on, readers may find echoes of the present day in this timely story. Through the eyes of fictional Anglican priest Theodore Wesson, Thom Satterlee details a richly imagined version of the time John Milton was nearly “cancelled” for opposing the English monarchy and then had to go into quarantine to avoid catching a potentially deadly illness (in 1665, that would have been bubonic plague). Milton’s flight to the countryside in search of refuge from the worst human society can deliver reveals that, from the worst the human heart can do, there may at times be nowhere to hide.

Satterlee’s achievement in God’s Liar is to dramatize the consequences of questions that, in themselves, are often reduced to abstract terms in philosophical theology. For Wesson, Milton, Toland, and the constellation of characters who surround and support their hiding places, these questions are live issues with concrete implications: can we fully believe and trust in God’s Providence, in the face of the sometimes devastating plot twists of each person’s life? If Providence somehow includes and accounts for all the ways nature and experience may harm us, all the ways we may bring harm to others through self-interest or thoughtlessness or mere lack of clear intention, all the ways we deceive ourselves and others both knowingly and not: what stringencies, what penances, must we then accept to limit the damage of which we are capable—and what mercies are still available to us?

For all its backdrop of monarchical intrigue, assassination attempts, intra-church politics, and Manzoni-reminiscent plague drama, Satterlee’s storytelling is at its best when it addresses itself to the interior worlds of characters responding to otherworldly realities. Broader context is rendered in brief glimpses rather than Balzacian disquisitions. Individual human motivation—love, shame, grief, ambition, fear, and the longing for transcendence—remains consistently in the foreground.

As a result, the novel wears its author’s learning with a praiseworthy lightness, a grace not always conspicuous in historical fictions. Facts about the political and religious landscape, as well as quotes from work by Milton and his real-life biographer Toland, blend seamlessly in, so that the reader learns effortlessly by immersion—a pleasure proper to good historical fiction, one that the liveliest nonfiction can at times strive in vain to offer. An impressive list for further reading sprawls through the acknowledgments, an authorly generosity both to researchers and to the curious.

The text is not free of occasional infelicity, mainly in the rendering of the sound of the seventeenth-century English that Milton so thoroughly commanded. In all fairness, to render imagined Miltonian English with perfection is a task to give vertigo to any talent. Where the effort succeeds, it delights; where it falls short, it distracts from another of the novel’s charms, the presentation of characters who seem less like visitors from the foreign country of the past and more like people you might bump elbows with at a parish potluck. Purists may find themselves wishing the implied translation of the past into modern idiom either a bit more or a bit less thorough; others may find the blend of deliberate archaisms and contemporary syntactical patterns just right; this may be a matter of personal taste.

In constructing his fictional argument, Satterlee plays with, even turns inside out for exploration, St. Augustine’s dictum that “God does not need my lie.” Satterlee makes Wesson into what James Wood in The Art of Fiction calls a “reliably unreliable” narrator, but in a twist on the tradition, a self-consciously unreliable one: Wesson believes he can knowingly practice dissimulation for the sake of deeper truth. This may tend to suggest an analogy to the act of fiction writing (insofar as a responsible fiction is, precisely, a complex “lie” or fabrication constructed, arguably, in such a way that it points to truths higher than itself). As the plot winds its way toward completion and the consequences of Wesson’s self-deception play themselves out, readers are invited to reflect on honesty’s insistent demands and the places where real refuge is alone to be found.

Katy Carl is the 2020 Wiseblood Books writer-in-residence and the editor in chief of Dappled Things magazine. Her nonfiction has appeared in the National Catholic Register, Evangelization & Culture, and St. Louis magazine, among others. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Wiseblood Books in 2021.

Motherland by Sally Thomas
Able Muse Press, 2020; 126 pp., $19.95

Review by Meredith McCann

Sally Thomas is one of my absolute favorites among all the poets we’ve published in Dappled Things. There’s something Philip Larkin-ish about the elegant yet easy flow of her verse, with its unsparing meditations on aging and its remembered English landscapes. Larkin, of course, was a grumpy agnostic librarian who famously regarded marriage and children as a death sentence, so perhaps that’s where the similarities end. Thomas’s new book is called Motherland, and maternal energy is its “ground of being.” The book’s foreword enumerates the possible meanings of the title: “Thomas’s own motherhood,” “Mother Nature,” “the maternal birthing of poems,” “English as Thomas’s mother tongue,” “Mother Church,” and “Mary as the Mother of God.”

It has been widely recognized that the past fifty years have seen an explosion of “the poetry of motherhood.” The Poetry Foundation’s website introduces a page of mother-themed poems with the rueful judgment: “Before the 1970s, very few realistic poems about motherhood were published.” After Sylvia Plath, poets rapidly began to make up for lost time, and in the words of Stephen Burt in his essay “The Poetics of Motherhood,” “It is no wonder, then, that if we look back on American poems since the 1970s, giving birth and caring for young children are salient topics, perhaps the topics (if we want to segregate poems by topic) that have prompted the most widespread stylistic invention, the greatest number of poems by the most poets that sound the least like the poems of the past.”

Sally Thomas takes her place effortlessly in this new tradition, although her poems are not deep in the thick of milk and sleep deprivation. Her voice has a cool, leisurely authority to it: she is the mother in middle age, past the intense confusion of babies and screaming toddlers. When she does look back on those days, every reader with children will feel the stab of recognition:

You too had a pram, and children. You walked
beneath windows.

You pushed your little loneliness up the road.

Time and mortality loom large in Thomas’s work. Here is one of my favorite poems from the book, quoted in whole:

“Deer Apples”

While you’re still wondering what happened to the spring,

In cool moonlight and the crickets’ whispering,

 

The season turns. No more bridal lace.

Purplish heat flushes the shifting face

 

Roadside dogwoods wear, this hurried day.

Back home, you’re chopping apples to put away

 

In the deep-freeze for the winter: soft, bruised
windfalls—

Deer apples, people say—the fruit stand sells

 

Six dollars for a twenty-odd-pound box,

To bait hunters’ stands. Worm-bitten Gala, Cox,

 

Granny Smith, some little ones whose name

You don’t know, all together breathe the same

 

Ripe smell, almost fermented. Now you cut

The grainy flesh right down to the chambered heart,

 

Rigid as cartilage, where the black seeds nest.

You fill ten Ziploc bags, but mound the best,

 

Least-bitten apples in a bowl. It used to be

That passing children ate them up immediately.

 

Who’ll eat them now, before they liquefy

Inside their loosening skins? A waste, you’d cry,

 

Except that in this moment they’re a feast

To look at, heaped together in the last

 

Off-kilter light—curvaceous, red, or gold

As pollen, wax-cheeked, radiantly cold.

This is the best sort of contemporary formal poetry: not just metrically correct, but lithe and conversational. The music of the poem builds and builds until the gong-like shimmer of the final two words. How is it that our lives begin speeding up, quietly at first, while we still believe we’ll be “twenty-something” forever, and then “the season turns”? What happened to the spring and the “bridal lace” of summer (which is both a wildflower and the memory of being a young newlywed)? How do children grow up so quickly? All this relentless change, even the apples with their “almost fermented” smell, threatening to liquefy. And yet, the defiant beauty of this still life of apples “red, or gold as pollen” will persist—that has always been an important function of poetry since ancient times. (Remember Horace and his boast of creating a “monument more enduring than bronze.”)

Crowning the book is a sequence of poems called Richeldis of Walsingham, which first appeared in this journal. Like Seamus Heaney’s Station Island, it is a series of poems linked to an ancient Catholic pilgrimage site. Hopkins name-dropped the shrine in one of his poems when he said “a starlight-wender of ours would say / The marvelous Milk was Walsingham Way”—that is, the medieval pilgrims used the Milky Way as a signpost to their destination. According to legend, the Virgin appeared to Richeldis in the year 1061 and told her to build a replica of her house at Nazareth. She tried and failed three times, only to awake one day and find that angels had built the house while she slept. The house and its holy well became known as “England’s Nazareth,” the most popular destination for pilgrims after Canterbury. Eventually the shrine was destroyed under Henry VIII.

Gary Waller, a literature professor who made a little secular pilgrimage to Walsingham in 2006, wrote about his experience and mentioned the literary impact of Walsingham’s destruction, which “uncannily haunted the Elizabethan age in poems and folk songs.” Rather like Philip Larkin in “Churchgoing,” Waller visited the holy site with mixed feelings of mockery and nostalgia, only to be unexpectedly moved. “As I stood up and left the Holy House, pausing to regret the dryness of the well—no ritual of sprinkling for me that day—I asked myself what so many pilgrims ask: Have we listened? Perhaps the Guardians of the shrine would have had me listening to a more orthodox lesson, but what I was hearing was: Have we nurtured in all of us, men and women, what Shakespeare’s Cymbeline terms the “woman’s part”? Not, I think, enough. Walsingham gently suggests, to this pilgrim at least, that doing so is where our salvation may most profoundly lie.” His trip strongly impressed on him (despite his unbelief) that Walsingham “is a place of devotion to the female religious experience—that is experience not just by, but of, the female.”

For Thomas, this female presence radiates through the shrine’s history. She creates a polyphony out of many different women’s voices: Richeldis looks back on her life; a nurse returns home from the First World War; a medieval innkeeper complains that she is run off her feet serving crowds of pilgrims. I’ve mentioned before that Thomas’s poetry is often haunted by an anxiety about time—flowing relentlessly towards death, or looking back as our memories recede further and further into the past. And time is constantly confronting us in the Richeldis poems as we zigzag between the present day and the past, visiting 1080, 1918, 1854, 1659, 1216, and returning to 1080 again. Modern vignettes are braided together with the historical poems:

Through green May softness every year, the people
come

Barefoot into town, calling each other Pilgrim

 

In the self-conscious way that people do

When their world’s ceased to believe.

The medieval-sounding opening is a wry misdirection: the pilgrims are modern; the scene moves to a hostel where “an American couple / Watch with mounting dismay as their two-year-old / Smears herself with red jelly and cream beneath the mild / Horrified gaze of more cardigan-armored ladies.” This gently mocking tone does not, however, cut the modern readers off from the past, as if we can no longer relate to it. In a poem dated 1401, an innkeeper shouts irritably to a pilgrim that she has run out of room:

God found Our Lord a bed. Ale, ale.

Let Him—God save us—find you,

By Our Lady, a clean straw bed without fleas.

Everyone is demanding something of her at once—someone wants beer, another lodging—and her exasperation links her sympathetically with the modern American couple and their wild, jelly-smeared toddler. Richeldis herself speaks in Thomas’s usual poetic voice, except in the last poem where her words are charged with Anglo-Saxon and the pre-Norman world of Beowulf and Caedmon:

High heaven harrowed a dew-fallow field,

Planted what pleased it. The first building blundered:

Square, Saxon-style. Wrong.

Bad in its bones, the treasure-ship sank.

Each day the doing mocked and unmade me.

Like those deer apples, her very English is doomed to ferment and become something unrecognizable to her. And yet her words aren’t completely forgotten, as Thomas has named each poem in the sequence with an Old English title: “wif,” “sceadu,” “halig dag,” “brimfugol.”

Perhaps I can end this review with the observation that Sally Thomas is a pro when it comes to endings. That “click” of a good final line closing like the door of an expensive car is half the pleasure of poetry for me, and I will leave you with an assortment:

The polished slab that keeps his bones in place.

My unmaking made this.

I’d dress up now and marry you again.

A recurrent longing for something else.

And always to the sea are hastening down.

Meredith McCann is a poet and reviewer as well as the poetry editor of Dappled Things magazine. Her work has appeared in Presence and Able Muse, among others.

Andalusian Hours: Poems from the Porch of Flannery O’Connor by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell
Paraclete Press, 2020; 128 pp., $19.00

Review by Maryanne Hannan

With the Heroides, a series of imaginary letters written by legendary lovers in elegiac couplets, Ovid (43 BC–17/18 AD) claimed to have invented a new literary genre, the persona poem. While this claim can be debated, poets, since then, have frequently released themselves from the confines of their own ego minds in order to enter imaginatively the minds and hearts of real or fictional characters.

Andalusian Hours: Poems from the Porch of Flannery O’Connor takes on the inner life of the acclaimed Catholic author Flannery O’Connor. Despite her early death at age thirty-nine, she left behind a large literary legacy, two novels, thirty-two short stories, numerous reviews, essays, and bundles of correspondence, some of which has recently been made public. Fordham University professor, associate director of the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies, and the author of four books about Flannery O’Connor, including the recent Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor, Angela Alaimo O’Donnell is ideally suited to the challenge of writing in the persona of this brilliant, complex, wickedly funny literary giant.

The book draws its title from Andalusia, the family’s so-named dairy farm outside Milledgeville, Georgia to which Flannery withdrew in 1951 to live with her mother Regina for the last thirteen years of her life. Here she would write her oeuvre, while continuing to correspond with the literary world she was forced to leave behind when she developed lupus, the disease that had killed her father. Rather than limiting her work, as she had feared, living in relative isolation enriched and grounded her work, where she’d come as “the magnet pull home to this red clay, / like a stone saint who has wandered away” (“Flannery’s Pilgrimage”).

Hours in the title refers to the divine office, which gave form to Flannery’s days, in addition to the daily Mass she attended with her mother. O’Donnell weaves poems about Flannery’s deep spiritual yearning throughout, expanding on “Flannery’s Prayer:” “Oh Lord, at present I am a cheese, make me a mystic, immediately.” Hours also refers to the book’s organization, according to the Catholic liturgy of the hours: Lauds for poems mostly concerned with Flannery’s early life, from the death of her father to Iowa; Terce for poems of converse with the outside world, from James Baldwin to Thomas Aquinas; Sext for poems exploring the centrality of her work; None for poems of Andalusia; Vespers for poems outside Andalusia, including actual journeys, her trip to Lourdes, and imagined, the Camino; and finally, Compline for end poems, threshold poems.

Each of the one hundred sonnets written from Flannery’s point of view opens with an epigram, chosen primarily from one of her brash comments or insight-filled stories, letters and essays. They provide O’Donnell opportunity to explore problematic aspects of Flannery’s inner life, including race, amour, her fiction, family, and death, while preserving the characteristic sardonic humor, intellectual acuity, dedication, and self-scrutiny. Then, in cadences and language that Flannery might have used, O’Donnell’s sonnets unpack, react, or expand on the quote. For instance, “Flannery’s Existential Thoughts while Porch-Sitting” expands on her observation that she and her mother might both have named a dog Spot; her mother, “without irony,” herself “with irony.” O’Donnell uses this wry comment as an entry point into Flannery’s complicated relationship with her mother: “I almost envy her her darkness— / or should I say her light.”

The poems are loosely chronological. Important issues are addressed more than once, circling around and building based on earlier references. A notable example is the sequence of poems referencing her failed love relationship with Erik Langkjaer. The epigram for that series, “Flannery in Love,” is a quote from Erik, noting that kissing Flannery was like “kissing a skeleton.” Despite the revenge she exacted, “So I became Hulga, made him Manley, / the saddest story that I ever told” (“Flannery in Love, Take III”), she ultimately admits the value of the experience in “Flannery in Love, Take IV:” “When you left / I was myself again, lonely, odd . . . Even so. I treasure those long rides, / the thrill of your kiss on a red hillside.”

During her time at the Iowa workshop and time subsequently spent with the Fitzgeralds, she developed important contacts in the literary world, which she was able to maintain and increase through correspondence and the occasional visit. One correspondent in particular, Maryat Lee, elicited from Flannery troubling racist comments that O’Donnell develops in a couple of poems. Of her refusal to meet James Baldwin in Georgia, Flannery admits: “Where I live we kill our prophets, / beat and butcher them, hang them from the trees. / Queer or Catholic, Negro or Jew” (“Flannery and James”), concluding “I choose to tell the truth in quieter ways.”

O’Donnell gives space for Flannery to express how central her work was and even to offer some critical understanding: “Here Jesus comes to me in every comma. / I do my best to make straight the way / for his incarnation every day” (“Flannery’s Christmas”). In “Flannery’s Manifesto,” she declares: “But what else can I do but write what my crooked heart tells me to?” And, then: “But what else is making fiction for / if not to trouble folks . . . / make them question why they rise from their beds.” God is good; creation is good; and writing in service to these truths is definitely good.

Both parents appear frequently. Regina, as above: they are devoted to each other and their way of life, but so different. Flannery felt a greater likeness with her father, who died when she was fifteen. His early loss ushered in “Flannery’s Fear:” “When my father died I could not bear / the grief that fell on me like hard hard rain. / But that was nothing next to the fear— / full knowing my mother was mortal, too.” When she too was diagnosed with lupus, “when the Red Wolf / ate up my dreams” (“Flannery Country”), that identification deepened.

The concluding poem, outside the cycle of sonnets, “Poet’s Apology,” written in O’Donnell’s voice as a farewell to Flannery, admits to “brief trespasses on your private mind.” To delve deeply into another’s psyche and try to make plain what perhaps even the subject herself has not fully realized is risky, especially with our contemporary sensitivity to cultural appropriation, but neither Ovid (nor any author of persona poetry that I can think of) felt compelled to justify their “stealth / and nerve to steal your mind and heart.” Perhaps because so many of us assume personal Flannery ownership, we react proprietarily, but in accepting these sonnets as literary creations, authorial what-if musings, I was thoroughly engaged. Did I agree? Disagree? Ever thought of that before? And so forth.

With her thorough understanding of Flannery scholarship, her nuanced critical understanding of Flannery’s work, and her own widely recognized skill in the sonnet, O’Donnell brings intrigue and insight to an acknowledged fictionalization. It was as if I were given access to a previously unimagined three-way conversation between Flannery, Angela O’Donnell, and myself. As a decades-long Flannery fan, I relished these exhilarating forays into Flannery’s world.

Maryanne Hannan, a poet and former Latin teacher, is the author of poetry collections Rocking Like It’s All Intermezzo and This Can’t Be Good, as well as a series of short books on classical literature.

Hotly in Pursuit of the Real: Notes Toward a Memoir by Ron Hansen
Slant Books, 2020; 183 pp., $20.00

Review by Jeffrey Wald

One of the most enjoyable experiences for any reader is to be introduced to a writer and to find in that person a new friend—and then to turn that new friend loose to participate in the ongoing conversation in one’s own head. Such has been the experience I have had with two of my favorite writers, Ron Hansen and Walker Percy.

After a heavy dose of large Russian novels in my early twenties, Walker Percy was one of the first contemporary Catholic novelists I encountered. I remember picking up a used copy of The Moviegoer and being blown away by its Christian existentialism. I was a sophomore in college at the time, studying philosophy and literature. I was daily confronted with new ideas and ways of living I had never before encountered. I found Binx’s pilgrimage toward the transcendent apropos for my own inner search, and I soon ordered the rest of Percy’s corpus; Lost in the Cosmos remains a top-five all-time read.

Not long after, my professor introduced me to Ron Hansen. What, I thought, a Catholic novelist who is still alive and writing? This I had to encounter firsthand. So I picked up Atticus, and here I found another quest. But unlike Binx’s open-ended movement out of the malaise of postmodernity, Atticus Cody’s journey aimed to discover what happened to his lost drifter of a son. Whereas Binx may have been something of a “prodigal son” (with no father), Atticus was a true prodigal father, willing to descend to the depths of human misery to find and rescue his son.

Although Percy and Hansen are perhaps best known for their novels, they are also formidable essayists. Percy’s posthumously published Signposts in a Strange Land covers an impressive range of topics with both seriousness and humor, and Hansen’s first collection of essays on faith and fiction, A Stay Against Confusion, transcends its focus by means of a Catholic worldview at once particular and generous. Hansen’s second book of essays, Hotly in Pursuit of the Real, was published by Slant in April. These twenty-two short essays and two interviews again have put my mind on Hansen, and by extension, on my old friend Walker Percy.

Like Percy’s essays, Hansen’s succinct gems can be read and enjoyed in two principal ways. First, they can be savored in their own right for the beauty of the prose, the clarity and precision of the writing, and Hansen’s ability to express the hints of transcendence that inhere in created objects. Hansen sees reality as sacramental. He is at his best when portraying the salvific narrative ever-present in God’s world. His titular essay “Hotly in Pursuit of the Real” details how this narrative began to unfold in his own life as it drew him toward writing from an early age:

Looking back on my childhood now, I find that church-going and religion were in good part the origin of my vocation as a writer, for along with Catholicism’s feast for the senses, its ethical concerns, its insistence on seeing God in all things and the high status it gave to scripture, drama and art, there was a connotation in Catholicism’s liturgies that story-telling mattered. Each Mass was a narrative steeped in meaning and metaphor, helping the faithful not only to remember the past but to make it present here and now and to bind ourselves into a sharing group so that, ideally, we could continue the public ministry of Jesus in our world.

For Hansen, the world is haunted by a Creator, steeped in deep meaning and discoverable truth. Like Percy, he perceives the strangeness of existence. But also like Percy, Hansen’s writing is all about illuminating the signs and symbols that surround us, and thereby seeking to come nearer to the One behind the signs. For example, read Hansen’s response to an interviewer’s question in “Fiction as Encounter:”

I once read that according to ghost hunters, when you go into a house you almost never see a ghost by looking straight at it, but you can often see it out of the corner of your eye. I think that’s what happens in fiction: If you address something straight, people either accept it or reject it. But if you approach it tangentially, then they absorb it and it becomes more theirs.

Hansen’s essays, like Percy’s, can also be read as insights and interpretative lenses into his own fiction. The two writers cover different ground: Percy is fascinated with existentialism, science, the American South, psychology, and language; Hansen with history, the American West, crime, Scripture, and Ignatius. Both writers bring these deep interests into their fiction. Their topical nonfiction provides insight not only into their source material but also into what they are trying to accomplish in their narrative art.

In the third section of his new collection, Hansen directly addresses his own writing. He specifically discusses writing four of his historical biographies: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Exiles, A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion, and The Kid. These essays are some of the most enjoyable in the entire book. In them, the reader comes face-to-face with Hansen’s fascination with outlaws, outcasts, assassins, and adulterers. Here, Hansen’s empathetic imagination shines. For instance, of Billy the Kid, Hansen writes:

Reading everything I could about the Kid, I only found myself liking him more and wishing he’d had a father or mentor—which he persistently sought—in order to show him the right path. The older men he did find and admire were all soon killed.

Hansen also provides insight into more recent figures. Although I’ve long intended to dive into Thomas Merton’s work, I have yet to do it. Previously, everything I knew about Merton was contained in Paul Elie’s wonderful joint biography of Merton, Flannery O’Connor, Dorothy Day, and Percy (again!), The Life You Save May Be Your Own—until I read Hansen’s essay “Goodbye to All That.” The essay is part Merton biography and part analysis of Merton’s WWII novel, My Argument with the Gestapo. I had never before heard of Merton’s sole novel; now I want to read this book that Hansen describes as “an interior monologue about Tom’s conflicted hankering, vacillation, uncertainty, and the naysaying voices that seemed to be railing against him,” a book that was “essentially a journal of his wistful intention to find solitude, renounce the world, and give up everything, even his writing talent, for a God who was the Solus Tuus.” I’m sold. Now I just need to get a copy.

Another of my favorite essays is “Shakespeare & Me.” Owing to my denseness as a reader, I was completely unaware how much of Hansen’s fiction owes a deep debt to Shakespeare. Not only does Hansen pay tribute to Shakespeare for the general form of much of his fiction—i.e., biographical fiction, akin to Shakespeare’s biographical plays—but Hansen also illustrates the specific illusions to Shakespeare’s work in many of his novels. The screwball comedy Isn’t It Romantic? was directly inspired by A Midsummer Night’s Dream; A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion owes much to Macbeth; the extended ending of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford owes its form to Julius Caesar; Sallie Chisum quotes Shakespeare in her conversations with Billy in The Kid. Why the captivation by Shakespeare? Hansen is ever in pursuit of the enduring, the infinite, and the eternal. And by his own estimation, “what seems to be everlasting is Shakespeare.”

Finally, I simply love “Why the West?” This short essay, perhaps inspired in form by Percy’s “Questions They Never Asked Me,” is composed of a series of twenty-five questions on the West. Here are a few representative questions:

Why does Big Sky country lift my spirits?

Why is it that the British automobile manufacturer Rover named its high-end model a Range Rover? And why are GMC SUVS named after the Alaskan wilderness?

Why is it that the cigarette named after the Duke of Marlborough, an English lord, was famously advertised by a cowboy?

Why do movie characters on the run always head west?

Why do so many Americans feel their country is overpopulated when 96 percent is parkland and open range?

Here’s one more question to add to the mix: why do I like this little essay so much? Again, I can’t help but think of Percy’s wacky and wonderful questions in Lost in the Cosmos. And again I’m reminded of the power of good literature, of the connections between writers that one finds, of the literary friends that one makes along the way. If you haven’t yet made friends with Hansen, Hotly in Pursuit of the Real is a great place to make his acquaintance. If you’re old friends, what a perfect way to continue the conversation. And if you’re so inclined, perhaps you might invite Percy to join in as well.

Jeffrey Wald is a writer and attorney whose work has previously appeared in periodicals such as Dappled Things, Touchstone, Philosophy Now, and elsewhere.