Orchard

by Jack H. Bailey

self published     2016

364 pages     Fiction

The Shortlist

I am deep into Wuthering Heights this week, but I didn't want to miss telling you about an interesting book that comes out tomorrow.

Orchard by Jack H. Bailey looks good. There are a variety of interesting facets to Orchard that would appeal to readers of history and of westerns. Jack Bailey grew up in Idaho, where the notorious criminal Orchard lived and worked. Bailey became fascinated with him at a young age, and finished this book shortly before his death in 2010. His wife has posthumously published this novel. It will be available July 26 from Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Orchard combines mining history and true crime in an incredibly readable page turner. If you are a lover of Longmire, true crime, and history, you will enjoy Orchard. Also check out Shot All To Hell by Mark Lee Gardner about Jesse James and the Northfield Minnesota bank robbery.

Here is the information about Orchard from the publicist:

Description
This much is true. It's 1899. Harry Orchard is a member of the fire-breathing Western Federation of Miners. While other members labor underground to harvest the riches of the earth, Orchard is paid to kill men who are a problem for the union. He's an interesting killer, well-liked by his peers and by the ladies. 
After years of cat-and-mouse pursuit by legendary Pinkerton, Charles Siringo, when he's arrested in 1906 for the murder of Idaho's former Governor, Frank Steunenberg, he's killed nineteen men in Idaho and Colorado. Even today, in the silver mining towns of northern Idaho, his name is spoken in whispers by those familiar with his deeds.
"This much is true: Jack H. Bailey is a damn good writer. In Orchard he mixes facts with fiction as he spins a rollicking yarn of bombers, union busters, and political assassination. A dynamic novel." - Larry Karaszewski
Author Bio
Jack H. Bailey, author of Orchard, descended from gold miners and grew up in and around the locales frequented by Harry Orchard. It was while living in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho that his fascination with Orchard began. Jack joined the navy at seventeen and served in WWII aboard the aircraft carrier USS Lexington until she was sunk in the Battle of the Coral Sea. He graduated from USC with a BA in English and spent sixteen years in aerospace during which time he wrote two critically praised novels, The Number Two Man and The Icarus Complex. Jack wrote prolifically until his death in 2010. Most notably, Jack was an annual participant in the prestigious Academy Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting, sponsored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and was one of only a handful of writers to have advanced in the competition seven times. Follow his author page on Facebook. 

Here is Jack Bailey's website

Train Dreams

 By Denis Johnson

New York, Picador, 2002

116 pages     Novella

Once in a while a book affects you in profound ways. Such was my experience reading Train Dreams by Denis Johnson. Written as a story for the Paris Review in 2002, when it won the O’Henry Award,  the story has just recently been printed as a hard copy novella, and it was shortlisted for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize. If you will recall, no Pulitzer Prize was given for fiction this year. So, being shortlisted is just as good as winning.

Grainier is a man of the West in the early years of the 20^th century. He works at all kinds of odd jobs, lives in the woods, and is, at heart, the loneliest of men. “Grainier had also once seen a wonder horse, and a wolf-boy, and he’d flown in the air in a biplane in 1927. He’d started his life story on a train ride he couldn’t remember, and ended up standing around outside a train with Elvis Presley in it.”

Grainier is a Christian man, a Methodist, in prohibition Idaho. He works on the railroad, chops wood, and does all sorts of other odd jobs all his life. When he is in his 30s, he builds a small cabin on a small piece of land and marries a young woman who soon bears him a daughter. Because he isn’t used to having people around, he leaves his wife and baby often, and in the pivotal experience in his life, the cabin and his family is consumed in a forest fire while he is away. 

After that experience, he becomes one of those people who live on the fringe of society; one of those people who are just around. You know them but then, again, you don’t. Johnson says that Grainier was “a man of whom it might have been said, but nothing was ever said of him, that he had little to interest him.”

The reader of  Train Dreams knows him, and our hearts break for his loneliness, for his isolation, and for his loss. However, all is not heaviness with Grainier. He has an interesting perspective on the ways in which the West is changing; how he sees the changes is very different from the way we view those changes from our perspective nearly 100 years later. One of my favorite stories in the book is when he is operating a livery service and takes a man who had been shot by a dog (yes I wrote that right) to the hospital. His exchange with the wounded man is more than humorous, it is outright funny. Also very funny is the tale about the time he took a biplane ride.

The most magnificent part of Train Dreams is how concise it is. There is not a wasted word, and yet in its sparseness, it is profound.The reviewer in The New Yorker says: “Clean, American simplicity in prose is easy to mimic and hard to make. The New York Times reviewer says that is the beauty of the book. The paucity of the words makes it all the more dynamic. He also says: “The novella also accumulates power because Johnson is as skilled as ever at balancing menace against ecstasy, civilization against wilderness. His prose tiptoes a tightrope between peace and calamity, and beneath all of the novella’s best moments, Johnson runs twin strains of tenderness and the threat of violence.”

Train Dreams is a short one to two hour read, and as I thought about Grainier, I kept thinking, “I know this man.” Then I realized that I had been thinking about my Uncle Harry all the way through the book. Uncle Harry was a World War One veteran, a silent man who spent his life in Seattle working as a desk clerk in a men's hotel. I never met him until he retired and moved back to Minnesota to live with his sister, my Grandma. Did we ever get to know him? Probably not. For all the years he lived with my Grandma, all I ever knew about him was that he liked to watch wrestling on television, and he put sugar on everything, including tomatoes and macaroni and cheese. I would guess that he suffered from PTSD from the war, which was not diagnosable at that time, of course. Uncle Harry lived to be 100 and remains a mysterious figure in my life. 

Denis Johnson is one of America’s most prominent novelists, the winner of the National Book Award. He was a new author to me, and I want to read another one of his books

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The review in the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2011/09/05/110905crbo_books_wood#ixzz29m5Eb4oA

Here is the review in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/books/review/train-dreams-by-denis-johnson-book-review.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

A reader’s discussion on the Diane Rehm Show: http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2012-05-23/readers-review-train-dreams-denis-johnson