The Night Visitor and Other Stories by B. Traven

Ten well-drawn tales of Mexico

The information we have on author B. Traven’s life is sketchy. The name is a pseudonym, and he deliberately kept his real identity a secret. Journalists and literary scholars have connected him to prior aliases, but I don’t think his actual birth name has ever been ascertained with certainly. He was born in Germany and emigrated to Mexico in 1924. Traven wrote all of his literary works in the German language, and most of his fiction is set in Mexico or elsewhere in Latin America.

The Night Visitor and Other Stories, a collection of Traven’s short fiction, was published in 1966 by the American publisher Hill and Wang. Some of the volume’s ten stories had been previously published in a German-language collection entitled Der Busch, published in 1928. One story, “The Cattle Drive” is an excerpt from Traven’s debut novel The Cotton-Pickers (1926). As is typical of Traven’s work, all of the stories in this volume take place in Mexico.

Two of the stories included here are longer and more substantial than the other eight. In “The Night Visitor,” an American farmer in Mexico loses himself in his neighbor’s extensive library and becomes obsessed with pre-Columbian Mexican history. “Macario” has the feeling of an old Mexican folktale that Traven has adapted for modern readers through some O. Henry-esque storytelling. The title character, a poor, overworked woodchopper, has one great desire in life: to eat a roasted turkey all by himself. This humorous story takes some wonderfully unexpected turns. In both these selections, Traven inserts some supernatural elements that create a Twilight Zone effect. He doesn’t overdo it, however, to the point where these tales venture into the horror or fantasy genres. Of the book’s shorter entries, the aforementioned “The Cattle Drive” and the comical “When the Priest Is Not at Home” are both very vividly rendered and engaging stories.

The American writer whom Traven most calls to mind, stylistically and philosophically, is Jack London. London spent a few years in Alaska and the Yukon Territory during the Klondike Gold Rush and was able to parlay that experience into half a career’s worth of novels and stories. He brought the Klondike alive for armchair readers who would never venture there. Traven does the same for Mexico. Both writers depict their chosen settings in a naturalistically realist style but draw romantic touches from regional folklore and legends. London was a socialist; Traven an anarchist. Both often feature proletarian themes and critiques of capitalism in their fiction. Later in his career, London did travel to Mexico and wrote one excellent story set there, entitled “The Mexican.” Traven, however, is the best writer of fiction about Mexico who’s not actually Mexican. Katherine Anne Porter might be his only real competition in English-language literature.

Traven’s writing on Mexico is more than just typical tourist fare. He really makes an effort to understand and interpret the culture, mindset, and spirit of the Mexican people, including the nation’s Indigenous inhabitants. As a Mexicophile myself, I appreciate that Traven gives Mexico the same attention and consideration that countless other authors have given to Paris or London. Traven’s work sometimes resembles the writings of the great Mexican author Juan Rulfo, whose landmark collection of short stories, The Burning Plain, was published in 1953. In general, the stories here in The Night Visitor are more lighthearted than Rulfo’s, but they share a similar grittily authentic, sometimes eerie atmosphere and a respect for the Mexican peasant, the Indian, and the working man. For an American reader, it is surprising that it takes a German author to reveal Mexico to the non-Latino. These enchanting stories make one wonder why more authors from the U.S. haven’t ventured south of the border for literary inspiration.

Stories in this collection

The Night Visitor

Effective Medicine

Assembly Line

The Cattle Drive

When the Priest Is Not at Home

Midnight Call

A New God Was Born

Friendship

Conversion of Some Indians

Macario

A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies by Bartolomé de las Casas

Speaking truth to power in the 16th century

Perhaps a half a dozen contemporary book-length accounts of the Spanish conquest of Latin America have survived. These accounts now serve as foundational texts in Latin American history. Much of what we know about the early days of conquest and colonization come from just a few narratives, such as Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s True History of the Conquest of New Spain, the autobiographical Journey of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, and the Narrative of Some Things of New Spain by an anonymous member of Hernán Cortés’s army. Indigenous accounts of this period are even scarcer. One Spaniard, however, did stand up for the Native peoples of the Americas and documented their experience of oppression and genocide under the Spanish conquerors.

Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566) was among the first Spaniards to arrive in the New World. His father, who had served on one of Christopher Columbus’s voyages of exploration, brought his family across the Atlantic in 1502 to become colonists on the island of Hispaniola. At first, Bartolomé de las Casas lived on a farm with slaves and participated in raids and massacres of the Native population. In 1514, however, he had a change of heart and began campaigning to end slavery and the abuse of the Indigenous people of the Americas. He had been ordained a secular priest in 1507 and entered the Dominican order in 1522. De las Cases wrote A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies in 1542 and, during one of his trips back to Spain, presented the document to King Charles V of Spain and members of the Council of the Indies in hopes of influencing policy changes in Spain’s governing of the Americas. The Brief Account was published in book form in 1552.

The book is divided into chapters based on geographic location, starting with Hispaniola, Cuba, and other Caribbean islands. Mexico is divided into several chapters according to the provincial divisions of the time. Nicaragua, Guatemala, Venezuela, Peru, and the Rio de la Plata region (near Buenos Aires) are all covered. In each district, de las Casas details how the Spaniards subdued, persecuted, and tortured the Native population. De las Casas traveled to quite a few of these locations himself, so much of his testimony is based on first-hand knowledge. Some chapters, however, are drawn from letters or previous documents written by other sympathetic clergymen. De las Casas cites a lot of population and death statistics, but his figures should be taken with a grain of salt considering the difficulty of achieving accurate numbers in those times.

The historical importance of this document is immeasurable, but is it a pleasant read? Of course not. It’s horrifying and demoralizing, but that goes with the territory of this subject matter. De las Casas, as an author, also has some shortcomings. If you’re expecting an eloquent philosophical essay condemning slavery, like someone might have written in the Enlightenment Era, you’ll be disappointed. The text is basically just a catalogue of atrocities listed one after the other, with very little pausing for reflection and almost no conclusive summation. Some of the more interesting passages relate how groups of Indians fought back against the conquistadores. Although such efforts were ultimately crushed, they do indicate that the Native Americans were not merely passive and ignorant victims. One odd authorial choice that de las Casas makes is to omit the names of the perpetrators of these war crimes. Instead, he’ll use phrases like “a certain tyrant” or “this captain” or “that pirate.” In some cases, one can tell when he’s talking about Columbus, Hernán Cortés, or Ponce de Leon, for example, but one would have to be a professor of Latin American history to identify all of the unnamed persons he accuses in this book.

De las Casas has his share of critics. One measure he advocated to lesson the oppression of the Indians was to increase the African slave trade. Whether or not the Brief Account really brought about tangible changes in Spanish America, his speaking truth to power and exposing these crimes is commendable. If nothing else, we owe de las Casas a debt of gratitude for the historical documentation he has provided of this time and place.   

Dynamo by Eugene O’Neill

Failed attempt at profundity

I’m gradually working my way through the complete works of Eugene O’Neill, great American playwright and winner of the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature. O’Neill also won four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama, but this lesser-known play was definitely not one of his award winners. Dynamo premiered on the stage in 1929, with future movie star Claudette Colbert in one of the lead roles. The production ran for 50 performances, but that was considered a failure compared to O’Neill’s more successful efforts. After the stage debut, O’Neill made significant revisions to the text—including adding some new scenes and deleting a few characters—before publishing Dynamo in book form.

As the curtain rises, the set consists of a pair of two-story houses on the stage. Living rooms are on the bottom floors, bedrooms above. In some scenes, the front-facing wall of a house is removed; revealing the occupants within; in others, the walls remain, and the rooms are concealed. Characters frequently lean out of windows and converse with other individuals outside. In the house on the right lives the Light family: the Reverend Hutchins Light, his wife Amelia, and their son Reuben. In the house on the left lives the Fifes: Ramsay Fife, his wife May, and daughter Ada. Hutchins Light is a sanctimonious Christian, and Ramsay Fife is a confrontational atheist. The two fathers, therefore, have a natural and intense antipathy for one another. Ramsay Fife works at the local power plant, but Mr. and Mrs. Light look down on the Fife family as if they were trash.

Unfortunately, and not surprisingly, the two young adults, Reuben and Ada, are in love with each other. Mother and father Light in no way want their son involved with Ada. Fife, on the other hand, seems to view the relationship as a satisfying prank—his daughter dating Reuben is a great way of sticking it to that pompous self-righteous Reverend Light. The play is primarily concerned with Reuben’s growth into manhood. As he pursues his relationship with Ada, and witnesses some hypocritical behavior by the adults, Reuben’s ideas on love, sex, and religion change over the course of the play.

A debate between Atheism and Christianity would seem like a good premise for O’Neill, the master of dramatic realism, but here in Dynamo he takes it in such a weird direction, the play often feels like a comedy. Electricity is a theme that runs throughout the play, in the imagery of lightning, the power plant and its dynamo, and as a symbol for materialistic atheism. One character sees electricity—or in a larger sense, atomic forces—as the higher power in the universe. That’s not too far off from what many materialists, determinists, monists, or pantheists believe. When said character starts worshipping electricity as a god, however, O’Neill has taken that idea too far into silly territory.

We generally remember O’Neill for his classic plays about dysfunctional families, alcoholics, or sailors, but he occasionally wrote plays that were more experimental in nature. While some of those forays into more avant garde fare are interesting, this is one of O’Neill’s failed experiments. Dynamo might have had something worthwhile to say about the place of faith in the modern world, but O’Neill paints his symbolism with too broad a brush.

Rock and Roll, Part 3

More music history and biography
I occasionally review books on the history of rock and roll music. After reaching a critical mass of reviews, I periodically post a recap on the subject. This is the third of such “omnibus” posts, the prior installments being Rock and Roll (Auto)biographies and Rock and Roll, Part 2. Highlights of the past have included memoirs by Bobby Womack, Bob Dylan, and Neil Young, oral histories of Warren Zevon and Sly and the Family Stone, and a biography of session man Nicky Hopkins. Below are ten new selections reviewed by Old Books by Dead Guys over roughly the past year and a half. Click on the titles below to read the full reviews.

Heartbreaker: A Memoir by Mike Campbell with Ari Surdoval (5 stars)
Tom Petty’s lifelong guitarist Mike Campbell presents this candid account of his career as one of rock’s greatest sidemen. The story of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (and their earlier bar band, Mudcrutch) is an engaging rags to riches tale, and as Campbell tells it here, they wore rags for a long time before the riches showed up. Campbell also details his work as a sought-after session man and producer for other artists, including Bob Dylan, Fleetwood Mac, and Don Henley. Everything you'd want in a rock autobiography is here: every recording session, every touring milestone, every band personnel change, every interior personality conflict, and every record company business deal. Campbell’s humble and likable voice shines through in this very well-crafted narrative. This is one of the best rock memoirs I’ve ever read.

Drums & Demons: The Tragic Journey of Jim Gordon by Joel Selvin (4.5 stars)
Jim Gordon was one of the top rock drummers of the 1970s. He was briefly a member of Derek and the Dominos and Traffic, but he was also a session musician on thousands of recordings by many other artists, including the Beach Boys, George Harrison, John Lennon, Steely Dan, the Everly Brothers, and even television theme songs. This book provides a fascinating look inside the career of an expert session man. Behind this great talent, however, there was a darker side to Jim Gordon. A longtime sufferer from undiagnosed schizophrenia, he eventually went insane, killed his mother, and died in prison. Gordon’s tragic downward slide  into insanity is riveting, and veteran rock journalist Joel Selvin delivers a compassionate and moving account free of tabloid sensationalism. 

The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music by Dunstan Prial (4 stars)
John Hammond is a legend in the music industry. As a talent scout, record producer, and Columbia executive, he was one of the most influential trendsetters and tastemakers in 20th-century American music. Rock fans will know him as the man who discovered Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Stevie Ray Vaughan, but Hammond started decades earlier as a jazz impresario who helped launch the careers of Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday, and Count Basie. Hammond was also instrumental in desegregating the music industry and also served on the board of the NAACP. Author Dunstan Prial delivers a well-researched, balanced, and comprehensive biography that really gives you a sense of the personality of the man behind the music.

Why Bob Dylan Matters by Richard F. Thomas (3.5 stars)
An odd but interesting study of Dylan’s music by a professor of classics at Harvard University. Richard F. Thomas uses his prodigious knowledge of Dylan lyrics and classical (ancient Greek and Roman) texts to point out parrallels between the two. Focusing mostly on Dylan’s highly regarded work of the 1960s, his 1976 album Blood on the Tracks, and his late '90s and early 2000s renaissance, Thomas makes a reasonably convincing case that Dylan has drawn ideas and phrases from the works of Virgil, Ovid, and Homer and is somewhat obsessed with The Odyssey. Like most books of Dylanology, the depth of minutiae will be too much for casual readers, and not everyone is going to appreciate lengthy discussions of Cicero, Virgil, and Catullus.

Sound Man by Glyn Johns (3 stars)
Glyn Johns is one of the most highly respected record producers and sound engineers in the history of rock. He worked with the Who, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and Eric Clapton on albums like Who's Next, Abbey Road, Let It Bleed, Led Zeppelin I, and Slowhand. Johns gives the reader a whirlwind tour of his career, recalling recording sessions with a multitude of arts, from Rock and Roll Hall of Famers to obscure has-beens. This is primarily a music-business memoir about making records. There aren’t a lot of anecdotes here about rock stars’ personal lives, with the exception of the Rolling Stones. If you’re a classic rock fan, you’ll enjoy Johns’s perspective on the music biz of the ’60s and ’70s.

Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin): A Memoir by Sly Stone with Ben Greenman (3 stars)
Sly Stone was a genius songwriter, musician, and record producer who changed the landscape of soul music. He was also kind of a scary character, with a drug problem that allegedly fueled a vindictive demeanor and violent tendencies. That’s the picture that his bandmates and colleagues give in Joel Selvin’s book Sly and the Family Stone: An Oral History. Here, Sly has the chance to set the record straight, if indeed it needs to be straightened, but he mostly glosses over all the negative stuff and focuses on upbeat anecdotes about recording sessions and talk show appearances. The text, written in the hip conversational voice of Sly, is fun to read, but you don’t end up liking the guy.

Slowhand: The Life and Music of Eric Clapton by Philip Norman (3 stars)
British rock journalist Philip Norman provides an overview of Clapton’s life, but it’s not particularly well done or pleasant to read. It focuses heavily on Clapton’s early career and doesn’t cover much after about 1986. Because Norman is known as somewhat of an expert on the Beatles, nearly half of this book is about the relationship between Clapton, George Harrison, and Pattie Boyd (the woman who married them both). Norman has nothing good to say about Clapton in this book and seems to enjoy digging up dirt on him, so it’s a book about a not very nice guy written by someone who doesn’t like him. Sound like fun? You’d be better off just reading Clapton’s autobiography. It gives you a better understanding of the man and his music.

Hüsker Dü: The Noise-Pop Pioneers Who Launched Modern Rock by Andrew Earles (3 stars)
Minneapolis post-punk band Hüsker Dü never became a household name on the level of Nirvana, but they had a profound influence on all alternative rock that followed in their footsteps. Author Andrew Earles is so awed by this influence that he would rather write about all the bands that learned from Hüsker Dü rather than concentrate on a biography of the band itself. This book is more of a music-business narrative about recording, touring, and selling records, with little information about the personal lives of the band members. Earle also digresses into stories about every obscure band of the Minneapolis scene. Drummer Grant Hart and bassist Greg Norton participated in interviews for this book, while guitarist Bob Mould did not.

Trouble in Mind: Bob Dylan’s Gospel Years—What Really Happened by Clinton Heylin (2.5 stars)
Clinton Heylin has written at least a dozen books on Bob Dylan, but does he even like his music? He certainly doesn’t like the period he’s writing about in this book: Dylan’s three gospel albums from 1979 to 1981—Slow Train Coming, Saved, and Shot of Love—and the tours that followed them. Heylin has assembled a detailed chronology of events from this period, much of it too trivial for all but the most diehard of Dylan fans. I like this period in Dylan’s music, so I liked learning more about it, but I couldn’t stand Heylin’s snarky, pompous attitude and the way he denigrated Dylan throughout the book. The artist and this work deserve more respect and consideration. Read Scott Marshall’s Bob Dylan: A Spiritual Life instead.

Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras: A History of Blaxploitation Cinema by Odie Henderson (4.5 stars)
This is actually a film book, but if you know anything about the Blaxploitation genre you know that the music made to accompany these films was some of the best soul and funk music of the 1970s. Maybe about 15% of this book is about the music, discussing soundtracks and scores by such artists as Isaac Hayes (Shaft), Curtis Mayfield (Super Fly), Marvin Gaye (Trouble Man), James Brown (Black Caesar), Willie Hutch (The Mack), Bobby Womack and J. J. Johnson (Across 110th Street), Roy Ayers (Coffy), the Staples Singers (Let’s Do It Again), The Impressions (Three the Hard Way), and more.

The Secret Life of the Universe: An Astrobiologist’s Search for the Origins and Frontiers of Life by Nathalie A. Cabrol

Discouraging recap of our quest for certainty

Nathalie A. Cabrol, a French-American astrobiologist, is the director of the Carl Sagan Center of the SETI Institute (SETI = Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). She is very much qualified, therefore, to write about the latest research on extraterrestrial life. Her book The Secret Life of the Universe was published in 2023. These days, it’s hard to keep track of all the piecemeal press releases about exoplanets, unmanned space probes, Mars rovers, and such. I hoped to find in Cabrol’s book a comprehensive and intelligent recap of what we know about the possibilities of life within and without our solar system. She does a fine job of summarizing the present state of knowledge in this area. This book is generally organized from the Earth outwards, from Venus and Mars to other bodies in our solar system, and then on to the recently discovered exoplanets beyond.

Although we’re talking about other planets and stars here, astrobiology relies much on geology and meteorology—the workings of water, ice, gases, volcanism, and plate tectonics, for example. Since the life forms are unknown, Cabrol’s work, at least as revealed in this book, is more about studying environments that might be conducive to life rather than speculating about the life itself. She has deliberately written this book to be accessible to a wide audience whenever possible. In general, the text is less challenging than articles in Scientific American or National Geographic; it’s more on the level of USA Today. There are passages, however, where complex chemistry can’t be dumbed-down enough, and the lay reader may find it tough going.

In addition to filling Sagan’s role at SETI, Cabrol also tries to fill his shoes as an inspirational science communicator, but she is less successful at that. This book is educational, but it doesn’t generate a lot of excitement or a great deal of hope. As someone who cares about science and wants to learn more about the universe, I am hopeful that in my lifetime we will discover extraterrestrial life—by that I mean evidence of microbial life elsewhere in our solar system. After reading Cabrol’s book, however, I doubt that’s going to happen anytime soon. She points out lots of possibilities for life in our solar system, but also gives plenty of examples of why confirmation is impossible. We’ve had landers on Mars for 50 years, and we still don’t have a definitive yes/no answer on life there. For almost every other body in the solar system, Cabrol says again and again that there may be life miles beneath the surface. Given how many years and dollars it takes to develop exploratory space missions, it’s unlikely we’ll be digging that deep in the near future.

Exoplanets, and their diversity of environments, offer more hope of finding life of some kind, at whatever stage of development, but we’re nowhere close to sending a probe over light years of distance. Our only hope of discovering interstellar life is if it discovers us first. Cabrol briefly discusses UFOs, or UAPs, but that’s really outside the scope of this book, and she’s a skeptical in that department. More coverage is given to the SETI program, which is actually a number of different programs under the SETI umbrella. Not much luck there yet, either. Cabrol then goes from disappointing to depressing by closing the book with an environmentalist tirade that reminds us that we’re on the verge of rendering ourselves extinct anyway.

Scientists who take on the role of educating the public—Sagan, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Bill Nye, and so on—generally try to inspire a sense of awe and wonder in the reader, hoping to spark their interest in the workings of the universe. Cabrol tries to do the same here, but this reader was just left feeling hopeless and kind of bored.

The Naturalist on the River Amazons by Henry Walter Bates

An exemplary narrative for armchair explorers

Henry Walter Bates (1825–1892) was an English naturalist. His area of expertise was entomology, the science of insects, but in the 19th century scientists were allowed to be generalists, so he made discoveries in other areas of biology as well. In 1842, Bates embarked on an expedition to explore the Amazon rainforest and gather specimens of the animals and plants that live there. Upon completing an expedition, 19th century naturalist-explorers would compile volumes of scientific texts describing the species they brought back with them. In addition, many would publish a narrative account of their travels intended for a general audience of non-scientists. In Bates’s case, the popular memoir he wrote of his South American journey is The Naturalist on the River Amazons, published in 1863.

This Amazon expedition started out as a joint undertaking with fellow British naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace, who is now better-known than Bates for having formulated the theory of evolution about the same time as Charles Darwin. Once in Brazil, Wallace and Bates seem to have often split up and conducted their own research, and Wallace returned to England several years before Bates. It’s hard to tell how much time the two spent together. Bates only mentions “Mr. Wallace” a few times in this memoir. That’s not unusual for scientific memoirs of this period, however. There seems to have been a gentleman’s agreement that each explorer would talk about himself and leave his traveling companions to write their own books. Wallace published his account, A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro, in 1889.

Bates’s mode of operation was to travel up the Amazon to a certain city, acquire a house on the outskirts of town, and live there for a few years. From these home bases, he would make hiking or boat trips deeper into the wilderness to explore and gather specimens. In this memoir, Bates’s explorations center around three main locations: Pará, near the Amazon delta (today there is a state named Pará, but the city is named Belém); Santarém, several hundred miles further up the river; and Ega (now called Tefé), a small village on the upper Amazon near the Peruvian border. The Amazon region was already somewhat “civilized” by this time. Bates interacted mostly with Whites (Portuguese) and Mamelucos (people of mixed Portuguese and Indigenous heritage, the Brazilian equivalent of Mexico’s Mestizos), but he did encounter some Native tribes living a relatively untouched existence, as well as Blacks of African descent, both slaves and free. Despite the extent of Portuguese colonization, very few European scientists had explored the Amazon by this time, so new, undescribed species were ripe for the picking. In the book’s introduction, Darwin states that Bates collected specimens of 14,712 species, about 14,000 of them being insects, and about 8000 of those species (not just insects) being previously “unknown to science.”

The problem with a lot of exploration narratives of this era is that despite attempts at accessibility for a popular audience, they end up being too academically scientific. Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle (1839), though still widely read and highly regarded, is a difficult read for the non-scientist, as is Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America (1814). Bates, however, really strikes the perfect balance between travel memoir and scientific text. He really armchair travelers a vivid impression of what the Amazon region was like in these frontier days, but if you’re interested in biology, there’s also plenty of good stuff in here about the bugs, birds, monkeys, reptiles, and plants of Brazil. You also learn a great deal about the people of Brazil—communities of all different races and levels of economic and cultural development. While Bates was certainly not the anti-colonial liberal that Alexander von Humboldt was, he does not display a great deal of expected Victorian-era racism in this memoir. He does have a tendency, however, to judge people by their level of “civilization” and view those living further in the bush as dumb hicks, regardless of race. All in all, the strengths of Bates’s writing add up to an exemplary exploration narrative. For those who envy the lives of these pioneering naturalists—traveling to exotic lands, studying the natural environment, and discovering “new” species—Bates’s book is a dream come to life.

Parnassus on Wheels by Christopher Morley

Ma Kettle’s Travelin’ Bookstore

American author Christopher Morley (1890–1957) wrote or edited more than a hundred published books, but he’s probably best remembered for his first two novels, Parnassus on Wheels (1917) and its sequel The Haunted Bookshop (1919). In Greek mythology, Mount Parnassus is the home of the muses, and thus the word “Parnassus” has come to be used as a metaphor for anything related to education, literature, and the arts. In Parnassus on Wheels, Parnassus is the name of a bookstore in the form of a horse-drawn wagon that travels the countryside bringing literature to rural readers.

Parnassus on Wheels opens with a brief preface addressed to David Grayson, a popular author of the time, who wrote Adventures in Contentment and The Friendly Road, both of which served as inspiration for this book of Morley’s. Right from the get-go, therefore, the reader knows he’s in for the same kind of wholesome, homespun, lighthearted fiction for which Grayson was known. The character of Andrew McGill in Parnassus on Wheels, perhaps a fictional equivalent of Grayson, is a successful author and a bachelor who lives on a farm in the Long Island area of New York State with his sister Helen, who serves the role of his housewife, managing his domestic affairs. One day while Andrew is away, a traveling salesman pulls up to the McGill farm, driving the aforementioned Parnassus bookmobile. The proprietor of this traveling bookshop, Roger Mifflin, is not just looking to sell books but also to sell his entire business—wagon, books, horse, dog, and all. Helen decides to buy Parnassus, partly to stick it to her brother, who takes her for granted, and partly just to experience some adventure in her life for a change. She heads out onto the road with her new business. Mifflin accompanies her for the first day to show her the ropes of bookselling.

The spunky heroine of Parnassus on Wheels is not the typical beautiful young woman one usually finds in popular literature of this period. Helen is 39 years old, and by her own admission, “fat.” She also seems the unlikely owner of a bookstore since she opens the novel with an attitude that don’t take to no book-learnin’. The novel itself gives mixed messages about literacy. Morley’s clearly preaching the love of books, but in almost an anti-intellectual way. A century ago, it would have been difficult for rural Americans to get their hands on books, so Parnassus is a solution to that problem. It brings the bookstore to those who live nowhere near a bookstore. The message that Morley imparts through Helen in this novel, however, is that reading is good for people as long as they don’t challenge themselves. Country folk should stick to popular literature like Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, and cookbooks. Shakespeare would be a stretch for them, and they should stay away from philosophy or poetry.

Morley’s biggest mistake in writing Parnassus on Wheels is that he gives away the ending in the preface, so you spend the whole novel waiting for the inevitable to happen. Nevertheless, this book is moderately entertaining. Helen and Mifflin are likable characters. Everything that happens in the plot is utterly predictable, but you don’t mind so much because it’s clear that the novel was meant to be light, dumbed-down fare and never strives to be anything deeper. I certainly prefer Morley’s writing to Grayson’s. I put both authors into a literary category I call, “chicken soup for the soul,” which is not a compliment, but not necessarily an insult either, as long as you know up front what you’re in for.