Last week, thanks to the good offices of the Ottawa Public Library, I read Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents―and What They Mean for America’s Future by Jean M. Twenge.
As longtime readers will know, and as others will not know, I am into the generational-cycle theory set forth by writers William Strauss and Neil Howe in their books. So I wasn’t coming to this book fresh and unspoiled; I definitely went into it with an already-existing perspective.
Twenge’s main argument is that one generation is different from another because of the available technology in their respective formative years. I don’t think that’s a dumb thing to say, but there are a couple of reasons why I think it could be improved upon.
Twenge cites Strauss and Howe, but disagrees with them; she characterizes their argument as saying that generational personality is formed by the generation’s reaction to a major event in their younger years. That’s close, but really S&H say that generational personality is formed by the generation’s reaction to the whole era of the generation’s younger years. So, Strauss and Howe do consider the available technology as part of what helps shape emerging generations… along with the available culture, parenting styles, older generations, social problems, and everything else they might meet in the world.
Still, if Twenge wants to say it’s just the technology, not the other stuff, that’s fine, it’s her book. The problem I have with it is this: technology isn’t a force. It’s something people make. And those people are doing things for their own reasons. So, when she says that rising generations are influenced by the available technology, she’s really saying that they’re influenced by previous generations. Which isn’t that different from what Strauss and Howe were saying.
Plus… I have a hard time with the idea that technology actively influences anybody. Technology has no agenda of its own; it just allows people to extend human nature further in directions it was already going. The most I’d be willing to say is that the emergence of a new technology may allow a rising generation to express its priorities in ways that weren’t available to previous generations… but it doesn’t do anything to set those priorities.
Most of the book is Twenge’s exploration of a collection of research datasets that she digs deep into to describe today’s living generations. This part of the book is worthwhile and thorough, in that she gives us a picture of six generations that we might not be able to get anywhere else. If I ever buy my own copy of the book, which I might, it will be because of this part. The trouble is, Twenge’s argument about technology is not further developed in these sections. The generational descriptions are strictly factual and don’t say anything one way or the other about whether people grew how they grew or did what they did because of new technology. Or not much, anyway; maybe I missed it.
So I have my differences with Generations: TRDBGZMGXB&S-AWTM4AF. I think its argument is too limited and not presented forcefully enough, but it has worth anyway.
Just a couple more items for the Strauss-and-Howe-heads who may be reading this:
like everyone else, Twenge doesn’t use the S&H birthyears for the generations. She’s got the Boom running from ’46-’64 of course, she puts the Millennial-Zoom boundary earlier in the ’90s than I’ve seen before, and she’s got the Polar generation starting I think in 2013 or 2014
she cites S&H’s Generations and Millennials Rising, but in the GenX chapter she discusses 13th GEN briefly without noting that it was written by Strauss and Howe. Why? Did she forget? Not notice? It’s strange
This is a review of Neil Howe’s new book, The Fourth Turning Is Here. This part, above the line, I’m writing in early July, before the book is out and before I’ve read any part of it.
Neil Howe has been writing about generations for a long time. He and his late coauthor, William Strauss, wrote a series of books about their concept of generational cycles starting with Generations in 1991. Their second book, 13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?, in 1993, is a study of what we now call Generation X, and it’s the one I read first. I thought it was really interesting and hunted up their other stuff, and when their third book The Fourth Turning came out, I (along with a lot of other people) spent a lot of time on the message boards of the book’s website. This eventually led to a series of get-togethers in Washington and Nashville where we met Strauss and Howe, and also to some of our bons mots being quoted in their fourth book, Millennials Rising.
A quick description of Strauss-Howe generational cycles. First, a stage of life is about 20 years long. You’ve got youth (0-20), adulthood (21-40), midlife (41-60), and elderhood (61-80). Roughly speaking. This is all roughly speaking. Second, a generation is about 20 years long. A Strauss-Howe generation is a group of people in the same society who were born within about a 20-year period, who therefore shared similar coming-of-age experiences, and who therefore largely share a similar generational personality.
Third, a generation will give to society what it perceives to have been missing from society during its youth. (History produces generations; generations produce history.) Fourth, there’s a four-stroke cycle of generational types that repeats, always in the same order, and this generational cycle is visible in history, art, literature, and legend.
Fifth, this cycle produces 20-year eras (or “turnings”) that can be characterized by which generational type is in which age bracket at the time. Like, at one time you’ll have type 1 in youth, type 2 in adulthood, type 3 in midlife, and type 4 in elderhood. Then forty years later the type 1s will have aged to midlife, the type 2s will have aged to elderhood, and we’ll have new type 3s in youth and type 4s in adulthood. And their respective personalities will be one of the things that make these eras feel different from each other.
Sixth, this gives us a repeating 80-year cycle of historical eras. Again: all very roughly speaking.
This isn’t science, and yet it also isn’t historicism. Howe and Strauss think they’ve found a pattern, and they’ve identified a mechanism that they think produces it and will continue to produce it. They haven’t been afraid of making predictions, and a lot of their predictions look pretty good after a couple of decades. But a lot of what they’re talking about is inescapably subjective, and as such I don’t think it’s really falsifiable.
Many will say that this is a crackpot theory and that generations aren’t really a real thing anyway. I get that. I don’t agree, but I do think there are things to be said on that side. Anyway, I won’t argue; you don’t need to agree with me. There are other objections that can be made, of varying levels of validity. That’s all fine.
My perspective is, I think Howe and Strauss are on to something. The generational cycle makes sense to me, and since the mid-’90s, when I first learned about it, it hasn’t stopped making sense to me. It has vastly increased my understanding of history, by giving a shape to it. It’s fun to talk about. If you want to look into it, you can.
Some specifics. The “fourth turning” that Strauss and Howe refer to is one of their types of historical era, also called a “Crisis”, in which visionary Prophet generations (like Boomers) are in elderhood, pragmatic Nomad generations (like GenXers) are in midlife, capable Hero generations (like Millennials) are in adulthood, and sheltered Artist generations (like Zoomers) are in their youth. In this kind of era, society goes through a drastic and dangerous fundamental change that makes everything after it different from everything before it. Like the American Revolution, or the Civil War, or the Depression+World War II. Their book The Fourth Turning (1997) was a warning to everyone that such an era was coming and we would do well to get ready for it. The meaning of the title of the new book, The Fourth Turning Is Here, is obvious in this context.
I’m wondering, first, what the writing is going to be like in the new book, now that William Strauss is no longer with us. Both Howe and Strauss wrote books separately on other subjects, so it’s not like Howe can’t do it on his own, or anything. But my experience of them was always that Strauss was the showman of the two (he’s the same William Strauss who cofounded the Capitol Steps troupe), while Howe was quieter. It could make a difference.
But mostly I’m wondering what Howe is going to tell us about what’s going on. See, I think, and I’m not the only one, that the Crisis era began with 9/11 in 2001. I think that’s when Everything Changed. It’s true that that would mean that the Crisis came early; it gives us a pretty short third turning (or Unraveling era), from 1984 to 2001. That’s not necessarily a problem, though; something similar may have happened around the Civil War, depending on who you talk to. But my understanding is that Neil Howe considers the financial crisis of 2007-08 as the inciting event of the Crisis. He probably has a good reason for this.
But it has implications about where we are now. If the Crisis started in 2001, then here in 2023, after more than 20 years, we ought to be about ready to come out of it, if in fact we haven’t already. And I think it’s plausible that we have! But if it started in 2007, then we’re almost certainly still in it, and we’ll have to brace ourselves for a few years more of this nonsense.
Understand what I’m saying, because I’m not interested in sounding any more cracked than I actually am: I’m not saying, “we have this pattern, it says we’re in a Crisis era, therefore we’re going to do this and this and this”. It’s not deterministic like that. The generational cycle pattern is trying to be descriptive, not prescriptive. It’s more like, “we have this pattern, it suggests that people have an appetite for doing this and this and this, and that we won’t get tired of it for another few years, and until we do we’ll still be able to describe the era as a Crisis”.
I don’t want to speculate (one prediction I’m very confident about: there will be advice on how to prepare ourselves for the next turning!) too much about what’s in the book, but that’s what’s going to be at the top of my mind when I read it. A few more things I want to touch on while we have time:
Strauss and Howe have many prominent readers from the upper echelons of U.S. government circles. In the ’90s the cover blurbs made much of the fact that both Newt Gingrich and Al Gore liked Generations, for instance. Bipartisan, you see. More troublingly, the Project for the New American Century, Paul Wolfowitz’s group, were way big into the generational cycle, presumably trying to find a way to bend the arc of history in favour of their own nefarious ends. And of course ol’ Steve Bannon is also a fan, probably for the same reason. I swear you don’t have to be evil to like this stuff! If I could kick Bannon out of the club I would.
Strauss and Howe write from a U.S. perspective, and here I am up in Canada. I’m not the researchers they are, but what reading I have done has always suggested to me that Canada is on the same cycle as the U.S.A., give or take a couple of years here or there. If I’m right that the Crisis ended in the U.S. on January 6th, 2021, when Trump’s coup failed, then I would say that the Crisis ended in Canada on February 21st, 2022, when the convoy was finally cleared out of Ottawa, for instance.
Strauss and Howe may use different generational boundaries than you’re used to. It’s the least interesting thing to argue about, but I’ll list theirs just so we can proceed on a basis of shared understanding. Note the boundary between the Boom and GenX in particular. Today’s living generations:
The G.I. Generation (often called the Greatest Generation) (Hero): 1901-1924 (2023 age 99-122) The Silent Generation (Artist): 1925-1942 (2023 age 81-98) The Boom Generation (Prophet): 1943-1960 (2023 age 63-80) Generation X (formerly called the 13th Generation) (Nomad): 1961-1981 (2023 age 42-62) The Millennial Generation (Hero): 1982-2005? (2023 age 18?-41) (or, my speculation: 1982-1997? (2023 age 26?-41)) The Homeland Generation (often called Zoomers) (Artist): 2006?-?? (2023 age 0-17) (or, my speculation: 1998?-2018?? (2023 age 5??-25?)) a new Prophet-type generation (Prophet): 2019??-?? (2023 age n/a) (or, my speculation: 2019??-?? (2023 age 0-4??))
One thing about this generational stuff is that the best way to do it, by far, is in retrospect. There’s obviously no way to look at a newborn baby and say, “this baby is clearly going to end up with a different generational take on life than that two-year-old over there”. A lot about how we view the Millennials and Zoomers will depend on how we come out of the Crisis era into the first turning (or High era). We’re using the generational pattern to pretend we know more about what’s going on than we really do. Again, these generations and eras are purely descriptive: people will do whatever they do for whatever reasons they do them, and the generational terms are for making sense of it afterwards.
I suppose I should point out, if it wasn’t clear already, that I hold both Howe and Strauss in high regard, that their ideas have been very influential on me, and that both men were very kind to me the times we met. (At the same time, I like to think that I’ve still got enough healthy skepticism to disagree with them, or split with them entirely, if and when I think it’s warranted.) So this review is certainly not going to be a big slam.
Now for the part I wrote after reading the book.
Okay, I read it. I went through it pretty fast, but just flipping through it again while writing this, I think I might need to take another pass at it. I can do the review, though!
First things first: I wasn’t sure how different this book would be from the four previous books Howe and Strauss wrote about the generational cycle. I’m pleased to report that the narrative voice is the same, and the presentation of the material is as good or better than those other books. Should I have taken this for granted? Anyway, I didn’t.
Part of this is because Howe continues to reuse descriptions and citations that he and Strauss have used many times before. In how many different places have I read their metaphor about GenXers walking on a deserted beach that’s been ruined by Boomers? It’s here again (although significantly altered!). This is fine, for two reasons. First, every comic book is someone’s first. (That’s an expression. I’m not saying this book is a comic book.) Most of this book’s readers will be encountering the generational cycle for the first time. You have to write for them and not for the small clique of eccentrics who’ve been with you for decades. Second, how many different ways does one need to describe the same things over and over again? It’s a big book; no need to reinvent the wheel.
But, longtime Howe-and-Strauss readers, be warned: there is a great deal of material in this book that you’ve seen before.
Some of it’s better than it used to be, though! I was always dissatisfied with how Strauss and Howe dealt with music in their books. There would be a passage of, “This generation listened to this kind of music, and that generation listened to that kind of music, and…” and my reaction would be, yes? I’m sure they did; what of it? But in The Fourth Turning Is Here, Howe expands on this with some intriguing ideas about generational types and music. I don’t know if the subject is fully developed yet, but Howe has at least taken a definite step forward with it. That’s one example. Overall I would say that, yes, this book is worthwhile for generationheads.
In the first half of this article I described my disagreement with Howe about the timing of the Crisis era. Now that I’ve read The Fourth Turning Is Here, I understand Howe’s position much better. First, he manages to fit 9/11 into his ideas about a third turning (Unraveling era). Second, if I can interpret him here, you can’t have a Crisis without a lot of drastic action and chaos and death, which we have not yet had. Sure, the last fifteen years have been plenty eventful, but they haven’t been, from a U.S. perspective, World War II eventful. And, according to Howe, that’s the kind of scale that Crises operate on before they’re done. In this light, my argument about how the Crisis may be already over is like I’m trying to fulfill the technical requirements of a Crisis without actually having one.
I don’t know if I agree. I think it’s possible that Howe is insisting that this Crisis will resemble previous Crises more closely than he can know for sure. I’d say the same about his characterization of the Millennial generation, which doesn’t remind me of any Millennials I know. I’d say the same about his continued prediction that a Gray Champion figure will emerge to lead society through the worst of what’s to come. To quote Dennis Miller (another Boomer), when talking about Bill Clinton in a context remarkably similar to this one, “Maybe!… but I’m not getting that vibe.” The good news, and the bad news, is, we’re all going to find out. (Except, some of us might not.)
(I do have a dog in this fight. I have two sons, of an age such that if I’m right about the timing of the Crisis, they’re Homelanders, or Zoomers, who spent the Crisis at home not catching Covid. If Howe is right, they’re Millennials who have not yet seen the end of the Crisis. Since the role of Hero generations like Millennials is to be footsoldiers in the Crisis, that’s a prospect that scares me more than a little, so I’d rather I was right.)
A couple of things I wasn’t enthusiastic about. First, Howe deals with the current political climate with that kind of both-sides-ism that never fails to put me off. I don’t think it’s responsible. I do, grudgingly, understand it, though. First, Howe is trying to sell this book to conservatives as well as liberals (and has a day job in which I imagine he has to deal with a lot of conservatives). Second, he’s not dealing with “who is right” as much as he’s dealing with the question of “what are people going to do”, and that is a separation that can be made. I still don’t like it, but I’ll let it go.
Second, I think Howe underestimates the role that climate change will play in the Crisis. He mentions it, but focuses more on politics and economics as the things that the rest of the Crisis will be about. Maybe he’s right, but I think it’s a huge oversight.
At one point, Howe writes that the dominance of superhero movies is coming during a Crisis era, just as comic-book superheroes were in their Golden Age during the previous Crisis era. And that is an excellent point that, somehow, entirely escaped me up until the point that I read it. How did I miss that? I of all people should have clued into it. Maddening. Thank you, Neil Howe, for showing me how to tie my shoes. I’ll try to pay better attention.
When illustrating the personalities of the generations, Howe and Strauss have often used pop culture references to make their points. And I don’t think this has ever been their strongest suit. The characterizations often seem a little off. One example that struck me in this book is Howe’s reference to “works for me!” as a GenX catchphrase of the ’80s. Which… I mean, we said it, sure. It was around. But on the one hand I feel like their must be better examples of the kind of stuff we said, and on the other hand I mostly associate “works for me!” with the title character of the cop show Hunter, where Hunter was played by (Boomer) Fred Dryer. So: a little off, but nothing that really damages an argument.
But then there’s Howe’s repeated description of Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X as “sardonic”. I don’t know if you’ve ever read any Coupland. He has a sense of humour that he isn’t afraid to use, and he likes his pop culture references… but he isn’t sardonic. He’s one of the most earnest writers I’ve experienced. Douglas Coupland has some things he wants to get off his chest. Generation X in particular is (loosely) about characters who are trying to leave ‘sardonic’ behind, and who eventually arrive at a point of genuine affirmation. It’s still a very GenX book! But it doesn’t help to get things like this wrong.
I had one criticism in mind for this book that I’m going to back down from. Originally I was going to say that a big problem with this book is that it’s not really telling us anything about what’s coming. That it’s no different from The Fourth Turning in that it gives us the same prediction about what the Crisis will be like, but doesn’t give us any details, even with a quarter-century more information about it. But when I was flipping back through the book, I decided that that wasn’t true. On one hand, the generational-cycle theory has been developed some more, and Howe gives details about the structure of a Crisis that do shed more light on what it is we’re up to at the moment. This is one reason I have to reread it; I have to pay more attention when he writes about things like “regeneracy phases”. On the other hand, Howe and Strauss made their names by predicting only as much of the future as they thought they could, and no more. Unrealistic of me to hope that Howe’s got some kind of crystal ball now.
I predicted above that Howe would give us advice in this book for how to prepare for the upcoming first turning (High era), and he doesn’t exactly. He discusses that future extensively, but he doesn’t give us a checklist to consult. Fair enough. I’ll call my prediction a wash.
Overall it’s a well-written book that made me think hard about a subject I already knew a lot about, and made me want to read it again. Bonus: it may give us a way to navigate a decade of danger. What more could I ask from a book?
Conclusion: if you’re interested in this generational-cycle idea, and you can only get one book, this is the book you want. I think you should be interested, but you must be the final judge of that. Whether Strauss and Howe are right or wrong in their theory, Howe has done an admirable job of presenting their case. I give The Fourth Turning Is Here a strong recommendation.
Elizabeth Enright’s four books about the Melendy family are among my favourites of all time.
They’re kids books, written in the ’40s and ’50s, about the idyllic experiences of four kids (Mona, Rush, Randy, and Oliver) who live in New York City (in the first book, The Saturdays (TS)) and then move out to the country (in the second book, The Four-Story Mistake (4SM)), and about how their family changes over time (third and fourth books, Then There Were Five (TW5) and Spiderweb for Two: A Melendy Maze (S42)).
I recently conceived the idea of drawing a map of the area where the Melendys live in books 2-4. I just want to. Partly to see if I can; partly because as far as I can tell nobody else has done it. So I looked over the books and I don’t think it’s possible to do in a completely consistent way. There are some details that Enright provides that are… not *explicitly* contradictory, but close enough as to be unworkable as such. (Obviously, Enright’s priority was to tell good stories, not to enable my fanwankery.) But we’ll see what we can do. (I’ll try to avoid spoilers.)
Some context: the Melendys live in a big house called the Four-Story Mistake. It’s out in the countryside, near the towns of Carthage, Braxton, and Eldred, somewhere in New York State. There are real-life towns in New York named Carthage and Eldred, but they aren’t anywhere near each other, and real-life Carthage is too far away from New York City to make all this train travel they’re doing so casual. So I’m guessing this Carthage has nothing to do with that Carthage.
(I might want to do a smaller-scale map of the Four-Story Mistake grounds, and also a floor plan of the house itself. But for now let’s stick with the wider area.)
More details of these towns: Braxton is the biggest one, the most modern, impersonal and noisy. Mostly, for our purposes, it’s where the train station is. It’s close enough to bike to to see a movie. Carthage is the closest to the Four-Story Mistake; it’s a friendly kind of village. We know the most about it; it’s got two butchers and a jeweler and the school and the bank and a traffic cop and a bus. We never see Eldred; we only hear it being mentioned. Probably the smallest of the three.
One of the problems I run into when mapping this stuff is the issue of crossings. The Melendy kids are always wandering around in the woods. Fine. But there are roads in this part of the country, and Enright doesn’t describe the kids crossing these roads. Does that mean they didn’t, or does it mean she just didn’t mention it? Similarly: one of the most important features of the Four-Story Mistake property is the brook that runs through it. There are times where the kids go places and it’s not mentioned how, or whether, they cross the brook. Maybe they don’t! But if they don’t, then that has implications for where everything is in relation to the brook.
Okay, let’s get into it: the first we see of the Four-Story Mistake is when the family moves in. They arrive at the Braxton train station and take a cab to the new house. Father says the house is “miles away […] in a valley.” The road there is described as being straight, with no turns described. It is mentioned, later on, that the nearest village is three miles away. (4SM c1)
Next chapter: Rush explores and finds the brook. The important thing here is that none of the kids suspected the existence of the brook before this. (City kids. See a valley and don’t deduce a river.) Which means that they didn’t cross it on the way in; it’s on the other side of the house. Later, Father and Randy look out of the four windows of the cupola atop the house, and we get a description of the views in all four directions. It’s quite helpful, but it also causes us a problem, as we’ll see:
north: “the only long [view]”… faraway up the “shallow and wide” valley, trees, fences, the brook, and, eventually, a village, which Father says is “Carthage, three miles away”
south: “all you can see is spruce branches and the weather vane on the stable roof”
east: “all you can see is the brook and the woods on the hill”
west: “all you can see is the road winding back over another hill, through more woods”, “the road you traveled yesterday”
(4SM c2)
Okay, there’s some excellent stuff in here. First and most important: Carthage is three miles north and therefore is also the closest village. That’s tremendously helpful, and is repeated later in the book. No matter what other problems we run into, we will always be able to rely on the Four-Story Mistake being three miles south of Carthage. (Note also it says “up” the valley.)
Also, it’s confirmed that the brook is on the east side of the house. Which… it’s not the way I pictured it, but it’s unambiguous. And, finally, the road they traveled on yesterday is on the west. Sounds like it leads away to the west, doesn’t it? Not that it’s to their west, and parallel to the horizon, but rather leading west to the horizon? I’m going to suggest that what they see is the dirt road that they turned off onto from the main road, which is really more like what we’d think of as a driveway, however long, and that the main road isn’t visible from the cupola. Because it doesn’t really make sense the other way. (Enright does use the word “driveway” in the series, but is more likely to refer to such thoroughfares as “roads”.) This works, actually, because the description of the family driving in in the first chapter has them cresting a wooded hill before descending to the house. So, that’s fine: the hill blocks the view of the main road.
It does suggest to us that the road from Braxton is a north-south road, parallel to the brook. So is Braxton to the north or the south? Well, if it’s to the north, it must be pretty close to Carthage… but they didn’t see Carthage on the drive from Braxton. Let’s say, provisionally, that it’s to the south.
(I came into this exercise with no clear idea where Braxton is.)
A couple of chapters later, the Melendys get bikes, and Randy, Rush, and Mona take an experimental ride to Carthage. It’s described as a straight highway on which they swerve to the right at one point, and that puts them on Carthage’s main street, where Randy crashes her bike into the back of a parked bus. (Detail: Mr Wheelwright, the Carthage traffic cop, and his wife live in a house on that main street.) So that’s all right: Braxton could still be north on that highway and they could have missed Carthage on the drive in because you have to take that turnoff to see it. And I have the idea that it works better to have Braxton up that way.
(While we’re on the subject… how is Carthage big enough to have a traffic cop and a bus? It’s a village in rural New York in the early 1940s. My explanation: traffic cops are the 1940s equivalents of stoplights, and the bus is a like a Greyhound or something, not a local bus.)
A few chapters later, the Melendy kids put on a show, and some of their friends take a cab up from New York City to see it. One of the results of the show is that Mona auditions for, and eventually gets, a part in a radio drama in New York City, for which she’ll have to travel down there twice every week. This is one of the reasons why I don’t think the Carthage in the books is the real-life Carthage: the real-life Carthage is up by Syracuse and is about, like, five hours away by train. You’re not going to make that trip every few days for a radio show, and you’re not going to take a cab over all that distance to see some kids put on a play. The fictional Carthage must be closer to New York City. (4SM c7, 9)
Later on, the three eldest Melendys go for a skate on the brook. I was paying close attention to the prepositions here. Well, let me quote the passages: “‘What do you say we go exploring down the brook […]?'” “‘Why, you know perfectly well we’ll just end up in Carthage,'” “‘The other way, then,'” “They had to walk down the banks at the side of the frozen cascade, and then they took to the brook again.” It’s ambiguous, but it does seem like Carthage is upstream from the Four-Story Mistake. Anyway, the only thing they find downstream is a nice old couple called the Peppers, whose house is not so inaccessible that Father can’t come and drive the kids home from there. (4SM c9)
The only other detail from 4SM that we can pick out is that there’s a farmer named Peterson who lives “up the valley”, which seems to mean toward Carthage.
In the second chapter of TW5, Randy and Rush go on a scrap drive. They hook up the horse to the carriage and travel down the road in search of metal for the troops. They make three stops, and meet new friends at each one: the Addisons, Mr. Titus, and Mark Herron (and his mean cousin Oren).
The first question is, what road is this that they’re on and where does it go? Well, Mark and the Addison kids don’t go to school in Carthage; they go to the District School near Eldred. Okay, so, clearly they’re not on the road north to Carthage; maybe they’re going south on the same road. Or maybe there’s a turnoff or something. It’s not clear. (We do get more information on this later.)
But this stretch of road does open up quite a bit of the world to us. Mark knows lots of interesting spots in the woods where they can go and have adventures. Mr. Titus has lots of fishing holes where he and Oliver can go. Now, most of these places are just… places that are around there somewhere… that can populate a map, but that we don’t have explicit directions to. But there are some that have a bit of that kind of detail.
Originally I thought that this road they’re on led to Eldred. It would make some kind of sense. But I’m not sure it’s quite right. It might work, and it’s simple, but we also need to make room for all this wilderness; I wonder if it makes more sense to have Eldred further south, accessible by some side roads or something. I also thought of putting it south of the Four-Story Mistake on the highway. Near the Peppers! But this makes the whole question about where Mark and the Addisons go to school a little difficult, as it’s tough to figure out how that’s closer than Carthage. As for the scrap-drive road, I’ll spoil the surprise: there’s a chapter in S42 that establishes clearly that it leads west from the highway that goes north to Carthage. Good: let’s call it the Addisons’ road.
In fact, let’s skip to that chapter in Spiderweb for Two now. In it, Oliver is following a mysterious poem that leads him to a hidden secret. The poem tells him to head west from the Four-Story Mistake and describes the landmarks he’ll see on the way. The poem assumes he’s going to slog through some wilderness and come out on a road which (unknown to him) will take him past the Addisons’. Oliver gets off course a bit, though, and veers south and gets lost, and meets a kindly old lady, Miss Bishop, who puts him on the road and tells him how to get back home.
It’s a very problematic chapter for us. Some details:
– Oliver walks due west from the house and, as far as the description of his day is concerned, doesn’t encounter a road until he leaves Miss Bishop’s place
– Miss Bishop’s directions for how Oliver should get home are that he should walk east(ish) on the road in front of her house, and when that road meets another road, he should turn right and it’ll take him right there
– Oliver is surprised when he sees the Addisons’ mailbox (which must be the same one that Rush and Randy saw), because he’s used to coming to the Addisons’ by their back way, which is shorter to get to
– Miss Bishop lives in a place called Corn Hollow. Not sure what that is; if it’s a little hamlet or the name of Miss Bishop’s house. Let’s assume it’s her house; it’s not referred to any other time and we don’t see anything else around there. But it’s close enough to Carthage and Eldred that she refers to both of them to orient Oliver
Okay. So the first problem is, how does Oliver manage to get over to Miss Bishop’s without crossing a road? Because the Four-Story Mistake, as best we can tell, is between a road and a brook, both running north-south; it’s east of the road and west of the brook. You can’t go west from the place without crossing the road.
Unless! What if the road comes south from Carthage, passes the entrance to the Four-Story Mistake property, and then abruptly swings around to the northwest? Miss Bishop’s directions to Oliver still work. It means we have to come up with some kind of elaborate side roads to allow Father to drive to the Peppers’ to pick up Randy, Rush, and Mona, but it would work. (We might have to fudge things around to make it make sense that Mark and the Addison kids go to the school near Eldred instead of the one in Carthage, but that’s doable.)
Or we could just have the road go north-south like is sensible, and assume that Enright didn’t bother to describe Oliver crossing it. Or it didn’t occur to her that the road would be there.
The second problem is, if Miss Bishop lives on the Addisons’ road, why didn’t Randy and Rush stop there when they were collecting scrap? Explanation one: they just didn’t, that’s all, mostly because Enright hadn’t thought her up yet. Explanation two: Miss Bishop lives on a different fork of the Addisons’ road, such that Randy and Rush could get on the road without going past her house.
The third problem is that Oliver and Mr. Titus are great friends, and Oliver hangs out with Mr. Titus all the time. They’re always wandering all over the countryside fishing. And Mr. Titus lives on the Addisons’ road. So how come Oliver could be so unfamiliar with Miss Bishop’s part of the Addisons’ road?
That one we actually do have a partial solution for. Let’s say that the back lane that Oliver’s used to using to go to the Addisons’ place goes past them to Mr. Titus’s place too. That makes sense, doesn’t it? And we can also say that Mr. Titus’s favourite fishing spots are all further west, or, anyway, not near Corn Hollow (which has no nearby brook, as Oliver takes note of as he’s wandering around lost).
So let’s take stock of the roads we’re dealing with in the area. We’ve got the highway south from Carthage, which runs past the Four-Story Mistake and then either continues south or swings northwest after that. Then we also have
– the Addisons’ road, which runs west from that, and which has the Addisons’ and Mr. Titus’s front entrances on it (and, also, Meeker’s farm). Note that the Addisons’ front entrance must be basically due west from the Four-Story Mistake, but the Addisons’ road can’t start at that latitude; it must start north of there, or Oliver would have run into it too soon
– the back lane to the Addisons’, which probably also has an entrance to Mr. Titus’s property on it, and is easily accessible from the highway
– a fork off of the Addisons’ road, which has Miss Bishop’s house on it, and which intersects the highway somewhere north of the Four-Story Mistake
That’s a lot of roads to all come together at about the same place in the middle of the countryside, and I basically don’t believe it. There’s no occasion to have so many roads, and I prefer the simpler explanations for how it all works.
There’s another suggestive passage in TW5 where Rush and Randy go to Meeker’s farm to help with a fire. As they’re traveling, they are passed by the Eldred fire engine. This sounds helpful, as, if the fire engine has to come up behind them, it means that Eldred must be south of the Four-Story Mistake on the same road as Carthage and Braxton. But when it happens, Rush and Randy are on the lane into the farm, so it doesn’t really say anything about where Eldred is.
The last geographical description of consequence comes in the final chapter of S42. The directions Randy and Oliver get are to “follow Highway 22, proceed, and take the next turn right, beyond the cows of Herman Heidt. Travel a mile and you will see a Northern name and a tall tree.” They do so, starting in Carthage. It’s clear that they’re familiar with the roads involved: both Highway 22 and their turnoff to the right. For one thing, Randy refers to “the sight of Herman Heidt’s repulsive cows,” and since when does Randy think cows are gross? Must be some history here.
We haven’t heard of Highway 22 before. It’s not really satisfactory for it to be the road south to the Four-Story Mistake; for one thing, they know that road too well. I’d much rather have it be the road from Carthage to Braxton. (Which actually is the same road. But this is how country roads work: they change names as they go from place to place.) It’s one that the Melendys take a lot, but not all the time, and the modernity of Braxton goes along well with the modernity of the house that Randy and Oliver find there.
So, that’s simple; from Carthage, go out to the highway, go north, and take the first right. A mile east, and you’re at the house in the clue, Villa Borealis.
Most of what’s left is various spots in the wilderness that Mark or Mr. Titus introduce the kids to, and they can pretty much be fit in anywhere. Mr. Titus tells a story about a place called Abbot’s Slough, for instance, which is near the house where he lived when he was a child, and is also in this area somewhere; is it the same house he lives in now? We don’t know for sure, but it sure could be, and I think we might as well assume it. Other of his locales: Baggot’s Pasture, Squaw Dam, Powder Hill.
Mark knows the woods for miles around his place, and takes the Melendys to a place where blackberries grow, an old graveyard back of his farm near a burned-down church that was struck by lightning, a hill where arrowheads can be found, a quarry where one can swim, a cave that’s not too far from Steinkraus’ farm and the house of Mr. Cutmold the auctioneer, and a backwoods still frequented by several villains of the region.
So that’s all the information, and we can start putting the map together now. This is what I came up with; it may not be exactly right, but I think any map based on these books has to end up looking something like this:
I just finished reading 419, Will Ferguson’s new novel. It’s about Nigerian e-mail scams and related topics, and I recommend it. Ferguson became one of my favourite writers because of his books on Canadian history and culture, but he’s also done a couple of travel books which I liked. I suppose there was some chance of his becoming the Canadian Bill Bryson, which wouldn’t be too bad of a thing to be, but he’s taken a left turn by switching to fiction. His first novel, Happiness^TM, won all kinds of awards although I really didn’t care for it. Second up was Spanish Fly, which I thought was tremendous, and now 419.
One interesting but frustrating thing about Ferguson’s books is how eager his publishers seem to be to retitle them:
– Hokkaido Highway Blues was retitled Hitching Rides with Buddha
– Generica was retitled Happiness^TM
– Spanish Fly was retitled Hustle
Anyway, at the start of 419, this one character dies. Now, I don’t want to do the work for you here, but I believe that Ferguson was being very very careful and clever when he chose the name for this character. It’s a name that has appeared in fiction before, and in a context that contrasts very neatly with the themes of 419. I’m sure he did it on purpose. You go read 419–you’ll like it, it’s good–and then look up what other character had the same name as the dead guy, and think about that. It’s pretty neat. I like it when writers do stuff like that.
Recently I started reading John Scalzi’s blog, and eventually worked my way all the way back through the archives. That inspired me to try his actual books, which I’ve also been enjoying. Just last week I polished off Agent to the Stars and Old Man’s War, two of his earlier works.
They’re very different books in many ways, but they share some virtues: they’re extremely readable, they’re entertaining, they have admirably direct plots, and they both have something for you to think about (specifically, they’re both concerned with the nature and preservation of human identity, among other things). They’re in the highest tradition of genre fiction. And Scalzi makes it look easy.
One of the books I enjoyed reading when I was really young was Karin Anckarsvard’s The Mysterious Schoolmaster. Anckarsvard was a Swedish author, and the book was about two kids, Michael and Cecilia, who come upon a mystery in their little Swedish town, and get to the bottom of it by being plucky. There were sequels, but I could never get them all in the right order.
Fast forward to about a year ago. I determined to track down all these books and read them in order and see if I liked them as much now as I did then. There were four of them: The Mysterious Schoolmaster, The Robber Ghost, Madcap Mystery, and Riddle of the Ring. I was able to order the first three from a used-books website, but not the last one. That was okay; I’d get the last one some other time. But then I read some kind of suggestion someplace that Riddle of the Ringwasn’t a Michael-and-Cecilia mystery. So when I finally did order it earlier this year, I was curious about just what the deal was.
Turns out that the deal is that RotR does take place in the Michael-and-Cecilia-verse, but the main characters are Tommie, another girl in the same town, and Henrik, Cecilia’s younger brother. Since Madcap Mystery, Michael and Cecilia have grown up and gotten married. Michael has joined the navy, and is therefore hardly ever home, and Cecilia has had a baby, and they’re very happy.
Nothing against the story of RotR, which was perfectly serviceable. And nothing against Tommie and Henrik, who were engaging enough characters. But what I wanted was more of Michael and Cecilia. In particular, if they were going to fall in love and get married and stuff, I wanted to read about it. Even worse, I think it sucks that Cecilia goes from solving mysteries to being cooped up in an apartment with a baby and acting like she likes it.
Oh well.
I imagine Cecilia’s not as good in a fight as Lisbeth Salander. But she’s better company and just as reliable.
It’s a fantasy series by Canadian author Kenneth Oppel. It’s about bats. It would probably not be completely out of line to say that this series is to bats as Watership Down is to rabbits. Except that Watership Down is an all-time classic, and this series is generally decent.
Maybe my problem was that I had a hard time identifying with the bat characters, because after all bats are pretty unlike humans in a lot of ways. But then at the same time Oppel tries to write them as close to human as he reasonably can, and that also takes me out of the story, because I just don’t buy it that they’re like that. It’s tricky. He’s achieved a legitimately good adventure story, which I have to give extra points to because of how unconventional it is… but I had a hard time getting it down anyway.
Oppel has written other stuff I’ve liked better, like his steampunkish adventure series about young aviator Matt Cruse and young scientist/heiress Kate de Vries (consisting of Airborn, Skybreaker, and Starclimber); recommended. And then he did some books for much younger readers, including Peg and the Yeti, which I got a kick out of when I read it to the kids. So Oppel is okay by me, but the bat trilogy isn’t my favourite. There’s a prequel, Darkwing, that I think I will not hunt down; enough is enough.
Patience is important. That’s what I really want to say. Patience is important.
See, there’s this book, The Ghost of Dibble Hollow (by May Nickerson Wallace, whom I know exactly nothing about). It’s a kids’ adventure book from 1965, about a boy who spends the summer in the country, in a house that’s long abandoned but has been in his family for a long time. He meets the ghost of his great-uncle, who died as a boy way back when. Not a great book, but enjoyable and readable. I had a copy when I was young but I don’t know what happened to it.
I decided a few years ago to try to track down another copy, partly because I liked the book and partly to use for inspiration for this one project I’ve had on the back burner for a while. And it turned out to be really hard to find. When I checked on abebooks.com and alibris.com, all I could find were copies for like $50, $80 bucks. Which, forget that.
So I bided my time and kept my eyes open. And earlier this month I was at a used book sale where I plucked a copy of The Ghost of Dibble Hollow off one of the kids’ tables for a buck.
Matthew Elmslie 