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Editor’s Note: Maine Bound is a column featuring new books written by Maine authors, set in the Pine Tree State or with other local ties.
FROM HERE TO THERE & BACK AGAIN, by Sue Hubbell, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, Mich, 175 pages, $26.
A transplant to Down East Maine nearly a decade ago, Sue Hubbell is a travel writer and the author of several acclaimed natural history books with a self-reflective bent, including “A Country Year” and “Waiting for Aphrodite.” Her newest title assembles 16 essays of varying lengths published over a 20-year period (1983-2003) in The New Yorker, Time, Smithsonian and several other magazines (two selections are drawn from her books).
Hubbell is on the road for much of this collection, sometimes accompanied by her German shepherd Tazzie (shades of Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charlie”). She offers moving vignettes of pre-dawn truck stops across America and an account of hand-delivering honey from her Ozark farm to several New York City outlets, including the World Trade Center. She goes out of her way to explore the offbeat and unusual, be it a magic convention in Colon, Mich.; Elvis sightings in Vicksburg, Mich.; Raye’s mustard museum in Eastport, Maine;, or the newsroom of the National Enquirer in Lantana, Fla. (the latter piece is titled “Space Aliens Take Over the U.S. Senate!!!”).
One of Hubbell’s sweetest adventures is recounted in “The Great American Pie Expedition,” a New Yorker piece that first made this reviewer a fan. On a dream assignment to taste some of the best pies in the country, the author eats her way through parts of Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Massachusetts and Maine, providing recipes along the way. In the last-named state, Hubbell settles into a routine of raspberry and blueberry pie, “each one … better than the one before it, which makes them difficult to write about.” Yet write about them she does, describing the desserts sampled at a variety of eateries, from the Village One Stop in Lovell to the Elm Tree Diner in Houlton and Duffy’s in East Orland (whose blueberry pie she declares “the best of all”).
Hubbell often draws on personal history in her narratives. In “Linnaeus,” for example, the devastating aftermath of a divorce leads this daughter of a botanist to obsessive classifying as a means of working her way through emotional debris. A description of a trip down a Costa Rica river in search of rare blue morpho butterflies reveals personal passions as well as a sense of humor. Entering the rain forest, Hubbell experiences “a shock of recognition: It was filled with houseplants. This is what happens when your dieffenbachia, philodendron, ficus, and begonia have exactly what they want.”
A nonfiction master along the lines of John McPhee, Hubbell relates natural and social history with engaging grace. Emotional resonance also characterizes her writing, as when she describes leaving her Ozark home. “Process is all,” she states at the end of “The Gift of Letting Go,” as she lays the last course of a rock walkway at her Missouri farm. Then she looks to the future: “And Maine, I reflected as I placed the final stones, is full of rocks just waiting to be harvested and put to use.” And, she might have added, plenty of great pie to eat. – Carl Little
Carl Little can be reached at little@acadia.net.
A DREAM OF PARIS, by Ardeana Hamlin, 365 pages, Ardeana Books, Hampden, Maine; $12.
Bangor Daily News readers may think they know Ardeana Hamlin of Hampden through her weekly column “By Hand,” which covers handcrafts, or by her local news reporting for The Weekly. But behind the decidedly nonfictional world Hamlin inhabits during the daytime is a closet novelist who delights in plucking pieces from the past and assembling them into a fictional collage. Inspired by historical events and her grandmother’s artistic aspirations, Hamlin has published “A Dream of Paris.”
“A Dream of Paris” follows Hamlin’s first novel, “Pink Chimneys” – another page-turner – published in 1987. In her second novel, the Hampden author succeeds in making problems and concerns faced by people a century ago relevant to today’s world. This dreamy story may appeal more to women than men, but if you think that means Hamlin’s novel follows the chick-lit trend, think again. This book qualifies as literature, covering timeless topics such as love, war and women’s suffrage with historical authenticity and a fictional twist.
The book opens with pots boiling at heroine Laura Dearborn’s house. Laura’s father, fueled by his own dashed hopes of singing opera, fosters his daughter’s artistic talent. Her mother, however, would rather see Laura abandon her “picture drawing” in favor of marrying John Butler Jr. and settling down as a wife and mother as she did.
Meanwhile, the flamboyant painter Madame Clementine Morse, who professes to have lead a Bohemian life around the world, swoops into a small Maine town near Skowhegan to claim her family’s estate. Over the mother’s objections, Laura’s father arranges for her to meet Madame Morse and seek her guidance in competing for a scholarship to study art at the School of Design in Paris, “not a conventional dream for a young woman in Downing, Maine, in 1911.”
Enter Robert Prince, who also signs on as Laura’s teacher, mentor and more. The young woman soon learns, though, that nocturnal dreams look different in daylight. Readers discover that Laura’s passions are not limited to covering canvas with paint as they enter uncharted territory with Laura in her sensuous first encounter with a man.
Besides her father, Prince and Morse, Laura’s other ally is her suffragist friend, Jane Richardson. According to Jane, “painting and creativity mean putting into practice new social ideas for the common good.” So of course, women will vote, women will paint – it’s all one to her.
Hamlin again shows her skill in blending fact and fiction as she channels the ghost of her aunt Hadassah Herrick, who kept the withering suffrage movement in Maine alive through her $250 bequest.
Beyond the suffragist subtext, the novel touches on such nightmarish events as the 1918 influenza pandemic, a world war, and a surprise snowstorm, all of which have far-reaching consequences for Laura.
In the end, the thread that binds this captivating novel together is Madame Morse’s favorite expression: “One must live, one must paint, one must dream. Voila, it is the same!”
Professors of women’s studies have a tailor-made lesson in “Dream.” And veteran Hamlin fans know what to do: Just curl up and read. – Melissa MacCrae
“A Dream of Paris” is available at BookMarc’s, Borders Books Music and Caf? and online at www.pinkchimneys.com. Melissa MacCrae can be reached at mmaccrae@bangordailynews.net.
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