Bangor characters provide 1800s ‘feel’ Fictional 19th century residents narrate tales of living during the city’s heyday

Editor’s Note: Maine Bound is a column featuring new books, which are written by Maine authors or set in the Pine Tree State.

BY DANA WILDE

OF THE NEWS STAFF

A NEW ENGLAND SONATA, by Gardner Patterson; no publisher information given, 2005; 64 pages, perfect bound, no price given.

There will be readers in central and eastern Maine who find comfort and pleasure in “A New England Sonata.” Its contents include the life stories in “blank verse” of 15 fictional characters based in 19th century Bangor. In almost all the pieces the accounts are narrated by the characters themselves, who range from theologian to “poor shanty Irish,” from town doctor to sailor and, of course, lumberjack.

The intent is to provide a feel for life in Bangor in the 1800s. In a way it succeeds, although the feeling is so familiar and antique it’s hard not to wonder if Fanny Hardy Eckstorm herself didn’t play some role in the writing.

The “blank verse” described in the book’s introduction is not really verse; it’s prose sentences arranged in long lines that over-run the margin. The characters do not so much tell stories as make factual statements about themselves, and because of this methodicalness, the voices are almost indistinguishable from each other. We are clearly meant to take what they say about themselves at face value, with no sense of that irony that can emerge when people say or believe things of themselves that are clearly untrue.

Still, readers who relish the facts and feel of old accounts of Bangor in its lumbering-shipping heyday might enjoy this book. You could look at it as a sort of “Spoon River Anthology” of Bangor, except prosaic and displaced in time.

Gardner Patterson has also written a novel titled “Bangor,” which was published in 2002.

BY WAYNE E. REILLY

SPECIAL TO THE NEWS

AND THAT’S THE WAY OF IT: A MAINE VILLAGE LIFE, 1907-2002, by Bird B. Stasz, Sheepscot Valley Conservation Association, 2005, paperback, 166 pages.

Dorothy Carney Chase was born and lived in Sheepscot, a picturesque village in Lincoln County. Bird B. Stasz, a teacher at Elon University, began to interview her when Chase was 95 years old and living in an assisted living center. The result is this delightful book of reminiscences on life in rural Maine in the 20th century.

The subjects include everything from Chase’s family, which included the eccentric Lucy Farnsworth of Farnsworth Museum fame, to homemade wine to blacks in Lincoln County. “She [Chase] is a gifted narrator and storyteller, her ‘take’ is clear and unsentimental, and blessedly her interviewer knew how to ask the right questions, all of which makes for an interesting and readable book,” wrote Sandy Ives, former director of the Maine Folklife Center, for the book jacket.

The book contains lots of interesting stories. There’s the one about digging up her grandfather’s grave to retrieve some diamond shirt studs and another about the theft of her horse, Donna, and another about the harrowing story of her own birth. These are complete stories and not fragments of half-remembered gossip or remnants of popular culture often encountered in many reminiscences.

Chase was a born storyteller. Besides asking the right questions, Stasz provides the context as historian, revealing things about Chase and the town and various characters in the stories. She inserts herself into the narrative where necessary so there is a constant interplay between past and present.

In the end, there is a chapter on Chase’s thoughts on old age and religion and death. She offers some advice: “…. you have to be independent. You have to say what you think. If others don’t like it, they don’t have to have you.” Readers will like what Dorothy Carney Chase had to say and will want to have her on their bookshelf.

BY DANA WILDE

OF THE NEWS STAFF

A NO LIFE STORY: A NOVEL, by Bill Pagum; Peter E. Randall Publisher LLC, Portsmouth, N.H., 2005; 250 pages, trade paperback, $15.

“A No Life Story” relates the misadventures of Bob O’Neil, a mentally ill recovering alcoholic. Bob spends a lot of time seeking help from doctors, psychics and financial advisers, and can’t quite escape associating himself with weird people who come and go from his everyday routines like clouds in springtime.

What results constantly has the possibility of being funny, although people who have to deal with mental illness in the real world might not see the humor quite the same way author Bill Pagum does. Some chapter titles are clues to the tone of the book: “Bob and Ted’s Adventure” (in which “Teddy” is a dog in a short story, not a kid in a cheap teen movie); “How Bob Shrank at the Shrink’s”; and “How God Drove Bob Crazy” (in which God voices dubious instructions which Bob follows and wrecks his car). The humor is in the situations, and for most of it, you sort of had to be there.

Although subtitled “A Novel,” “A No Life Story” is actually a series of loosely connected accounts of Bob’s calamities, loosely composed. Characters appear without introduction, as if we had known them all along, and disappear as completely. Sometimes the spelling of their names changes, which might be a clue to the speed at which the stories were written and edited.

Bill Pagum lives in Kittery, where he invents card games about substance abuse recovery and prevention.