Book: San Miguel by T.C.Boyle

Now this TC Boyle novel is well worth reading.

San Miguel is one of the Channel Islands off the California coast, off Santa Barbara. This book is historical fiction and makes a wonderfully engaging tale of the two families who lived on San Miguel, mostly from the perspective of the women, the wives and mothers.

The first small family unit was the Waters. Marantha was consumptive and not well and hated the island. The second family was the Lesters, and Elise (wife of Herbie and eventually mother of two daughters) loved the island.

They came to San Miguel because the men had dreams. They came first as caretakers to raise the sheep but hoped to make enough money to eventually buy the ranch. With only very occasional contact with the mainland when a supply or fishing vessel arrived, most of the time they were self-sufficient, small worlds unto themselves. There are many, many beautiful and evocative passages in this book: of the weather and the sea, of time spent ashore, of the business of raising sheep and the daily rhythms of the seasons, of passions (love and hatred) between the couples and always of the sense of island living in an era with few of the material or physical comforts that ease work in our time. Their time was the late 1880s through the first half of the 1900s.

Marantha:
"I'll tell Will, she was thinking, frightened all over again, terrified. Tell him it's not going to work, tell him I need sun not gloom, comfort, pampering, civilization,, that this is all wrong, wrong, wrong. Tell him I can't be his wife, can't sleep in the same bed with him, can't do what expected of a wife because my bones won't stand it, my lungs, my breast, my heart, my heart....."

"What could she say? She tried to be accommodating, tried to soothe him, tried even to scrub the place into submission, but the idea was a living death to her--the world was in San Francisco, in Boston, in Santa Barbara, not here. Queen? Queen of what? the sheep?"

Elise:
"As they emerged from the canyon and started across the beach, the sled gliding over the sand with a soft continuous hiss and the mule going easier now, she saw that the sea was alive with birds, an enormous squalling convocation of them--gulls, shearwaters, pelicans, all of them bobbing and wheeling and plunging into the careening froth of the waves so that the boat, the schooner was almost lost in the storm of them"

"He put the mice in an old sock and left them beside the stove, for warmth, then ducked back out the door and into the fog that showed no sign of burning off. She went about her business, careful where she stepped as she moved around the kitchen, the cobbler taking shape and the soup she'd prepared for lunch boiling furiously on the stovetop. Three times that morning he came in to check on the mice, patiently holding the eyedropper to their snouts, though whether they took any of the milk or not she couldn't say."

This was Herbie, Elise's husband The Legenary King of San Miguel, a complicated gorgeous character. All of the novel is just such fine writing and a complete story with a beginning and end, which is always an important criterion for me.

"They walked the hills, hand in hand, picked mussels from the rocks at low tide, sat before the fire at night and warmed each other in bed. And she had Marianne, who toddled around the house all day, chattering to herself and taking naps whenever and wherever the mood struck her and each night climbing determinedly into her father's lap for her bedtime story when dinner was done, the dishes washed and the light failing out over the ocean."

I don't like every book Boyle writes. So pick The Tortilla Curtain or The Women or even Drop City if you haven't read him before. Don't choose Talk Talk or Budding Prospects. Even his zuzu books are well written though and entertaining, I guess. The man surely can write.