In Karen Chase’s new collection of essays, history—public and private—is embarrassing. Personal. Complicated. Chase sounds multiple depths, plumbing her personal history in the America as it was and has been during her lifetime. Reading these essays, we experience time passing and the sweep of modern American cultural history.
In “Hedgeballs and Rinkydinks” Chase has given her son her old car, and they’re driving it to his home in Santa Fe. While the essay characterizes their relationship (warm) and some of their family history (complicated by divorce), it also surveys the geo-cultural landscape along their route, recounting the landmarks they see and the songs they sing in the car. She is old enough to know the words to Joni Mitchell’s “Morning Morgantown,” Bob Dylan’s “One More Cup of Coffee (Valley Below),” and Hare Krishna’s chanting, as well as to have dodged a blind date with Timothy Leary’s friend Richard Alpert (AKA Baba Ram Dass). Along the route, she shares her impressions. Seemingly quick and tossed off, her travel notes are actually carefully chosen objects that characterize place: a power plant, smokestacks, and coal barges along the Ohio River, “ethereal billows of carbon spewing into the sky”; Elvis impersonation night at a Mexican restaurant in La Grange, Ky.; straight roads, grain elevators, and dry cornstalks through the Midwest.
Chase grew up and studied on the East Coast, and like many of her generation and left-leaning political stance, she stuck to “exploring the corners of the country.” We witness Chase as she travels across the middle of the country, “absorbing a new geography,” both emotional and geographical. Geography provides the occasion to reconsider her past. The previous summer, her two sons had cared for their dying father, who “walked out the door” when they were children. She recalls:
The sordid details of our divorce and the turmoil it caused crowded out the possibility of much contact … He was on the outer edge of my life. Now, with his sudden actual death, I, to my surprise, was drawn to mourn the richness he had brought to our family’s young years.
Below the easy travelogue, the details of motels and diners, the passing glimpses of architecture and geography, the essay concerns the reassessment of personal history over time—with her sons, her ex-husband, and her own youth. She is a strong enough writer—and confident enough—to allow the subject of the essay to ride beneath its surface. The abiding but unspoken preoccupation of this collection is the writer’s calling: to observe herself as she was and is now and to examine that self in time and culture.
As narrator, Chase is unassuming. She is a small woman; she chats; she sings along with the playlist. She is friendly and familiar, like the neighbor who has just come in through the back door and kicked off her shoes. The neighbor is carrying a one-pot dish, and when you taste it, you sense a subtle blend of spices. So Chase’s essays feel grounded in the writer’s biography but reach beyond the local to historical currents. Personal history is the river through which these currents run.
The crosscurrents of personal and public history deepen in “Polio Boulevard,” where Chase narrates the story of her hospital stay for polio, which she contracted when she was 10 years old. “Everything leads me back to my polio days now.” Her narrative is fragmented in the way a patient’s memories might fragment in and out of dreams over a long hospital stay in an iron lung. She sees President Roosevelt’s image on television; she dreams about him. His life is linked to hers by the disease they share. “History is confusing. It is like a braid—you and I and everyone else interweave.”
Chase’s treatment for and survival from polio drove her interest and research in FDR and offered her a context for considering his personal and public life, the careful development of his public image, and his relationships with Eleanor and Alice. Chase tells this story in “Ship Ahoy: FDR’s Houseboat Years” (an excerpt from her longer work, “FDR on his Houseboat: The Larooco Log, 1924–1926”).
In her road trip essay, “Hedgeballs and Rinkydinks,” she describes herself as a young mother. “Because I was in my early twenties when I gave birth to my sons, we grew up together. In those years, I was mistaken for their older sister or the babysitter.” The depiction is consonant with the modest portrait she has painted of herself. But this disarming descriptor belongs to the past. The mature narrator of this collection is assessing her life and her skill as a writer in the context of who she had been and what she is capable of now.
By the time Chase drives across the country and writes “Learning to Shoot” and “To Befriend Only to Betray,” she is interviewing men twice her size, all of whom are packing guns. The power of these two essays, which comprise the final section of the collection entitled “Horrors,” resides in the contrast between the diminutive narrator and the men she interviews, as well as her refusal in each case to describe her subjects in the way we expect a Sarah Lawrence graduate to describe men with guns. She is aware of how her physical presence affects those she interviews. She dresses for an interview with an undercover agent, “first trying on my white linen sheath … Then I thought, No wearing white is symbolically all wrong, so I switched to a beige version of the sheath.” She dresses for neutrality, a metaphor for how she interacts with her subjects and her willingness—eagerness—to meet them in their own worlds. She allows both the criminal hunters and the federal agents who infiltrate their group to display their humanity. She convinces us that she has allowed her characters/subjects to present themselves as they see themselves. The undercover agents are the guys enforcing the law, but they are also betrayers. One whispers to Chase how dark and dangerous their mission was. The bear hunter is a “a creepy, sinewy man.” She tells him she is “Trying to piece together these two people, you in the [grisly] video [of a bear slaughter] and you as a family man.” She is looking for a portrait of him that is whole. Long after the events, he has nightmares, still distraught about the lies and betrayal by the men he thought were his friends. He felt “he was a good man at heart.”
On their road trip, mother and son sing “America the Beautiful.” The collection is suffused with America—its music, its highways and industrial landscape—and the slice of history through which Chase has lived. The essays are colored with the near-past in the way Joan Didion’s work is washed with her past. In her Preface, Chase quotes Didion about the emphasis on the “I I I” of personal essays. “It shows how self-centered a person can be,” says Chase. Her reference to Didion affirms that in showing “how this particular person moved forward at this particular time on earth,” Chase recalls an eccentric and particular America in which she has lived. She has tuned her hearing to the sound of the decades that formed her. Perhaps, like Didion, no one else has heard the pitch quite like she has.
Author Karen Chase will be appearing at The Bookstore, in Lenox, on Sunday, March 10, at 4 p.m. She will be in conversation with The Bookstore owner Matthew Tannenbaum and will do a reading from her book, “History is Embarrassing.”
