In the introduction to "Unpleasantries: Considerations of Difficult Questions," Frank Soos hits on what can be both enlightening and maddening for readers of essays.
"Our thoughts are not linear, and when we begin thinking of X and then discover we're thinking of Y instead and can't remember the chain of thoughts that took us from X to Y, we have demonstrated in a small way the path an essay may take."
Essay writing is a tricky business. By Soos' reckoning, an author sets out on a mental adventure somewhat akin to a physical adventure. There could be a general end goal in mind, but the stops along the way are where the adventure itself is found, and the final destination could be quite different from what was originally planned.
Soos, Alaska's current writer laureate, is a professor emeritus of English at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and has led an active life outside of academia. In this collection he's frequently looking back at his young years in Pocahontas, Virginia, a former mining town, which, he writes, "is falling back into the Earth, one person, one building at a time."
Instilling toughness
The essays on his childhood, the people he knew growing up and the fates that befell them are the strongest in this book. One early piece, "A Little Iliad," concerns school sports in a rough town where the adults had known hard labor and the battlefields of World War II and sought to instill toughness in their kids.
The concerns for the feelings and self-esteem of children so prevalent in today's schools would have been laughable to these grownups. Soos writes of football coach Tommy Lucas and Gaza Kovach, the principal, both of whom set rules but left the boys to work their conflicts out as young males do in the absence of constant guidance.
"Lucas and Gaza Kovach were preparing us boys for the world they had grown up in, the one they expected us to grow into," Soos writes. "Whether by accident or by design, their mixed messages taught us skills they believed we needed to survive."
In another solid essay on the town, "The Man on the Bridge," he explores the experiences of his immigrant family as they abandoned the dream of his grandfather to make it big in the New World then return rich to the Old Country, becoming Americans instead. His father belonged to a big family, one that had its secrets, but those secrets were hard to keep in a small town. It would be a friend, not his family, who filled him in on perhaps his family's biggest secret.
The Pocahontas Soos grew up in is largely gone now. The coal industry collapsed and little more than a ghost town remains, one that Soos returns to late in the book after both his parents have died. The sadness Soos has for the passing of a place that tried him hard but formed him into who he became is deeply felt.
In essays like these, the reader is drawn into a different time and place. While Soos moves about quite a bit, jumping back and forth rather than maintaining strict chronological order, one still gets a strong feeling for where he spent his youth and comes to share his sense of loss.
In other essays, Soos rambles much further and these can be hard to stay with at times. "Mont Sainte-Victoire, Approximately" wanders from a fishing trip in Alaska to the artwork of Paul Cézanne to rumination on Locke, Ovid, Jackson Pollock and even Pythagoras, to time spent on a stationary bicycle and a kayak, and through numerous other topics without ever landing anyplace. It certainly fits Soos' point in his introduction about the nonlinear nature of thought, but for the reader, it's easy to get lost and wonder what's the point of following along.
Lies we tell ourselves
A couple of other essays are similarly structured, posing similar challenges for readers. Fortunately these are in the minority. In the bulk of these pieces, Soos is a bit more disciplined, allowing his mind to wander while staying largely on topic. This is where his best insights are found.
One of those essays, "Some Fibbers," looks at the little lies we tell ourselves and others, small exaggerations that can easily spiral out of control and, when exposed, alter the course of lives and even history. Starting from a harmless fib of his own he moves on to a childhood friend who spun tall tales as an adult, ultimately resulting in a glowing newspaper article that led to his undoing. Soos also touches on the fraudulent explorer Frederick Cook and the doped-up cyclist Lance Armstrong. Part of the reason they lied, he notes, is that they knew we wanted to believe them. Yet each lived knowing the cost of possible exposure.
The schoolmate ultimately committed suicide when his web of fibs unraveled. This echoes an earlier essay in the book, "Naked to the World," prompted by the suicide of a cycling companion of Soos'. It's a moving piece on the limitations of life and the choice some make to break those limits by ending life themselves.
Death haunts this book. In a line from "Meditations on My Cousin Lou, Dead at Thirty-Three," Soos considers his cousin who was killed in a work accident and says, "I confess that I neither fear nor love God but have plenty of questions about what manner of God we are up against here." It's a thought that could summarize much of this collection.
"Unpleasantries" is an uneven but worthwhile book. The meandering nature of some sections, forewarned of in the introduction, bogs it down at times. But like a good jazz musician — a metaphor he draws in one of the closing essays — Soos often enough hits on some amazing riffs that make his noodlings worth sitting through.
Unpleasantries: Considerations of Difficult Questions
By Frank Soos; University of Washington Press; 2016; 208 pages; $28.95
David A. James is a Fairbanks-based freelance writer and critic.