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Radio Readers BookByte: Poet as Storyteller

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This is Leslie VonHolten of Strong City, Kansas, with another HPPR Radio Readers Book Byte.

There is joy in reading the story of Captain Kidd and young Johanna, the main characters in Paulette Jiles’s News of the World.

The plot, the characters, the setting are beautifully rendered in this story about the Captain’s task of returning the young girl to the family she was taken from four years earlier.

But there is an additional element that inspires me to recommend this book: It’s style. The sentences, the language, and its 209 slim pages make it just a pleasure to read.

The author Paulette Jiles is a poet first who came to novel writing later in her career. Her poet’s sense brings a grace to this hard story that lifts it to the realm of the near-universal. Although none of us have had lives anything similar to Captain Kidd and his horseback travels through Texas, most of us have stood at a moral crossroads and faced work we thought we were finished with.

Early in his journey with Johanna, Captain Kidd fights with his inner self. He is worried about his ability, and his purpose, to keep her safe: “I raised my girls. I already did that,” his rational self says. He is old, cranky, ready to—quote—“look at the human world with the indifference of a condemned man.” And yet when he protests again that he has already raised children, Jiles writes that—quote—“A celestial voice said, Well then, do it again.”

This is the author’s brilliant craft at work. Where many novelists would set the scene and distract with a focus on the coarseness of the 19th century west, Jiles delivers this inner argument with a sympathetic simplicity. The Captain was not looking to shirk his responsibilities. He was a man, like many of us, who was cowering in the self-doubt of doing the job well. But like Jacob wrestling with the angel, he comes out of that slim paragraph a righteous man.

Jiles uses these poetic descriptors throughout the story, and with this conveys emotion that is unrivaled in most novels I read.

The Irish woman Doris, who brings Johanna a doll and sees in Johanna the same psychic pain and loss she witnessed in survivors of the Great Famine in Ireland, describes how children—quote—“go through our first creation [as] a turning of the soul toward the light, out of the animal world,” and that being pulled from the “first creation” risks everything.  What a lovely way to explain to the men how children like Johanna will always live outside social convention.

Or when the Captain and Johanna come upon the young Kiowa men swimming in the river. He expects Johanna to yell out to them because—quote—“This was what she had wanted so much, to return to the Kiowa and the life she had known. The people whom she considered her people, and their gods her gods.” What a graceful way to convey a deeper meaning for the word “culture.”

News of the World is so much an adventure story of 1870s Texas, but it is also one of inner landscapes: where we are in life at age 10, or age 71. What that makes of us. The author tells a rich story full of grace and sensory detail, and without a word to spare. The characters come fully realized but briefly, just like so many people in our real workaday lives. It takes a poet like Paulette Jiles to distill these experiences into such a short novel.

This is Leslie VonHolten for the HPPR Radio Readers Book Club. I encourage you to read News of the World by Paulette Jiles along with us. Find more at HPPR.org, or Like us on Facebook.