Recommended Readings: A Novel Approach

Posted with permission of the publisher.

By Arthur I. Blaustein
From Make a Difference: Your Guide to Volunteering and Community Service

The instruction we find in books is like fire, we fetch it from our neighbors, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.--Voltaire

More often than not, volunteers are placed in communities or neighborhoods that are quite different from their own; asked to work with ethnic, racial, or cultural groups with whom they are unfamiliar; and confronted with problems, issues, and conflicts with which they have little experience. This section is designed to help you to be better volunteers by giving meaning to the old adage "To be forewarned is to be forearmed."

Though classroom learning and the reading of nonfiction can be helpful, they usually tend to be too academic, abstract, and theoretical. They tell you the facts but don't give you psychological, emotional, and moral insight into the complexity and ambiguity of reallife circumstances. Only fiction can give you a sufficient context for understanding these crucial aspects of the human condition. Novels can do wonders for your social vision and moral sensibility -- before, during, and after your volunteer experience.

Robert Penn Warren, our first poet laureate, warned us, "History is dying.  If this country loses its sense of history, it has lost its sense to complicate men's feelings and emotions. If I could, I would reevaluate the education system in this country, to emphasize history and literature." Warren gets to the heart of the Issue: the identity of a society -- or a community -- is determined by its connection to history and the moral values passed on through its literature. The valuing process is the lifeblood of civilized and human society, necessary for a shared sense of national purpose.

The novelist John Gardner dealt with the same Issues in the collection of essays On Moral Fiction:

In a democratic society, where every individual opinion counts, literature's incomparable ability to instruct, to make alternatives intellectually and emotionally clear, to spotlight falsehood, insincerity, and foolishness -- literature's incomparable ability, that is, to make us understandought to be a force bringing people together, breaking down the barriers of prejudice and ignorance, and holding up ideals worth pursuing. Literature in America does fulfill these obligations.

Warren and Gardner are absolutely correct. Novels offer genuine hope for learning how to handle our daily personal problems and those of our communities in a moral and human way. They can help us to understand the relationship between our inner lives and the outer world and the balance between thinking, acting, and feeling. They can give us awareness of place, time, and condition about ourselves and others. As our great Nobel Prize winner William Faulkner said, the best literature is far more true than any journalism.

Throughout history, the imaginations of young people have been fired by characters who function as role models. Yet when we look around us today, I'd argue that we find role models who are less than healthy and truths that are far from selfevident. We find troubling symbols of success, fantasy, or celebrity as, all the while, we are surrounded by a technology of speed and efficiency that neither questions its means nor knows its ends. In the past thirty years, massmarketing and advertising techniques have created an entirely new moral climate in America. The superficiality, the alienation, the escapism, and the hollowness are a result of a steady bombardment of confusing and deadening messages designed to reduce us to passive consumers. And we have paid a heavy price: a sharp decline in both civic participation and meaningful public discourse. We have become serious about frivolous issues and frivolous about serious ones.

How curious: while people around the world are risking their lives for American democratic ideals, we're voting in underwhelming numbers and telling pollsters that we're alienated from our political system. Prior to 9/11, the acquisition of more and more material goods had become our highest form of endeavor; terminal consumerism had become a way of life. However, as novelist John Nichols put it, "Thirty-six flavors doth not a democracy make." How has it come to pass that our founding fathers gave us a land of political and economic opportunity, and we have become a nation of political and economic opportunists? As we have come to worship the idols of power, money, and success, we have neglected the principles of justice, equality, and community.

Socially conscious novels force us to confront our society's inability to distinguish between authentic moral behavior and abstract moralizing. The former is a sensibility, a moral conviction informed by reflection; the latter is used to manipulate our emotions for selfserving goals. This distinction is especially critical during a period in which politics has become entertainment. There is a powerful difference between the glow that illuminates and the glare that obscures, between the freedom of imagination and the slavery of image.

In the face of the awesome power of indiscriminate mass marketing, American literature has a critical role to play. The job of good literature is to make distinctions, to break the unhealthy grip of phony myths and false symbols, to remind us of human values, to help us feel alive.

We depend on our fiction for metaphoric news of who we are, or who we think we ought to be. The writers of today's social realism are doing no less than reminding us of our true, traditional American values the hopes, the promises, and the dreams. They know that to point their fingers at the pain of poverty or the hypocrisy of injustice, and to expose false myths and symbols, is an act of allegiance to our nation and to our people.

When we read these novels, we learn about who we are as individuals and as a nation. They inform us, as no other medium does, about the state of our national soul and characterof the difference between what we say we are and how we actually behave. They offer us crucial insights into the moral, social, psychological, and emotional conflicts that are taking place in communities across America. We need such exploration today more than ever.

Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina (Dutton). An unsparing, passionate, and gritty work about a young girl growing up in poverty. It resonates with integrity, empathy, and realism.

Lisa Alther, Original Sins (Knopf). Set in the sixties South, this intelligent and absorbing story details the challenges, dreams, and follies of the era. The novel transcends the differences between races in an insightful and generous manner.

Harriet Arnow, The Dollmaker (Avon). A family moves from the hills of Kentucky to industrial Detroit. This epic novel tests the strength of the human heart against the bitterest odds.

James Baldwin, Another Country (Dell). A magnificent, tumultuous, and disturbing work about racism that rings with authenticity.

Russell Banks, Continental Drift (Ballantine). An absorbing story about a frostbelt family that moves to Florida to find the good life. Instead they find a nightmare.

Charles Baxter, Shadow Play (Norton). The assistant city manager of a small, depressed town in Michigan see his life fall apart when the chemical plant he lured to town turns out to be an environmental disaster.

Wendell Berry, The Memory of Old Jack (Harvest). Remarkable and graceful, set in Appalachia, offering keen insights into the life of an aging farmer and America's changing values.

Dorothy Bryant, Confessions of Madame Psyche (Ata). The twentieth century as experienced by a Chinese American woman. This moving account of Melli Murrow's saga is a metaphor for California's and our nation's multicultural experience.

Sandra Clsneros, The House on Mango Street (Knopf). A poignant comingofage novel set in the Latino section of Chicago with unforgettable characters.

E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime (Penguin). A rich and lyrical account of America's social history in the early twentieth century. It dramatically captures the spirit of the country.

Michael Dorris, A Yellow Raft in Blue Water (Warner). Compassionate and psychologically complex, this novel spans three generations of Native American women in the Pacific Northwest -- on and off the reservation -- who share a fierce independence and a love of family.

Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man (Vintage). The powerful classic about race, individuality, and identity. A southern black man moves to New York and learns the many ways whites are unable to see him.

Gretel Ehxlich, Heart Mountain (Penguin). Explores the experience of Japanese Americans exiled to a relocation camp in Wyoming and their relationship with local ranchers.

Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine (Harper Perennial). Stunning and haunting insight into life for today's Native Americans, on and off the reservation.

Denise Giardina, The Unquiet Earth (Ivy). From the devastation of the Depression to the hope of the War on Poverty, this is a moving story of a West Virginia community's struggle for survival.

Kaye Gibbons, Ellen Foster (Algonquin). An exhilarating and endearing tale of an eleven-year-old orphan who calls herself "old Ellen," moving from one woe-be-gone situation to another with spirit and determination.

Davis Gmbb, Shadow of My Brother (Zebra). Perfectly paced, a dramatic tale of a Tennessee town in the 1950s caught in a moral crisis over racial violence.

Ernest Herbert, The Dogs of March (New England Press). Brilliant, sensitive, and funny, this novel captures what it is like to be unemployed in the 1980s. Set in New England, itŐs the American dream gone bellyup.

Linda Hogan, Mean Spirit (Ivy). A magical and compelling story about whites robbing the Osage Indian tribe of their oil wealth in Oklahoma.

John Irving, The Cider House Rules (Bantam). A fine writer brings his incisive storytelling gifts to fruition with this excellent novel about choice, class, and Yankee common sense.

Arturo Islas, The Rain God (Avon). A Southwestern classic set in a fictional small town on the TexasMexico border. It examines the spirit of Mexican American life --  faith, family, and culture -- and how it conflicts with the Anglo drive of "making it."

William Kennedy, Ironweed (Penguin). Pulitzer Prize winner's shrewd study of the diceyness of fate. This modern Dante's Inferno about life on skid row is especially poignant as homelessness casts a shadow across our land.

Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams (Harper Perennial). A wonderful tale of multiculturalism in Arizona, about authenticity, community, integrity and truth.

Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memories of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (Vintage). Brilliant and haunting account of the Chinese American experience. Kingston's account of growing up Asian and poor adds a cultural richness to the landscape.

Ella Leffiand, Rumors of Peace (Harper Perennial). A fierce California girl comes of age during World War II, making her own sense of racism, Nazism, the bombings of Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima, and the coming of peace.

Thomas Mallon, Henry and Clara (Ticknor & Fields). Clara and Henry, the young couple in the box with Lincoln when he was shot, are the focus of this riveting account of the political and cultural conflicts of the Civil War era.

Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (Bantam). This enduring masterpiece, set in smalltown Georgia, is a compassionate study of how people confront the problems of poverty, race, class, and gender, and, most important, how they handle the conflicts of the human condition.

Toni Morrison, Beloved (Plume). Winner of a Pulitzer Prize, this is a powerful story of the legacy of slavery. The basic theme, that of the relationship between slave and master, examines the tragic complications underlying our historical experience.

Bharati Mukherjee, The Middleman (Fawcett). Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, this is a profound, Intelligent, and often funny book about recent immigrants to America and their struggle to survive.

Faye Ng, Bone (Harper Perennial). In a clear and emotionally powerful novel, Ng takes us into the heart and inner secrets of a family in San Francisco's Chinatown.

John Nichols, The Milagro Beanfield War (Ballantine). Provides nononsense insights into how the economic and political "shell game" is being run on ordinary Americans. Part of the author's New Mexico trilogy, it is a contemporary Grapes of Wrath, with Mark Twain's downhome humor.

Joyce Carol Oates, Them (Vanguard). A poignant account of the hopes, strategies, and chaos of urban community organizing during the time of the 1960s riots.

Tulle Olsen, Yonnondio (Laurel). A remarkable, poetic, and timeless book about a young family's struggle to overcome poverty during the Great Depression.

Ruth L. Ozeki, My Year of Meats (Penguin). A feisty Japanese American filmmaker takes on the beef industry, chemical corporations, and commercial advertising in this witty, provocative, muckraking novel.

Jayne Anne Phillips, Machine Dreams (Dutton). A chronicle of midAmerican family life, from the Depression to Vietnam, about identity, shifting values, and the ironies of a rapidly changing America.

Marge Piercy, Gone to Soldiers (Fawcett). A sweeping epic of women's lives during World War II that seamlessly blends political, social, and economic issues on the home front.

Chaim Potok, Davita's Harp (Fawcett). A compassionate comingofage novel about a young New York girl developing a social, moral, and political consciousness.

E. Annie Proulx, Postcards (Collier). Winner of the Pen/Faulkner Award. Proulx has written a remarkable story of the struggle of New England farmers to confront the loss of home and place in economic hard times.

May Sarton, Kinds of Love (Norton). This book is about truth, honesty, integrity all those traditional virtues that have become unfashionable. Three generations celebrate the American bicentennial in a small town in New Hampshire.

Danzy Senna, Caucasia (Riverhead). Birdie Lee's black father flees in the seventies, and her white, activist mother is forced to take the girl underground, where Birdie copes with adolescence and the complexities of her racial identity.

Mary Lee Settle, The Scapegoat (Ballantine). A stirring account of a historic strike in the coal fields, this novel describes the realLife struggle between immigrants (Italian, Greek, Polish, Slavic, among others) and robber barons. You won't find this in most history texts.

Jane Smiley, Moo (Random House). The financial, academic, sexual, and political scandals of a Midwestern university are laid bare in this satire of higher education.

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (Penguin). This classic novel of farmers forced to move West during the Great Depression electrified the nation and reminded us of our historical commitment to compassion, opportunity, and social justice.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jailbird (Dell). An unflinching mix of wit, politics, and class. Vonnegut's hilarious tale about Nixon's social policies of "benign neglect" and the Watergate era should be required reading.

Alice Walker, Meridian (Fawcett). A powerful novel about civil rights activism in the South in the sixties. Warm, generous, and complex, Walker's book challenges each of us to examine what it is to become a decent, responsible, and honorable person.

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Excerpted from Make a Difference: Your Guide to Volunteering and Community Service by Arthur I. Blaustein ©2002 Heyday Books P.O. Box 9145 Berkley, CA 94709 , USA p:(510) 5493564 f: (510)5491889 e: orders@heydaybooks.com also available through amazon.com.

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