Two books, two worlds

Moving books around the house has prompted me to re-read a couple of favorites.

One is 'North of Monadnock,' a 1961 collection of essays about life in back-country New Hampshire by Newt Tolman, a man my father knew. The other is 'Shock Value,' a collection of essays by schlock auteur John Waters, published in 1981, just after his most fertile period of movie-making, I think.

I love both books. But the worlds they come from could not be more different.

One is old-time Yankee writings from a guy whose family had lived in Nelson, N.H. since before the Revolution, and still does. The other is the proto-punk musings of a filmmaker from Baltimore whose aim at the time was to shock the sensibilities of the American middle class.

But these two books (and their authors) have more in common than you might first realize.

First, they are both written by individuals with a worldview that is complicated and interesting and all of a piece. The worlds are worlds apart, yes, but both writers are able to make a compelling (and entertaining!) case for them.

And their views flow naturally from their life experiences, which take place in settings that are completely different from each other -- one rural New Hampshire, the other urban Baltimore. I find each man's response to life completely justifiable, given their backgrounds.

But the most important connection they both share is subversion. The energy in Tolman's writing, it seems, comes primarily from a desire to dispel a hundred clichéd notions about quaint Yankee life. The old-time country store was not a friendly down-home kind of place, but a filthy rat hole often run by the most disreputable character in town. (Being a shopkeeper was no life for a grown man, it was felt.) The subversion in the Waters book is far more obvious: when Lady Divine's Cavalcade of Perversion includes 'The Human Puke Eater,' it's hard to miss.

I think I'm drawn to both books, to the point of wanting to spend time reading them again when so many other books beckon, because both men succeed in explaining their worlds so thoroughly and completely and entertainingly. They are both superb tour guides to places they know very well, and both trips are so good they're worth taking again. Hence the re-reading.

For me personally, the Tolman book represents my childhood, and not just in a general way. We spent our summers in that area (where my dad grew up) when I was a kid. I personally knew a few of the people Tolman writes about, and got just enough of a whiff of the whole scene for everything he relates to really resonate.

The Waters book, I think, represents my rebellion -- not in any specific way (I didn't go to Baltimore and join in the underground film scene), but the general rebellion that all adolescents work through in their own ways. In my case, I rebelled by going to college in New York City and eating at the White Castle.

But both books are windows into worlds worth knowing. I'm glad the great slot machine of life somehow led me to them long ago, and glad for the chance to revisit them. It's a rare case of me being grateful for being a packrat, and I'll take it.