Читать книгу Broken Ground - John Keeble - Страница 7

Kathleen Dean Moore

BROKEN GROUND is the story of Hank Lafleur, a man who tries to redeem his marriage, his lost child, his dying father's foundering business, and maybe his own hapless life by signing on to oversee a massive construction project in the high desert of eastern Oregon. Gradually, he comes to understand that the project is a prison to be built by a private consortium, and that an extra conduit will serve as an underground torture and interrogation cell for political prisoners. There is a creepy malice in the project, heightened by the fact that the reader knows—what author John Keeble imagined with uncanny prescience but could not have known decades ago—that horrors of this sort will in fact take place under American control and that they will take place with the tacit consent or unknowing silence of us all.

Lafleur knows his business. He is adept at the practice of bulldozing, an artist in the medium of broken ground, carving precise holes in the cheat-grass desert, piling rubble beside the river, coolly obliterating the hollows, even as his heart opens to their sublime steep shadows and dusky light. To do a job and to do it well, to do it beautifully—maybe there is redemption in good work. Or maybe there is only the squirming purgatory of those who do good work in the service of evil. To the extent that we are all Lafleur, the question matters.

Ground / n. the foundation or basis on which knowledge, belief, or conviction rests.

Today, twenty-three years after the publication of John Keeble's moving and disturbing novel, 193 men are still held at Guantanamo Bay, never convicted, tried, or even charged with a crime. The U.S. Department of Justice had ruled that some forms of torture are permissible, and, indeed, at Abu Ghraib, U.S. soldiers tied Iraqi prisoners' heads in bags, stripped them naked, burned them with electric cattle prods, and, in some cases, left them to die. Our prison system has become a Prison Industrial Complex—a corporate takeover of the criminal justice system, with profits rising as numbers of prisoners increase. More than 2.3 million of us, one in every one hundred Americans, are in prison. We have been told that this is all part of free enterprise or the war on terror or the war on crime—enacted by well-intentioned people doing what's best for America. Then we feel the ground shift under our feet. What we had thought was solid begins to shimmy like volcanic mud.

How does a person do what he thinks is right, inside a structure that is fundamentally wrong? How can a person know what's right, when even the most well-intentioned acts cause harm and when sometimes one does have to do something terrible to accomplish some good? And who can know in advance what will happen, what will justify a decision or reveal its stupid tragedy? Is it enough to mean well? Is it excusable to just not know? To look away? To look away while a child is lost in a river, while a nun is raped, while a ranch house is bulldozed—is that different from drowning or raping or destroying, and in what particular way? To know the good is to do the good, Socrates said, but what if you don't know the good? And what a crock of lies that is, anyway: of course you can know what's right and do what's wrong. Where in this sliding, seismic world can we find solid ground, something to stand on, a morality we can be sure of? And where, in the end, will we find forgiveness?

This is the desert land that John Keeble explores in his brilliant Broken Ground.

Ground / n. the surface on which man stands, moves, and dwells; the surface of the earth.

Lafleur's business takes him from the damp night-time streets of Portland, across the Cascade Mountains, through juniper breaks and sage flats to the far eastern edge of Oregon. Here are the Owyhee River badlands and bottoms. Flattened by hot sun, the landforms rise up in the cool evening, cut by the copper glow of the river itself. John Keeble, who is as intimate with this place as he is with language, brings the landscape to powerful life. Sometimes portrayed with slanting storm-light worthy of Albert Bierstadt, sometimes spattered brutally on the page—a rattlesnake torn in half, a chase across a crumbling cliff—the land is real enough to smell, real enough to fear. It is real enough to care about.

A few people live on the land where the prison will be built. They have made their living for a very long time in the two-pump crossroads towns and the high plains wheat fields. Wallace Stegner wrote, “Tell me where you're from, and I'll tell you who you are.” Indeed, with a few deft strokes—the pitch of a man's hips as he leans against his truck, the glance that lingers on a silo—Keeble draws the people of this place, as sun-hardened as stone. But when the bulldozers break ground, they break the covenant that binds the people and the land. Then Broken Ground takes on a different challenge: “Tell me what has happened to your land, and I will tell what has happened to you.” Keeble brilliantly sculpts the faces of this horror, the fragmentation of families and hopes, the fatal cynicism when the land is cynically misused.

Here, too, Broken Ground is a book of our time. Decades before degradation of land and air became a global ecological catastrophe, Keeble told the story of people displaced from their scratchy fields by the prison project. There are no easy answers in their stories, no strained lessons about sustainability. Rather, Keeble imagines for us the people who silently serve chili in the dusty café. He imagines the bulldozers—the smell of their exhaust and the rumble that shakes the ground, how the levers lower the blade, how the blade scrapes the earth to bedrock, and the rattle of dynamite in the bed of a pickup truck. What is lost, when people lose a close, sustaining connection to a place? What is destroyed, when the land is barricaded and paved? When the prison complex finally falls to dust, what vast time will it take to heal not only the land but the relation of the people to that place?

Ground / n. the area to be won or defended as in or as if in battle.

The re-issue of Broken Ground comes at a challenging time for fiction, and indeed for all art forms. What is the work of a writer in a world gone so dangerously wrong? Maybe writers' loyalty is to their work, and the great and sole obligation of writers is to write as well as they know how. But is there an obligation also to the time, to ask the questions that may have no answers, to challenge wrong-headed or destructive authority, to cry out from the margins in defense of what is beautiful and true? Broken Ground is evidence that a writer can do both, and, indeed, it is testimony to John Keeble's conviction that a writer must write powerfully even as he engages the quandaries of a time.

Literature is to culture as the layered stones of the Owyhee canyons are to time—beautiful, puzzling, sometimes tortured, enduring, revealing. Just as the texture of the stones expresses the workings of time, literature embeds the moral discourse of a culture. In the layers of detail and meaning in the stories writers choose to tell is a record of a culture's struggle with foundational, defining questions: What is a human being? What is the place of humans in the natural world? How, then, shall we live? In a time in which basic values are contested and our five-hundred-year-old Enlightenment understanding of the world is called into question, we need the wild imagination of the novelist, the created worlds, the contests of ideas enacted in an imagined place. As we enter the lives of fictional characters, see the world through their eyes, agonize over their decisions, cheer them, blame them, we feel with the characters, which is compassion, which is insight.

Broken Ground is an exemplar of powerful, attentive story-telling. John Keeble writes his paragraphs the way he might tune the elk-skin head of a drum, tightening, listening, tightening here, listening again, exactly, exquisitely balancing the tones he strikes, until the prose sounds loud and true. In this way he honors his art. Equally, he honors his time, calling out questions about corporate, national, and personal brutality—questions whose importance has grown over the years since the book was first published until they now dominate the headlines that brought the former administration to an ignominious end. So the book is both timeless and deeply, significantly, of this time.

Ground / n. the metal object buried in the earth to make electrical connection with it.

Broken Ground has been widely praised. “A powerful, labyrinthine novel,” the New York Times wrote. “An eerie vision of great intensity,” answered the New York Times Book Review. The Hungry Mind said, “No other serious American novel has confronted so directly and so eerily the slithery power of corporate dominance over humble lives as well as over our changing, dehumanized landscape.” All of this is true today.

Congratulations and gratitude to the University of Washington Press for bringing out Broken Ground at a time of pivotal change and renewed hope. Broken Ground will help us find the courage to change what cannot be allowed to continue, and the moral imagination to create what must come next. It is a high-plains lightning bolt that can help empower once again our sense of justice and human decency.

Corvallis, Oregon, March 2010