Pretty soon I may post a list of my favorite books of the year. By which I mean my year, the books I read in 2008, not books published this year. Between waiting for them to become available at the library and/or waiting for them to come out in paperback, it's rare that I get to read a book hot off the press. Anyway, one of my absolute top reads this year was Strange As This Weather Has Been by Ann Pancake.
I was reminded of this wonderful novel by an alarming story in yesterday's New York Times. It seems that the horror show of last-minute rule changes the Bush administration is rushing to add to its eight-year-long list of atrocities includes a rule that, according to the Times, "gives coal companies a legal right to do what, in the past, they could do only in exceptional circumstances." The rule will facilitate and encourage the coal industry's horrific move toward wholesale mountaintop removal--that's right, mountaintop removal, where coal companies simply blast off the entire top of a mountain to get at the coal underneath--by permitting the resultant toxic runoff to bury valleys and destroy rivers and streams.
Pancake's novel is a wonderful example of how fiction can raise readers' consciousness and even, one hopes, move them to action. It's about a family in the West Virginia coal country whose lives are disrupted, devastated, by mountaintop removal. The wrenching story opened my eyes about how people's health and the beautiful green hills are being destroyed and moved me to learn more about the ongoing struggle to stop Big Coal. The novel is an example of something else, too: how political fiction can rise to the absolute highest reaches of art. What Ann Pancake does with language is a new and beautiful thing.
For more about how communities are organizing against mountaintop removal, this website is a start.
Meanwhile, in Manhattan...
The landscape may be the glass canyons of New York, not the mountains of Appalachia, but there's plenty of wreckage draining down the city's streets this week in the wake of an orgy of restructuring in the publishing industry. For a blow-by-blow of at least the most evident of the carnage--editors sacked, imprints erased, authors in limbo--the blogs Moby Lives and MediaBistro/Galleycat are good starting places. It's not easy, however, to find the true extent of the bloodletting, by which I mean the layoffs and wage cuts and benefit takebacks affecting the thousandfold work force that includes not only those who sit at desks in the skyscrapers but also those who manufacture and distribute and sell the books and for that matter those who cut the trees and process the paper and also all the related low-wage high-tech workers in cities like Bangalore and Manila to whom much of the labor is no doubt being shifted. Yet it's not hard to see what's happening. This is an industry that had already spent much of the last two decades consolidating. Hence company names like Houghton Miflin Harcourt. Hence every imprint from Doubleday to Knopf to Crown to Shocken actually being part of the monster that is Random House. Hence every previous wave of layoffs and cuts.
The only raison d'etre for any capitalist enterprise is profit. The only means to profit is by exploiting labor. In a time of financial crisis brought about by overproduction, in publishing as in every other industry, the only option to maintain profitability is to ramp up the level of exploitation. Fewer workers doing more. Squeeze 'em for every penny.
The spectacle du jour is the Big Three auto CEOs (with their loyal lackey Ron Gettelfinger at their sides) demanding their due on Capitol Hill. Tomorrow, who knows, it might be the book biz's biggies. If he were still alive, would the sainted Bennett Cerf be dancing to big money's tune? He'd have to, or be out of a job.
