Post 392: Hell at the Breech

Hell at the Breech by Tom Franklin. ISBN: 9780688167417.

How much are we ethically influenced by our jobs? How often do we do things in our work that we might not do if we had a "choice" of doing them versus keeping our jobs? This question is raised by Sheriff Billy Thwaite when he has to make the decision to uphold the law as it's written or break it in order to serve and protect his people, as he has been hired and is expected to do by his community. Franklin (through Thwaite) states it best here,

"His goddamn badge. Its weight inside his coat was a thing he'd grown accustomed to, a thing he wasn't aware of--like some internal organ going about its silent duty. And like some silent dutiful organ it operated a part of him, did for him certain things he'd not have otherwise done. As if his conscience had become grown about the badge and shaped around it like trees he'd seen with bark grown over metal signs nailed to their trunks, the sign as much a part of the tree as leaf or root." Page 170.

Most of you might be thinking to yourselves that you don't have a job where your personal morals, ethics, whatever get in the way of doing your job. Well, either you're very lucky, you own your own small business and treat your employees extremely well (are you hiring?), you have never thought about it, or you are so corrupted you are not certain where your true values lie. Think about even the lowly line cook. Surely s/he knows that the meat being served at the restaurant is probably not quite as good as the restaurant claims. At the very least s/he is forced to cut corners in order to meet quotas or fill orders within a certain time frame so that the cashier doesn't get yelled at by some asshole customer who can't wait the extra three minutes it would take to make absolutely sure his kid's burger doesn't have live tapeworm eggs.

Even in the library field we run into ethical dilemmas. In fact, I may have run into them more than at any other job I worked, because it is the one profession I've been trained for where they are almost more obsessed with ethics than doctors and philosophy students. We have privacy issues, we have issues of freedom of speech, we have access issues, have to deal with the homeless, the potentially homeless, the mentally ill, the physically ill, various levels of mental capacity and use, various levels of technological abilities, and the issue of which really useful service or staff member to cut in times of budgeting crises (which has been pretty much all the time).

Possibly the least challenging ethical question I was faced with during my day as a graduate reference student: "This student is in a hurry, do I try to show them how to do this on their own, or do I assume they won't pay attention anyway because they're too busy thinking about getting to their class across campus in five minutes?" Some days that question was easier to answer than others and some days I had harder questions, such as, "Do I email this article to someone from one of our databases even though I know it violates copyright law, but gee, our vendors have been steadily raising the cost of electronic journals and well, if they've taken a hefty chunk out of our asses..."

These may not sound like life changing moments, but when you think about how much time we spend at work making those kind of decisions, it can't not affect who we are as people. Some of that ethical fortitude is going to seep out into our "regular" lives and our interactions with family, friends, and strangers on the bus or at the Starbucks. The question is... Should it be allowed to? And if not, how do we even begin to change how businesses are run so that people can maintain their integrity and still do their job without causing too much chaos for business owners? Or do we all agree that leaving our integrity at the door when we sign up with HR is the best possible thing for god and country?*

This review from the Book Reporter was pretty accurate. I still found Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter to be the superior novel, if only for the lyricism of the prose.
LibsNote: Borrowed from a family friend.
*However you choose to define them.

Post 325: Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin. ISBN: 9780062048745 (eBook).

Spoiler Alert: I don't tell you whodunnit, but I hint at whodidnt.

I really, really identified with the character of Larry Ott. I was never accused of murdering anyone, but I certainly felt and understood the pain of not fitting in and being looked at like I had done something wrong. If anyone should get anything from this book it's how valuable the concept "innocent until proven guilty" really is.

Ott's financial, educational, and social life was pretty much ruined by the ostracization of the town. Granted, he was the weird kid to begin with, but had he been left alone long enough to finish high school, he might have gone on to college where his "strange" habit of reading, interest in snakes, and knack for "odd" scientific facts would not have been unusual. Instead, Ott was harassed right out of high school because people still believed he committed the crime, even though a body wasn't found. What surprises me is that Ott didn't sell all of his father's property and leave town after serving in the military.

I suppose that kind of abuse sticks with some people in different ways. By the end of the novel things have changed for Ott, not necessarily that the town has come to accept him wholeheartedly, but he finally decides not to live as a victim of other people's perceptions anymore. His way might have been braver than mine in the long run. Instead, I left the places where people threw trash at me from their pick up trucks or called me a devil worshipper or invited me to parties only when they needed beer money or a place to crash. It only took me 5 years to escape from that situation, whereas it took Ott 30 years to learn to cope with his.

Then again... It looks like I may be thrown back into the snake pit soon.

My roommate is moving and I can't afford to live on my own. So I'll be moving back in with my mother, who settled in the very place I never wanted to set foot in again. Looks like everything I worked for ended up in the garbage anyway.

There's an excellent book review by Bookmarks Magazine. I'm not sure why it repeats on their page, but you can also follow their reviews on Goodreads.
LibsNote: eBook downloaded from my library via Overdrive Media.

Post 324: Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin. ISBN: 9780062048745 (eBook).

There are a few people in this world who are so passionate about their preferred entertainment/enrichment media that they can get me to read, watch, or otherwise consume almost anything. Nancy Pearl happens to be one of those individuals, and she tricked me with her tricky tricks into reading this murder mystery. My regular readers will know the issues I have with murder mysteries, but not only did Nancy Pearl's enthusiasm and energy for this novel make me interested in something I probably wouldn't have picked up for myself, but... she was right about it.

This is probably the best reason in the world to be widely read and to have professionals who are widely read. Just because I don't like mysteries as a genre, doesn't mean that I can't enjoy them occasionally. The things I don't like about mysteries don't apply to ALL mysteries, and so I was really glad that I got to hear Nancy Pearl talk about this title, because otherwise I would have just walked by it. It has a lot of the things I don't really get excited about (a southern setting, an emphasis on race relations, no female characters worth mentioning), and yet somehow seeing Nancy's face light up when talking about it made me scribble down the title in the back of my journal. If there's one thing that woman can sell, it's books, and she does a good job at it.

So what made this different from other murder mysteries, other than it was recommended by someone I trust and appreciate? Well, it is definitely more centered on character development, which is something I find most murder mysteries lack. Some authors actually have very well developed characters, but choose to feed us bits and pieces of character over the course of a 10+ book series so they can keeping milking said character, or they just reveal the same character traits over and over again.

Franklin also seems to actually love language. I mean really love it. The vocabulary in this book is strikingly rich and varied compared to similar novels. And you can tell he really enjoys his setting in the way that he describes the town, the trailer park, the stacks of mail and paperbacks in Larry Ott's home. I'll give you a sample, this is the second paragraph:

"It'd stormed the night before over much of the Southeast, flash floods on the news, trees snapped in half and pictures of trailer homes twisted apart. Larry, forty-one years old and single, lived alone in rural Mississippi in his parents' house, which was now his house, though he couldn't bring himself to think of it that way. He acted more like a curator, keeping the rooms clean, answering the mail and paying bills, turning on the television at the right times and smiling with the laugh tracks, eating his McDonald's or Kentucky Fried Chicken to what the networks presented him and then sitting on his front porch as the day bled out of the trees across the field and night settled in, each different, each the same." Page 1.

What wonderful words I would have missed out on if it hadn't been for Nancy Pearl. Is there someone out there whose recommendations you read even if it isn't in your chosen genre? What's the best/most surprising book they recommended for you?

There's an excellent book review by Bookmarks Magazine. I'm not sure why it repeats on their page, but you can also follow their reviews on Goodreads.
LibsNote: eBook downloaded from my library via Overdrive Media.