Charles Shain

Beware of this book. It could prove to be very expensive reading. Not expensive to buy, mind you. You can get a copy on Abe for probably less than $5. But it could be expensive to read. I've already ordered two books from Abe and put several more on my LT wish list! So it's reading this anthology that proves to be expensive, because you'll want to get the full books of many of the excerpts that you read. My next visit to Maine, I'll probably be looking for quite a number of these authors in the "Maine Alcove" at the Big Chicken Barn and other book stores throughout the state.

The Maine Reader begins with writings by the earliest European explorers in the early sixteenth century and runs through a short excerpt from Carolyn Chute's 1985 novel The Beans of Egypt, Maine, though some of the authors excerpted have only a tenuous relationship to Maine (e.g., Sinclair Lewis, the portion of Babbitt in which "George Babbitt Takes a Maine Vacation"). The materials excerpted include poetry, fiction, and non-fictional prose and include sections on the revolutionary and pre-Civil War eras, the Civil War, the forests and maritime regions and small towns, Maine artists, and early twentieth century and later twentieth century literature..

As with any anthology, there will be some quarrels as to inclusions and omissions. While I very much enjoyed the excerpt from Mary Ellen Chase's memoir A Goodly Heritage (which I own but have not yet read), I would have substituted a chapter from The Edge of Darkness, which happens to be my own favorite of her novels and, I understand, her own personal favorite as well (it also serves as the successor to The Country of the Pointed Firs and the predecessor to Olive Kitteridge) – but opinions will vary. (And note to fans of Elizabeth Strout, that The Maine Reader was published in 1991, explaining the absence of an excerpt from Olive Kitteridge or any other of Strout's work.)

One thing that I do wish is that the Shains had included, instead of Harriet Beecher Stowe's two "Letters from Maine," an excerpt from The Pearl of Orr's Island – either the incident where Moses (to Mara's chagrin) steals the eggs from the eagle's nest or Captain Kitteridge's telling the children tall tales of mermaids and other stories of the sea (to the chagrin of his wife). Considering that The Pearl of Orr's Island, in its legitimization of Maine regional dialect, was the single-most important influence on Sarah Orne Jewett, The Pearl is definitely something that should be included in any anthology of Maine literature.

And one other omission. Why is it that anthologizers tend to overlook drama? Why no reference to the plays On Golden Pond (1979) and The Whales of August (1980) and their film adaptations?

A couple quarrels. The books could have done with a good deal more annotation. Some terms used will be unfamiliar to most readers – and one, the word "detentive" (referring to "detentive forests"), used by John McPhee, I was unable to find in any dictionary. And a good map of the state, including rivers, lakes, mountains, and cities referred to in the text, would have been helpful. And even among the relatively sparse editorial commentary, some apparent errors appear – for example, in the biographical material on Robert Carter (1819-1879), the Shains write....

His involvement with the antislavery Free Soil Party led him to organize a convention in Massachusetts in 1848 at which a platform was drafted and the name Republican chosen. It was one of several similar political meetings convened that year to protest the Kansas-Nebraska Act and led to the formation of the Republican party.

....which would have been a bit difficult a feat for Carter to have accomplished in 1848, considering that the Kansas Nebraska Act was passed in 1854. {NOTE: It's occurred to me, since I first wrote this review, that the year 1848 is merely a typo and that it should read 1858, and if that's the case then I'm really just being unduly picky.}

Take the editorial commentary in The Maine Reader with a grain of salt and check out its accuracy before you rely on it, but read this book for its wealth of anthologized excerpts that, however, could prove a bit expensive to your pocketbook if you decide to further explore all of them as much as you're probably going to want to.… (mehr)