I'm often drawn to books about people, often living in small towns, whose lives are bigger than may seem to the eye of the casual observer. And while I'm drawn to them I'm also often disappointed (Sherwood Anderson, anyone?) and like I could do better (well, duh...). Staggerford is one of those books.On the outside it has great potential. Miles Pruitt is a 35-year-old teacher in Staggerford, Minnesota, a small town with a supposedly big heart, if you can just get past the neuroses of the characters. You have an old Catholic school marm, a student in love with Miles whose mother is the town crazy going door-to-door to collect bones from dinner plates in order to make chicken feed, a gym coach who just can't get past the idea of not coming in first, and on it goes. As far as plot, there is not much of one in Staggerford. The people come and go and do as people do, but beneath their simple exteriors the reader comes to find all of the characters are hiding something from the rest of the town. Everyone has experienced deceit, whether at the hands of another person in the town, or at the hands of themselves. The secrets start coming out as the Indian Reservation nearby creates an uprising over the treatment of one of their children in the school.I wanted to like Miles more than I did. But I think that's also the point. He isn't a very productive teacher, and he is in love with the married teacher across the hall, and he has very little spine and even less direction. The fact that Staggerford is a small town makes it seem that Hassler was trying to portray small town people as unambitious and unfocused.I will say, however, that I read one of the funniest bits I have read in a long time:...[Miles] listened to Roxie Booth, who had never read a book in her life, review Love Story, which had been last night's late show on TV. She concluded her review by saying, "It would be almost worth it to die young so you could see how hard your boyfriends take it. Boys make me cry all the time. Just once I'd like to see them cry."Miles asked her if she saw the movie on TV."No, I never did.""You read the book?""Yeah, I read the book." She adjusted the ropes and chains and spangles that hung around her neck."Then why do you refer to one of the characters as Ali MacGraw?""Because that's who took the part in the book."Miles gave her an F.
The worlds Jon Hassler paints are ugly. Something in me recoils from the unprettiness of the scenery - the messiness of the characters' lives. Jane Austen, on the other hand, enthralls me. Her worlds are succinct, neat, tidy orderly. Even the chaos in her novels is well-framed by virtue, and never becomes too unhinged. In contrast, Hassler plays with the dark side of each mind. You never are allowed fully to escape from the fact of chaos. The situations in this book are - messy. The main character, Miles, is in love with a married woman. His student, a high school girl, is in love with him, her teacher. The moralist inside of me wants to run from this - it's ugly, unprintable - at least, I don't really want to admit these things into my fictional backdrop, where everything can be ideal, or balanced, or orderly, the way it never is in real life.Yet I continued to read, and then I stumbled onto this paragraph:"'So what I was thinking, Miles, was that maybe there is a similar process going on in human affairs. If you let sunshine stand for goodness in the world and you let rain stand for evil, do goodness and evil mingle like sun and rain to produce something? TO bring something to maturity, like those ferns? Does God permit sin because it's an igredient in something he's concocting and we human beings aren't aware of what it is? Is there sprouting up somewhere a beautiful fern, as it were, composed of goodness and sin?'"I underwent a transformation in the journey of this book. I found that my taste for Jane Austen and the orderly plot had somewhat limited me from the depths of richness that realism could show me. I found in Jon Hassler that I was running from the often erratic patterns of life itself, unable to see or appreciate that the world has patterns of its own outside of my narrow conception. What he showed me in Staggerford is that there can be poetry and beauty even in a messy world.
Do You like book Staggerford (1997)?
Hi! My name is Plot and I think the writer overlooked me in this book. That makes me so sad because I am really necessary for any book to be, you know, GOOD. I am a trick thing to nail down, aren't I? The writer sniffer around me a few times. Was I supposed to be the saving of Beverly the chain smoker? Was I supposed to be the big blow out that wasn't between the white man and the Native Americans? What? At any rate, I am so sad to be left out of this book. I am going to cry now. Love, PlotPatti
—Patti
The story of a week in the life of a thirty-five year old school teacher in the small town of Staggerford, Minnesota. The New York Times said, "A writer good enough to restore your faith in fiction." That's what got me to read this book. It's an old book. It's been around a few decades, so your sure to find it on your library's shelves. This was a book filled with rich descriptions, hilarious scenarios, and an engrossing story. I don't want to give away too much, but if you want a great read, you must read this.
—Elizabeth
This is Hassler's first book, and an interesting one. I enjoyed it, but am torn between 3 and 4 stars.It takes place over 6 or 7 days in Staggerford, a small town I believe to be in Western or Northern Minnesota. Its a nice town, but full of all the troubles of the 70's. The story revolves around the hometown high school english teacher. It starts very slowly, with the pace of a portait painter from before the camera era. By the third day you start to care for the characters and by late in the fouth day the action is flying along. They are rich and deep, and all have flaws and almost seem real. Yet somehow several become too much a caricature of themselves as it progresses. It's in part their flaws that make them real, but it also makes them seem to be from a different era.
—Matthew
