Plow or In The Hollows, a novel by Saz Keukan

 

The only way out of a rut is to dig your own path. (p. 46)

The intensity begins on the very first page. We are instantly immersed into the despair of Patrick, who is overcome by the demands of his job. Once overweight he is now almost gaunt, and his hair stands up in tufts, interrupted by red lesions, on his scalp. It is easy to see that he is close to breaking down, mentally and emotionally.

Is a casino the best place for such a man to gather with his buddies? Maybe. Maybe he can recoup the fifty thousand he owes his former employer, from whom he has let a leave of absence segue into a full separation. Maybe we will lose even the five hundred he has given himself permission to gamble.

The novel is fraught with tension, a burning need to keep reading toward the resolution. It is made even more so by the writing which resembles a stream of consciousness. There is no wasted punctuation; quotation marks would only get in the way of this tale steamrolling toward destruction. Or, one hopes, redemption.

The cadre emerged from the broken dreams and there was a table before them a gleaming siren amidst the numbing dulling fog and a dealer with pointed features and a sharp chin and an aquiline nose and wicked eyes beckoned them to his empty table a vessel of not-so-safe voyage before the turbulent casino currents. (p. 77) 

The cadre: Patrick, Nikolai, James, Rob, Jim, and Grant. Old buddies meeting for a wild time in Vegas. They gamble. They drink. They snort. They eat a little. They drink. And, drink. It made my head dizzy reading about their weekend of utter abandon. Will such recklessness bring the hoped for fulfillment? Or, will they leave in despair?

When they go their separate ways at the airport, Patrick’s life is revealed with more clarity. He phones his estranged twin sister, Henrietta; their conversation addresses some of the battles they have each faced, bringing greater clarity to themselves. To us, as readers.

I read feverishly on, as if I myself was the one who had been betting, drinking, winning, and losing. I wanted Patrick to find redemption. I wanted him to fill the hollows with something of substance.

I am caught by this passage near the conclusion of the novel:

There’s a great debate. Choosing salvation in a higher power or oneself. I don’t know what the answer is. I guess it’s gotta be both. (p. 157)

Patrick. Don’t you know that salvation cannot be found in both? It’s an either/or situation, not and/both. But, that is only my opinion. 

The path that Patrick takes, the choices that he makes up to the very conclusion of this novel, make it a fascinating look into despair and hope. While experiencing his life vicariously, we examine our own, and come away enriched from the experience. 

Thank you to the author, Saz Keukan, for sharing Plow or In The Hollows with me. I enjoyed reading it, and thinking about it, and learning about a way of life I could only experience from a peripheral view such as this novel gave me. Find him on Substack here.

The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry

 

I am the daughter of a third generation cattleman. My father, his father, and his grandfather, all worked in the Chicago Union Stockyards before it closed in July, 1971. I grew up with stories of the men who handled the livestock told every night at our dinner table. 

They were not the men of today. They were rough and bold and brave and strong. They had to withstand the bullying handed out daily by man and beast alike. If any one of them  would have worked his hair into a bun, or put on eyeliner, I cringe to think what would have become of him. 

When Liveright sent me The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry, in celebration of its 60th Anniversary, I eagerly consented to read and review it. For Lonesome Dove remains one of my favorite books of all time.

The Last Picture Show is not Lonesome Dove.

Of course it would be foolish to assume such a thing; how can a band of cowboys as found in Lonesome

Dove be recreated? Why, in fact, would they be? Especially as the focus of The Last Picture Show is on a small, western town, not on adventure.

In The Last Picture Show we begin with two teenagers. Sonny and Duane are upperclassmen, bored with the antics of the freshman, and eager to find love. Or, at least intimacy. We have the wife of the high school coach, who is lonely and desperate enough to crave the attentions of Sonny. We have a town outside of Wichita, named Thalia, which must be one of the loneliest, dustiest towns about which I have ever read. It has a pool hall. A diner. A school of no academic merit that I could see. And people who are living lives of quiet desperation.

I began reading with a sense of nostalgia, as Sonny wakes up on the first Saturday after the last football game he will ever play, and I continued on eager to uncover the characters’ lives through their interactions. Take, for example, when Jacy’s mother, Lois, comes into her daughter’s bedroom at night with this piece of advice:

The only really important thing I came in to tell you was that life is very monotonous. Things happen the same way over and over again. I think it’s more monotonous in this part of the country than it is in other places, but I don’t really know that - it may be monotonous everywhere. I’m sick of it. Everything gets old if you do it often enough. I don’t particularly care who you marry, but if you want to find out about monotony real quick just marry Duane. p. 44

It speaks much more of Lois’ life than it does about the fear for her daughter’s.  

Jacy, apparently, has no fear at all. She is the prettiest girl in Thalia, and the richest; she has a reputation to build up and hold on to, which will permit neither modesty or honesty.

It took a rich fast crowd to go swimming naked, and Jacy always prided herself on belonging to the fastest crowd there was, moral or immoral. Indeed, for a rich, pretty girl like herself the most immoral things imaginable would be to belong to the slow crowd. That would be wasting opportunities, and nothing was more immoral than waste. p. 74 

Well, we come it immorality in short order after Jacy goes swimming and the boys decide to chase down a blind heifer in its pen. I had to lay down the novel, unable to read further.

But, perhaps I have gleaned the gist of what McMurtry was portraying: a small town in the West inhabited by imperfect, foolish, and ultimately, lonely people. It doesn’t matter that the setting of The Last Picture Show was sixty years ago. The town he has shown is surely a picture of the American town that was, and continues on today, in many ways, just as it did then. Are we able, in any community, to move beyond our frail humanity?

The 6:41 to Paris by Jean-Philippe Blondel (“…thanks to you I am not what I seem.”)

No one ever warned us that life would be long…No one told us, either, that the hardest thing would not be breaking up, but decay. The disintegration of relationships, people, tastes, bodies, desire. Until you reach a sort of morass where you no longer know what it is you love. Or hate. 

Such are the thoughts one might have on a train, reviewing one’s life because you find yourself sitting next to the person you once loved. 

Cécile Duffaut. Philippe Leduc. Twenty seven years ago they were in London together. Now they sit next to each other on the 6:41 train, headed to the Gare L’Est in Paris, not knowing if the other remembers who he, or she, is.

(Photo credit here.)

The reader is thrust between what is going through Claire’s mind to Philippe’s; we want to know what the terrible thing that happened in London involved. And, once we do, we want to know if they can find forgiveness for each other. Or, themselves.

What do other people do to forget?

Ah, now there’s a question. I often have thought that I am the only one with a reel of regret replaying itself on repeat in my memory. Apparently, Philippe asks himself the same question as it will not let him go.

It’s  not a long book. Nor does it have a cover which is in any way, in my opinion, attractive. What it does have is a tension which may occur to many of us, when, given the time and opportunity we ask ourselves, “What could have changed?” 

Today, Claire knows: don’t be impressed by anyone, but treat them as equals; do something about your wardrobe; come to terms with your past.

When we do, we often can turn what wounded us most into an impetus for forgiveness. 

( Thanks to New Vessel Press for sending me this book which I read especially for Paris in July 2026, hosted by Emma at Words and Peace. Find links to other reviews for the event here.)

 

Old Goriot by Honoré de Balzac for Paris in July 2026

“My heart is big enough to hold all your troubles.” 

Thus speaks Old Goriot, un père extraordinaire. No amount of money is too small for his daughters; no sacrifice is too great. This vermicelli maker has worked hard to amass enough money to marry his daughters well. But, surely it is a fool who thinks that money can offer either satisfaction or security.

His two daughters, Delphine and Anastasie, have each married vile men who forbid them to see their father. He’s good enough to provide them money, of course, but not good enough to come to their homes. And so Goriot lives in a lodging-house of the most modest nature, in a room with wallpaper peeling from the damp. 

One of seven lodgers at Maison Vauquer is Eugène Rastignac, who has come to Paris at the great financial sacrifice of his family in the country. Eugène is supposedly a law student in Paris, but he is a much more serious student of Paris’ society in the early 1800s than he is of law. By the end of the novel, his education is almost complete. 

Throughout his novel, Balzac brings us to the awareness of the emptiness of riches, and the pain of love’s deceit. As Old Goriot lies dying, having given everything he has for his daughters’ luxuries, he asks Eugène, “Did you see my girls? They’re coming here directly, they will rush here as soon as they know that I am ill; they always took such good care of me in the Rue de la Jussienne!” He lives a life of hope which is at first admirable, but by the end of the novel has become pitiable.

There are other relationships depicted in this book, dalliances and affairs, but none are as significant to me as that of Father Goriot and his daughters. It is a heart wrenching read, so well summarized by this sentiment from Eugène near its conclusion:

There is a God! Oh! yes, there is a God! and he has made a better world for us, or this earth is blank and meaningless.

He knows that there is no fulfillment to be found in Paris, in a world which he had once wished to gain. Now he faces Society, with the words, “It’s war between us now!” I am comforted that he, at least, has learned this after the death of Old Goriot.

(Find links to other posts for Paris in July, hosted by Emma at Words and Peace, here.)