Shane 1
Joe hasn’t left tables out front in years. I like a table when I’m there, so sometimes I’ll take one outside myself, with permission of course. As I started carrying the table out today, a boy, maybe 9 years old, said to his dad, “She’s stealing the table!” Dad laughed, the boy was obviously kidding, and said, “First of all, that’s a man, and he’s not stealing it.” Dad gave me a grin, head tilt and shoulder shrug. I thought it was more fitting than any kind of verbal apology or explanation. I returned the same gestures. We all know the boy was kidding. About stealing the table, anyways. I said to the boy, “I admire a man who watches his surroundings.”* The boy shied away. Perhaps spooked. Perhaps embarrassed. Probably just uncertain. I stopped when I got to the closed door to negotiate the table through it, and the boy ran to the entrance. I said, “Are you here to help me or to stop me?” Dad answers, “To help.” Boy smiled, and held the door open for me.
Such an uncanny thing to say without any context: “I admire a man who watches his surroundings,” but it was fitting. That line could be verbatim from the pages of the book I went there to read, Shane by Jack Schaefer, which I just read for the second time. The first reading was sometime when I should have been reading young adult, but someone noted that he had to read it in elementary school.
It’s a second hand copy. Someone left a newspaper clipping inside. The shop owner didn’t know it was there.
There is one line in Shane I remembered almost word for word: “His mouth was a bitter gash on his face.” The actual sentence is, “He raised his head and the mouth was a bitter gash in his face.” It appears roughly a third of the way through the book. I thought it was near the end. I wanted to think that the line repeats verbatim later in the book, giving it a kind of a post-modern self-aware, self-referential element. What a mind warp that would have been on discovering that on a second reading decades later. Not the case.
As far as I can tell, Shane is not one of the great works of Western Literature. But it has made me think about so many things, which I predict I’ll muse on again.
* I doubt that those words came out my mouth as smoothly as that reads. But it’s descriptive enough though fails to convey the delivery.
Jae-Ho
I feel like I’m going to have to read this book. I remember when you made the connection with Pale Rider and you wanted to communicate to me that fact, or the fact that you’d realised it, OR maybe you were talking to that teenager you worked with and he hadn’t made the connection.
The original title of Shane was Rider From Nowhere.
Oh yes, I did mention that. It was a guy I went to highschool with. He said Shane and Pale Rider might share some superficial similarities but that is all. I guess Leonard Maltin, Roger Ebert, Wikipedia, and I should just agree to disagree with him.
Rider From Nowhere actually does a diservice to one of the main themes of the book I think.
Don’t not read Shane.