Why Read Charles Bowden?

I love fiction so much I won't read a newspaper. I rarely listen to radio news and never watch television. I read books, mostly fiction. Well, not so much anymore. I've been distracted by this disclaimer: "Based on a True Story." Movie marketeers and booksellers use this phrase as if truth is the most essential element in a story. What about plot and characterization? What about setting? A story can live without truth, but not without setting. Place and time establish foundation and breathe life into events. Imagine a tale about an uninhabitable planet where unnatural beings live on high frequency sound and self-procreate. Is this based on a true story? As René Descartes said to the bartender before he disappeared, "I think not."

Who really wants the truth? I recall a short story about a child who dupes a teacher with a phony report on a holiday parade. The child in the story concludes, "All people really want are beautiful lies." Stories don't have to be true, but they must be beautiful.

Literary fiction has always been my safe haven. I could escape or hide from the world as easy as turning a page. I reveled in the beautiful lies and shunned the paradox of journalism, which, in the latter half of the twentieth century, was dedicated to the endless quest for truth. During that time we were obsessed with the truth about the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, Watergate, drugs, who shot JR, Milli Vanilli, OJ, Tonya, and Monica. This quest, this truth hunt, was serious and seriously tedious. It all seems so quaint here in the future, where a child can find a truth, maybe not the truth, simply by asking Siri.

Sandy Wolfmueller turned me on to Charles Bowden. She and her husband, Jon, own and operate Wolfmueller's Books. It is a glorious bookstore that would be on the cover of a magazine if folks loved books as much as barbecue. Their place is host to thousands of used and rare books. It's well organized, books are placed upright on shelves, and they don't have a cat. Talk about rare.

The Charles Bowden Reader, edited by Erin Almeranti and Mary Martha Miles (2010 edition, University of Texas Press).

Sandy has an instinct for book lovers. She certainly has my number. Still, it was a shock when she handed me a copy of The Charles Bowden Reader.

I thumbed through the copy and set it down.

"This guy's an essayist. He's a journalist. What the hell, Sandy?"

"Just read."

I read. Admittedly, at first I was a little put off by the drama in Bowden's prose. "The air screams…" is an example. I felt his point of view was thorny and somewhat macho. As I continued, the thorniness, the machismo, twisted and turned through my thinking brain like a murderous bramble, ripping and exposing my half-baked worldview. Snakes, bats, rapists, heat, starvation, and loneliness grew leaves on this unholy vine and took root. "Tell it like it is," as they used to say. Bowden did so and I became a disciple. Here was truth, not based on truth, but the Excalibur of truth. It was a spiritually enthralling, albeit painful, experience. Charles Bowden, or Chuck to his friends, paints pictures of a brutally violent world, in an exquisitely beautiful manner, his words shadowing his subject until the story comes to life. Magically the writer, his subject, and the reader conspire to exist together in real time. The reader rubs the bottle and a genie appears. Bowden's words, fire branded to every page, strive to uncover a truth long since abandoned. His truth is that which struggles to answer this one question: "Why?"

Why are the bats going away? Why don't we do something about the irresponsible use of groundwater? Why have all the beautiful border towns disappeared? Why are we so complacent? Why do we need all this stuff? Why don't we give real consideration to our way of life? Why, if we have...