Moon Over Manifest, Clare Vanderpool. I guess I have read the last three Newberry Award-winning books, and they have all been excellent, so I need to applaud the committee first of all for a string of wonderful choices. I should also applaud them for rewarding a very midwestern book this year in Moon Over Manifest, which takes place in southeast Kansas in a small town during 1936 and 1918, both important dates for the American Girl series, what with them being Depression-era and World War 1 era, but also being a very different, more comprehensive in the details, approach than those American Girl books (which are usually pretty good, by the way, if read as morality tales rather than novelistic fictions). Moon Over Manifest, by taking place in separate moments only 18 years apart, and removed from contemporaneity, has a structure that might emulate two trains, one leaving at 7:10 from 1918 and the other leaving at 10:30 from 1936, moving towards each other, a mathematical problem that has philosophical and moral resonance in the novel (and this kind of problem actually appears more than once). It opens with a 12-year-old girl jumping off a train just before the town of Manifest, which is echoed 30 pages later when a 16-year-old boy jumps off a train just before Manifest, and the novel ends the same way. The trains of time are all moving different directions but to the same centerpoint, and the effect is indeed like one of those fifth-grade math problems. Solving the puzzle requires not only skills that come with organizing times, places, and speeds in the brain, but also requires the ability to piece together contexts, relationships, and stories.
This isn't just a strained analogy: Abilene, the 12-year-old protagonist, is given a homework assignment over the summer to tell a story, and this homework assignment becomes the problem of the novel: the ability to present not just an answer to a homework problem but rather a process, the story, by which she gets there. The construction of that story, as is often the case in juvenile fiction, becomes the means by which salvation occurs--whether the story is invented on the spot, a con in which the ideas are more truthful than the facts, or a historical truth that can unlock, with a skeleton key, the significance of identity, place, material objects, and genealogy. I realize I am being especially vague in my description of its structure, but that is only because this blog entry wants you to have the pleasure of solving the homework problem in real time without the interference of a nosy neighbor or an intruding parent figure.
In fact, the process of uncovery matters so much more in this novel than the answers. Abilene, if she just asked the right questions, might find all of the facts of her, and the town's, situation, but it would lose all of its emotional power if the story weren't slowly "manifest" in the way it is. Abilene does not ask questions but rather allows things to be revealed, a process that can test her patience but that allows the full range of significances to come forward. The town's name is also its primary storytelling method, and there is no meaning in the immediate facts without the context of the story in which they are told. This is the same principle I often discuss with my students when we wonder why we can't boil a poem or novel's method down to its basic truism, down to its moral, cliche, central point. The "heresy of paraphrase" as some critics have put it: the sense that truth moves beyond the story in which it is told is false: truth is relative--a controversial stance, I suppose, let me change it--truth is meaningful only within its story, its picture, its voices. For Abilene, the truth of her existence and the truth of the town's history, are contained within the teller's voice, and the storyteller will only allow the truth to be told if there is a payment, perhaps of herbs, attention, work, or sympathy. On the other hand, Abilene must supplement the story with her own research, reading, and acts of generosity so that a more complete version reveals itself. It is all part of the process of having thing manifested. The fact that the train started moving in 7:10 is ultimately less interesting than who was on the train, how they got there, where they want to go, and perhaps greatest of all, who they are sitting by.
The novel has its own network of stories on which it draws: one of the particularly scary characters is named Finn, and evokes Huckleberry Finn's frightening father. Mark Twain's novel seems to be stamped all over this book, especially in the way moral and historical truth looks to a child that is developing his or her moral identity, as Huck and Abilene are. The major way in which the books are different is that Moon Over Manifest is about place, township, and community whereas Huckleberry Finn has a permanent suspicion about towns and place, where inhabitants are constantly deceiving, backstabbing, and stagnant, which is one of the reasons Huck lights out for the territories at the end of that book. In Moon Over Manifest, the 1918 story begins with Jinx, nephew and surrogate son to the frightening Finn, lighting out for the territories but getting sidetracked and essentially adopted by Manifest, an irony bearing on the doctrine of "manifest destiny," which keeps its inhabitants moving west. Here the destiny is Manifest, only nobody, including the reader, yet understands that destiny in Manifest is not the grand, and unethical, appropriation of Manifest Destiny but rather the acceptance of community on a smaller and more intimate level, the level in which truth becomes satisfying. Jinx, the clear successor to Huck, lights out but stops in Kansas, in a town whose population is overwhelmingly first-generation poor immigrants without the genteel tradition that Huck had to combat.
This is all to say that the novel operates on a structural level that is not as much layered as it is darkly illuminated in different shades: the sun over Manifest brightens the day but also bleaches the town in drought and poverty; the moon over Manifest allows the ghostly shadows to reveal themselves. The moon over Manifest allows nighttime meetings to take place, clandestine deals to be made, kindnesses to be administered without the burden of the work day, the drought, the pallid bleach of sun. The night does not darken Manifest, it allows the truth, the light, to finally manifest itself. It is no wonder the saint of the book is named Shady, and the benevolent "spy" is dressed in black, or even that a principal character is named Hadley, the pregenitor to Boo Radley, that nighttime wanderer and savior. Another principal character claims Gideon as his moniker, and the Gideon of the Bible was instructed by God during nighttime (and, interestingly, refuses to be king). In this book, the Spirit doesn't go to bed at night, it wakes up, called out by the moon.
Let me end by wondering: what is it about 12-year-old girls that make them such wonderful protagonists? It seems that lately I have taken to watching Maria, half that age, go about her business with a mixture of awe and wonder. It is as if I can see her brain moving at lightning speed, concentrating on words, behaviors, and relationships, allowing the complications of the world slowly manfest themselves in bits and pieces. What happens between now and when she is a preteen is perhaps beyond my understanding, but the mystery of her development is certainly powerful to me: a potent mixture of fierce intelligence and whimsy, bravery and vulnerability, loyalty and rebelliousness. I don't know--could be that I am too sentimental, but there is something about girls growing up that makes me exhilarated that there is always so much potential, and sad that our world, we, most often don't let them realize their powerful selves. It seems that the 12-year-old, at least in adolescent novels, has achieved enough womanhood to be incredibly interesting but not enough to be struck down by roles, values, and images that we give her for her own ruin. I don't mean to end this review on a sad note, so let me revert to awe again: the perfect protagonist is the one who is willing to let things manifest themselves in all their newness and glory, and treat those things--stories, identities, people--with the reverence they deserve. To capture those moments is to write a good story.
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