(NYTimes) ... AS I DROVE UP INTERSTATE 40 from Little Rock, I passed the exit for Dardanelle in Yell County, where Mattie proudly hails from. Farther on, I made out the flat top of, as Ms. Tartt’s voice intones, “beautiful Mount Nebo where we had a little summer house so Mama could get away from the mosquitoes,” now a state park and a favorite launching point for hang gliders. As much as the book is identified with Oklahoma (the writer Robert Dumont has called it “The Great Oklahoma Novel”), Mattie is an Arkansas homer, never missing a chance to sing the glories of her native state, much like “the meadowlarks of Yell County trilling a joyous anthem to spring.”
She thinks Fort Smith looks as though it “ought to be in Oklahoma instead of Arkansas,” the “big wide street there called Garrison Avenue like places out in the west,” and it’s true Fort Smith was founded in 1817 as a bulwark for the federal government against the depredations of the wild western territory.
Continued
No comments:
Post a Comment