Minor Regional Novelist Tells All

By Christopher Shaw

(Remarks delivered before the Lake Placid Institute, July 12, 2025; originally titled Mountains as Muse: Fictionalizing the Adirondacks)

I had some anxiety about living up to the highfalutin title, so I'm not going to speak about any of the increasing numbers of Adirondack novels being published, nor about the recent list in Adirondack Life on which my novel The Power Line was included. It's enough to try to give you an insight into the only process I can speak of—which is my own—for transforming the subjective experience of being Adirondack in the context of history, culture, landscape, and a quality indefinable, into stories that illuminate and entertain.

I was going to start by defining two terms of literary or literary adjacent art: "Late style," in the sense coined by the critic Edward Said in 2004, and "minor regional novelist," a dismissive label applied by a critic to the Texan novelist Larry McMurtry, author of Lonesome Dove and many other books. McMurtry adopted the label and wore it proudly on a sweatshirt he had printed with the phrase.

Said said we often think of the artist toward the end of their working lives as attaining what he called a "a spirit of reconciliation and serenity," referencing Shakespeare's The Tempest and A Winter's Tale, Sophocles's Oedipus at Colonnus. Just as often,  however, the works were defined by what he termed "intransigence," such as in Beethoven's last quartets and other works, a troubled, dark quality. Gnarly, difficult, unresolved.

Both of my Adirondack novels, and my memoir, The Crazy Wisdom, do arrive at a place of reconciliation and acceptance, but only after some pretty intransigent goings on. As Nabokov said, you have to get your characters up a tree, then throw rocks at them. (Even if the character is you.) The cultural/historical/financial demands must always be harsh. So I hope the books do what I think the best books do—which is to lead the reader through the characters' trouble and beauty to a place of, yes, at least partial reconciliation, but one mixed with uncertainty and a hint of death in the air. The quality Lorca termed "duende."

I have used both phrases as mantras to fuel my late life as a "minor regional novelist" who is self-published, no less, and you can't get much more minor than that.

Thirty years ago I wanted to avoid the regional label so badly I wrote my first book about canoeing the Usumacinta River in Mexico—still about wilderness and with a strong Adirondack echo. When it came out I drove down to Canton to visit Professor Paul Jamieson, who edited The Adirondack Reader, wrote the Adirondack Mountain Club's "North Flow" canoe guidebook, with its wonderful historical asides and anecdotes, and numerous articles for Adirondack Life, including when I was editor. He was 102. A friend had taken him my book, and while he told me he loved it, he added, "But why didn't you write an Adirondacks book?"

I was embarrassed to tell him.

I had carried my character Lonnie Monroe's voice around in my head for years, a composite of the storytellers, wise men and women, blowhards, and con persons I had known coming-of-age Adirondack in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, whose speech and living memories were disappearing. Born in the 1890s, many of them, theirs was still an oral culture. I had thought to record them, as Abel St Martin actually does in The Power Line, but I waited too long, and they died.

Instead I wrote The Power Line after my first cancer in eighteen months, channeling the fictional Lonnie, purely as an exercise in self-entertainment, but also heavily under the influence of William Kennedy's Albany novels. We had met and corresponded. You could call The Power Line a naked homage to Kennedy's Ironweed, and Legs. Nobody had transformed the local into the universal as masterfully since Joyce, Faulkner, and Marquez, and he was doing it in my larger region using places and dialogue I recognized. So I wrote it as a dialogue between Kennedy and myself.

I had little expectation for its publication, which liberated me from adhering to current critical fashions, as well as with honoring current critical taboos. I assumed commercial publishers would look askance at a novel by an obscure writer set in the Adirondacks. It freed me to undermine archetypes, mock sacred cows. Unfettered, and with the confidence of the craft I didn't have when I was younger, I threw in everything I had been saving up from my own experience—of living without electricity, of guiding, of the older musicians we knew who still played out, and with the passing of that generation whose own memories went back as far as their grandparents' memories, as ours do, too.

The book went around to publishers, got rejected, I started working full-time on the faculty at Middlebury. I put it away.

It was somewhere around 2018 then, when I retired at 70, after a second cancer treatment, that my colleague and friend, the writer Robert Cohen, reminded me that anything I wrote henceforward would be unambiguously in the zone of Said's "late style." That was my cue to take The Power Line out of the drawer, update the old Word files, do some rewriting and editing, and at my son Noah's insistence, publish it myself. I wanted to show readers the world of Lonnie and Fran Germaine of soldiers, woodsmen, guides, cooks, and nurses—all of whom I had known and met at the sundown of their generation. A bottom up view of the class and labor structure inside the Adirondack bell jar—how their reality fused with the outsider summer class, and how the two formed each other. This allowed me to introduce Rosalyn Orloff, a widowed Jewish writer and critic and the vital element of thought and philosophy—and spirituality—that arose out of Follensby Pond and Putnam Camp from the 1850s to the 1910s, which formed the early thought basis of environmental consciousness in the Adirondacks.

You might think The Manager comes from an entirely different set of interests but the parallels are there. The novel emerged unexpectedly when I was in Mexico three winters ago. I went down expecting not to write anything, probably just to read for another project. But I began with the hitchhiker anecdote that opens The Manager— one of few bits of direct autobiography in the book—thinking I might get a short story of it. But the characters took over and the story opened up as if waiting for me to get to it all my life. Like The Power Line it is somewhat freewheeling in its expression, even more so, less than shy in its depiction of depression as borderline comic, of weed and alcohol and sex, all in the interest of a spy-genre-adjacent story with tropes stolen from the hard-boiled detective genre as well as from dyspeptic literary narrators going back at least as far as Ishmael, all decidedly intransigent.

Walter Loving’s whiny neurotic voice and persona may seem out of context in the usually earnest context of Adirondack writing. It is very present in the American grain, however. Ishmael is as prone to doubt and disparage himself as he is Ahab and the Puritan New Englanders who own the ships. After Melville there is a chorus of such complainers, not entirely white, straight, or male, who persist in their bilious and acerbic view of their own characters and abilities as well as of the characters and the culture surrounding them. “Throwing up roadblocks to our identification,” as novelist Garth Greenwell says of them.

But we have certainly known Adirondackers who are intransigent, profane, neurotic, simultaneously self-doubting and grandiose, failures at everything, who we nevertheless admire, listen to, learn from. Perhaps classical Adirondackers past would have been intransigent and annoying as well: Rondeau, Bob Marshall, French Louie, Martha Reben, Paul Schaefer, William James, William Stillman, Cheney and Plumley. Even Lonnie Monroe. Even Anne LaBastille.

So the two books taken together make fictional use of various regional archetypes while simultaneously challenging or satirizing them. They mix fictional characters with historical ones, often out of context, who then behave fictionally, like the Paul Smith character in The Power Line. Both books have a comedic element. Geography is at times precisely accurate and at times completely fantastical. You want the reader to be steeped in one kind of shared Adirondack reality, while hoping to open a doorway to larger views and understandings all still unfolding beneath the proscenium arch of landscape, light, biosphere, and weather we recognize. You need to cast a spell.

Walter Loving faces the constant moral necessity to challenge archetypes and question received information, about the Olympics, about the Club and its legacy, ORDA, local journalism, "Peak Experience", his own abilities and relationships and failures. All the usual suspects take a hit. Both books visit and elaborate on neglected regional themes such as intellectual and bohemian history, persistent Indigenous presence, woodsmen's dependence on women in the home or working in mills or cure cottages, the phenomenon of summer people becoming established year-round families, the transition periods when a past era survives into a changed present. Both novels have writers, thinkers, literary references, scholars real and fictional, my goal being to redeem the place from what one of my narrators calls this sepia-toned, sentimentalized and idealized past, and to show the continuity of how this moment arose out of those moments, when the vastness seemed so much greater and the past unrelated to the more complicated and digitized present. I wanted to infer from my own experience, combined with reading and reporting and listening, how a certain period would have "felt," and how the characters would express most fully their fleshed out yet imaginary Adirondack beings, some of them highly compromised individuals who only want to clear their karma and find peace like everybody else.

In each case they are marked in some way by their experience of place.

So I accept being a minor regional person in late life, throwing in all the saved up scenes and characters he hasn’t used before, without undue constraint but intending no harm and in the interest of representing eternal verities, including the commonplace erotic lives people pursue as much inside the Blue Line as anywhere else. Finishing is the goal. Time is short. Mortality is ever present. Commercial publishing is slow and often less than satisfying.

We know much more about our own place than we did in the 1980s. The field of knowledge and perspective has exploded. I have cribbed shamelessly and widely from Jerry Jenkins's Adirondack Atlas, from Amy Godine's many articles detailing the Adirondacks' ethnic and racial diversities, and in the process dispelling the myth of the "real" Adirondacker; from Andrea Barrett's The Air We Breathe, and Robert Taylor's Saranac Lake: America's Magic Mountain, with their emphasis on the huge importance of the tuberculosis era; from Curt Stager and Melissa Otis, from William Kennedy and William James and Paul Jamieson and Maitland DeSormo and many other writers and scholars. The Adirondack story, though still grounded in the mountains and creeks, in the wildlife, the guides, the outlaws and cooks and caretakers, keeps expanding. We need a fiction that reflects that enlarged collective awareness.

You must have both the intransigent and the reconciled. You have to satisfy reader’s expectations while subverting them at the same time, setting up an experience of beauty combined with terror that Keats called "negative capability."

My late minor romances attempt to recast Adirondack experience, elevate and expand it, to represent how it is connected to rather than isolated from the world, how it impinges on and affects the world, and how long-term immersion in its totality structures individual minds. You must go deeper. When you do there is more there than you expected. The landscape opens up. You see how it is more than a "park," and you understand in a new way how it is inexhaustible, and infinite.

Thank you.