Tigers in Red Weather

Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock Wallace Stevens

The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches Tigers
In red weather. 

The lines of Wallace Steven's poems clench the meaning and depth of Liza Klaussman's book, Tigers in Red Weather. The June issue of Whole Living magazine featured a write-up about Tigers in Red Weather. Klaussmann released the book this summer, and being the historical fiction nerd that I am, I decided to immediately request it from the library in Charlotte. I really hope I was the first to read it.

I love Wallace Steven's poetry, "The Emperor of Ice Cream" being my favorite, and I find it most interesting to try and decipher the seemingly random things he puts into his poems. The theme of dreams plays a really important part throughout Klaussmann's book but not the kind of unconscious dreams we have at night. The book plays on fantasies and daydreams, characters' aspirations, and their desires becoming or not becoming reality.

Klaussmann bases the story around a house, called Tiger House, off the coast of Massachusetts (presumably Martha's Vineyard because of the reference to the proximity of Chappaquiddick) during the 1950s and 1960s. It's post WWII, everything has changed. Marriages have changed, lives have changed, and moms popped out baby boomers like nobody's business. To me it seemed as if the red weather could have been referencing the time period, the red scares, the threat of communism, but probably it references one particular character's personal domination over almost every relationship she possessed. The story focused on Tiger House, but also members of the family who inhabited it.

The true Tiger is one of the characters, Nick, a 1950s housewife who has "it." Everyone flocks to her, is controlled by her, hates her, and can't help but follow what she says and does. Nick is the driving force behind most actions in the story. Her passion chews up and spits out many of the other characters in the story. She avoids most of the messes she creates and truly focuses on her self and her desires.

My favorite aspect of Tigers in Red Weather was how Klaussmann played with the bounds of truth and reality through character perspective. The book is divided into different sections, each from the perspective of a different character in the story: Nick, Daisy, Helena, Hughes, and Ed. All the events in each of the sections reflect the specific period in the life of Tiger House. However, I was so surprised by the lack of repetition. I wasn't bored or confident I knew what would happen next, but hung on to each moment, shocked by the story and lack of understanding of each character. The book gave an adequate description of how people's perceptions, experiences, and thought processes lead to conflict and resolution not just within the story, but also within real life. The audience gets the best picture of "truth," though it's patch-worked together in the reader's mind. Meanwhile, the characters wander around in their own personal oblivion, grasping at conclusions that don't fit together with what's happening. Klaussmann definitely calls into question the ability of a single human to really understand something based on their own faulty human brain.

The book is pretty tumultuous and crazy. There is also some unexpected violence towards women, but it really challenges people to think back to epic moments of life or any conflict and reflect on the different angles of the situation. I was enthralled.