The Literature of Storms

The Liars' Club is not just a great memoir, it's also a great book about our own Gulf Coast region (so Mary Karr's January reading here in Houston will be something of a homecoming). One of the most riveting sections of the narrative is Karr's account of fleeing (or, more accurately, almost failing to flee) Hurricane Carla in 1961. From her dizzying description of an accident on the Orange Bridge to her father's memory of the storm surge ("It was like a whole building made out of water"), these chapters could earn a place in some hypothetical anthology of hurricane literature.

In fact, you could probably teach a whole elective course on the literature of our great storms. Of course, you would have to include the Great Storm--Galveston, 1900, which has been the subject of both significant fiction (Ron Rozelle's The Windows of Heaven) and non-fiction (Erik Larson's Isaac's Storm). Though it happened just four years ago, Hurricane Katrina has already produced at least one major novel, in the form of Dave Eggers' Zeitoun.

My own candidate for inclusion in this canon of storm books is a little odd, in that it is neither set on the Gulf Coast nor does it concern a hurricane, or even a natural disaster. In 2005, (that same, fateful storm season as Katrina) when we were on the road with about two million of our closest Houstonian friends, I kept thinking, this is like the "airborne toxic event" sequence from White Noise. When we (finally) got back to Houston, I sat down and reread that portion of the novel, and discovered that, yes, Don DeLillo had captured the uncanny, controlled hysteria of that longest of Texas days--twenty years before it happened.

Posted on Mon, December 21, 2009 by Robert Cremins

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