John Banville, _The Sea_

 JOHN BANVILLE AND J. M. Coetzee occupy adjacent niches in my memory palace of contemporary fiction. They are close in age: Coetzee was born in 1940, Banville in 1945. They both write in English, but neither is from the U.K. or the United States (Banville is Irish, Coetzee South African). Coetzee has won the Nobel Prize, and Banville ought to (methinks). Finally, even though they write in English, they seem much more influenced by the continental masters—Dostoevsky, Mann, Kafka, Musil, Nabokov—than by the English ones. 

The Sea won the Booker Prize back in 2005, and it seems to me his most Proustian novel, saturated in themes of time, place, and memory—not to mention another of Proust’s particular hobbyhorses, social class.

The recently-widowed art historian Max Morden is back in Ireland at the summer holiday spot his family stayed at in his later childhood. Shades of Balbec, but the Mordens stayed in the humbler cottages, while Max can now afford a nice B&B. 

Max spends part of the novel remembering his wife and her relatively early death from cancer, but he spends more time remembering a family, the Graces, that he attached himself to one of his last summers there.

The pubescent Max became erotically obsessed first with the mother of the family, Mrs. Grace,  then with the daughter, Chloe. The really cunning trick of Banville’s first-person narration, though, is that we see that Max’s story is not simply of sexual awakening, but simultaneously one of social aspiration, of getting out of his family’s working class world into the middle class world of the Graces.

More wrenchingly, Max seems to be starting to realize that his marriage, too, might have been not just about sexual attraction, but about getting up-and-out from the world into which he was born. That Chloe may have been his first love but was also a rung on a ladder, a means of ascent—and, terrible to realize, maybe his wife was too.

Alison Bechdel, _Spent_

GRAPHIC AUTO-FICTION, I guess we could say. Alison Bechdel enjoyed breakout success with a graphic memoir, Fun Home, about growing up in a family mortuary business with a closeted dad, a thwarted mom, and two brothers; the book became the source for a successful Broadway musical. The Alison Bechdel of Spent enjoys breakout success with a graphic memoir, Death and Taxidermy, about growing up in a family taxidermy business with a sister; the book becomes the source for a successful television series. Both the actual Bechdel and the Bechdel of Spent have a partner named Holly and live in Vermont; I do not know whether the actual Holly also raises goats. In short, Spent takes place in an alternate universe just a hair to one side of our own.

The political economy of this alternate universe works just like our own. Holly and her goats and Alison and her books have to navigate the same terrain of labor, commodification, exchange, and (unfortunately) exploitation that we do. The chapter titles of Spent are all taken from the chapter titles of Volume I of Marx's Capital: "The Process of Production of Capital," "The Process of Exchange," and so on. I wasn't sure how well this conceit worked, to be honest, but it does emphasize that artists, even though their work is highly specialized, idiosyncratic, and personal, are still workers, just like the rest of us, subject to the same economic forces as the rest of us, even when they are as successful as Bechdel.

The real treat of Spent's alternate universe is that it includes several characters from Bechdel's beloved and much-missed comic, Dykes to Watch Out For: Stuart, Sparrow, Louis, Ginger, and (briefly) Samia. (Not Mo, however--perhaps Mo and Alison being in the same universe would create a cosmic collapse.) They are older--Stuart and Sparrow have a college-age kid--but still they are a wise, funny, and affectionate portrait of the way at least some of us live now. New character Naomi is a welcome addition, and Alison's MAGA-fied Christian sister reveals some surprising dimensions by book's end.

Paul Muldoon, _Joy in Service on Rue Tagore_

 MULDOON'S LATEST, I am happy to confirm, contains plenty of what you are expecting/hoping to find in a volume by Muldoon.

Exuberant play with a variety of closed forms--sonnet, quaternary, pantoum, some you don't know the names of, some that probably do not even have names yet? Check.

Whirligig simultaneous development in the same poem of deeply unlike subject matter, like the fall of the Roman Republic and  the rise of glam rock? Check.

Outrageous rhymes (e.g., Aristotle's star pupil / Mott the Hoople)? Check. Several checks.

Due honor to those to whom honor is due? Check! ("Near Izium," on Ukraine's valiant self-defense.)

Oh, and of course, the long final poem, check, but moreover this one--"The Castle of Perseverance"--can stand beside "Yarrow" as one of Muldoon's most moving and vulnerable poems. 

And there's also the things you were not expecting but are happy to find: a couple of surprisingly moving Christmas poems ("Nativity, 2020" and "Whilst the Ox and Ass") and a convincing, cliché-less acknowledgement of one's own mortality ("The MRI"). 

Like the Union veteran in the Winslow Homer painting on the book's cover, swinging his scythe, Muldoon is still out there after all these years, gathering the harvest.

Mário de Andrade, _Mácunaíma: The Hero with No Character_, trans. Katrina Dodson

 ...WHAT THE heck is this? It's almost one hundred years old, for one thing, first published in Brazil in 1928. The main character, Mácunaíma, is a folklore figure, an infinitely resourceful trickster who outsmarts every opponent and sleeps with everyone's girlfriend while also being capable of feats of strength--so, maybe Br'er Rabbit plus John Henry plus Pecos Bill? Except that he at one point takes off for São Paolo and masters the accelerated, mechanized, bristling with modernity urban environment as thoroughly as he mastered the Amazonian forest and the backlands. 

Translator Dodson's afterword mentions Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo and the Tropicália movement of late 1960s Brazil (Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Os Mutantes), and both comparisons make sense: traditional material laced with the latest and most electrifying modernist concoctions, Paul Bunyan on LSD. Start with stories from the indigenous peoples living by the Amazon, stir in some of the traditional wisdom of the enslaved African peoples who slipped off to start their own settlements in the forest, top liberally with heteroglossia of Finnegans Wake, and serve. 

Dodson also mentions Rabelais--right about that too, the same erudite sending-up of erudition, the same blowing up of literary decorum, the same feeling that these characters are much, much larger, in every way, than we are.

I suspect that there are a good many expressions in Andrade's Portuguese that just do not go easily into English, leading Dodson to creaky colloquialisms ("pizzazz") that show up on the pages like leaky, wrinkled balloons. What are you going to do? Props to her for going ahead and getting it done (and props to New Directions for publishing it). What must it have been like to go from Clarice Lispector to this?

Sam Tanenhaus, _Buckley: The Life and Revolution That Changed America_, Part 1: Prodigy in the Making

 THIS NEW BIOGRAPHY is as good as the reviews are saying it is, but with notes and index it does clock in at just over a thousand pages, and knowing myself as I do, I expect it will take me the better part of a year to finish. That being the case, it seemed better to post my notes on it section by section, rather than waiting until I have finished the whole book. This way, the details are relatively fresh in my mind.

The main outline of Buckley's career is relatively familiar stuff, given how famous he was, but Tanenhaus has added a wealth of detail.

(1) I already knew, for instance, that Buckley grew up wealthy and privileged in Connecticut with a great clan of siblings. What I did not know was that even though the Buckley children had the usual horses and private schools and extensive travel associated with their class, the family's devout Catholicism made them a bit apart, a bit of an "other." 

Tanenhaus conjures up the Buckley family childhood as a little bit Swallows and Amazons, a little bit Mitford sisters: a world of its own, with rivalries, private jokes, keen enthusiasms. Founded in privilege, yes, but also astonishingly self-sufficient psychologically and emotionally. Also surprisingly well-versed in the Spanish language and Mexican culture (The father had made his fortune in Mexican and Venezuelan oil.)

(2) Young Bill's first political passion was America First and Charles Lindbergh, the anti-intervention movement that was gathering momentum in 1940 and 1941 but evaporated after Pearl Harbor. His father, William F. Buckley, Sr., was passionately (and unsurprisingly) opposed to the New Deal and also, it turns out, dead set against American involvement in World War II. Son Bill, a teenager, enthusiastically joined the cause, taking the America First side in debates at his school (Millbrook Academy). 

(3) Buckley always seemed to have a Southern Agrarian, I'll-take-my-stand streak to his conservatism, and it turns out he came by it honestly: besides the big place in Connecticut, the family had a big place in South Carolina. Tanenhaus reports that the Buckleys treated the mainly Black household help in South Carolina well, but the family shared their white southern neighbors' opinions on the rightness of segregation.

(4) Buckley's first book, God and Man at Yale, was written the year after he graduated and counts as an early example of one of the enduring American literary genres: the right hook aimed at academia (later practiced with great success by Allan Bloom, Roger Kimball, and Christopher Rufo).

(5) Again and again, one's jaw drops at Tanenhaus's spadework. For instance: World War II was still on when Buckley finished high school, and he went into the army. His unit was scheduled to go to the Pacific, but Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought the war to a quick close, so Buckley spent his stint doing administrative work in Texas. Tanenhaus found out exactly what he did and how well he did it. I'd call that going the extra mile. He doesn't spend a long time describing Buckley's duties and does not attempt to overstate their importance...but he does actually have the goods. Every page testifies to just how thorough his research was.

David Trinidad, _Dear Prudence: New and Selected Poems_, (1 of 2)

 TRINIDAD CAME UP with an ingenious way of organizing the book. Most "new and selected" volumes tuck the new poems at the end, but Trinidad put them in front and gave that section its own title, "Black Telephone." The section is about the length of a generous collection (120 pages), so I would not be annoyed to plunk down $19 for this even had I already purchased the volumes from which the "selected poems" were selected.

I don't know Trinidad's work well enough to say whether "The Black Telephone" is a staying-in-the-wheelhouse collection or a radical-departure collection, but I will say that (a) Trinidad's work is distinctive and (b) I like it. He combines elements I never would have expected to be combined: a passion for Sylvia Plath with a passion for Patty Duke, for instance, or thirty-four haiku based on episodes of the 1960s television series Peyton Place, or a list in the style of Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book that includes "The voice of Dusty Springfield." . Much of the work is based on and quite candid about his own memories and experiences ("Sheena Is a Punk Rocker," "AIDS Series"), but we also get formal experiments like an idiosyncratic erasure poem based entirely on phrases Sylvia Plath underlined in her copy of Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night.

Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, and Sharon Tate appear, as does Dick Fisk (a gay porn star); steering by those stars, we know we are in queer baby boomer male waters, but there are more than enough surprises to keep things interesting. Had James Schuyler been born thirty years later than he actually was, he might have written not unlike Trinidad.

Timothy Egan, _A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them_

READING THE WORST Hard Time, Egan's book about the Dust Bowl, was a personal landmark for me; my parents grew up in the Dust Bowl, and Egan's book gave me a clearer idea than I had ever gotten before, even from their own stories, of what their childhood had been like.

This book did not have the same personal relevance for me, but considering it was about events of about one hundred years ago, it felt painfully relevant to our moment. 

The Ku Klux Klan, the terrorist vigilante outfit of the Reconstruction years, was revived in 1915 in the wake of D. W. Griffiths' popular and influential film Birth of a Nation (which, among other things, celebrated the exploits of the Reconstruction era Klan). By the mid-1920s, stoked by a variety of anxieties about "others" (Blacks moving north, Jews, Catholics, women's suffrage), membership had exploded, and the Klan had started to flex some serious political muscle.

Egan focuses on Indiana, where a particularly energetic Klan organizer and demagogue, D. C. Stephenson, had such a talent for provoking and channeling the fear and ressentiment of midwestern white Protestants that Indiana's local law enforcement, municipal government, courts, and state legislature were all crawling with Klan members. Stephenson saw himself, with some justification, as the most powerful man in the state. He could even tell the governor what to do.

Besides being a talented organizer and effective speaker, Stephenson was a serial rapist and sexual abuser, crimes he could commit with a degree of impunity, given his connections. However, Madge Oberholtzer, a woman he kidnapped, raped, and assaulted, lived long enough (despite poisoning herself in desperation) to  tell her story. Her parents, friends, and lawyers were foresighted enough to have her deathbed testimony witnessed and notarized, and that testimony was ruled admissible in the prosecution of Stephenson for what he did to her. In a verdict that surprised the whole country, he was convicted.

Because Egan focuses so closely on two characters, Stephenson the Caligula wannabe and the brave though grievously injured Madge, I kept thinking what a natural candidate for a film or television series A Fever in the Heartland is. I was thinking even more, though, of how much D. C. Stephenson--arrogant, entitled, vicious, dishonest, drunk on his own power, seemingly beyond the reach of the law--reminded me  of a certain DJT, and what a sweet and fitting thing it was that justice at long last caught up with him.