Mircea Cartarescu, _Solenoid_, trans. Sean Cotter (2 of 2)

SEVERAL CHAPTERS ARE set in the narrator's childhood, and I was taken by surprise by how familiar the world of these chapters seemed. I say "by surprise" because even though Cartarescu and I are in the same age cohort--I am two years older--Romania in the late 1950s and early 1960s must have been a very different place than the American Midwest during the same period. Or so one would think. But the atmosphere of the institutions, the slightly stricken look of the streets, the lingering traces of life as it was before the Second World War, were apparently similar enough that the landscapes of Solenoid, physical and spiritual, seemed eerily recognizable to me.

The young Cartarescu and the young me were growing up under very different kinds of government, of course. Soviet troops only left Romania when Cartarescu was two years old, and Nicolae Ceaușescu came to power when the novelist was nine. The novel only occasionally glances at the political, however, and perhaps the Cold War era as lived in in the lower-profile regions of the East was somehow comparable to the same historical experience in the lower-profile regions of the West.

Ceaușescu is never mentioned by name in the novel, but we still get a sense of a lowering sky, of a grayness, of painfully circumscribed opportunities, of a vaguely oppressive something or other that gets in the way of any kind of flourishing or renewal. All this may be Cartarescu's way of  rendering life in a totalitarian society. And the novel's recurring sense that there is another possibility, a fourth dimension, mysterious but possibly accessible, may have a political aspect: it may represent, among other things, the feeling that there is another way to live, that Communism might come to an end. The tesseracts, Klein bottles, and unreadable manuscripts may all be pointing to the idea that the unrealizable may be realized after all, in some other realm, some other time, some barely imaginable transfigured future.

The end of the book, when Bucharest seems to emerge out of a state of suspended animation into some kind of transformation, both devastated and remade, perhaps renders the cataclysm of 1989. There are no specific references to those events, which in Romania were particularly terrible. But the sense that we have emerged into a different world, unfamiliar but alive with potential, make for a hopeful ending.

Mircea Cartarescu, _Solenoid_, trans. Sean Cotter (1 of 2)

 IT TOOK ME quite a while to finish this, taking a few breaks, but my admiration for it is limitless. Deep thanks to Deep Vellum for bringing it out in the U.S. and to Sean Cotter for a graceful, compelling translation.

My genre designation would be "alternative autofiction." That would be "alternative" as in "alternative history," e.g. Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle or Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, historical fiction that imagines how history might have unfolded had one event or another fallen out differently. Solenoid, I think, is (to some extent) about one of the lives Cartarescu might have led had some episodes in his earl life gone differently. The only comparable novel I have read is Paul Auster's 4 3 2 1, which actually gives four alternative lives to a characters whose starting circumstances closely match Auster's own.

The (unnamed) narrator has literary ambitions as a young man, but a poetry reading that might have been his big breakout moment goes terribly wrong, and he instead becomes a teacher of Romanian at a secondary school in Bucharest. Cartarescu's own youthful literary ambitions bore fruit: he got published, won prizes, became famous. But what if they hadn't? He might easily have ended up teaching Romanian literature in Bucharest, in just such a school as this, with a group of students, administrators, and fellow teachers as idiosyncratic as the cast of a Wes Anderson film.

The building itself has its idiosyncracies, for that matter, subterranean passages and outbuildings that house unlikely objects (e.g., a kind of demonic, David Cronenberg dentist's chair) and contain mysterious portals. The world of Solenoid is somewhat comparable to that in Alasdair Gray's Lanark, a grimy urban setting that somehow exists alongside, or parallel to, or behind a weirder, more fantastical one. A kind of European magical realism, maybe, as in Bruno Schulz or Gunter Grass? 

The novel's mysterious parallel other world may be the one in which Cartarescu is a celebrated novelist. Is that world better? Maybe, maybe not. The crucial notion is that it is there. The novel persuades you that the world you know in its three familiar dimensions is not the only world there is--that fourth and fifth dimensions are out there, to be fleetingly glimpsed in dreams, or in the visionary theories of Nikola Tesla, or the inscrutable language of the Voynich Manuscript, or in the humming power of the giant solenoid buried under the narrator's house, which enable him and his girlfriend Irina to levitate during sex.

Jane DeLynn, _In Thrall_

PUBLISHED IN 1982, but I had never heard/read of it until I saw Malin Hay's London Review of Books piece on the 2024 Semiotexte reprint. Hay explains (as does Colm Tóibín in this volume's introduction) that the novel has long had the standing of a classic among lesbian readers, and it's easy to see why. It's brilliant.

The narrator, Lynn, is a senior in an all-girls high school in New York City, circa the mid-1960s. She is Jewish and middle-class, belongs to a circle of girlfriends who reminded me a bit of the girls in Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye, is dating a handsome, athletic but profoundly uninteresting boy named Wolf, and has fallen helplessly in love with her English teacher, Miss Maxfeld.

Miss Maxfeld notices how seriously smitten Lynn is, starts inviting Lynn to her apartment for tea, and eventually, a sexual affair commences. Miss Maxfeld is taking advantage of the situation, one could say, but it's hard not to sympathize with her. She is lonely, but would never have seduced Lynn, I felt, had Lynn not been wholly receptive to being seduced. Miss Maxfeld is painfully clear-eyed about both Lynn and herself. She never flatters and always tries to be honest with herself and Lynn about how short-lived the affair is likely to be. She entertains no illusions and tries to dispel Lynn's illusions, without much success.

I found myself admiring Miss Maxfeld, actually, while Lynn...well, let's say Jane DeLynn has few rivals in the category of writers making adolescent characters based on the writers themselves seem vain, foolish, and maddeningly self-centered. James Joyce, perhaps. Joyce in the fifth chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man perhaps makes Stephen Dedalus as little likable as DeLynn makes Lynn--a performance of artistic self-abnegation so complete one can only salute and admire.

An early chapter features Lynn's English essay on the tragic hero, in which she argues that she herself is the perfect example of a tragic hero (see above, "maddeningly self-centered").  As the book approached its close, I began to fear that the novel's denouement would turn on the irony that, by getting fired, Miss Maxfeld would be the character with the tragic ending. Inevitably Lynn's parents are going to find out what is going on, and inevitably are going to pursue some form of punishment for Miss Maxfeld, and I was sure Miss Maxfeld was going to be fired if only to fulfill narrative symmetry.  However (spoiler alert), Lynn prevents that outcome in an unexpected flash of quick thinking and unselfish action. Whew. 

In an alternate world, this might be assigned in high school to be read alongside Catcher in the Rye. It would make a nice counterbalance.

 

Tommi Parrish, _Men I Trust_

 PARRISH'S GRAPHIC NOVEL deftly reconciles seemingly divergent modes. 

The "graphic" part feels expressionist. The human figures, for instance, are highly stylized, with small, sometimes tiny heads and enormous legs, their torsos stretched and elongated. (The effect is a little like the figures of Fernand Léger.) The color palette changes from episode to episode, looking a  little like Matisse here, a little like Emil Nolde there, darkening or brightening with the tone of the episode.

The "novel" part, however, is unvarnished realism. Eliza is a single mom with one son and an ex-husband who tends to be delinquent with child support payments. She has a job and is trying to establish herself as a spoken word poet. (Parrish uses an Anne Boyer poem as a sample of Eliza's work, so we know she's good.) Sasha is slightly younger and has yet to get much of anything going for herself; she has just moved back in with her parents, an arrangement that pleases no one. 

Sasha hears Eliza read and develops a powerful crush. Most of the novel is Sasha doing her damnedest to get as close as she can to Eliza, hoping to become her lover. Eliza appreciates Sasha's friendship but is not ready to reciprocate Sasha's feelings.

The reader assumes...well, this reader assumed that we were headed for some nice rom-com ending, but actually, no we are not. We get the tale of a relationship that might have gone in one direction but instead goes in another, alongside all the up-and-down stress of living in families and trying to make a living. 

Straight contemporary urban realism, then--but taking place in a visual world all its own. Maybe a little like what you might get if Georg Grosz turned Berlin Alexanderplatz into a graphic novel.

I'm baffled by the title. A few men make brief appearances in the story, but not a one of them seems trustworthy. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Matthew D. Taylor, _The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Democracy_

 I HAVE RECENTLY been reading several books that try to map out ideological configurations of Trumpism. This one covers the Christian nationalist angle. On the whole, I found it not quite as illuminating as Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Kobes de Mez (who provides a dust jacket blurb here), but it adds some valuable detail to that portrait.

Taylor focuses on what he calls the independent charismatics. Charismatics are Christians who believe that the miraculous powers bestowed on the apostles on Pentecost--speaking in unknown languages, healing, prophecy, handling snakes without getting bitten--can still be obtained by those open to the Holy Spirit. Some charismatics belong to traditional denominations (e.g., Roman Catholicism), and some belong to denominations explicitly dedicated to tapping into the Pentecostal powers (e.g., Assemblies of God). Other charismatics, however, find the whole institutionalized structure of a denomination--creeds, polities, seminaries, ordination, and so on--an obstacle to the flow of the Holy Spirit, so they just set up shop for themselves, so to speak. These are Taylor's independent charismatics, and there are a lot of them out there.

These are not your familiar run-of-the-mill evangelicals, by the way. Those folks tend to support Trump, but find his style a little off-putting. The  independent charismatics, however, are truly on board, and were much in evidence on January 6, 2021...yea, even on the very ground of the Capitol Mall itself.

The main body of Taylor's book looks at several of the leading personalities of this tendency. The "independent charismatics" are not formally organized, of course, but they are highly networked and do sometimes coordinate activities. The late Peter Wagner, at one time of the evangelical-but-not-necessarily-charismatic Fuller Theological Seminary, was particularly effective at networking and coordinating. Dutch Sheets worked up the "ekklesia" movement, based on the idea that the Greek word "ekklesia," usually translated "church" when it occurs in the New Testament, should really be translated "assembly," hence the church and the government ought to be one and the same. Lance Wallnau came up with the "Seven Mountains Mandate" metaphor, a version of "dominion theology" (i.e., again, fusing church and state) asserting that (charismatic) Christians should aspire to control the seven crucial dimensions of a society: family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and government. We also meet Paula White, Cindy Jacobs, Ché Ahn, and Sean Feucht, all of whom Taylor deftly evokes. (Not sure what his own theological orientation is, but he almost sounds like an insider at times.)

The main idea seems to be that the United States ought to be guided by the Holy Spirit, which practically means it ought to be guided, perhaps ruled, by independent charismatics. Bringing this about may require battling demons--that is, it may require violence. "We will not take dominion by remaining passive. We will only take dominion if the Body of Christ [= Christians, the church, the ekklesia] becomes violent and declares war on the enemy!" That's Peter Wagner, from his book Dominion!, p. 118 (Taylor is scrupulous about his sources). 

The saying of Jesus that gives Taylor's book its title--"From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force" (Matthew 11: 12)--was quoted by some of those storming the Capitol five years ago today, and according to Taylor, it has become a watchword among Christian nationalists.

What in the world do they see in Trump, though? Does he ever seem to have been seized by the Holy Spirit? (His babbling could sound like talking in tongues, I suppose.) The answer to this puzzle is the "Cyrus Anointing," another Lance Wallnau trope. Just as King Cyrus of Persia, not himself an Israelite, delivered God's Chosen People from bondage in Babylon, so Donald Trump, not himself one of the saved, will deliver God's Chosen People from bondage in a secularized, multicultural, woke USA. 

Joe Brainard, _The Nancy Book_

WHAT EXACTLY DREW the brilliant writer and visual artist Joe Brainard (1942-1994) to Ernie Bushmiller's comic Nancy? 

There have always been a few strips that attracted more educated and sophisticated readers (Krazy Kat in the 1920s, Pogo in the 1950s, Peanuts in the 1960s, Doonesbury in the 1970s, Calvin and Hobbes in the 1980s), but Nancy seems an unlikely candidate for that kind of attention. Its humor was broad, its drawing plain and reduced to essentials, its vision of the culture straight down the middle of the road. Yet Brainard is by no means the strip's only admirer: Scott McCloud, Art Spiegelman, and Bill Griffiths are also advocates.

That Nancy is a kind of apotheosis of ordinariness may be what fascinated Brainard. His astonishing "I Remember," among its other virtues, holds nothing back in its embrace of ordinariness. So when Brainard adds Nancy's face  to a De Kooning, or a Picasso, or a Goya, the juxtaposition of a drawing style meant to be infinitely reproducible with revered works of individual genius, there's a beauty in the sheer incongruity, masterpieces made cozy and homey by the bare-bones geometry of Nancy's face, Nancy elevated to the firmament by her placement in iconic paintings. 

Or, when Nancy and another comic character, the silent Henry, engage in athletic sex, we get a different effect, not unlike the détourné comics of the Situationists. The domesticated is re-wilded, the complacent surface of the family newspaper is ruffled by anarchic winds, the sanitized and safe rendered dirty and dangerous.

The Nancy Book is an homage that becomes a work in its own right. That one could not imagine such a project with, say, Blondie, may reveal in a roundabout way the nature of Bushmiller's idiosyncratic genius.

Patricia Lockwood, _Will There Ever Be Another You_

 IN A HAPPY coincidence, I was reading this over the same span of weeks that I was reading Leonora Carrington's The Stone Door, and they both appealed to me in the same way. They both had a central idea, a big picture, but the real joy of each book lay in the dazzle of the details, the twists, turns, and leaps that went from one surprising sentence to the next. 

The big picture in Will There Ever Be Another You  deals with the mystery of personal identity. The title sounds like it could be the title of a break-up song--the singer wondering whether she or he will ever find another person they love as much as the lost "you"--and it happens also to be the sentence that was on the cover of the issue of Time magazine that covered the advent of Dolly, the cloned ewe--the pun addressing the question of whether "you," or anyone, could be reproduced exactly. 

In Lockwood's novel, though, the sentence seems to be raising a whole other question: whether the "you" of your self could at some point, say six months from now, be gone with nary a trace, replaced by another "you," your self inhabited by a startlingly different personality.

Something like that apparently happened to Lockwood, possibly the consequence of a case of long COVID, but the beauty of the novel is the complete absence of explanations or even speculations about causes. Somehow, everything has gone weirdly and unpredictably disjunctive, nothing connects very neatly to anything else, and the narration--third person in Part One, first person in Part Two, and in First, third, AND second in Part Three--ricochets from scene to scene without even pretending that it all makes sense or adds up or resolves into unity. It's a wild ride.

A few years ago, I taught Lockwood's No One Is Talking About This. The students were baffled by Part One, in which the Lockwood-esque narrator goes down a million internet rabbit-holes at once, but riveted by Part Two, in which the book becomes laser-focused on the narrator's niece, born with a rare and fatal condition called Proteus syndrome. I think these students would find Will There Ever Be Another You frustrating, precisely because it never does focus, never does zoom in on a single story. 

But that may be what I liked most about it. Take the chapter called "Shakespeare's Wife." I have a hunch Lockwood is talking to Jessie Buckley about a proposed film or television adaptation of No One Is Talking About This, but no such explanation ever emerges, and I actually found not knowing why Lockwood was talking to this unnamed actor a little more satisfactory than having things spelled out. Or "Mr. Tolstoy, You're Driving Me Mad," a chapter of scattershot observations about Anna Karenina. No explanation offered here, either, but Anna Karenina also gives us a heroine unable to pull in single focus her own multiplicity, so it works without working...if you see what I mean.

Right at the moment, having just finished the book, I feel like it's her best yet. The characters--her parents, Jason, her sister--seem like old friends at this point, after Priestdaddy and No One Is Talking About This, and Lockwood seems even more herself in not being herself...if you see what I mean.

And I am glad to see she is publishing poetry again.