Min Jin Lee, _Pachinko_

"SWEEPING MULTIGENERATIONAL SAGA" is the phrase that recurs in the reviews excerpted on the paperback edition's cover and opening pages, and it is true enough. The phrase got me wondering: do novelists still go in for multigenerational sagas? There were more around, I think, a hundred to a hundred-and-fifty years ago or so--Mann's Buddenbrooks, Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga, Zola's Rougon-Macquart novels. One Hundred Years of Solitude would count, certainly, but I am having a hard time thinking of more contemporary examples. 

The main family in Pachinko is the Baeks, represented in Part One (of three) by two Korean brothers, both Christian converts. (The family name is a fairly common one in Korea, "also often spelled Paek, Baik, Paik, or Back," according to Wikipedia). The main action begins, however, with Sunja, daughter of a couple that keeps a boarding house in Busan (also spelled "Pusan"), who is seduced and impregnated by a Korean businessman, Hansu, visiting from his main base of operations, Osaka, in Japan. The businessman is married with children and won't leave his wife for Sunja, but the younger Baek brother, Isak, selflessly does offer to marry her. Together they move to Osaka, where Isak's older brother Yoseb lives with his wife, Kyunghee.

And so it goes. Isak and Sunja have two boys (including the one fathered by Hansu), who grow up, have children of their own, and so on, and as chapter follows chapter we soon have a multi-generational saga. A key thread to this saga is the difficulties of being Korean in Japan, which turns out to be not much easier for the second and third generations than it was for the first, owing to what seems like a deeply-entrenched Japanese prejudice against gaijin, foreigners, even when the "foreigners" were born in Japan, are native speakers of Japanese, and have no intention of living anywhere else.

The family establishes itself and becomes prosperous thanks to pachinko parlors. This game is never explained in the novel, but apparently it is rather like pinball, but with slot-machine-style payouts (the house always wins in the long run, of course). Pachinko is legal but a little disreputable, since (as with legal gambling in the USA) organized crime (the yakuza) has a history of getting involved. The Baeks stick with it, however.

Pachinko turns out to be a thematic thread of its own, since playing a game that always ends up favoring the house is a bit like being Korean in Japan: that is, the odds are always a bit against you, and disappointments will be frequent. We do want the Baeks to pull through, though, and by and large they do, difficult though it has been. The novel's final scene, in which Sunja, now a grandmother, visits her husband Isak's grave, is very affecting.

Chaim Grade, "The Rebbetzin," trans. Harold Rabinowitz and Inna Hecker Grade

 I CHECKED THE recently-published version of Chaim Grade's Sons and Daughters out from the local public library and, truth to tell, found it more generously provided with description and exposition than I felt like continuing with. (I do enjoy 19th century novels, but there's a reason novel-writing took a different direction.) There was something in the voice I liked, though, so I took the advice offered by Daphne Merkin in her NYRB review of Sons and Daughters and picked up one of Grade's novellas.

"The Rebbetzin" (i.e., "The Wife of the Rabbi") is set in Lithuania, I think, although it may be in northeastern Poland or western Belarus (googling the names of the towns that figure in the story did not quite pin things down). The title character, a rabbi's daughter, was as a young woman betrothed to an up-and-coming rabbi who broke off the engagement, offering her family a relatively plausible excuse but telling his own family that Perele was a "shrew." He goes on to become the Horadno Rabbi, leader of his city's Jewish community and famous throughout European Jewry for his wisdom and scholarship. Perele instead marries Uri-Zvi Koenigsberg, who becomes the rabbi of a smaller town, Graipewo. He is loved and respected by his community, but is nowhere near as big a deal as Moshe-Mordechai Eisenstadt, the Horadno Rabbi.

Decades have passed, but Perele has not forgotten what she takes as a slight, and her slow campaign to get back at the Horadno Rabbi drives the plot. She persuades her husband to retire early, then to move to Horadno, then to take on various tasks that will give him some standing in the Horadno rabbinate. Somewhat mysteriously, misfortunes befall the Horadno Rabbi: his adult daughter sickens and dies, his wife is prostrated by grief, his own health falters. Perele never articulates any particular plan or expresses any particular animus, but the reader nonetheless gets the distinct impression that she has engineered the whole thing.

The novella put me somewhat in mind of Nikolai Leskov's "The Lady Macbeth of Mtensk." As in the Russian fiction, we meet a woman who is constrained (a) by the subordinate situation she is locked into by her sex and (b) by the provinciality of the setting she happens to occupy, but who otherwise has the same relentless ambition and the same willingness to do whatever that ambition requires that we see in Lady Macbeth. Koenigsberg, the Graipewo Rabbi, is no Macbeth; he would rather study Talmud than assassinate Duncan and would have preferred to stay in Graipewo. But, as his and Perele's daughter Serel exasperatedly puts it in the novella's last sentence, "My dear little mother will win out over everyone. Everyone!"

I am not quite ready to attempt Sons and Daughters again, but I would definitely read another Grade novella. 

James Atlas, _Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet_

NOT SURE WHAT to make of my loving to read about Delmore Schwartz but never much liking to read Schwartz's poetry. His critical essays have some snap to them ("The Duchess' Red Shoes" takes a healthy bite out of Lionel Trilling) and I think the story "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" is an American classic. He thought of himself as a poet, though, and I can't think of a single poem of his I wholly admire. He had a rare talent for titles: "In the Naked Bed, in Plato's Cave," "The Heavy Bear that Goes with Me," "Starlight Like Intuition Pierced  the Twelve." Poems that lived up to those titles I would cherish, but the poems Schwartz actually wrote for those titles never get out of second gear.

When people are writing about him, though, he lights up the page.  William Barrett's The Truants, for example--I have kept that tiresome book on my shelves for decades just because of its passages on Schwartz. Or Eileen Simpson's Poets in Their Youth, a brilliant book, especially for its portrait of Schwartz. Or Humboldt's Gift, the only Bellow novel I would ever be tempted to re-read.

Atlas's biography appeared in 1977. I was a bit reluctant to pick it up, not sure I was up for a book-length treatment not by Bellow, but it's very good. Focused more on the astonishing liftoff of Schwartz's career with In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (1938) than on the sputtering descent of the 1950s and 1960s, Atlas's biography conveys the wit, energy, and chutzpah that made Schwartz such an unforgettable figure. Its prose is graceful, its pace swift, its judgments sound. Good book.

T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Wallace Stevens all thought Schwartz was the real deal. He was the next generation of Modernism, but then it all came apart. The dissolution of his career probably had a lot to do with his own precarious mental health. These days, he would have drawerfuls of prescription meds. In the 1940s and 1950s, though, he had to manage as best he could with sleeping pills, dexedrine, and alcohol, which went very badly. 

Somehow, though, I think the real problem was not him, not Schwartz's particular history and demons, as much as it was that there couldn't be a second generation of High Modernism. Its classics were not imitable; they did not serve well as models. Lowell and Berryman did their best work once they gave up trying to be High Modernists. Frank O'Hara and Jack Spicer decided they weren't going to try. Schwartz tied himself to the mast...and went down with the ship.

Rachael Allen, _God Complex_

 BEN PHILIPPS'S RECENT REVIEW of this book in n+1 persuaded me to pick it up. As I read it, to my surprise, I kept thinking of Eliot's The Waste Land, but maybe The Waste Land would fit Philipps's category of "eco-confessional," now that I think about it.

Besides being, like Eliot's 1922 volume, a book-length poem ("a sweeping and corrosive epic," according to the jacket copy), God Complex resembles The Waste Land in showing both the natural world and social institutions locked in some feedback loop death spiral, each coming unglued in response to the other's coming unglued.

Once, twice, three times a year,
the river would burst its bank.
The river would burst its muscly bank
all over the closed bars and into our house,
dark, destroying our rooms,
like someone in an unpredictable rage.
The parasols and our belongings heading out to sea.

Phrases like "one sanitary pad floated in the river's dank" and "rat-sweetened water" might have come right out of that description of the Thames that opens "The Fire Sermon."

And, as in The Waste Land, at the core of all the coming unglued lies a disastrous relationship--there are several in Eliot's poem, actually: the "my nerves are bad tonight" couple and Albert and Lil in "A Game of Chess" and the typist and the clerk in "The Fire Sermon." God Complex has just the one disastrous relationship, but it is as bad as all of Eliot's put together. The speaker is in a slow-motion shipwreck with a fellow next to whom Eliot's clerk, the "young man carbuncular," seems like a chivalrous charmer. 

"I called the wrong thing love for so long / I cannot switch it back," Allen writes. Much to one's relief, however, the very last poem in the book (p. 99), cast in the third person, suggests she has started to do a least a little better. Just about anything, though, would be better than what she has been through:

In this pain I was a charred donkey in an office chair--steaming, stupid and unusual. I'd have whole conversations with myself pretending half of me was you. I was so alone, so deeply, there was only river, and an inexplicable dome of smoke in  the sky.

Chris Lehmann, "American Gothics: The Failures of the Trump Novel," in _The Baffler_ #81

I ALWAYS LOOK forward to reading Chris Lehmann, but the response of U. S. fiction writers to Trump and Trumpism has not been as inadequate as he claims in his piece in the most recent issue of The Baffler. I would take issue with him on several points.

(1) The novel is not a good genre for hot takes, because novels take a long time to write, and the gaining of genuine historical perspective takes even longer. The best American novel about the country’s potential for fascism in the 1930s is not Sinclair Lewis’s estimable but flawed It Can’t Happen Here but Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, written sixty years after the events it imagines. For similar reasons, the best novel about Europe in the Napoleonic era, War and Peace, was written more than fifty years after Waterloo. We will likely not live to see the truly great novel about Trumpism. 

(2) For now, no one novel is going to do the whole job of making Trump and Trumpism discernible. We have a lot of excellent non-fiction books devoted to that undertaking, by (for example) John Ganz, Kristin Kobes du Mez, Quinn Slobodian, and Laura Field, but no one of them does the whole job all by itself. Similarly, the novels by Ben Lerner, Hari Kunzru, and Gary Shteyngart that Lehmann criticizes do focus on aspects of Trump and Trumpism rather than all 360 degrees of that phenomenon; take them together, though, and we begin to get a convincing picture. 

(3) Lehmann objects that these novelists focus too exclusively on Trumpism’s “failings of language, etiquette, and aesthetic representation” while staying silent on “most questions of Trumpian politics and policy-making, from election denialism to DEI moral panics to evangelical militance.” I think Lehmann is mistaken in thinking these are two separate domains. The unforgettable playground scene in Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School does focus on language and etiquette, but it does so in a way that reveals the worldview underlying election denialism, DEI moral panic, and a lot else. Making these connections visible is what the greatest novels do. 

(4)I am very glad Lehmann praised Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport, one of the great American novels of this still-young century. I hope he will get around to The Unfolding by A. M. Homes, whose “Big Guy” gives us a portrait of Trumpism at the other end of the class hierarchy from Ellmann’s Ronny. Nicolás Medina Mora’s América del Norte makes a contribution too, showing us Trumpism from the perspective of a resident non-citizen. 

 

The complaints of Lehmann and others notwithstanding, the novelists of the United States are on the case. 

Sam Tanenhaus, _Buckley: The Life and Revolution That Changed America_, Part 2: At Odds with His Time

 Continuing my section-by-section notes on Tanenhaus's new and excellent biography of William F. Buckley, Jr.:

(1) Tracking down a reference, I discovered that John Judis, author of the 1988 book that up until now has been the most thorough biography of Buckley, granted Tanenhaus access to his archive of interviews.  This had to have been an invaluable resource--for one thing, I imagine at least some of the people Judis interviewed died before Tanenhaus would have had a chance to talk to them. 

What a generous thing to do. Judis must have known that Tanenhaus's book would replace his own as the go-to on Buckley, but still shared what he could have hoarded, in the interest of a truer, more comprehensive history. As someone who spent a career in academia, where a lot of policing of territory occurs, I was impressed at Judis's selflessness.

(2) Like a lot of promising Ivy grads right after World War II, Buckley was invited to work for CIA, and yes, he did, for a while, in Mexico. Not surprising, really, but the real twist in the story is that during Buckley's brief stint as a spook, he met and befriended E. Howard Hunt, later one of the (ahem) masterminds of the fateful Watergate break-in.

(3) Buckley's emergence was well-timed. American conservatism was on the ropes in the thirties and forties, what with (a) the popularity of New Deal innovations like Social Security, collective bargaining, and the 40-hour week, (b) the fascist overtones of the "America First" movement, and (c) the Republican party's embrace of relatively moderate presidential candidates like Willkie, Dewey, and Eisenhower. The campaign against Communism perked things up a bit, but the tawdriness of McCarthyism soon clogged  the wheels of that effort. 

American conservatism needed an advocate who was young, intelligent, articulate, and energetic--and lo, one appeared.

(4) Buckley's energy was prodigious. A lot of Part 2 is about the launching of the National Review, a daunting undertaking, but one Buckley was equal to and that in a short time rearranged the landscape of American political commentary. That alone was a breathtaking accomplishment. But he also found time to found Young Americans for Freedom, a nationwide association of young conservatives, and (along with great friend and brother-in-law Brent Bozell, who ghost-wrote The Conscience of a Conservative) to get off the ground a campaign to elect Barry Goldwater President.

(5) National Review placed its marker firmly on  the pro-segregation side of the civil rights question, most (in)famously in Buckley's editorial "Why the South Must Prevail." This we knew. But Tanenhaus has made the further and truly eye-opening discovery that the Buckley family also funded a segregationist newspaper in Camden, SC, its hometown-away-from-hometown. The first issue carried a "Statement of Principle" by the newly-formed White Citizens Council. 

Cole Swenson, _Such Rich Hour_

 COUNT ON COLE Swenson for an original and surprising starting point for a collection, in this case the famously gorgeous late medieval illuminated manuscript, the Trés Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, commissioned in 1411 by the duke himself (third-born son of King Jean II) but not completed at the time of his death in 1416--not completed, indeed, until 1440, by hands other than those of the originally commissioned painters, the Brothers Limbourg, who also died in 1416. And then the whole thing was lost for a few hundred years, to be rediscovered in a girls' boarding school in Genoa in 1855.

The manuscript is organized around the months of the year and depicts a serene, prosperous, well-ordered world, which the territory and court of the Duc de Berry supposedly was. Actually, early fifteenth century France was anything but serene, prosperous, and well-ordered. A lot of its territory was occupied by England, whose royal family was aggressively pursuing its claim to the crown of France, and the French royal family was enmeshed in a bloody intra-familial feud worthy of Game of Thrones or The Sopranos. Agincourt, the Hundred Years War, Joan of Arc, rival popes...that 15th century.

Swenson's poems represent both the beautiful world seen in the manuscript's illuminations ("the forest whole in its gentle bow / mirrored in color / love was something we invented/ / and perfectly enacted") and the terrible world in which the book was produced ("Choose a bridge in broad daylight, The Yonne drifting / by below while Tanguy du Châtel / simply kills him. Others lean / on the railing and watch"). Often the poems represent as well the processes that producing the book required, vellum and brushes and paints, the material bases by which it exists at all.

The book follows the manuscript in being organized around the months, but the poems do not make the mistake of trying to sound or look like facsimiles of 15th century poetry. They are thoroughly contemporary, disjunctive and paratactic, sometimes in ways that suggest erasures. The further I got into the book, the more sense this choice made, as it seemed to reflect how our knowledge of the world of 15th century France was necessarily fragmentary, composed of brightly colored but disconnected pieces that we had to assemble as best we could on our own, imagining our way into the lacunae, the empty spaces. Such Rich Hour steers well clear of pastiche, finding its own way to recreate the beauty of the art and world it honors.