Loads of Learned Lumber

Amy Gerstler and David Lehman, eds., _The Best American Poetry 2010_

2012-01-13T11:15:00.000-08:00

HERE I AM a year behind again, but this one was well worth reading once I got around to it -- the best since Heather McHugh's, I think. A very broad spectrum of publications represented, nice mix of the conventional and not-at-all conventional, some great old hands and some intriguing work by names new to me. Among the latter: Mark Bibbins, Peter Davis, Gabriel Gudding, Dolly Lemke, Camille Norton, Gregory Pardlo. Mr. Gudding apparently has published a 436-page poem with Dalkey Archive. Dalkey Archive, how I love you!

David Mitchell, _Black Swan Green_

2012-01-10T15:20:00.000-08:00

A CURVEBALL (or googly?) from Mitchell, heretofore given to razzle-dazzle in his fiction, as Black Swan Green is a relatively straightforward coming of age story, set in a small town in the southern part of England in 1982, the year of the Falklands War.

Jason Taylor, the narrator, is thirteen, and faces the quintessential dilemma of thirteen-year-olds in the western world: are you one of the cool kids who can seemingly get away with anything, one of the large mass of the nondescript who blend in and manage to avoid the worst kinds of trouble, or one of the persecuted preterite singled out for the torments of the damned? As a stammerer (like Mitchell, according to interviews), Jason is at graver-than-usual risk of falling into the third category. Quick-witted and capable of bravery, he gets a shot at joining the local gang, which would make him a cool kid, but he loses that opportunity when he chooses to stand by a friend who disastrously failed the initiation (good for you, Jace). From then on, he is increasingly in the sights of the King Bully, and things go from bad to worse to even worse.

Pluck (in shop class, Jason crushes the expensive calculator of one of the bullies in a vise, thus getting the authorities' attention while also demonstrating nerve) and luck (he finds the King Bully's lost wallet at the fair) win Jason a degree of redemption; there's also the fact that the bullies don't grow up to write the books. A conversation with Mme. Crommelynk, whom we met in very different circumstances in Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, helps Jason discern a vocation as a writer.

Ordinarily, I'm disappointed when someone who successfully writes the more adventurous kinds of fiction decides to play it straight, but Mitchell is so good at it that I could only marvel and enjoy. The holiday verbal death match between Jason's father and his uncle... the three teenaged girls emerging from a photo booth singing Duran Duran's "Hungry Like a Wolf"... the perfect counterpointing of the Falklands War with the contest of wills between Jason's parents... all the NYTBR and New Republic folks wishfully scanning the horizon for a great contemporary version of 19th century realism should be looking right here.

Steve Stern, _The Frozen Rabbi_

2012-01-09T11:30:00.000-08:00

A nerdish teenaged Jewish boy living in Memphis, searching his family's deep freeze for a piece of liver in which to masturbate á la Alex Portnoy, discovers a frozen Hasidic rabbi. Alternating chapters in Stern's wonderful novel lay out (a) how the frozen rabbi wound up in a suburban Memphis deep freeze and (b) what happened when he was thawed out.

Stern's evocations of a century of Jewish milieus (and a century of slow assimilation) are brilliant, especially thanks to his unequalled gift for the depiction of luftmenschen. The novel's comic/satiric vein -- the thawed rabbi opens a New-Age-ish spirituality center and more or less immediately succumbs to temptations of every kind, while the teenaged boy discovers he has the makings of a tzaddik -- is a tad more predictable but still enjoyable.

Jewish as it all is, the novel's conclusion left me thinking of Greene's The Power and The Glory and its trio of miracles proving the sainthood of the whiskey priest. Stern's final pages, even with one more bit of Rothian outlandish outrageousness at the very end, likewise beautifully conjure miracles and sanctity.

Ben Lerner, _Leaving the Atocha Station_

2012-01-07T14:59:00.000-08:00

A BRILLIANT SHORT novel, perhaps of autobiographical inspiration, since Lerner himself grew up in Kansas, went to an Ivy League school, and did a Fulbright year in Spain, and the novel's narrator, Adam Gordon, grew up in Kansas, went to an Ivy League school, and has a grant to live in Spain for a year and write a long poem about the Spanish Civil War... except that Adam, a good Ashberyean, does not believe poems are "about" anything, so the idea that the book is "about" Lerner himself may be a red herring.

The novel could hardly be more convincing, though. It feels as knobbily real as anyone could wish, Ashbery notwithstanding. Lerner makes little to no effort to make Adam Gordon likeable, even in a roguish bad-boy way. He's a bit self-absorbed, not always honest, and given to pretending he understands more of what his Spanish interlocutors are saying than he really does. (Hilariously, Lerner often gives several versions of what a Spanish character just said.)

Adam's warts-and-all self-presentation does tend to win the reader over as the book proceeds, though, mainly because his engagement in the place and the people deepen. At first, he devotes almost all of his time either to writing poems by substituting words and rearranging lines in English translations of Garcia Lorca poems or to getting stoned. His first acquaintances occur in a fog of guesswork translation. Luckily, though, he gets the benefit of a doubt from some young Spanish artists and writers, who befriend him in, set up readings for him, and let him into their world. If these bright, energetic people like Adam, I found myself thinking, he must be OK.

Tension between the real and the represented heaves into view again at the end of Part 2, when Adam has an instant-messaging chat with a stateside friend who has actually witnessed a stranger's death, and then History raises the stakes in the question when Adam is in Madrid at the time of the Al-Quaeda bombing and the election that ousts Spain's pro-Bush government. Suddenly, in his po-mo, multiply-mediated way, he's in the tradition of Auden, Orwell, and the other writers who came to Spain during the crisis of the civil war. By the end of the novel, he's planning to stay in Spain. One suspects he won't...but his wanting to suggests to me that his heart has found its over-medicated, wandering way to the right place.

Timothy Donnelly, _The Cloud Corporation_

2011-10-18T12:32:00.000-07:00

A LONGISH WAIT -- seven years -- who does he think he is, Elizabeth Bishop? -- but worth it. Donnelly still has the capacity, demonstrated repeatedly in Twenty-Seven Props..., to keep you teetering off-balance while moving recklessly forward, ultimately landing you in some spot you never saw coming until you were already there.

I keep thinking I detect some of the same species of way-too-late-Romanticism that Harold Bloom detected in middle-period Ashbery. "In His Tree" seems a contemporary busted-quest poem, along the lines of Shelley's Alastor, Browning's Pauline, Rimbaud's Le Bateau Ivre or Hart Crane's "The Broken Tower."

I set out to find that thing, drawn down by an under-

water instinct true to the warp and weft of a small

false deafness, locked deep in the blue-green private

compartment broken up into shifts and strung

in accordance to the wiles of arachnid light, a light too

truant from its source to reflect a compact back

with fidelity: the sun its half-remembered lozenge

trapped among the birch.

I plucked this virtually at random, but it's a good sample of the pleasures of the volume: the whiplash-inducing enjambment of "a small / false deafness," the twisty syntax (does "strung in accordance" modify "compartment" or "deafness"?), the baffled engagement with the natural world... which baffled engagement makes one think of the Romantics again, as does Donnelly's juggling with religious feelings he's not sure what to do with:

a lifelong feeling that I feel now, remembering

down the highway half-hypnotized in the

backseat feeling what I feel now, and moderate

happiness has nothing to do with it: I want to press

my face against the cold black window until

there is a deity whose only purpose is to stop this.

("The New Hymns")

There are hi-jinks as well, such as a hilariously terrifying blending of phrases from Springsteen's "Born to Run" with phrases from the Patriot Act ("The Last Dream of Light Released from Seaports"). "Dream of a Poetry of Defense" works almost as well -- it blends Shelley's Defense of Poetry and the 9/11 Commission Report -- but the one blending the Beverly Hillbillies theme song with one of Osama bin Laden's addresses, ennh, I don't know. But the hits far outnumber the odd misses in The Cloud Corporation.

Jonathan Safran Foer, _Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close_

2011-10-17T10:58:00.000-07:00

TO BE HONEST, I did not care for Everything Is Illuminated and had no plans to read Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close, but then it ended up being one of the monthly selections of the book club, so... oh, well.

I enjoyed it more than I did Everything Is Illuminated. It certainly has what we could call a family resemblance. Oskar Schell, our narrator, is as richly provided with quirks as was Alex Perchov. We again have personal traumas nested within historical ones, the Holocaust in Everything, 9/11 and the Dresden fire-bombing in Extremely. In both novels, New World descendants come to terms with what happened to Old World ancestors.

I cannot quell my suspicion that J. S. F. is drawn to historical trauma and Old World settings because they all by themselves (he might hope) lend a gravitas that his fictions otherwise would not quite attain. For my money, Joshua Cohen blows him out of the water.

But I was fond of the almost Dickensian A. R. Black, his index cards and exclamation points, and I loved that Oskar was cast as Yorick in his school's streamlined production of Hamlet. I may give Foer's third novel, when it comes, a shot. I won't be letting him tell me what to eat, however.

Jonathan Franzen, _Freedom_

2011-10-16T11:10:00.000-07:00

FINISHED THIS A few months ago, but you know how it gets once the semester starts... in any case, I emerged thinking Freedom certainly a good novel, but not a great one; not as compelling as The Corrections, I would say, which might turn out to be a great one. There is nothing in Freedom to match the streak of satiric fantasy that came up with Corecktall, for one thing, and more damagingly Franzen does not inhabit any of the characters of this novel -- save Joey Berglund, perhaps -- with the uncanny intimacy he brought to the Lambert siblings.

As for the comparisons to Tolstoy that were in the air a year ago... what were people thinking? After all, Tolstoy did write about an infidelity-racked marriage, so direct comparisons are possible. In the fascinatingly caddish betrayer with rare flashes of conscience role, the matchup is Richard Katz vs. Vronsky. No contest, really. There is no scene here to rival Vronsky's steeplechase on Frou-Frou. One gets the feeling Richard was supposed to be a swirling vortex of nihilistic energy, but he more often comes off as just a grouch. Moreover, his putative status as 80s indie rock cult figure is unpersuasive next to Jennifer Egan's much more knowing depiction of that scene in A Visit from the Goon Squad.

In the role of the devoted, conscientious, uncharismatic plodder occasionally capable of lashing out, we have Walter Berglund and Alexei Karenin. We can call it even, I suppose.

Then we have Anna herself and... Patty Berglund. Oy.

The best part of Freedom is the subplot with the Berglunds' son Joey, his doggedly (and doggily) devoted high school girlfriend Connie, and the dazzlingly well-connected rich girl who is the sister of his college roommate. Is it as rich as the Levin-Kitty subplot? Erm, no. But Franzen knows Joey to the bone, and everything about the character convinces.

Still -- if posterity ever wants to know how the white American professional class of the late 20th and early 21st century walked, talked, argued, and fought, what they read, watched, and listened to, they could hardly do better than to pick up Freedom. Franzen is not our Tolstoy, but he may well be our William Dean Howells.

Barry Unsworth, _The Songs of the Kings_

2011-08-28T16:05:00.000-07:00

IPHIGENIA IN AULIS, in historical novel mode -- operating under the assumption that Agamemnon, Odysseus, Achilles, et al. were every bit as petty, hypocritical, opportunistic, duplicitous, and unwilling to acknowledge their real motives as Bush, Blair, & Co.

And not an assumption you need strain much at, provided you are willing to go along with the premise that these fictional characters are the real scoop on characters who were fictional in the first place.

The Songs of the Kings thus belongs in "twas ever thus" category of historical novels, rather than the Lukács-approved "things were wholly different once" category. Or perhaps the historical-novel-as-oblique-commentary-on-contemporary-events category, like, mmm, Felix Holt the Radical, perhaps, or Wajda's film Danton.

A good novel, but I found myself continually making unfavorable comparisons to Mark Merlis's An Arrow's Flight, one of the great novels of recent decades, to my mind, as well as one of the most compelling contemporary re-imaginings of the matter of Troy, and one which so far as I can discern gets nothing like the accolades it deserves. It's up there with Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, if you ask me. So get around to asking me, won't you? Thanks.

Sixth note on _Witz_

2011-08-08T13:44:00.000-07:00

6. Cohen likes long, extraordinarily long sentences. Here is what Benjamin encounters as he crosses from New Jersey into New York City via the Holland Tunnel (p. 520):

Landscaped from one of the two mouths of the tunnel, for the many tunnels of this mutated city are monstrous throats that never digest or ever waste what they swallow, without intestine or stomached gargle, how they merely gorge then regurgitate and then gorge themselves again down to the bottom of Broadway – willows groved tightly, their trunks lashed together to prevcnt from being uprooted by the tunneling wind, their boughs hung with many other objects, or forsakings, the harps of the Philharmonic, disbanded since last season’s interruption, and then with their strings, all their sections: their violins firsts and seconds, violas and violoncellos, the occasional weepy, drooping bass, their strings wilting in memory, going loose and detuned in the howl coming up from the bay – trees hung not just with bisbiglissandoing harps and with fiddles gutted and bows but with memories, too, and forgettings, pleas and supplications, signs and notes slipped and tied dire: help me find my father, one says, have you seen my partner? Another, this posted alongside a photo faced grainy from its constant reproduction, a losingly lined courtroomsketch, if so contact Sassoon & Silver LLP., cash reward for information leading to his recovery, all (succor) wanted, need, & offered […]

That’s not the end of the sentence, but let’s stop and take the census so far. We begin with a participial phrase, but have to wait a bit for the noun it modifies (“willows”) because the tunnel’s having a “mouth” triggers a short excursus on its being the maw of this Moloch of a city. The willows get an interesting nonce verb – “groved” – then turn out to be lashed together, which seems peculiar, but even more peculiarly have been festooned with the abandoned instruments of the Philharmonic, disbanded since so many its musicians died (a lot of the orchestra’s members are, indeed, Jewish, but these days the Asian musician might be able to keep it going). The surreal image of the now useless string instruments in the willows shifts suddenly as we next are presented with the kind of notes that appeared all over Manhattan after 9/11, with a striking inversion (‘tied dire”) and another noun-into-verb transformation (“photo faced grainy”). Then there’s the “losingly lined courtroomsketch” – does the hand-drawn image that Sassoon provides of Silver (or Silver of Sassoon) somehow suggest that their law practice has been infrequently victorious?

Cohen often makes use of absolute phrases – “their strings wilting,” “signs and notes slipped and tied dire,” “trees hung etc” – a classic maximalist’s device for adding detail after detail to a sentence, as we see as the catalog of objects left in memory of the dead continues:

…tins of spam dangling from giftribbons, plastic liters of generic soda, empty jars of mayo weeping ornamentally wrapped from these trees, trays of decorative cupcakes and cookies, novelty balloons; these groves nymphabandoned, lining Canal Street west to the Bowery with equity neckties, daytrader suits on hangers commoditized fresh from the drycleaners, high heels, dressy pearls’ strands – this the highest rate of return, a reversion to our natural state, a great comfort unconfined: this season, menschs let out their bellies; womenfolk smear their makeup onto the faces of streets, pink and streaks of red like rainbows trailed by snails, then pray for an innerly inclement weather, asking the cloudfall to cool their lusts, to purify their souls; their kinder pitch pennies worthless into the sewer green and gold, dogs once theirs now stray dash lame from snow to snow … skyscrapers once new, abandoned to scaffolds; earthworming giants idle, dumpster hulks sanctifying as symbols of an emptiness within; ambition unfinished, thrusts unfulfilled; lorded over by an inutile silence and the holy stillness of cranes. (520-21)

We note the Yiddish – the novel invariably uses “mensch” for “man” or “person,” “kinder” for “children” – and the high modernist touches, the Joycean aversion to the hyphen, for example, as in what may be an allusion to Eliot’s Waste Land: “these groves nymphabandoned”. The plague has laid waste not only to symphony orchestra but to Wall Street, with homely details (drycleaned suits still on hangers) and grimly ironic puns (“highest rate of return”), an image of made-up women collapsing on the street heightened with a simile both beautiful and queasy-making (like rainbows trailed by snails). Next, we have an image of orphaned children, perhaps not long to live themselves, and abandoned dogs in a stunning string of monosyllabic words (‘dogs once theirs now stray dash lame from snow to snow”) that almost sounds like a William Carlos Williams poems. Then Cohen pulls out all the stops, piling up absolute phrases that read like Whitman-out-of-Ginsberg (‘earthworming giants idle, dumpster hulks sanctifying”) before flipping in a wholly surprising but perfect French adjective and a final image that sounds like Li Bai until you realize it completes the picture of arrested construction.

Joshua Cohen, _A Heaven of Others_

2011-08-05T08:15:00.000-07:00

LITERARY HEAVENS, FROM Dante to Mitch Albom, gravitate towards explanation, clearing up the big questions, reconciliations, and the like, but Joshua Cohen's afterlife in A Heaven for Others is if anything stranger, more bewildering, and more abounding in loose ends than ordinary earthly existence.

On his tenth birthday, Jonathan Schwartzstein of Jerusalem is in a shoe store with his father when a suicide bomber crashes in. The explosion kills Jonathan, but due to some cosmic missed exit he winds up in the Muslim heaven, complete with houris, camels, and a K'aba ("Schawartzstein" could be translated "Black Stone"). He sets off on a pilgrimage to find Muhammad and learn how and why he is there, but Muhammad is unlocatable. He does come across a boy his own age who seems be the suicide bomber who crashed into the shoe store.

There is a risk of sentimentality in this scenario (the text is dated "Yom Hazikaron, 2004," an Israeli holiday honoring fallen soldiers and civilian victims of terrorism), and Cohen is not wholly successful in avoiding it (e.g., p. 142). But the book's uniqueness and strangeness prevent one from drawing ready conclusions. Why the occasional shift from Jonathan's first-person narration to that of an omniscient third person? (God? Cohen?) Why the three poems, titled "Alef," "Beit," and again "Alef," prefaced by designs by Michael Hafftka based on those three letters, which spell "ABA," that is, "father"? Why the epigraph from Russian Hebrew poet Saul Tchernichovsky, about a student acquiring a disgust for what his teachers most want him to learn?

And what can we make of Jonathan's gnomic utterances such as "Limitation is what I now understand to be the sole attribute of God [...]"? That the lesson we emphatically learn about God is that God is a God of some (us) but not all (them)? Or what about "heaven must be understood as borderless if it is to have any borders at all" or "an eternal boy matures eternally"? We are far indeed from Albom or Alice Sebold here -- as we are from Beatrice's painstakingly precise scholastic commentaries.

Plenty to ponder, then; fair enough. But I was most taken with the final section, "A 'Metaphor'," in which Jonathan recalls his bath on what was to be the last night of his life in the river-overflowing-its-banks prose of Witz.

Fifth note on _Witz_

2011-07-31T15:42:00.000-07:00

5. I began by saying that the events of the story are readily summarized, and have just noted that the book vividly conjures up its settings, but event and setting are always seen through the decorated scrim of the book’s narrative style; like a scrim, the style is not fully transparent, and as with a decorated scrim you may find yourself paying as much attention to the decorations as to the action occurring behind it. More attention, perhaps – as in Gaddis’s Recognitions, tracking the turns of the sentence is so absorbing that you may fail to take in what is being narrated. The reader is always conscious of Cohen’s style: le style, c’est le livre.

And his style beggars description. It’s a torrent, for one thing, a deluge, an outpouring. Sentences routinely take up most of a page. The sentences are self-interrupting, constantly breaking in on themselves to illustrate, expand, make a joke. They usually embrace several tonal registers during their course, from the demotic to the epic, sometimes sounding like Lenny Bruce on amphetamines, sometimes biblically ornate like Cormac McCarthy, if McCarthy liked to pepper his prose with Yiddish and Hebrew. Alliteration and puns abound.
Consider some of the phrases from the sentence on the fart salvoes, quoted above. “[E]normous sortie wet and thick” – note the little internal rhyme on the “or” sound, the adjectives before and after the noun, the military flavor of the noun, conveying how men enjoy bringing a martial ardor into even the most ludicrous circumstances, figured later in the sentence with “barrage,” “booms,” “bombs.” Or “bucking the uppers,” with its surprising assonance, the animated-cartoon image of bunks lifting and falling from the abrupt shock of the farts. The odd Miltonic inversion of “from cot to cot echoing.” The quirky juxtaposition of homonyms in “there their.” The outlandishly apt figuration of farts as “dark graffiti.”

Arielle Greenberg, _My Kafka Century_

2011-07-30T14:25:00.000-07:00

HERE IS THE book's back jacket copy:

"In My Kafka Century, Arielle Greenberg raises the gothic European ghosts sealed under the glib facade of contemporary American culture. Trying on the sometimes hilarious, sometimes discomforting guises of Jewish folk humor, pop eroticism, and kiddie epistemology, she reveals and revels in the cracks and contradictions of a bristling, brainy Babel."

I despair of improving upon that. I don't know about "glib facade" -- if you recall the original meaning of the word "facade," the figure may seem silly -- but the writer seems to have read the book and actually grasped something of its strategies and achievements, as opposed to 99% of jacket copy for volumes of poetry ("So-&-so's brilliant new collection embraces themes of change, vision, and history in astonishingly evocative language"). The jacket copy is a much better indicator of the volume's contents and quality than the blurbs: "intellectually challenging" (zzz), "dazzling explorations" (yawn), "a dark confection" (nice try, but...).

So who was writing the jacket copy for Action Books in 2005? Some U. of Alabama grad student, I suppose, but whoever it was, he or she sure nailed it. As you might gather from the copy, this volume is like some sweet, funny, clever kid you met in fourth grade who turns out to have a pet tarantula and a scab collection.

That would be plenty, I'd say, but there's more -- startling, strange, moving poems on pregnancy ("Honey," "One Hundred and Eighty," "Red Rover," "Katie Smith Says [...]," for instance, and remarkably original meditations on Jewishness. The final poem, "Synopsis," reads like a highly compressed and highly idiosyncratic montage of the history of the Jews -- or of one person's memories of learning that history -- in 46 short sentences. Lines 18-30:

Boys are plied with wine and snipped.

I pray according to daylight.

Next year will return to the city of gold.

I shield my eyes from the priests' blessing.

Girls get two candles each.

I stood at the bottom of a mountain with my soul.

A very small parcel of real estate was promised.

I was taken for a fool by my village to make a story.

He offered the angels his most finely sifted flour.

I hid in an attic with my diary.

The tents are goodly.

I was a lost tribe and came out black.

Fourth note on _Witz_

2011-07-30T14:24:00.000-07:00

4. As for plain-label realism itself, the book has many episodes of nuanced social observation, vividly presented. There’s an extraordinary account of Israel and Hanna’s wedding (241-46); the museum gala with which the Benjamin part of the book closes is another excellent set piece. Ditto for the accounts of the Florida apartment complex of Benjamin’s grandfather, or of the Vegas hotel in “Los Siegeles,” or of the Southwest, or the suburban development in which the Israelsteins live, of Israel’s law office, of Chinatown. The novel is very good at the kind of thing novelists like Trollope and Updike are good at – noticing what it is about the way we live now that we are too inattentive to notice, helping us to see our own world.

The novel’s many extraordinarily effective mimetic passages are all cast in the book’s idiosyncratic style, however, which is a whole other topic.

Gary Shteyngart, _Super Sad True Love Story_

2011-07-21T13:19:00.000-07:00

I STARTED THIS soon after finishing Sam Lipsyte's The Ask, and that may be why they seemed to have so much in common. The central main character in both is a shlimazel, a misfortune magnet, whose hold on his job is tenuous and whose beloved is starting to notice better prospects. Both have a satirical thrust, Lipsyte's novel exaggerating (slightly) the vice and folly of our time to blackly humorous effect, Shteyngart's extrapolating from that vice and folly to create an all-too-possible near future (all are rigorously judged according to youthfulness, wealth, and conformity to current fashion, the country erupts in violence when China and the E.U. call in their chits), again to blackly humorous effect. Both seemed to me...

Time out. OK, what is the right way to form an adjective based on Evelyn Waugh's name? "Waughian" won't do. Perhaps add a "v," on analogy with Shaw --> Shavian? We'll go with that.

...Wauvian (looks peculiar, but I'm sticking with it), especially the Waugh on Vile Bodies and A Handful of Dust, hilarious and chilling, laughter with a bleak, frozen wasteland at its core.

Third note on _Witz_

2011-07-19T10:24:00.001-07:00

3. Magical realism? Kinda sorta, maybe. Benjamin is born bearded, wearing glasses. The first catastrophic dying-off of the Jews occurs on the eve of the day his bris would have been celebrated, so he is uncircumcised – except that his foreskin magically circumcises itself, then grows back, removes itself again, and so on. A pack of feral dogs out of some mittel-european forest almost hunts him down as he is being returned from Florida to New Jersey. That Benjamin is set up in a simulacrum of his family home with thirteen shiksas playing the parts of his mother and sisters has a kind of fantastic quality. A certain hyperbole prevails throughout – but in this respect the book seems not at all like deadpan accounts of the incredible we get in Garcia Marquez, hence not all that magical-realist.

Is it a Jewish magical realism, then? Hmm. Jonathan Safran Foer (ptoo, ptoo, ptoo) seemed to be attempting something of the sort in the shtetl chapters of Everything Is Illuminated; Witz never sounds like that (like I. B. Singer crippled by an MFA). But here is Cohen describing a contagious outbreak of farting that occurs in the Great Hall on Ellis Island, which has temporarily become a dorm for Jewish first-born sons:

He grunts, then as if to say hello, to introduce himself he farts, a poof, a toot, is answered by that mensch neighboring, a response given upon permission, shameless, with another fart, this rip huge, Rrrrrrrip! an enormous sortie wet and thick, which tears a hole right out of his uniform pajamas, this sound echoed six beds down then maybe two over with another, is duetted with, a ffrrip, and yet another, pow, pow, -- and – pow from opposite sides of the barracks, a barrage of miniexplosions, from cot to cot echoing against the corroded collapsing wet walls, stacked booms rocking the lower bunks, bucking the uppers, bombs from the rafters to incise there their own dark graffiti, signing a scatology’s name. (155-56)

There are two more even longer sentences on this festival of flatulence. Not magical realism, exactly, but an embrace of fabulism, perhaps? A willingness to go over the top, road of excess, palace of wisdom, etc.? Its ancestor seems not so much Garcia Marquez as Philip Roth in his especially manic mid-70s phase, the Roth of Our Gang and The Great American Novel, and, later, my favorite bits of Operation Shylock.

Jill Lepore, _The Whites of their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History_

2011-07-18T11:16:00.000-07:00

THIS IS LEPORE more in her New Yorker mode, writing for a general audience, than in her Bancroft Prize mode (even so, there are 30-plus pages of notes), seven chapters with the grace and movement of essays that braid together several strands: her conversations with current Tea Party members at various rallies and other events in Boston, other movements and events (abolition, the bicentennial) when Americans looked back and tried to see an image of themselves in the people and ideas of the founding of the republic, and her own accounts of those people, events, and ideas (the original Tea Party, Lexington, Concord, Bunker Hill, Phyllis Wheatley, Paul Revere...).

A fine book, really -- well-informed, well-written, thoughtful. All in all, hard to figure out why Gordon Wood decided to blow the whistle on it in NYRB.

Lepore knocks down the Tea Party's vision of the Revolution without even really trying -- the number of people who know more about the period than she does is probably in the low single digits -- but she does not disrespect the people she interviews, it seems to me, nor suggest that they are more ignorant than most about the Revolution. People with politics 180 degrees away from those of the Tea Party, she acknowledges, are just as likely to make up self-serving myths about the founding era. She seems to welcome curiosity and interest in the period, and even takes historians to task a bit for not trying harder to connect with a broader reading public (67-69).

All in all, hard to tell how the bee got in Professor Wood's bonnet. It couldn't be because Lepore gave Wood's contribution to the Oxford History of the United States a respectful ho-hum when she was in the reviewer's chair? Surely not.

Second note on _Witz_

2011-07-18T09:07:00.000-07:00

2. So far, so picaresque. From even this bare summary, we glimpse many ways in which Cohen’s narrative has Judaic resonances. Hanna and Israel’s family is an inversion of Jacob’s, with twelve daughters instead of twelve sons; the disaster in which all Jews but first-born sons die is an inversion of the tenth plague visited upon the Egyptians in Exodus, with Santa Claus re-cast as the Angel of Death; Las Vegas’s new name honors the Jewish gangster, Bugsy Siegel, whose vision the city embodies; “Polandland” is an inversion of the Holocaust, in which Gentiles die for being Gentiles.

But we’re just getting started. Ben has oral sex with his ersatz mother on Tisha B’av (“The Ninth of Av”), the day on which both the First and Second Temples were destroyed, ever since a day of mourning, and according to some traditions the day on which the Messiah will be born. Ben performs cunnilingus on “Hanna” so energetically that he winds up in her uterus, which is described as a Jerusalem, then tumbles back out – so is he “born”? The novel keeps the idea of Ben-as-Messiah constantly in play. He emerges in “Palestein” not only horned (as, in one mistranslation, Moses was, hence Michelangelo’s statue) but in the company of a red heifer, red heifers being a crucial criterion for the future construction of the Third Temple, to be accomplished when the Messiah comes.

It would take days to list the allusions to Jewish traditions, learning, and folkways that occur in the novel. One striking example: Cohen’s description of the facility for Jewish first-borns, in which their submission to bureaucracy and authority is shot through with memories of both Ellis Island and of the Nazi concentration camps.

J. M. Coetzee, _Slow Man_

2011-07-17T09:57:00.000-07:00

AS IN DISGRACE and Diary of a Bad Year, we have a case of ill-targeted desire; after losing a leg in a bad bicycle accident, Paul Rayment falls in love with his nurse, prompting a number of exaggeratedly generous offers to help her children, perhaps with the goal of swaying her love from her husband to herself.

Divorced and childless as well as missing a leg, Rayment is perhaps trying to turn his life into a Hollywood screenplay in which a loss is amply compensated by making possible some greater gain. Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino and Victor Nunez's Ulee's Gold come to mind, Rayment being an older man, but examples abound. A kind of secularized theodicy -- yes, there is pain and loss, but in the bigger picture... etc.

However, the nurse and her family do not play along. They appreciate Rayment's gestures, up to a point, but find him a little weird, a little off-putting, and resist being adopted the way he wants to adopt them.

Elizabeth Costello -- a writer/animal rights activist from Coetzee's novel that bears her name -- shows up, invites herself into Rayment's home and life, and tries to talk him out of his deluded project. Her abrupt comings and goings and her mysteriously exact knowledge of Rayment's circumstances lead the reader to think that Rayment is actually a character in a novel Costello is writing. But he is a character with a mind of his own. She wants him to go in a certain direction -- he resists.

The nurse's family's resistance to Rayment's project goes to show that people don't want to be merely characters in someone else's novel -- the Costello vein of the novel goes to show that even characters in novels don't want to be characters in other people's novels. Rayment's resistance to and resentment of Costello should enable him to understand his situation vis-à-vis the nurse's family, and by novel's end, he is perhaps beginning to. Perhaps. As the title indicates, he's not quick.

First note on _Witz_

2011-07-16T08:51:00.000-07:00

1. Even though this is a very long novel (817 pages), its main story line is readily summarized. On December 17, 1999, a son, Benjamin, is born to Israel and Hanna Israelien of New Jersey, who already have twelve daughters. A week later, on Christmas Eve, all the Jews in the United States die, except those who are first-born sons. Ben is temporarily put in the care of his grandfather in Florida (also a first-born son), but the surviving first-born sons, including Ben, are gathered into a special institution by government command. At Passover, however, a second catastrophe strikes, and all of the first-born son Jews die as well, except Ben. Somehow, in the wake of this catastrophe, almost all of the United States converts to Judaism, or we might say adopts it, there being no Jews left to conduct any formal conversions.

Ben is now a precious commodity; he is provided with a model of his family’ home, complete with women performing the roles of his mother and sisters, is being groomed as a kind of royalty-celebrity, and is engaged to the president’s daughter. The wedding is to be held on the 4^th of July in Las Vegas – here, Los Siegeles – but Ben lights out for the territory. He roams the southwest, then makes his way eastward, finding his way to his family’s abandoned house in New Jersey, then reuniting with his ersatz mother and sisters. He has a spectacular episode of cunnilingus with his ersatz mother (in the course of which his tongue is ripped out), news of which leaks out via a hotel maid, leading to his disgrace and fall. Now an outlaw, he flees to Poland – here, “Polandland,” now owned and administered by the U.S. as a kind of Old World theme park with a sinister purpose: those who have refused to become Jews are brought here to be put to death.

Ben, however – I’m not sure how – emerges in “Palestein,” which in the alternate universe of this novel is an Arab monarchy. He has grown horns. He has an extraordinary visionary experience that ends, I suspect, in his death. In the final chapter of this main story line of the book, a museum holds a gala event to celebrate the acquisition of a sacred relic—Ben’s tongue.

The novel has a coda of some thirty pages in which the last living Holocaust survivor muses in unpunctuated, Molly-Bloom fashion over his past and present. He is 108, and the novel ends with the punchlines – only the punchlines – of 108 Jewish jokes.

A. R. Ammons, _The Selected Poems: Expanded Edition_

2011-07-11T12:40:00.000-07:00

I RECENTLY LEARNED that a contemporary poet of interest to me had been influenced by Ammons, whom I knew only through a few anthology pieces, e.g. "Corsons Inlet." It seemed like a good enough reason to drink more deeply of A. R. A.

Not all selected poems volumes are arranged by order of composition (and in this instance the publishers give us no clue), but I always tend to read them that way, and in this instance the succession of poems did suggest the progress of a career. Early on, a certain Eliotesque quality in which the landscapes seem more metaphysical than actual, even tipping into allegory -- then a Whitmanian era, long-lined, deep-breathed poems embracing process and heterogeneity -- then short-lined, imagistic poems (W.C.W.?) dropping down the page like a plumb line -- then a phase of unrhymed, heavily enjambed terza rima.

These last seemed to me the least compelling -- there's even a poem, "Sorting," which by talking about how dry the heights are suggests that inspiration can slow to a trickle with age. But some of the late stuff is superb: "Easter Morning," for instance, which reminded me a lot of Terrence Malick's Tree of Life, which I saw only a couple of days ago -- the shards of memory, the insolubility of the past, the profusion of the natural world, the sudden sucker-punch of grace.

Easy to see why Harold Bloom thought well of Ammons -- deep affinities with Wordsworth, Shelley, Whitman, Stevens, consciousness in dialogue with nature, identifying with it at one moment, insisting on its difference in another, interrogating, surrendering. The wind seems to be Ammons's totemic image throughout his career, going through a spectrum of permutations: "So I Said I Am Ezra," "In the Wind My Rescue Is," "Guide," "Project," "Small Song," "Conserving the Magnitude of Uselessness."

Stacy Doris, _Cheerleader's Guide to the World: Council Book_

2011-07-09T10:39:00.001-07:00

I PICKED THIS up because of intriguing excerpts in Swenson & St. John's American Hybrid. It was as intriguing as a whole as it was in part, but it's hard to describe.

In a prefatory note, Doris herself describes the book as "a sort of sandwich-translation read-through of four books: Popul Vuh, Paterson, Tibetan Book of the Dead, and the Secret Autobiographies of Jigme Lingpa." So... suppose you are reading something from an ancient civilization quite remote from your own, and recall that feeling one often has in reading such texts, that sense of missing something, that feeling that even though the words have been translated into your own language, some necessary contextual framing is unavailable to you, there are frequencies humming in the work that you can sense but not really hear. Imagine there are illustrations brought in from the original text, that seem to bear some relation to it, but again, what exactly are they illustrating, why in this way? Would the illustrations explain all if we knew what we were looking at?

So, imagine that sense of fascinated bafflement, understanding something of what you are reading, but being aware of likely missing more, and not being wholly confident that you really understood anything at all.

OK. Now imagine a text produced by our own culture that could conceivably create that same feeling in someone for whom our civilization is ancient and remote.

And now imagine a text that will give us here and now that feeling of bewilderment that our present cultural products will someday create in that reader for whom our culture is ancient and remote. Good? That text is Cheerleader's Guide to the World: Council Book.

The poems are uttered by (I think) the collective consciousness of the cheerleaders as they ponder the activities of the football players and the coaches. The poems are paratactic, disjunctive, elusive, but with an occasional startling lyricism ("Molten so praised bottle / bent to sand congratulations. / An improved carnage") -- quite a bit like reading a conscientiously literal translation of an unseizable ancient text.

Accompanying most of the poems are diagrams of American football plays (drawn by Bill Baker). Do these comment on the poems somehow, or vice versa? Are these the plays to which the cheerleaders are reacting? In any case, they are not at all self-explanatory, their relation to the text unguessable, swirling us again into that strangely satisfying limbo of confronting something decipherable which we lack the means to decipher.

Finally, allegory may be at work. The book reflects Doris's interest in "Money-Love-Writing," Doris says in her note, leading me to wonder if the cheerleaders represent writers -- Pindar was a cheerleader, she notes, his odes dedicated to celebrating the achievements of Olympic athletes -- while the football players represent those executing the fly patterns and end sweeps of capitalism, arcane to outsiders, overseen by the coaches of the Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, et alia? And then who loves whom in this allegory -- or is getting screwed by whom?

Yeah! Lose to win!

Scatter yourselves!

Bloodspill depicts

the reason for life.

Rain's made of it.

Go quench your thirst.

I wouldn't bet the farm on my allegorical interpretation, to tell you the truth, but it hovered in the back of my mind nonetheless as I read this utterly unique book.

Chris Bachelder, _Abbott Awaits_

2011-07-07T13:16:00.000-07:00

THIS, TOO, I reviewed elsewhere, although it will likely be a while before the review sees the light of day, so rather than go into matters in detail I will confine myself to an observation and a question.

The observation: what a fine, fulfilling, complete book this is, confirming Bachelder's status as one of my favorite young contemporary novelists.

The question: so why is it this guy is being published by a university press? LSU Press has a reputation for publishing excellent fiction (e.g., Confederacy of Dunces), and a lot of university presses do a nice job of promoting the fiction they publish (e.g., U. of Nebraska), but still...! This is Bachelder's third novel, all three have been original, intelligent, funny, and moving, but apparently commercial publishers are not (as justice would require) beating down his door, even though he's every bit as or more interesting than -- well, let's say Claire Messud, or Jonathan Safran Foer, or Nicole Krauss, or Joshua Ferris, or any number of folks who books lie in stacks at my local Barnes & Noble, get ads in the NYTBR, get shortlisted for prizes, and so and so forth. It's an old, old story, I know, but the older I get the more I resent it.

Butler, _There Is No Year_

2011-07-05T09:41:00.001-07:00

I WROTE SOMETHING about this that is eventually to appear in another venue, so I will here content myself with saying the novel lives up to its anticipatory buzz -- which is saying much. It really does turn out to be as strong as it was said to be (in contradistinction to, I would say, Freedom).

According to an interview I found on an internet trawl, Butler decided to write fiction after discovering Infinite Jest, and Wallace's death is noted in the novel at about its midpoint, at the end of Part Two. This seems fitting to me. I haven't encountered a novel by a young writer this original, this ambitious, and this rich since I picked up Infinite Jest, going on fifteen years ago.

In that same internet trawl, I saw a couple of references to the book being perhaps indebted to Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves. Urkgkh. I think not. Yes, there are the same use of unusual typographical and other design elements and the same conceit of a house capable of gaming the rules of time and space. But House of Leaves is a sophisticated horror tale, I would say. I gave up about p. 250, I think, because the prose is simply too gaseous to tolerate.

An argument could be made, I grant, that since Zampanó is writing an academic treatise with generous slabs of quotations from other academics, his prose needs to be as stiff and dry as cardboard, as Johnny Truant's needs to have a stoner's vagueness and looseness. But this translates into hundreds of pages of bad writing.

The prose in This Is No Year is lean, feral, cold, almost merciless. It remains austere even when creating its most outlandish, sensational effects. It is built to last.

Mark Levine, _The Wilds_

2011-07-04T11:21:00.000-07:00

THIS ONE MAKES Enola Gay feel a bit sophomore-slumpish in retrospect; one wouldn't call it a "return to form" or anything like that, but it has an integrity and energy that Enola Gay didn't quite have, and I expect it to stay with me longer.

Made me think of -- of all people -- Dylan Thomas. It must be fifty years or so since any American poet would welcome being compared to Dylan Thomas, but I have a soft spot for him.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white

With the dew, come back, a cock on his shoulder, it was all

Shining, it was Adam and maiden,

The sky gathered again

And the sun grew round that very day.

So it must have been after the birth of the simple light

In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm

Out of the whinnying green stable

On to the fields of praise.

That's from "Fern Hill." What with the dew and the maiden and the "wanderer white," the poem does not sound much like anyone writing today, and certainly not like Levine, but --

When you were in possession

of the pods and pens and octagonal plots

and your grappling hooks clattered in summer wind

and you loosed the bitter petal

-- that's from "Hand," and something, the idea of a memory vaguely rural, of a paradise which was lost, or just "summer" (as in "boys of...") rang a Thomas bell for me. Above all, there is a feeling for childhood being paradoxically very near and very far away at the same time ("more distant than stars and nearer than the eye," as Eliot wrote) in "Hand, " "Ontario," "Quarry," and "Grade Three."

Hard to think of anyone who renders being outdoors better than Levine:

We were there yet

sizing up the scenery

through the spokes of

the one wheel moving

this way, the other

that. There were four

corners of us promenading

in the sensation of

walking boots. The countryside

yielded a desert flower

on which a bee

reeled in the rain.

A mill wheel spun.

This was a place

we were in it

in sensation going there.

("Belongings")

But it's complicated -- there is a gulf between the human and the wild, even if you're as attuned as Levine, as the final poem, "Willow," seems to suggest:

You take it in or you don't

You hide the sky or else.

Things lived in you.

You, stranger.

Michael Earl Craig, _Thin Kimono_

2011-07-03T11:02:00.000-07:00

HIS THIRD BOOK, but the first I've read. Grounded, plain-spoken, drily funny -- in some ways, not the kind of book I expect from Wave Books. I do enjoy Wave Books and I did enjoy Thin Kimono, you understand -- it's just that they occupy what seem to me different points in the spectrum. So no offense to anyone, OK? OK.

Not that Craig is incapable of the kind of legerdemain that is one of the characteristics of Wave Books. "Diana" is a 6-page poem all but entirely composed of lines from Diana, a 1927 novel by Vida Hurst. Judging from what we get, Diana was a fairly ordinary novel about the reckless and feckless privileged types in the 20s, and the poem has something of the fizzy, heady quality of watching a two-hour Gloria Swanson melodrama that has been edited down to eight minutes. At one point in both novel and poem, Diana "dropped her clothes to floor, wrapped a thin kimono about her aching body and threw herself on the bed"-- hence the title.

And what a great title! It's half of the reason why I bought the book. (Plus one-quarter its being short-listed by The Believer for poetry volume of the year and one-quarter Craig's giving a reading in the town where I live.)

Another particularly intriguing part of the book is the 18 8-line poems that constitute Part II of the book. Craig did not intend them to constitute a whole -- I know because I took the trouble to ask him -- but the consistent form, the grouping of them together as a section without titles, and a sustained, wry observational humor nonetheless make the eighteen poems feel like they belong together, that they are having a kind of indirect conversation among themselves, with more than a few loose ends, true, but enjoying each other's company. Here too, as in Doller's Dead Ahead, one might detect a Muldoonian note or two:

He said she was like a gorge to him.

How so? she said.

He didn't say. She said something

to rhyme with meconium and

turned, and walked away.

He had a Pernod on the coaster before him

The seals were indeed in the harbor,

floating queerly like rockets.

Julia Holmes, _Meeks_

2011-07-02T09:30:00.000-07:00

A BRILLIANT SHORT novel, hard to categorize. The only comparison that comes to mind is with Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians, set in a wholly imaginary place, but with the texture of realism rather than fantasy, while still being loosely enough attached to reality to sustain a parable-like quality. An auspicious debut, that's for sure.

Most of the book is devoted to two characters, Ben and Meeks -- Ben a young, single man whose parents are both dead and who is without visible means of support, Meeks a homeless man of indeterminate age who is under the impression that he is a police officer. Ben's sections are narrated in the third person from Ben's POV, Meeks's in the first person.

For most of the book, one's readerly attention is less absorbed by the situations of Ben and Meeks than by the task of figuring out how the society they imhabit works. As a "bachelor," Ben lives in a special rooming house, and needs a pale suit -- he has only a black one, thus is excluded from "Listening Parties," his best bet for finding a woman to marry. If he does not find a woman to marry by "Independence Day," this community's big September commemoration of its founding by Captain Meeks, he will have to put on a gray suit and become a manual laborer. Meeks (named for the captain, we suppose), known to the community as the crazy man who sleeps in the park, is not a player in this high-stakes marriage market but has worries of his own, e.g., being carted off to parts unspecified by the "Brothers of Mercy."

Holmes gradually reveals that Captain Meeks founded the community on two principles, that communities endure because they are united by a threat and because social norms are rigorously conformed to. Thus we have the "Enemy," in the unending war against whom Ben's father died, the stringent duty to marry or toil for those who have, and the sacrifice which (we at length learn) forms the central act of Independence Day observances.

All too accurate an allegorical analogue, methinks, to the Bush II years. The elements are familiar -- we have a bit of M. Night Shymalan's Village (as read by Zizek), a bit of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," a bit of Auden's "Horae Canonicae" even (as Girard might read it) -- but at the same time the book has its own atmosphere, mainly due to Holmes's fresh and precise prose. One of Ben's memories:

He smelled the narrow, speckled fish cooking, spiked on sharpened sticks stabbed deep into the sand beside small fires, blazes of yellow-orange flower. Beached jellyfish were thick lenses on the sand. His mother brought him a mango; he peeled away the skin inexpertly; he bit into the sweet sherbet-colored fruit; he scraped the hard pit with his teeth. He buried the pit in the sand and rinsed his hands in the seawater. He followed the paranoid, supercilious crabs from wet rock to wet rock. He stared down the long, narrow, speckled fish that gathered in the tidal pools when the tide went out, the fish all facing forward dourly like parishioners in the cool cathedral space between the jetty rocks.

Holmes's ability to animate such moments ensures that the parable unfolds without a dull page.

Ben Doller, _Dead Ahead_

2011-07-01T11:31:00.001-07:00

HERE I WAS just writing that I have detected little of Paul Muldoon's influence among younger American poets (younger, that is, than I -- an alarmingly numerous class these days), and then the final poem in Doller's new volume not only rhymes ingeniously (e.g., adjacent/patient) and breaks at one point into sonnet form, but uses the peculiarly Muldoonian trick of using the last line of a section of a long poem to begin the next section.

The poem, "Period Style," is one of three excellent longer poems in the book, along with "Prescription Window"and "The Widow Ching Poems," and the three are strikingly different. "Prescription Window" alternates long lines and short lines while also alternating left justification and right justification to original and intriguing effect, and the Widow Ching sequence handles the theme of love well, and we can always use more of those.

Shall I sing

(I rarely sing)

of the patina

of promotion

the name unlike the name

that going

(everywhere)

you gave

green

the promotion

that came relinquishing the fleet

The Lustre of True Instruction

Lovely, no? A little like Cummings filtered through Pound's Cathay.

Since Doller's last book, FAQ (see LLL, January 2010), was a programmatic work with fairly exacting constraints, Dead Ahead was bound to be more formally and tonally various, but I'm happy to see it's even more formally and tonally various than it had any need to be. Doller is now three-for-three in my book, definitely on my List of Reliables.

Paul Muldoon, _Maggot_

2011-06-29T11:07:00.000-07:00

FOR YEARS I have been ready, should anyone ask me which Muldoon volume to try -- no one ever has -- to recommend Quoof. "The More a Man Has, the More a Man Wants" seems, if not the best, perhaps the quintessential Muldoon long poem, and the rest of the book has all the perversely ingenious rhyming, the yoking of unlikely concepts, and the deadpan, too-cool humor that make Muldoon unmistakeable.

Now, I think I would recommend Maggot. It has all of the above, but Muldoon sets himself even more daunting formal challenges, keeps even more plates spinning... all without seeming to make any visible effort, nattering away as if free-associating while the plates spin in perfect equilibrium without his seeming even to approach them. There's no single poem here that, for me, dislodges "7 Middagh Street" or "Incantata" from the top of the pile, but it's a really strong volume.

Muldoon is too much a trickster to be a confessional poet, but there is pain here, too, and a wisdom about it that Muldoon has not reached before. He has written about pain and loss before -- but a problem master formalists share (Alexander Pope, James Merrill, say) is that we automatically assume surfaces so perfect must conceal shallows. The young Muldoon was one of those poets about whom people (not me) would say, "Undeniably clever, but...." Maggot is always clever, but there's a bruised remorsefulness, an agenbite of inwit, even when Muldoon is rhyming "bento box" with "hollyhocks" and writing a poem about his testicles.

In his NYRB review of the book, Nick Laird suggests Maggot reflects the emotional strain of an episode (or more than one) of marital infidelity, with the betrayed dolphin of "A Christmas in the Fifties" and a few other poems figuring the betrayed wife, perhaps. Could be, for all I know. But the serial infidelities described in the poem "Maggot" seem more the fulfilment of a formal scheme than an autobiographical confession. Still, would Laird make the suggestion if he didn't know something? In the NYRB, no less. Oy.

The blurbs on the book emphasize Muldoon as influence: "the poet's poet of his generation," "Muldoon has enfranchised a whole generation," "one of the five or so best poets alive; to most of Britain and Ireland, he seems the single most influential" (that last by the rarely-off-the-mark Stephen Burt). High though his standing is, he doesn't seem nearly the influence on American poetry that Ashbery is, or Frank O'Hara, or even Jack Spicer. Who knows, though, I may be missing something. I would sure like to think Muldoon is a major influence on contemporary poetry.

Chris Hedges, _Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle_

2011-06-13T21:15:00.000-07:00

THE AMERICAN JEREMIAD is alive and well, if this book is any indication. It covers a wide spectrum of topics -- television, the pornography industry, academia, and the "positive psychology" movement all get sustained attention -- with the overarching thesis that as the real circumstances and prospects of we the citizenry have deteriorated, the tools and resources of those who would bamboozle us have become more powerful and more sophisticated, and our ability to pierce the illusion weaker.

The main culprit: corporations, with their insatiable appetite for profit and greater profit and their inability to take into account any future prospect save the next quarterly statement. Keep the marks bedazzled, the government regulators impotent or bribed, the media watchdogs drugged or muzzled.

Geez, what a downer! Hard to disagree with, though.

Hedges sounds some inspiring notes in the last few pages, but he keeps comparing the contemporary U.S. to Weimar Germany, and seems to think we would be a pushover if the right flag-waving, Bible-toting charismatic maniac came along. Sarah Palin's name comes up....

Not even a single reference, though, to Guy DeBord, an obligatory touchstone for the topic, or so I would think. Hedges takes a few smacks at "arcane academic jargon" and ivory tower-ism, but there is some critical theory out there that he could read with profit.

Edmund White, _My Lives: An Autobiography_

2011-06-13T16:22:00.000-07:00

THIS MAY SERVE as counter-evidence to David Shields's thesis in Reality Hunger (see LLL, December 2010). White drew on many of the same experiences and encounters he writes of here in his trilogy of autobiographical novels, A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony, and as far as I'm concerned, the fictional version takes the prize, hands down. (Any list of the 50 greatest post-WW II American novels that does not include White is not to be trusted.) Nor is it merely a case of déjà lu; the presentation here just seems more diffuse, more loosely associative, generally of a lower wattage.

I started reading this book two years ago, got about 70 pages in, and paused; picked it up a year ago, read another 70 pages, paused again; picked it up again this summer, and pushed on through. I've never before been so slow to finish a book by White (and this is the tenth I've read). Whatever it is I find irresistible about White's writing, this book does not have in abundance.

It has some amazing chapters, to be sure. It's arranged by topics (e.g., "My Shrinks," "My Women," "My Blonds") rather than by chronology, and the chapters devoted to topics that White has not so thoroughly mined in his fiction -- "My Master," "My Europe," "My Genet" -- are echt White. Even so, I found myself wishing he had used some of this material for fiction -- his astonishing portrait of Foucault, for instance.

Sam Lipsyte, _The Ask_

2011-06-04T17:32:00.000-07:00

IN BROADEST OUTLINE, The Ask resembles (I would say) Lipsyte's previous novel, Home Land: witty, linguistically inventive no-longer-young man with foibles a-plenty, whose life has jumped the rails, struggles from disaster to disaster to apparent turnaround that nonetheless implodes into disaster, ending the novel no better off save for some hard-won nugget that may turn out to be wisdom, but probably not.

Milo Burke is the kind of main character that almost no reader likes; I can almost hear everyone in my book club and most of my students declaring, "I couldn't stand him." He is poignantly aware of this himself:

"No, I mean, if I were the protagonist of a book or movie, it would be hard to like me, to identify with me, right?

"I would never read a book like that, Milo. I can't think of anyone who would. There's no reason for it."

Besides reminding me of Lipsyte, Lipsyte reminds me of the early (pre-Brideshead, let's say) Evelyn Waugh. Yes, they are easy to tell apart; on the basis of the two novels I know, Lipsyte likes first-person narration, which Waugh rarely used, and Waugh's style is spare and tight-lipped, while Lipsyte's is an exploding jukebox. But both Waugh and Lipsyte walk a nice line between realism and satire; all the implausible exaggerations seem within whispering distance of the plausible (e.g., ideological schism among the teachers at an experimental pre-school). Both zero in on the softest, rottenest underparts of charlatanry of the moment and whatever special patois it speaks (e.g., "a balm that not only heals but promotes understanding, especially in a world, a globe, as global as ours, where isolation is no option, where the only choices are globality or chaos"). Both are utterly disabused of any idea that the wealthy and powerful are at all like you or me.

Different as their styles are, they are both novelists one would read for the joy of the style alone. Both may come up a little short in the Arnoldian High Seriousness category, which I think is the main reason Waugh is often overlooked as a great 20th century British novelist -- it's hard to seem important when you're funny. But if Vile Bodies or Decline and Fall deserve a place on the list of great novels, there may turn out to to be room for The Ask.

Loved the Cooper Black on the dust jacket. Hurrah for Charlotte Strick and whoever did the design for the Black Keys' Brothers.

Francine Prose, _Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife_

2011-06-02T13:27:00.000-07:00

AN EXCELLENT BOOK. Informed and judicious on the history of the text of the diary and on the debates surrounding its theater and film adaptations, its authenticity, its use in the schools, its value as a document of the Holocaust (and the limits of that value), but also does justice to Anne Frank's real literary skill and accomplishment. That Anne Frank was truly a writer as well as a victim of the Nazis has been pointed out before, by Philip Roth, John Berryman, Cynthia Ozick, and others, but I rejoice in seeing the case made once again so thoroughly and authoritatively.

Jessica Savitz, _Hunting Is Painting_

2011-05-28T12:12:00.000-07:00

THE TITLE SETS the tone for the volume: a baffling assertion, but so calm and so clear that it creates a micro-climate in which the truth of the proposition seems incontrovertible. The book as a whole, its seven mysteriously-titled sections (e.g., "Conception is the Breaking Chain of a Burning Torch"), and its individual poems constitute a series of nested micro-climates that resemble consensual reality in some respects (containing trees, water, fire, and birthdays) but operate according to causal modalities all their own.

HUNTING IS PAINTING

Brown shirt littered in dove's blood;

Hunting is painting and excavating some greater forest.

And hose-water and knife through scales

Cooks alcohol of supper --

I spread the light in salt over my food

And often use a knife to remove a bruise

From the golden peach.

There is bait in the mouths of ice-fishermen.

The cutting knife heals, the fuel becomes the meal, the anglers themselves have taken the bait -- every poem has similar ostranenie-effects, lying at some tangent to the known world yet making the known world come into clearer focus by being obscurely different.

Some lines in "Ceremonial" suggest the title may derive from cave paintings like those of Lascaux, that the poems perhaps represent some intersection of document, dream, and desire.

it's greened, it's ruined

braided minerals on the cave walls

I went into the cave

of my own consciousness

and painted animals on the rounds and ledges there

I am standing or crouching on the shelf of the cave there in

the mind

I am The Neanderthal Kings

with this sweaty ash and jeweled eye

Like Medbh McGuckian, Savitz homes in on the True Earth-Wyrd.

Let's not forget the images drawn by Allison Hawkins, either, the perfect complement to this small book of charms and spells.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, _The Beautiful Struggle: a father, two sons, and an unlikely road to manhood_

2011-05-27T11:08:00.000-07:00

I SO MUCH enjoyed the super-carbonated fizz of Ta-Nehisi Coates's prose in an article I read in The Nation a couple of years ago that I decided to see if he had published a book. Sure enough, he had -- this one, which came out in 2008.

A coming-of-age memoir by a male African-American writer has to make its way past some monumental precursors: Black Boy, Notes of a Native Son, Manchild in the Promised Land, to name some of the obvious ones; Daryl Pinckney's High Cotton, to name a less obvious one. The Beautiful Struggle is not quite in that class, but worth the time nonetheless.

Coates grew up in West Baltimore in an interesting situation. His father was a committed member of the Black Consciousness movement of the 1960s and 1970s, whose calling was maintaining a small press devoted to that cause, and who simultaneously worked on the maintenance crew at Howard University so his kids could take advantage of a tuition remission program there. Born in 1975, Coates as a child was surrounded by DuBois, drums, African mythology; the family did not observe Christmas or the Fourth of July. He grows up with constant reminders that he has to get the grades he needs to get into Howard, or, as the book always calls it, "Mecca."

Just outside the door, though, as Coates comes of age, is the crack epidemic, gangsta rap, and the flight of the black middle class to the 'burbs. It's a bit like the story of a red diaper baby born in the late 1930s, suckled on legends of the Spartacists, the Wobblies, and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, coming of age in the McCarthy era.

Intriguing as these circumstances are, though, the book does not quite get its narrative arc all the way off the ground. Coates has more than his share of difficulties at school and in the neighborhood, and there is some drama at home (his father believes in corporal punishment, but not in monogamy), but the potential energy of the story tends to become diffused.

Fortunately, there's enough combustion in the prose to keep the pistons moving and the pages turning. Coates draws a bit on street vernacular, a bit on the language of comic books and sword-and-sorcery fantasy, but he has a way with a trope that is distinctly his own. To pluck an example almost at random, here is a bit on how Coates, forced to miss drum ensemble practice in order to take driver's ed, daydreamed his way through the class:

I just placed my palms on my thighs in ready position, leaned back in my wooden chair until I was five hundred years away, until I stood in the court of Mansa Musa, in a kufi and a dark robe. My djembe hung from my shoulders, and when the Lion of Mali nodded, my hands fired and called across the Sahel. The teacher would lower the lights and show films on driver safety. But I would play lead on my lap, imagining dancers who kicked and leaped through the dark like great black flamingoes.

Ariana Reines, _Coeur de Lion_

2011-05-26T15:11:00.000-07:00

HOW I GOT a hold of this is a story in itself. Intrigued by Reines's The Cow (see LLL for January 2011) and noticing that she had a second book out, I decided to find a copy. Checking my usual online outlets, I discovered not only that were there no new copies available, even though the book had been published as recently as 2007, but also that the cheapest available used copies were going for eighty or ninety dollars apiece. Surprising, no? Well, thanks to the powers that be for inter-library loan, and thanks especially to Mills College Library, whose copy found its way to me all the way here in Nebraska. I hope they put it in their rare book room when they got it back.

Fence Books, I gather, will be putting out a new edition in September, so soon Reinesians will not have to go the lengths I did to read Coeur de Lion.

And it was well worth the trouble. Very different from The Cow, which was a kind of high-wire act with flaming batons, bristling with startling appropriations, difficult, jarring, staring the reader in the eye with "hold on tight or get out now" look. Coeur de Lion is almost... confessional. Not to mention compulsively readable, hard to put down. Is it OK to say that? I think of Tina Celona's poem "Sangria," in Octopus # 11:

Confessional poetry is not very popular right now. Transparency is also out of favor, so that if you write in a style that is invisible people will hate you. Nonetheless some people are able to get away with it, if they approach it in a way that is not naïve and that contributes something new. For instance, Lydia Davis. I think it is possible to get away with such a thing, but I would not recommend it for everyone.

Coeur de Lion, which seems to have been written during and about a fairly short timeframe, orbits around a relationship that seems to have foundered, with a certain amount of attention devoted to Reines's studies, writing, and memories. I would describe it as both confessional and transparent. For instance:

Did I tell you

That I finally

Read your novel

All the way through?

When I reread

The first few pages

I thought

I might have been

Too hasty

When I told you

That day in the

Valley that

It was terrible but

Then I read on

And it is pretty

Bad, not in a

Good way. Sometimes

There is an excellent

Sentence and

My heart swells

With hope -- now

That I sort of hate

Myself for having

Fallen for you.

So, is the book, to pick up Tina Celona's criteria, not-naïve? Is it something new? The final lines of the excerpt I've quoted could almost come from a high school girl's journal, so Reines is apparently willing at least to sound naïve. The prevailing mood is not exactly new, either, as it seems to be that of Dickinson's Master Letters, a profoundly intelligent woman in love with an attractive but not nearly as intelligent man, swinging from abjection and unworthiness to bemusement and indignation in vertiginous swoops.

Not exactly not-naïve, not exactly new, but if we ask "does it work?", I would have to say yes, it does. It has the gravitational pull of a black hole. It won't let you go.

I remember heading off to college nearly forty years ago and discovering in the dorm room of nearly every woman with whom I became acquainted a copy of Ariel or The Bell Jar or both. At that time, both books were about nine years old. I like imagining that girls currently negotiating the reefs of third and fourth grade will as high schoolers come across Coeur de Lion (and, for good measure, Maximum Gaga) and bring much-read copies to their dorm rooms and then later write the dissertations that will make the Mills College copy of the Mal-O-Mar edition worth even more than it is now.

Jennifer Egan, _A Visit from the Goon Squad_

2011-05-23T17:48:00.000-07:00

AMONG MY RESOLUTIONS for the remainder of May 2011 is to finish at least a few of the books I left one-half, one-third, or one-quarter read in 2010. I started with this one... we'll see how far I get.

The Pulitzer people and I are not often on the same wavelength, but this book is a gem. It has the same jaded fascination with the pinging adrenal buzz of the fashion/entertainment world as Look at Me, the same probing of the way friendship can be braided with abandonment and betrayal as The Keep, but it's a stronger book than either of those.

It has some of the effect of a collection of short stories, as each chapter could be read independently, but works well as a novel, since we re-encounter characters from story to story, a peripheral figure in one chapter becoming the POV character in another. Each story/chapter focuses on a fairly narrow time frame of a day or a few days, but since we see characters at several different stages in their lives (and not in chronological order, just to make things more interesting), and since Egan has an extraordinary deftness at filling in antecedent action in a swiftly-paced paragraph, we get a novel-esque depth of time.

And time is our theme here. Although the music industry types we meet seem capable of hiring thugs, and although "The Goon Squad" would be an OK name for the kind of late 70s/early 80s alt-indie bands we meet in these pages, the "goon" of the title is time itself. Time, too, can rearrange your facial design, cripple you for life, leave you for dead. Much of the novel is about how we lose things, leave them behind, how we change, how things are taken away.

Intriguingly, though, a lot of it is about how time also restores things, about unexpected second chances, how life can resume after a pause. Lincoln Blake, a mildly autistic teenager in the second-to-last story (which takes the form of a PowerPoint presentation by his sister Alison) collects pauses in popular songs. Bix, an early e-mail adopter we glimpse in a story set in the early 90s, foresees a time when the Internet will do what people used to imagine heaven would do, i.e., bring back into your life everyone you ever knew. Scotty, a brilliant guitarist who did a Syd Barrett, re-emerges to play a legendary free concert in the "Footprint," Egan imagining the Twin Towers site transformed into an open-air performance space.

And then there are Alison Blake and Lulu, who, like the Miranda/Perdita/Marina characters in Shakespeare's late plays, have the power to make the world seem new again.

Delightful to find in the acknowledgements a shout-out to Jacob Slichter's excellent rock-n-roll memoir So You Wanna Be a Rock and Roll Star, which, among other things, describes the genesis of that pause in Semisonic's "Closing Time," which quite rightly makes Lincoln's list.

Olivia Manning, _The Great Fortune_

2011-03-22T10:57:00.000-07:00

This is the first volume of "The Balkan Trilogy," a paperback of which I picked up remaindered for $1.99 or so back in the late 1980s or early 1990s, shortly after it had been turned into a Masterpiece Theatre production starring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson (ditto its sequel, "The Levant Trilogy"). Somehow twenty years slipped away without my so much as opening it, even though it had the signal honor of being reprinted as a New York Review of Books Classic in 2010. Then, somewhat out of the blue, it was tapped by the book club my spouse and I belong to...

... and it turns out to be excellent. All six novels center upon Guy and Harriet Pringle, a recently married young English couple, who owing to Guy's teaching position at a university in Bucharest are in Romania in the fall of 1939 when Germany and the Soviet Union descend on Poland. The Great Fortune takes us up to the fall of Paris in 1940. The ambiguities and uncertainties of the "phoney war" period find their analogue in the the tentative, what-in-the-world-is-he-thinking, what-have-I-done-now feints and parries of the Pringles' brand new marriage. As the marriage gets serious when Harriet has to deal with a strange rebuff from Guy (he casts her for, then dismisses her from, an amateur Shakespeare production he is organizing) and at the same time gets a sudden offer to run off with one of his colleagues, so the war, after a winter's hibernation, gets serious as the Germans invade Belgium.

The writing is strong, brisk, intelligent, the characters sharply drawn (especially the shamelessly cadging Russian aristocratic exile, Prince Yakimov), the sense of history looming over one's shoulder convincing. Not surprising that Anthony Burgess called this "the finest fictional record of the war produced by a British writer." It certainly measures up to the the other British WW II novels I've read (Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh).

It's a stroke of genius, for instance, that the Shakespeare play Guy Pringle is mounting in Bucharest is Troilus and Cressida -- a systematic dismantling of the romance of war. On virtually every page is a deft descriptive touch; from a balcony on a rainy afternoon, Harriet looks out on the crowd watching the funeral procession of an assassinated prime minister: "As the band drew near, the umbrellas, quilted below, moved towards the kerb: the police, wearing mourning bands on their arms, rushed wildly along the gutter pushing them back again." It had never occurred to me that a crowd of umbrellas, seen from above, would resemble a quilt; but as soon as I read that, the whole scene popped into my imagination.

Nell Freudenberger, _Lucky Girls_

2011-03-21T11:11:00.000-07:00

THIS BOOK AND its author have collected quite a few honors: the PEN/Malamud Award (for "excellence in the art of the short story"), designation as a New York Times Notable Book, Freudenberger's being chosen by the New Yorker last summer as one of the "Forty Under Forty" fiction writers.

There are five stories here -- generally speaking, they are intelligent, subtle, well-mannered stories about intelligent, subtle, well-mannered people, for the most part U.S. citizens whom circumstances have taken to the south Asian sub-continent. Nuanced, evocative descriptions of settings... carefully integrated exposition of the characters' pasts... faintly enigmatic, open-ended final paragraphs...

... left me almost perfectly unaffected, to tell you the truth. Everything perfectly just-so, like a 19th century academy piece.

The last story, however, won me over and gave me reason to look forward to the next Freudenberger that wafts my way in Granta or the New Yorker. "Letter from the Last Bastion" is original in form (a 60-page college application essay that its author will never send), its plot revelations surprising and effectively paced, and it actually has something interesting to present about the composition of fiction.

Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, _Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses_

2011-03-06T14:09:00.000-08:00

MY FACULTY COLLEAGUES and I are being encouraged to read this, and being the co-operative faculty member I (sometimes -- nay, often) am, I read it. Unwelcome news.

Arum and Roksa conducted an extensive study (almost 2400 students on 24 different campuses) and found that most undergraduates are not making much headway in mastering "critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills" during their first two years of college.

Why not? Well, they're spending a lot less time studying than they used to, with more time than formerly devoted to part-time jobs, volunteering, clubs and activities, and general hanging out. It also turns out that they can get away with studying less because their instructors are assigning less work (specifically, reading and writing) than they once did. It's a sweet deal all around; the faculty can spend more time on their research, the path to bigger rewards and more prestige, and the students can spend more time hanging out.

Specifically, courses in explicitly pre-professional majors -- business, education, communication, computer science, social work -- seem to require less in the way of reading and writing, with concomitant slowed acquisition of critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills. Not exactly a surprise.

More surprisingly, "active learning," "collaborative learning," and greater involvement in student life activities, which have been energetically advanced in recent years as means to increase student engagement in learning, turn out not to be helpful in developing critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills. So, what is helpful? More reading, more writing, studying alone. Which doesn't sound fun.

The takeaway seems obvious to me: those faculty in business, education, communication, computer science, and social work better get cracking and build a little rigor (rig-gah as Teddy Roosevelt would say) into their curricula toot sweet.

Franzen again

2011-02-12T16:13:00.000-08:00

I FIND MYSELF enjoying the discourse about Jonathan Franzen more than I enjoy Franzen's actual novels. The Corrections was a fine book -- an excellent book, even -- but, to me, a degree or two less compelling than the discourse around the Oprah flap, or the broadside against Gaddis and the counter-broadside from Ben Marcus, or that piece in Granta by his (then?) girlfriend, or the piece in The Believer by the slightly-younger writer who had grown up in the same suburb and feared that Franzen had exhausted or would exhaust her town's potential as subject for fiction. I was beginning to find Franzen as cultural counter just a little more interesting than Franzen as novelist.

Then. last summer and fall, the Freedom buzz. Proclaimed a masterpiece in the NYTBR, praised in Time for saving American fiction from the ponderous involutions of David Foster Wallace and the maundering preciosities of a thousand MFAs. A minority report from across the water, as the London Review of Books refuses to go along. Then a symposium in n + 1, four of the editors weighing in... and being funnier, smarter, and more interesting than Freedom itself. Again, the discourse about Freedom is a better novel than Freedom.

But this all may be premature. I haven't finished the damned thing.

Jonathan Franzen, _Freedom_ (interim report)

2011-02-12T16:00:00.000-08:00

I HAVEN'T ACTUALLY finished this. I expect I will, perhaps in May, but I got through Patty Berglund's autobiography and decided to give the novel a rest for a bit. As I read, I was increasingly bothered that Patty, supposedly a person who writes and reads little, is a masterful stylist. Occasionally Franzen gives her a clunky, graceless passage, but more often she writes like someone who has devoted her life to shaping sentences and structuring narratives... which, in the realm of the novel, she has not. Her discourse is that of a person who could not conceivably exist. Interesting though her circumstances and conflict are, the further along I read, the more Patty seemed as fabulous as a hippogriff.

I imagine readers are not supposed to notice how well Patty writes, as we are not supposed to notice that Shakespeare's characters have mastered blank verse. A suspension-of-disbelief sort of thing. Okay, but didn't Bakhtin show us that the novel-ness of the novel lay in its self-awareness about its own discourses?

Cole Swensen & David St. John, eds., _American Hybrid_

2011-01-30T11:05:00.000-08:00

LAST SUMMER, AS I was reading Against the Day and wondering how many people still actually read 1000-page literary novels, I also started in on this (finishing yesterday), which made me wonder how many people still actually read 500-page poetry anthologies. Surely I am not the only one, but there can't be many of us. I don't imagine poets read them, save for skimming the introductions and tables of contents to see whose oxen have been gored. They must be mainly purchased by libraries, with a few bought by non-poets like myself, but how many of those copies purchased, in either category, actually get read?

Most anthologies have a purpose -- the idea of American Hybrid is that there are two broad tendencies in contemporary American poetry, the relatively traditional, comprised of poets whose work maintains a discernible continuity with the poetry of the past, and the relatively innovative, comprised of poets whose work breaks away from the techniques and assumptions of the poetry of the past.

(This is a much-argued point; is there really such a division, or not? I'm willing to grant there is -- even though there is many a murky precinct between the two tendencies, and attempts to define one approach as against the approach deconstruct themselves in seconds.)

American Hybrid is devoted to work that is innovative/experimental in some respects, traditional/conventional in others. The implied argument is that a lot of vital, worthwhile poetry is emerging from the murky precinct between the two broad tendencies.

Part of me -- the Steve Evans-influenced part, I might call it -- wants to say, "make up your mind! Be one or the other! Quit trying to have it both ways!" If you try to steer between Scylla and Charybdis here, aren't you likely to end up with posing, untheorized gestures towards the avant-garde, or pandering gestures towards the traditional without the honest commitment to craft that would make them work? Aren't you avoiding the challenge of pursuing the logic of your poetic, whichever it may be?

But as we read along, it turns out the work here tends to be good. I didn't like everything -- but I found everything was worth the reading. Just about all of it is by very-well-known to moderately-well-known poets with long publishing histories, and the quality of the work tends to be high. I could not figure out what exactly is experimental in James Galvin or traditional in Alice Notley, but 5-6 pages of either tend to be pages well worth reading, so why complain?

Still... anthologies tend to be more memorable if they are synecdoches of a tendency or movement. The feeling that the poets gathered share a poetic -- even if they would never agree to any explicit statement of what that poetic is -- can make an anthology feel greater than the sum of its poems. American Hybrid is a synecdoche, let's say, of a tendency to blend tendencies. But to appreciate how a traditional poet is embracing innovation, or how an innovative poet is embracing tradition, you have to read a lot of that poet's work. A 5-6 page selection of his or her work does not suffice, even if the poems are excellent. And the poems don't speak to each other, quite. If the goal of an anthology like this is to announce, "something's going on," then American Hybrid leaves us with no idea of what that something is, other than that a lot of strong, interesting poems are getting written these days.

Maybe that's enough. This is a Cole Swensen project, after all. It's hard to imagine her being off base about anything.

I hope neither she nor St. John had anything to do with the author bios, however, which are written in the most dreadful blurb-ese. "Their intense musicality links them to the Romantics and their seventeenth century precursors, while his use of collage, rupture, and fragmentation position his work firmly within postmodernism and its critique of the consolidated subject, which dovetails with his interest in the Middle English notion of the lyric as public song." Oh, does it now? That's a fine thing, indeed, the dovetailing. And thank goodness the musicality is so intense -- were it less so, it might remind us only of the Romantics, without quite evoking their seventeenth century precursors (and who would that be for fuck's sake, Traherne? Milton?). There's a gem like this in almost every bio. If the anthology goes to a new edition, I say out with 'em.

Tom McCarthy, _Tintin and the Secret of Literature_

2011-01-29T11:42:00.000-08:00

I READ REMAINDER a few years ago and had that giddy falling-in-love-with-an-author feeling I've had on a handful of other occasions: The Ghost Writer, City of Glass, The Age of Wire and String, to limit myself to living novelists. That I have urged the novel on two or three dozen people since with terrible results (none of them liked it nearly as much as I did, and many of them hated it) probably ought to have eroded my enthusiasm, but did not, so I was vibrating with glee when I picked up C. a few months ago -- still haven't read it, though, having impulsively decided I wanted to get through the back catalog first.

Which led me to this volume. Tintin is a French comic (ran 1929-1976) about a baby-faced journalist/investigator/adventurer, beloved in France and a cult favorite in the USA and many other places. It had been recommended to me a few times, but I actually had not read a single one of the twenty-odd Tintin collections when I picked up McCarthy's book (a deficit I have since remedied). Add in the fact that I do not usually enjoy laboriously rigorous, theory-heavy analyses of popular culture, and odds that I would enjoy the book were slender...

...but enjoy it I did. McCarthy won my confidence early on by probing the assumptions of the genre to which his book superficially belongs: "All of which raises the question: is it literature? Should we, when we read the Tintin books, treat them with the reverence we would afford to Shakespeare, Dickens, Rabelais, and so forth?" We can (and McCarthy does) train upon them the same sophisticated critical lenses that we use for Shakespeare et al., but does that make them equally worthy of attention? "Or is this bad logic," McCarthy asks, "fit only for cultural theory seminars and Buffy-the-Vampire-Slayer-as-Postmodern-Signifier conferences?" I barked with joy when I read that.

Now that I knew McCarthy had no plans to clobber me over the head with the High Seriousness of Tintin, I could relax and enjoy the show, and what a performance it is. He keeps a half-dozen or so powerful critical lenses in play like spinning plates: Debord, Bataille, Barthes (especially S/Z), Abraham & Torok on crypts, Derrida's Given Time 1: Counterfeit Money (no Foucault, but perhaps à la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien?). He has a true comics-obsessive's command of the details of the texts and their web of cross-references, patterns, and parallels. His style is a dance on a high wire, witty, nimble but weight-bearing, a breathtaking synthesis of energy and balance.

Hergé (Georges Remi, creator of Tintin) even turns out to have an ambiguous quasi-collaborationist past, like Paul de Man (for the same newspaper, of all things). Is this turning into a turn-of-the 20th-century trope? The King's Speech emphasized Edward VIII's softness on fascism, and it even shows up in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows via Dumbledore's foolish youthful allegiances. Not to mention Remains of the Day or Banville's Shroud. Is naïvete about Hitler now our archetype of the ominous biographical secret?

Secrets turn out to be the secret of literature for McCarthy, or at least the creation of the impression of having a secret, secretiveness without an actual secret. A useful tip when considering Remainder, its plot set ticking by an accident about which one learns nothing, and perhaps even C., according to reviews set ticking by Freud's Wolf Man and Abraham & Torok's re-reading of same. Tintin and the Secret of Literature has nicely whetted my appetite. First, though: Men in Space.

William Gibson, _Pattern Recognition_

2011-01-17T11:24:00.000-08:00

THIS IS THE first novel by Gibson I have read. It represents a departure of sorts, I gather, in that it is set in the present rather than the future. It nonetheless gives us a very futuristic take on its present (circa 2002, apparently) -- amazing gadgets, instant global communication, high mobility, and so on.

The main character, Cayce Pollard, is a "cool hunter," making a living thanks to her uncanny ability to know what will be cool next, information for which corporations pay well. Ironically, she is "allergic" to brands -- once she calls attention of commerce to a cool thing, it will be commodified and branded, thus rendering it loathsome to her.

Her great passion of the moment is "the footage," excerpts of some film project, periodically posted on the internet and subject to intense scrutiny by a devoted fan base. The makers and exact nature of the film are unknown, but a big corporation wants to find its provenance -- with a view to making a handsome profit, presumably. Who better to hire to track down the mysterious auteur(s) than Cayce? She takes the job -- even though she thus risks of commercial exploitation of something from which she gets great joy and meaning.

So, the novel turns into Cayce's search for the makers of the footage. After a lot of globe-trotting, clue-finding, and noir-ish hijinks, she finds them.

I wanted to know how being "found" was going to affect the makers of the footage and the project itself. Would it change, be turned into a mere product among products, no longer satisfy the imagination? The novel seems uninterested in those questions, though. Mission accomplished, Cayce finds a soul-mate, gets a bundle of cash (some of which she distributes to the deserving), and discovers that her brand-phobia is clearing up. Presumably, all live happily ever after.

On the strength of this novel, hard for me to tell why Gibson is sometimes hailed as the heir to Phillip K.Dick. Perhaps I'm missing something.

Hilary Mantel, _Wolf Hall_

2011-01-16T12:36:00.001-08:00

MANTEL HAS BEEN on my short list of truly great historical novelists (not to mention my list of great living novelists of any description) since A Place of Greater Safety, probably the best novel about the French Revolution I have ever read -- its sole serious competitor, for my money, is Anatole France's Les Dieux Ont Soif.

Wolf Hall is every bit as good. It may not be up there with War and Peace or Gravity's Rainbow, if we count those as historical novels, but it need not blush to stand alongside the historical novels of F. M. Ford, Graves, Yourcenar and Vidal.

One great quality of Wolf Hall is that it assumes you already know what an educated person ought to know about Tudor England. Most historical novels assume you know next to nothing about the period when the fiction is set (most readers of historical fiction, unfortunately, justify the assumption), leading to great lumps of exposition, often in the form of one character giving a lecture to another character, catching the reader up on personages and events at the expense of narrative pace and verisimilitude. For reader for whom historical fiction is a substitute for reading history, all this exposition is crucial, even desirable. And thus we have the corpus of James Michener.

Mantel is different. On p. 19, the novel's chief character, Thomas Cromwell, learns from his employer, Cardinal Wolsey, that King Henry VIII has decided his wife the queen will never be able to bear him a son, and so insists on a divorce and a new wife. No mention yet of Anne Boleyn, Martin Luther, Thomas More, etc. -- just a conversation between an ecclesiastical powerbroker and his trusted right hand about how tricky this business could be. Most historical novelists would be in exposition overdrive at this point, or frantically signalling how shudderingly important all this is -- Tudor history, and a lot of European history, teeter on the outcome. But Mantel doesn't bat an eye. No tiresome lectures, no ominous chords on the organ... just two men talking about a troublesome matter that has come up at work. After all, neither Wolsey nor Cromwell knows, Henry does not know, no one knows all that will shake out here...so the narration does not know either. Mantel knows, you the reader (should) know, but leaving the unfolding-drama stuff tacit makes the scene dramatic.

Okay -- second point. Cromwell. Brilliantly imagined. Famously intelligent, brutal, cunning, the English Machiavelli and so on, the blustering heavy of Robert Bolt's Man for All Seasons. Mantel's Cromwell is intelligent, cunning, capable of brutality even, but he is compelling and captivating, too, from the very first paragraph when he rises from the dead -- well, strictly speaking, he comes back to consciousness after a savage beating from his father, but it's as if he is able to learn from every punishment fate hands him and come back stronger, turn adversity into opportunity. What does not kill him makes him stronger -- and for the length of this novel, nothing is strong enough to kill him.

He is a self-fashioner in the Greenblatt sense, his personhood a work of art and learning, not something he was simply born with -- he runs rings around the boobies who think their birth entitles them to place and power. He survives not only his abusive father, but the perils of war and trade, and the perils of loyal service when Wolsey falls -- by staying true to his man as Wolsey suffers disgrace and death, Cromwell ends up Henry's most trusted man, the most powerful non-royal personage in the kingdom.

There was to be, eventually, a fall from which Cromwell could not rise, and it is faintly foreshadowed when Cromwell turns in the last paragraph towards Wolf Hall, home of the Seymours -- again, you have to know some history to catch the tone here -- but we bid him goodbye at a crucial moment, when he has caught More on the hip and sent him to where saints go. Mantel's More is also compelling imagined -- intelligent and of adamantine integrity, as advertised, but arrogant, proud, cold, maddeningly legalistic, fully capable of sending heretics to the stake when he had the power to do so.

Final point -- Mantel is a magnificent stylist. Take this passage of Cromwell ruminating on the old superstitious England that he, as Self-Made Modern European Man, believes ought to wither, but which is as unwilling either to change or to disappear as More, and like him is ferociously clinging to its existence. More is refusing to swear to an oath that Anne is queen and her children the legitimate royal heirs, and Cromwell imagines the rest of Olde England likewise refusing to swear:

Who will swear the hobs and bogarts who live in the hedges and hollow trees, and the wild men who hide in the woods? Who will swear the saints in their niches, and the spirits that cluster at holy wells rustling like fallen leaves, and the miscarried infants dug into unconsecrated ground: all those unseen dead who hover in winter around forges and village hearths, trying to warm their bare bones? For they too are his countrymen: the generations of uncounted dead, breathing through the living, stealing their light from them, the bloodless ghosts of lord and knave, nun and whore, the ghosts of priest and friar who feed on living England, and suck the substance from the future. (471)

Philip Roth, _Nemesis_

2011-01-14T10:47:00.000-08:00

According to the "Books by Philip Roth" list in the front matter of Nemesis, his recent short novels Everyman, Indignation, The Humbling, and now Nemesis constitute a group with its own name: ""Nemeses: Short Novels." Works for me. In each book, the main character is pursued and brought down by an implacable antagonist, furthermore an antagonist harbored within, a character quirk, an ambition, a weakness, a disease.

We all carry our own antagonist with us, it's true, some hamartia or other, if only in the shape of our own mortality, ticking away, its due date known only to itself, but certain to arrive.

The mortality ticking away in all of us dominates all of Roth's recent work, explicably enough: besides the four "Nemeses" novels, death looms in the last "Kepesh" novel, The Dying Animal, and the last "Zuckerman" novel, Exit Ghost.

Actually, the recent Roth book Nemesis most reminds me of is The Plot Against America. Perhaps because both are set in the mid-1940s, during World War II, but more because both are about fear and the ways fear undoes communities. (Tim Parks, in his review of Nemesis, mentions that the leitmotif of all the recent Roth short novels is "dread.") In Plot, the fear-plague is rooted in anti-semitism, in Nemesis, in a polio epidemic, but in both cases the evil we hope to purge in order to restore goodness, decency, and stability is always already us. The relevance of both novels to their own moment, the Bush II/Tea Party era with its fear of Muslims, immigrants, gay marriage, what have you, could not be plainer.

As for the novel as a novel -- another gem. What can I say? For me, he can do no wrong. The protagonist. Bucky Cantor, has a low cognitive wattage for a Roth protagonist -- the lowest since Ira Ringold, a.k.a "Iron Rinn," in I Married a Communist -- but there's enough to him to make his tragedy resonate. I'm nevertheless grateful for the contrasting perspective provided by the novel's narrator, Arnie Mesnikoff, in the final chapter, hinting that Bucky's tragedy need not have been as tragic as he insisted on making it.

What an amazing writer this guy is. And utterly sui generis.

The "about the author" note concludes by mentioning that Roth is the only living author published in the Library of America series, and then mentions, "The last of nine volumes is scheduled for publication in 2013." What the...? Does Roth know when he will finish his last novel? Does he know when he will die? (It's impossible to imagine him being alive and not writing novels.) How does he know his collected works will be complete by 2013?

Ariana Reines, _The Cow_

2011-01-10T11:12:00.000-08:00

SOME UNNAMEABLE PLANE in contemporary letters is defined by Selah Saterstrom's The Pink Institution, Lara Glenum's Maximum Gaga, and this volume, with their interweaving of feminism with accounts of industrialized meat production. Which is more grotesque, all three seem to whisper, what men do to women or what men do to cows and pigs? Does either activity tell us something we need to know about the other?

In Reines's The Cow, the answer to the latter question is yes, the answer to the former stomach-churningly open. The book bristles with hurt, anger, and intelligence. It bristles also with appropriated texts, from the Bible, the Koran, Cixous, Ashbery, Deleuze & Guattari, and particularly tellingly from a website giving instructions of how to turn the parts of a cow that are inedible by humans into feed for other cows ("RESULTING CARCASS MEAL CAN SOMETIMES BE USED AS AN ANIMAL FEED INGREDIENT"). This process was critical, as we now know, in the spread of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, "mad cow" disease.

The language of the book has an extraordinary range, from the paratactic and traumatized ("Blowhole") to what sounds like feverish improvisation ""In Which She Pays for Her Tardiness") to the relatively controlled and conventional, though not a whit less powerful ("Le Legs de Ses Tristesses").

The strongest impression left by the book is a paradoxical, but in some ways empowering one -- that there is no way mere writing can deal with the harm the book addresses, yet no way to address that harm except by writing.

I'd like to read more of Reines, but her Coeur de Lion, I see, costs several hundred dollars. Probably worth it, but somewhat beyond my means.

Donald Revell, _My Mojave_

2011-01-09T18:13:00.000-08:00

THESE POEMS BREATHE an unusual air, desert air perhaps. They sometimes seem to be on a pillar in a desert, subsisting on locusts and honey, waiting for visions. Revell seems aware of the mystical tradition in poetry in English (one of the poems here is titled "For Thomas Traherne"), and the quickest way to describe them, I think, would be to call them modern variations on that tradition... but saying that suggests they sound like Kahlil Gibran, and they are a good deal stranger than that. Dislocation, surface incoherence, the sense of something incommunicable, a message of patience within urgency or urgency within patience...

The other cheek spat on her

O glory of the snow

Go with Mary

Letters of the law

Go with Mary

So ends "Ayre."

In the government of Heaven

The grass is truly higher than here

Stones are warm as a circus

The kingfisher's common name is Abraham Lincoln

My son leaves a mark on everything

A shore of pines and one of birches

Where my rough feet shall Thy smooth praises sing

So ends "The Government of Heaven." (The last line, Google tells me, is from Edward Taylor.)

I don't know why part of me is surprised by the idea of a stone is as warm as a circus -- what do I know about the temperatures of circuses? -- nor why part of me thinks, "Good God, he's right... stones are as warm as a circus." And suddenly it seems all but inevitable that, in the greater scheme, could we know all there is to know, the kingfisher would be commonly known as Abraham Lincoln.

Somehow, none of this ever seems like good old-fashioned surrealism. It all seems like discovery, simply and plainly announced. Or as simply and plainly as it can be announced.

Paul Auster, _Sunset Park_

2011-01-08T09:31:00.000-08:00

ONLY RECENTLY LEARNED that Auster was born in Newark -- he grew up in South Orange, but was born in the same city as Philip Roth, nearly a generation later (1933, 1947). As they happen to be two of my favorite writers, I tried to think of other shared traits -- both Jewish, both like to work with a limited palette of favorite themes, both (of late) very regularly productive, with a new novel every fall -- that was about as far as I got, however.

Sunset Park has its share of Austerian themes: Brooklyn, the books and arts world, ruptures between fathers and sons, secret wounds and long lingering guilt, unusual photography projects, bumbling visionaries, the amazing woman whose love might set everything right... and I could continue. But the narration is a departure, for him. Auster almost always uses first-person narration. The only recent exceptions to this rule are Travels in the Scriptorium, his parable-novella about his own career, and Timbuktu, whose protagonist was a dog; before that, you'd have to go all the way back to The Music of Chance and New York Trilogy.

And not only do we have third-person narration, but we have it from a variety of points of view, not only that of Miles Heller, a classic Auster under-a-cloud literary loner, but also those of his father, his mother, and the other 20-somethings with whom he shares a Brooklyn squat. Lots of novels uses multiple p.o.v.'s, but I don't think Auster has written one before.

This development has at least a couple of noteworthy consequences. One, while the style is still mostly lean, it's more relaxed, a little more writerly, more exploratory. Since Auster is rendering a character's consciousness, not what he or she might utter or write down, the sentences get longer, more meandering. The focus shifts, the course changes; sometimes the sentences are so full of detail they become virtual catalogues. For instance, Miles's father, Morris, at one low point imagines becoming an alter ego he calls the "Can Man," whose life is imagined in a sentence that runs the bottom of p 178 to the bottom of p. 180. An excerpt:

...in his mind the Can Man is a Mohawk Indian, a descendant of the Mohawks who settled in Brooklyn in the early part of the last century, the community of Mohawks who came here to become construction workers on the tall buildings going up in Manhattan, Mohawks because for some reason Mohawks have no fear of heights, they feel at home in the air and were able to dance along the beams and girders without the slightest dread or vertiginous wobble, and the Can Man is a descendant of those fearless people who built the towers of Manhattan, a crazy customer, alas, not quite right in the head, a daft old loon who spends his days pushing his shopping cart through the neighborhood, collecting the bottles and cans that will fetch him five cents apiece, and when the Can Man speaks, more often than not he will punctuate his remarks with absurd, outlandishly inappropriate advertising slogans....

And that's only about a sixth of it. Has Auster ever resorted to a two-page sentence before? It's not his characteristic mode, certainly. A new trick for an old dog? I found myself enjoying it, actually.

The other noteworthy consequence is that the novel does not have the claustrophobic, walls-closing-in feel that Auster is so good at rendering as his main character runs out of options. That unfinished story-within-a-story in Oracle Night, of the character locked in the archive, is quintessential Auster. But in a novel with more than one point of view, the reader does not (thankfully, perhaps) have the same sense of foreclosed possibilities.

As the novel opens, Miles Heller has been out of touch with his parents for more than seven years, indirectly as a consequence of his feelings of guilt over his role in a stepbrother's fatal accident, which he has kept secret since the accident occurred in his early teens. Having dropped out of Brown after his junior year, he has been living nomadically and scratching out a marginal existence. He is living in Florida, holding down a job cleaning out foreclosed homes, when he meets and falls in love with a high school student, Pilar Sanchez. This sets in motion events that take him back to New York City. Living in dodgy circumstances in a squat, he reunites with his parents, resolves to go back to work on his degree, and plans to marry Pilar, who has won a scholarship to Columbia, once she turns eighteen. Despite some ominous moments, everything is coming up roses -- then, in the novel's closing pages, catastrophe descends. In the final sentences, Miles is headed out of town, on the lam after having assaulted a police officer, everything lost...

... but since Miles's perspective is not the only one allowed in the novel, you wonder if everything is really as lost as it seems to him. By including other consciousnesses than his, the novel has more room in it, room enough perhaps for him eventually to realize he need not flee. The ending is far from hopeful, but the narrative structure of this novel conveys that there is always more going on than Miles knows, so the loss and desperation of the final pages do not seem utterly final.

Tony Tost, _Invisible Bride_

2011-01-07T07:53:00.001-08:00

THIS HAS BEEN sitting on my shelf for what must be seven years or so -- why I finally picked it up, I do not know, but turns out it's excellent. All prose poems -- and they really seem to be prose poems, not "short shorts," not lyrical essays, but poems. Why is that? Well, let's say the poems conjure up their own space, their own time, seem to belong to a universe of their own that lies on a tangent to ours...

...a lyrical essay might do as much, perhaps? True. Inserted into my copy is a brief interview with Tost, who cites as influences not only a long list of poets and a few musicians (including the Kinks, good for him), but also examples of what he calls "internally-charged and/or visionary prose": Keats's letters, A Season in Hell, Alexander Theroux's Primary Colors, Cyril Connolly's (!) Unquiet Grave, Ben Marcus's Age of Wire and String (good for him again), Joe Wenderoth's Letters to Wendy's.

People are still coming across The Unquiet Grave these days... good to know.

So, um, yeah, they could be lyrical essays, but they unscroll with a certain intuitive illogic that I myself associate with poetry. It's also fun, if I can call it so, that one doesn't know quite what the structure of the book is. Some poems have titles; some simply occupy the top of the page. Should one respond to two or three untitled pieces on succeeding pages as related, or not? There is no table of contents, but there are six sections -- are they six sections of a whole? Or is each section a whole of some kind? The three texts of section 6 seem to belong together; perhaps the texts of section 5 do as well, although none too insistently. The texts of section 3 initially seem to go together, but then seem not to. For some reason, I found this tending-to-cohere-then-refraining-from-cohering not irritating, but delightful. Patterns would kaleidoscopically align, then, with a quick shake, disappear.

One more indication of the contemporary flourishing of poetry -- I can discover a great new book of poetry without even leaving my office.

Nicholson Baker, _The Anthologist_

2011-01-05T11:25:00.000-08:00

NOT SURE WHY I waited slightly over a year to read this; I bought it right away, and Baker is among my favorite writers. Pages 121-23 of The Anthologist reminded me why he is. The narrator describes going down a flight of stairs carrying a heavy-ish computer; he misjudges the final step and stumbles: "I was really falling. If I dropped the computer I could catch my fall. But I didn't want to drop the computer. So I did a strange low dance of clutching the computer and running forward. I was like a mother chimp fleeing with her baby." He collides with the door, not dropping the computer, whew!, but catching a finger between the computer and the doorjamb. As the pain subsides, the narrator realizes he now has a perfectly good reason to (continue to) delay in writing the introduction to his otherwise complete poetry anthology, the non-composition of which is the main MacGuffin of the novel: "And I knew that I was going to be fine, but that I might not be able to type for a while, which would give me a reprieve on writing my introduction. A great whimpery happiness passed through me like clear urine."

Who else is going to give you either of those two amazing similes about the mother chimp or the clear urine, to say nothing of "strange low dance"or "whimpery happiness"?

I have read all of Baker books -- in the spirit of full disclosure, following Baker's own example in U&I, I should note that I did not finish Double Fold -- and they seem to me to fall into three categories: (1) lengthy, minutely detailed tours of the narrator's/writer's idiosyncratically furnished mind (The Mezzanine, Room Temperature, U & I, The Size of Thoughts, A Box of Matches), (2) dialogues (Vox, Checkpoint), and (3) careful arguments in favor of positions that almost no one else holds, such as that libraries should hold on to all their old newspapers rather than preserve them on microfilm (Double Fold) or that World War II was unnecessary (Human Smoke). The Fermata and The Everlasting Story of Nory don't fit anywhere in my scheme, although the latter is among my very favorites).

The Anthologist is mainly a first category Baker book, a dérive through the consciousness of Paul Chowder, a reasonably successful poet (three books, one poem read on the radio by Garrison Keillor), who, having demonstrated his utter unfitness for teaching creative writing, is hoping his almost-ready-to-publish anthology, Only Rhyme, will repair the hole in his fortunes.

Here is where The Anthologist almost turns into a third category Baker: Chowder believes that rhyme and meter, after a century's eclipse, are about to regain center stage in English language poetry, and a good deal of the novel consists of his making this case. He has a lot to say about rhyme's role in the acquisition of language ("Rhyme taught us to talk"; see pages 106-12) and the needs it satisfies, and also makes an elaborate case that iambic pentameter is actually "a slow kind of gently swaying three-beat minuetto. Really. I mean it."

Despite a superabundance of opinions about rhyme and meter in poetry, Chowder is having a terrible time writing the introduction to his anthology; his partner, Roz, has said she will leave him unless he gets it done -- indeed, as the novel opens, she has already, somewhat reluctantly, carried out this promise. When he is not thinking about rhyme, or the wrongness of the label "iambic pentameter," or the departure of Alice Quinn as poetry editor at the New Yorker and Paul Muldoon's accession to the position, or Louise Bogan, or Theodore Roethke, or Sara Teasdale, or Vachel Lindsay, or his bête noire Ezra Pound, he is thinking about how to win Roz back. Which -- spoiler alert -- he does, having turned in a 230-page draft of an introduction to his publisher.

Is the novel itself that draft? (It's 243 pages in print.) I like to think so. And I hope Baker actually compiled Chowder's anthology and that it will be turning up on the shelves one fine day.

David Shields, _Reality Hunger: A Manifesto_

2010-12-30T11:28:00.000-08:00

I NOTE WITH satisfaction that I have averaged just over a post per week this year. Well done, Theobald.

It's too soon to tell whether Shields's Reality Hunger will in the long run stand alongside Woolf's "Modern Fiction" and Robbe-Grillet's "Towards a New Novel" as one of the seminal end-of-the-novel-as-we-know-it pronouncements, but those comparisons give the measure of the book's ambitions.

Ever since -- oh, shall we say Defoe, leaving aside for the moment such forerunners as Petronius Arbiter and Lady Murasaki? -- and the rise of the novel, i.e., the conscientious effort to tell one's tale while also creating the impression of the texture of lived experience, moments periodically arrive when the inherited conventions and contrivances for creating that impression begin to seem over-familiar, too obviously artificial, unpersuasive. At such moments, a Woolf or a Robbe-Grillet will say, "all that is not working any longer -- let's try...this!" And so we get To the Lighthouse or La Jalousie, which may not have as many readers as Arnold Bennett or Romain Rolland did at the time Woolf and Robbe-Grillet fired their salvoes, but which so enlarge and reorganize the possibilities of the novel that in the next generation Bennett's and Rolland's novels join the vast ranks of the unread.

Shields thinks we are at such a moment now, and declares that the future belongs to a certain kind of non-fiction, something like what John D'Agata calls the lyrical essay, personal, exploratory, hybridized, marked by a power and suppleness of style, more akin to poetry than fiction, sojourning towards a truth and wisdom the writer reaches only though the process of writing. For instance, Nicholson Baker (at his least novelistic), Anne Carson, Elizabeth Hardwick (Sleepless Nights), George W.S. Trow, Geoff Dyer, Proust, Coetzee (Elizabeth Costello), David Markson.

(Speaking of Markson, Reality Hunger could almost be the fifth in the series that began with Reader's Block and concluded with The Last Novel. It is composed in short segments, and the larger part of the segments are quotations, which appear in the text itself without attribution -- at his publisher's insistence, an appendix identifies the various sources.)

Shields has a point. As he says, a great many novels are based on the author's experiences, with some rearrangement, consolidation of personages, streamlining of events, and so on -- while the same rearrangement, consolidation, and streamlining go on in memoir. So is there really a difference, or just a kind of continuum, with memoir perhaps having the advantage in not having to go through a lot of rigmarole and belabored invention?

I admit, many is the novel I pick up these days, even much admired, prize-winning ones, and as the old weary machinery of exposition begins to grind and shudder, I just want to sigh. Do we really have to go through all this again? Or I read in the NYT Book Review of a "poignant and unforgettable fictional portrait of..." and I just want to cry out, save me from poignant and unforgettable fictional portraits!

Mine is a minority view, I suspect. A good deal of the reception of Franzen's Freedom this past fall seemed to express relief and delight to have a sort of Stendhal/Tolstoy/George Eliot novel about the contemporary USA. But could any serious art or music critic get away with saying, "This guy is great! He's just like Courbet!" or "He's just like Brahms!"?

Truth to tell, I don't think bourgeois-realist novels are going away. Too many people love them. But I'm glad to see the kind of writing Shields is boosting is getting a boost, because I enjoy it and hope it prospers.

How old is the term "creative non-fiction," by the way? Twenty-five years, thirty? I remember the day when essay and memoir were the shabby-genteel poor relations of poetry and fiction, weedy and tweedy and without much prestige in the creative writing curricula of this our republic, but take a look at what fine strapping lads they are now, not about to take a back seat to anyone. John D'Agata (multitudinously cited in Reality Hunger) landed a one-two punch to the canon with The Next American Essay and The Lost Origins of the Essay, and now Shields has provided a declaration of independence, or perhaps of war. CNF is yielding no ground and taking no prisoners, by the looks of things.

David Markson, _The Last Novel_

2010-12-23T11:42:00.000-08:00

MARKSON DIED ABOUT six months ago, and about five months ago I began reading this, having already read Vanishing Point and This Is Not a Novel, two of the earlier texts in the series that The Last Novel completes. I finished it minutes ago.

So were I to say, as I feel like saying, "I couldn't put it down," that would not be literally true, since I put the book in a stack back in August when my semester started and rescued it from that same stack two days ago, when my grades were turned in. But I truly have found all the Markson books I have read hard to put down. They have all been sequences of brief items -- facts, quotations, observations about the life of art and the lives of artists -- and, as with M&Ms or Triscuits, one more always seems like a good idea. They are no chapters or other divisions creating an opportune moment to replace the bookmark and get on with whatever else I ought to be getting on with, so I just keep reading, gobbling down one more item, one more page, five more pages.

That said, though, The Last Novel is sobering stuff. Published three years before Markson died, it is valedictory from its title to its last page, Markson's own death hovering just beyond the final entry ("Als ick kan," a phrase Van Eyck put beside his signature on a painting, which means something like "The best I can do").

And, as in earlier volumes in the series, the news from the lives of artists from antiquity to now is mainly grim: "Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke," runs a recurring entry. Prizes, popularity, and fame infallibly gravitate to the un- or scarcely deserving (Markson notes a particular dislike for Warhol, Christo, and Damien Hirst). Most artists are forgotten (he tries to recall the last time he heard anyone mention Sherwood Anderson, Erskine Caldwell, or James Jones, all immensely well known once). Critics are harsh and impercipient, one's artistic peers harsher and blinder.

So what is the source of the strange astringent joy in this book? Why is it -- dare I say it? -- delightful? Partly, it's just plain interesting. One finds out, for instance, that Ruskin could never imagine living in the United States because it lacked castles. Then there is the idiosyncratically bendy syntax Markson came up with for the series, e.g., "A century before Alcoholics Anonymous, something called the Sons of Temperance, Poe did make a stab at. To no avail."

Chiefly, I suspect, the joy lies in Markson having made a novel (four, even) without observing a single one of the form's conventions. At one point, he quotes:

I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it's been.

Said Wayne Gretzky.

Markson perhaps was thinking more about where the novel was going than where it had been, and so his book is alive and green even as it contemplates death and oblivion. So The Last Novel has no characters to speak of, no plot to speak of, no setting to speak of, not even any fiction to speak of (since it is all quotations and theoretically verifiable statements of fact, and even the asides from the "Novelist" voice seem squarely based on Markson's own circumstances and dispositions)... yet mysteriously feels like a novel. Watch me create a novel with none of the attributes of a novel, Markson invites us, and then pulls it off.

There is , apparently, one bit of fiction in The Last Novel. On p. 131, Markson writes, "For no reason whatsoever, Novelist has just flung his cat out one of his four-flights-up front windows." Jeez, I thought, he's losing it now -- for I quite believed him, you see. But was the flung cat only a snare for the careless reviewer? P. 135:

Novelist does not own a cat, and thus most certainly could not have thrown one out a window.

Nonetheless he would lay odds that more than one hopscotching reviewer will be reading carelessly enough here to never notice these two sentences and announce that he did so.

Ha! Unless there's a deeper game here and he did fling that poor cat.

Robin Robertson, _Swithering_

2010-12-22T10:48:00.000-08:00

THEY HAIL FROM four different countries, but somehow Robin Robertson (Scotland) calls to my mind Ted Hughes (England), Seamus Heaney (Northern Ireland),and Les Murray (Australia). The sound is crunchily consonantal, the texture loamy, the mood rural or at least out of doors, the memory yet green of the heavy wooden furniture of the grandparents and the smells of animals.

In "Entry," a Heaneyesque buzzard ("the slung bolt of her body / balanced in the wind / by wings and tail") lands on and devours a rabbit's corpse with Hughesian relish:

The wounds feather through him

throwing a fine mist of incarnation,

annunciation in the fletched field,

and she breaks in,

flips the latches

of the back, opens the red drawer

in his chest, ransacking the heart.

Hughesian, too, methinks, Robertson's poems on Actaeon's death ("the whole pack, thick with bloodlust, / flowed over the rocks and crags, over the trackless cliffs"), and Heaneyesque his animal poems, like "The Eel":

-- a dart of light, loosed

through the chestnut trees

ignites her glimmer, her muscle,

there in the dead pools

in the pleated grooves that stream the sides

of the Appenines down to Romagna [...]

The Murray note? Perhaps this, from "Swimming in the Woods":

Her long body in the spangled shade of the wood

was a swimmer moving through a pool:

fractal, finned by leaf and light;

the loose plates of lozenge and rhombus

wobbling coins of sunlight.

So what is the Robertson note? Hmm, dunno. I feel like reading more even though he keeps reminding me of other poets (poets I like, though, so maybe that's it). But there's something not at all like Hughes, Heaney, or Murray in this very short poem contemplating an adolescent girl (a daughter, I think, but I may be projecting):

THE CUSP

The child's skip

still there in the walk,

A woman's poise in her slow

examination

of the brightly coloured globe, this

toy of the world.

Is there anything

more heartbreaking than hope?

Meg Kearney, _Home By Now_

2010-11-20T11:11:00.000-08:00

MEG KEARNEY RECENTLY gave a reading here where I live, so I picked this up; published last year, it's her most recent book. Her language is plain, even colloquial, her themes often autobiographical (often about growing up as an adopted child, wondering about her biological parents), the lyrical idea usually lying near the surface, not too deeply buried, ready to be found. Hers is a poetry that even people who complain about poetry might enjoy.

My own taste is usually towards the baffling and outré, but even so I found a lot to like here. One poem responds to a writing teacher's advice (dated December 2001) to stop writing about herself and face the world ("George Says Stop Writing About Yourself") by listing all the things she is not to write about and thereby (ha!) writing about them nonetheless:

forget your mother

sipping a cigarette, a Dugan's Dew -- forget

your other mother, your other father, too,

and the one you last saw in a coffin not looking

at all like himself, so much not-him you couldn't

bear be near that body.

But this clever obedience-as-disobedience suddenly leaps into an engagement with history and the urgencies of the moment -- but then still based on the author's senses, her lived actuality:

It opens the window to that stench, three months

now of that smell, man-made, human, wafting

from downtown. This poem is in the street,

where war does its thing. See, there's a man

walking up Broadway: his shoes, suit, eyelashes,

lips covered with dust that used to be a building.

Also memorable are the wit of "First Blow Job":

Suddenly I knew what it was to be my uncle's Labrador retriever,

young pup paddling furiously back across the pond with the prized

duck in her mouth, doing the best she could to keep her nose in the air

so she could breathe.

And "So This Grasshopper Walks into a Bar," which does an extraordinary job of rendering the rhythms of a shift as a bartender, the early-evening bonhomie and euphoria metamorphosing into later-evening fumbling lust and red-eyed danger, to end with not a bang but a whimper -- the sour smells, the sense of abandonment and the unearthly quiet of closing.

Robert Wrigley, _Beautiful Country_

2010-11-06T11:51:00.000-07:00

WHATEVER BECAME OF the "Mistress of my Fate" blog? A distinctly snarky observation about Robert Wrigley, drawn from the blog, serves as epigraph to one of the poems in this, Wrigley's most recent book, a poem in which Wrigley snarks right back at the blogger. But "Mistress of my Fate" seems to have disappeared. Perhaps M. of my F. decided it was time to re-brand.

This is the first volume by Wrigley I have picked up, inspired by a reading he recently gave in the vicinity. Likeable work. Love poems, poems of natural description, memories of boyhood and youth... fairly traditional subject matter, it's fair to say. It's not surprising to learn from "Introduction to Poetry" that Wrigley heard the call to become a poet after reading Herrick's "Upon Julia's Clothes," for his poems typically travel down the broad highway of the English lyric. Not without the occasional contemporary touch -- Wrigley describes discovering Herrick's poem on a campus somewhere in 1973, at the very moment a classmate named Julie whooshes by, "streaking."

Loping in cadence, expansive in syntax, generous in figuration, the poems in Beautiful Country do not have, to my ear, a sharply distinctive music -- in a jumble assortment of Wrigley's poems with others by, say, James Wright, Donald Justice, and Stephen Dunn, I don't believe I could guess which were his -- but they are worth reading. And I'm pleased to note he himself reads them well; in an era when rather too many poets have taken literally J. S. Mill's dictum that "poetry is overheard," Wrigley performs his poems with a refreshing energy.

David Wagoner and David Lehman, eds, _The Best American Poetry 2009_

2010-10-23T15:32:00.000-07:00

HIGH TIME I got around to finishing this, with the new one soon or perhaps already out. I must have picked it up nearly a year ago. Nice cover -- a collage by John Ashbery, also making his nth appearance inside with "They Knew What They Wanted" -- but not as interesting a volume as some in the series, for me.

The poems tended to remind me of those of its editor -- wry, witty, colloquial, plenty of fauna, no small amount of flora, certainly likeable, but taken together in large numbers tending to leave me wanting something stranger, more ambitious, more startling.

There are some good things in here, to be sure; among the poets new to me in this volume, I'd be willing to read more by Mark Bibbins ("Concerning the Land to the South of Our Neighbors to the North"), Rob Cook ("The Song of America"), Michael Johnson ("How to be Eaten by a Lion"), Tina Kelley ("To Yahweh"), Keith Ratzlaff ("Turn"), Martha Silano ("Love"), Mitch Sisskind ("Like a Monkey"), Craig Morgan Teicher ("Ultimately Justice Directs Them"), or Debbie Yee ""Cinderella's Last Will & Testament"). What is that, eight? Not such a bad haul, really.

Lehman's introduction reports on the ink wars over William Logan's Loganesque take on Hart Crane in the NYTBR, taking the occasion to get in his own punches. But perhaps there's something to be said for Logan; he does have a keen eye for flaws and weak moments. That's about all he has, and the rare book he praises is never (I've found) any better than the many he trashes. But it's a gift, of a sort, no? Even when he's trashing someone I like, which is often, I have to admit he often puts his finger on a genuine problem.

John McManus, _Bitter Milk_

2010-10-18T13:26:00.001-07:00

NINE-YEAR-OLD Loren Garland, who lives in the shadow of Mt. Chilhowee in eastern Tennessee, has more that the usual kit of problems. He is drastically overweight. His teacher and his classmates persecute him. His relatives, variously deranged, are no friendlier. His imaginary friend, Luther, has a discernibly diabolic streak, and has killed off Loren's other imaginary friends, seven male and three female. His mother, Avery, is gender-dysphoric and without any explanation to Loren has taken advantage of a financial windfall (sale of the family's land to a sleazy brother-in-law real estate developer) to head out of town for sexual reassignment surgery, leaving Loren in the care of his alarming relatives.

An after-school special scripted by Flannery O'Connor? But there are further twists. The imaginary friend, Luther, is the narrator. Is he somehow more real than imaginary, more tempter than friend? When we read of him "walking up and down in the hallway," are we to think of the Adversary in the Book of Job, "going to and fro in the earth, and walking up and down in it"? When Luther says of the deaths of Loren's other imaginary, "I alone had escaped to tell the story," are we again being clued to think of Job? Or when Luther makes a kind of bet with Avery over which of them Loren will ultimately turn to in his abandonment? Or when it turns out Loren suffers from... boils?

Yes, the Biblical Book of Job haunts the novel, Loren in Job's role, Avery in God's, Luther in Satan's, the relatives, who think they understand both Loren and Avery but actually understand neither, in the role of Job's "comforters."

The great thing about McManus's novel, though, is that this key opens things up without closing anything down. The Job parallel gives the book a spine, but it's the novel's limbs that enchant. An afternoon at the pond with step-cousin Eli, a visit to Papaw on the roof of the barn, an interview with the school principal, unscrolling like a dream (there are no chapters or other divisions in the 195-page book) as Loren navigates through and eventually masters his inexplicable abandonment.

Stephen Burt, _Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry_

2010-09-19T11:07:00.000-07:00

THERE ARE PUNCHIER and more provocative reviewers of contemporary poetry out there, but I'm now 56, and I'have learned the hard way that the punchy and provocative typically has a very early sell-by date. So Stephen Burt is my favorite reviewer of contemporary poetry. He's gracious, he's smart, he's open-minded, and when he says something is worth reading, it almost invariably is. He's not above trying to launch a bandwagon (see "The Elliptical Poets"), but he doesn't puff poets for being oin the right side of some movement, nor trash them for being on the wrong side. I'm glad he's out there.

This handy volume from Graytwolf collects about thirty of the reviews and articles Burt has published since the mid-1990s, some on general topics in poetry, most reviews of particular poets. Quite a few I had read before, but they are worth re-reading, if only to confirm that they are really as good as I thought they were the first time around. Burt may not be infallible -- not quite sure what he sees August Kleinzahler, for instance (speaking of poetry reviewers, sub-category punchy and provocative) -- but he's to contemporary poetry what the late John Hammond was to contemporary music: a guy who knows the real thing when he encounters it.

Dezsö Kosztolányi, _Skylark_, tr. Richard Aczel

2010-09-18T11:38:00.000-07:00

I don't quite know how, with book publishing apparently in critical condition, the people at New York Review Books are making a go of things by re-publishing obscure and neglected masterpieces. Maybe they're not making a go of it, but are instead subsidized to the hilt by some enlightened benefactor; or, to be optimistic, perhaps it is a case of virtue rewarded, since with their current track record one can buy a New York Review Books publication, even if you have never heard of the author, and be fully confident that you have something worth reading.

I had never heard of Dezsö Kosztolányi, nor of Skylark, before the NYRB version appeared, but the plot description had some appeal. We're in a small Hungarian town around the turn of the 20th century, observing the Vajkays (Ákos and Antónia), an aging modestly-genteel couple whose unmarried adult daughter (Skylark) still lives with them. Skylark takes a week's vacation with relatives in the country, and after half a day of wondering how they will ever manage to get along without her, the Vajkays begin doing things they had given up years ago: eating at restaurants (which Skylark dislikes, too much paprika), going to theater (ditto, too vulgar), Ákos going to his old club, Antónia playing the piano. To their horror, they find themselves living a much more enjoyable life in Skylark's absence. What will they do when she returns?

Go back to being Mother and Father, of course. After a brief dramatic outburst the evening before Skylark returns, they accept their lot, meet her at the station, and slip into their old hebetude as into an old out-at-the-elbows bathrobe. In the final chapter, we finally get an extended look at things from Skylarks' point of view, and they are hardly rosier: her marriage prospects are virtually extinct, and she has nothing to look forward to but continuing to keep house for her aging parents, who will at some not-too-distant time die and leave her alone in a gray blankness she can hardly imagine.

A lot of Skylark is a charming, sepia-toned gallery of small town life during the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The town, Sárszeg, is a kind of Lake Wobegon, with its own small-town characters, habits, gossip, and institutions, and Kosztolányi a kind of Garrison Keillor, perceptive about his characters' foibles and narrowness but ultimately forgiving.

But underneath the charm we also sense a small but genuine domestic tragedy: three people in a situation no one of them likes, that does no one of them much good, but to which no one of them can conceive of an alternative. It's a study in resignation to the inevitable, an Old World lesson if there ever was one; here in the New World, we learn before we go to kindergarten that if one is unhappy, one Does Something About It. Skylark is about another world, and not just in the geographical or historical sense.

Muriel Barbery, _L'élégance du hérisson_

2010-09-06T15:06:00.000-07:00

WHAT HATH SALINGER wrought?

The English translation of this novel, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, was the book club selection for August. I read the original because it was summer and I had the time to do so -- besides, since I'm an American, everything sounds witty and intelligent in French. But the enchantment didn't entirely hold with this novel, since it feels like a Catcher with two Holdens.

There are two narrators, 54-year-old Renée, concierge in a haute-bourgeois apartment building, and going-on-thirteen Paloma, the younger of two daughters of a family that lives in the building. Like Holden, Renée and Paloma are perceptive and articulate but not taken seriously by the people around them. Like Holden, they can be savagely dismissive of anyone who strikes them as pretentious, insincere, or acting in bad faith. Like Holden, they tend to categorize all people other than themselves as pretentious, insincere, or acting in bad faith.

Most of the first half of the novel is mini-essays from either Renée or Paloma on the pervasive pretentiousness, insincerity, and bad faith that surrounds them. Paloma is so oppressed by it all that she plans to commit suicide on her 13th birthday by setting fire to her family's apartment.

Wheels begin to turn with the arrival of Monsieur Ozu, a Japanese gentilhomme of ample means, refined aesthetic sense, and pitch-perfect non-western sensibilité. Through his agency, Renée and Paloma discover each other and forge a cross-generational friendship of the sensitive, considerate and plucky, in Forster's phrase.

There is even a budding romance between Renée and M. Ozu, despite the formidable obstacle of her engrained suspicion and dislike of all wealthy people, but then fate of the tomorrow-we-could-be-hit-by-a-truck variety intervenes when Renée is hit by a truck. She dies, but Paloma has discovered a reason to live, and does not burn down her family's apartment.

Apparently L'élégance du hérisson is phenomenally popular all over the place, and I suspect that popularity may be due to the large number of people who feel that they, too, are perceptive, articulate, yet not taken sufficiently seriously, and moreover surrounded by phonies. Ever since Mark David Chapman, it's been hard to contemplate this segment of the population without a little inward shudder.

Bill Bryson, _The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_

2010-09-05T17:13:00.000-07:00

THE BOOK CLUB that my spouse and I belong to read this for July. Bryson is a witty, likeable writer who has handled a variety of subjects; this is a memoir of growing up in Des Moines, Iowa, during the Eisenhower-Kennedy era.

Since I am just a few years younger than Bryson, and also lived in Des Moines, and also had a father who worked on the staff of the Register and Tribune, this book was like a carton of madeleines for me. Younkers. Bishop's Buffet. Riverview Amusement Park. That enormous globe in the lobby of the Register and Tribune building. Not to mention all the odds and ends that anyone who was a child at the time will remember: Nehi soda, comic books, the communist threat.

The younger Bryson was more than capable of unmixed snarkiness about Des Moines -- cf. his first book, The Lost Continent -- but the tone here is more that of mildly bemused elegy. He seems to genuinely miss the pre-franchise when any modestly-sized American city had a full spectrum of its own shops, restaurants, and amusements: Reed's Ice Cream, in Des Moines, rather than Baskin-Robbins, the Younkers Book Department rather than Barnes and Noble.

Odd how attractive the era now seems, given how fervently, circa 1968-1970, everyone in Bryson's and my generation wanted to get away from it all, or blow it all up -- the martinis, the obligatory hats for men, the tiny white gloves for women, the tailfins, the whole split-level ranch-style nuclear bomb Ed Sullivan Show world.... Now, thanks perhaps to Mad Men, it has this strange paradise lost aura.

A few months ago I saw a billboard in town advertising Canadian Club whiskey: Cold War paterfamilias in his Cold War den (fallout shelter?) with a glass of whiskey, over the legend, "Damn Right Your Dad Drank It." None of your fancy-ass single malts for Dad, you pathetic twig on the family tree! Canadian Club and soda on the rocks, and pass the Chex mix.

Joshua Clover, _The Totality for Kids_

2010-08-06T11:23:00.000-07:00

IN A BLURB on the back cover of Clover's second collection of poetry (2006), Charles Altieri describes the poems as "crossing the cool, allusive intricacy of Quentin Tarantino with the abstract, intense social passion of Walter Benjamin." I would put it slightly differently, as for me the poems cross the cool, allusive intricacy of Walter Benjamin with the abstract, intense social passion of Quentin Tarantino.

Now why am I being so snarky? What Clover's poems actually are for me is an occasion of sin, to wit, the sin of envy. He has obviously received an excellent education and fully profited from it; he possesses a wickedly witty po-mo ingenuity (this is the first volume of poetry I've encountered that has a subject index); he has impeccable radar for what is most interesting in popular culture (in the index, Ashbery and Adorno rub shoulders with Astaire and the Auteurs); his politics are well-honed, smart but slogan-less; on the evidence of this volume, he spends a lot of time in Paris. It's hard to read Clover without the continually nagging sense that one wants to be Clover.

One cheap and obvious cure for envy is to dislike and disparage the object of envy -- not so easy in this case, unfortunately, since Clover's poetry is excellent: witty, musical ("jotting in our daybooks, how beautiful, the armies of autumn"), self-aware. Can one even mock his relentless post-everything-ism --

The most awful thing

About the phrase "Every Germinal must have its Thermidor"

Is that one never gets to say so anymore

And really mean it.

-- when he has done a better job of mocking it than you ever will in the three re-shuffled versions of almost the same poem, "Auteur Theory," "Kantine," and "A Boy's Own Story"?

About that index, though. On what principles was it compiled? Stephen Rodefer is mentioned on p. 64, and the index dutifully records, "Rodefer, Stephen, 64." Then I notice the index entry "Phair, Liz, 28, 59." Flipping to p. 28, I find no mention of Liz Phair, but the poem is titled "Letters and Sodas" -- a phrase from "Fuck and Run," a standout song from Phair's masterpiece, Exile in Guyville. So, the index tracks allusions as well as plain references...cool! Sure enough, "Guided by Voices, 50" sends one to a poem using the phrase "glad girls," the title of a great cut on Isolation Drills.

What a gift to the source-seeking dissertation writers, if only, as in the 1940s and 1950s, dissertation writers still sought sources.

But wait. On p. 32, we read "The danger of philosophy is that the the mayor is weeping over Love Will Tear Us Apart (The last chapter where Aglaya gets it [...]," which ought to generate entries for Joy Division and Dostoyevsky and does, but then the reference to "Rue No Fun" on the same page (and on p. 16) generates no entry for the Stooges. WTF?! All right, perhaps this was just some trans-lingual pun. But then the phrase "doing the Strand" on p. 50, which has to be an allusion to Roxy Music, generates no entry for Roxy Music.

Worse is to come -- on p. 62, we read "Je me promène. Principalement, je me promène," yet neither the entry for Guy DeBord nor the entry for Michelle Bernstein lists p. 62!

Ah, well, back to square one for our non-existent source-seeking dissertation writers. Makes for a better joke, though, no? If giving a volume of poetry an index is an ingenious po-mo gesture, it's obviously even more ingeniously po-mo to make the index inconsistent, fragmentary, fissured, and misdirective.

Down, green-eyed monster, down...

Rusty Morrison, _the true keeps calm biding its story_

2010-08-04T10:21:00.000-07:00

WINNER OF BOTH the 2007 Sawtooth Poetry Prize (judged by Peter Gizzi) and the 2008 James Laughlin Award (judged by Rae Armantrout, Claudia Rankine, and Bruce Smith), the true keeps calm biding its story obviously comes highly recommended. Were a prize mine to bestow, I might have kept looking, but the book compels respect and is worth reading.

One notices the volume's fixed form right away -- nine sections, each of six poems, each poem titled "please advise stop" and nine lines long (three sets of three lines apiece), line nine always ending "please advise," lines 1-8 always ending with either "please" or "stop." The poems are right-justified, so down one side one sees always a kind of column --

stop

please

stop

please

-- or some other combination.

The "please" has a wide semantic swing between the "please" of authority pretending to be polite and the "please" of desperate pleading, and the "stop" an even wider one, sometimes the voice of authority, sometimes the cry of a victim, sometimes telegram-ese for a period. As "please" and "stop" both tend to ask/demand something of the reader, the recurring conclusion "please advise" always tends to leave the ball, so to speak, in you, the reader's, court. "Well?" the poems seem to keep asking, "Now what? Can you make any more sense of this than I can?"

What sense there is to be made has to be made from the ground up, for the strict rigidity of the form is matched by the near-perfect disjunction as we go from line to line, from poem to poem, from section to section. Details of interiors flash by, scraps of etymology, a glimpse of landscape, a wink of introspection, any number of arresting images ("a huge walled-off deity affixed at the edge of my outer life stop").

But a thematic pulse is established as references to the death of the speaker's father recur, as if the book were in a wide elliptical orbit around that death. But -- it occurs to me -- an ellipse has two foci. The death of the father is one, but there seems to be an unnameable other as well. Is the other the poem's self-imposed form itself?

"After great pain, a formal feeling comes...." Is that the key here? Everything comes down to Dickinson (or Wordsworth or Eliot) sooner or later.

Niall Ferguson, _The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World_

2010-08-03T10:00:00.000-07:00

A BRISKLY READABLE account of where money, banks, bonds, stocks, insurance, the secondary market in mortgages, and hedge funds came from, obviously written for a lay audience, and a good thing it is, as I could hardly have made much headway otherwise. All we citizens need to know more about this stuff, but I for one feel at an enormous disadvantage. To me, as a humanities person, the processes of how credit flourishes and withers seems spectral and bewitched. No wonder Pound never emerged from the labyrinth.

Ferguison mentions several times in the book that he finished writing in May 2008 -- as if he knew enormously worse news was in the offing, as it certainly was.

Ferguson provides relatively little technical explanation (no equations) and a good many anecdotes, featuring among others the Medicis, the Rothschilds, the Scottish Widows, and George Soros. As an historian, he seems at his most comfortable and sounds at his most reliable when delving into origins.

When he turns to the contemporary scene, he's less persuasive. He takes a sickeningly indulgent view of the IMF and Pinochet's Chicago boys, for example.

Reading a book on the history of finance that has no equations is probably like reading a book on the history of music that has no musical notation -- which reminds me, I need to finish that Alex Ross book -- but for someone with my limitations, Ferguson's book is quite helpful. But how thick is his head if neither Naomi Klein nor John Perkins, whom he has obviously read, made no deep impression?

Gary Rivlin, _Broke, USA_

2010-08-02T11:20:00.000-07:00

IF YOU ARE sated with accounts of the upper-tier financial scoundrels and their derivatives, hedge funds, tranches, credit default swaps, and so on, but nonetheless still looking for insight into our ongoing meltdown, you should take up Gary Rivlin's trawl through the bottom feeders of our financial system -- the pawnbrokers, the folks who bring us pay day loans, the rent-to-own people, the instant tax refund people. The poor you will have with you always, as Jesus is reported to have observed, so what more reliable source of profit could there be than bleeding the poor?

Rivlin apparently started with the assumption that the pay day loan industry, dealing as it does with people who don't qualify for credit cards and whom ordinary banks disdain, was at least serving a real need. That assumption may have been what gained him access to Allan Jones, Billy Webster, and a variety of other smaller operators, who come to life in the book with a Dickensian clarity. Turns out, however, that the pay day loan industry generates enormous profits by urging its customers to take another loan at the soonest opportunity, to borrow more than they had originally intended, and thus keep them hooked up to the milking machine at APR rates of between 300 and 400 per cent, the interest eventually doubling or tripling the amount of the principal.

And then there are the predatory lenders -- the folks who kept the market in sub-prime mortgage bundles moving by urging home-improvement loans on people who had small ability to repay and often wound up losing their houses.

Ugly, ugly, ugly. It's not an impartial book, but it's well-researched and well-written, and all the evidence anyone needs that American hucksterism continues to thrive in every corner of the republic.

Lara Glenum, _Maximum Gaga_

2010-07-23T16:22:00.000-07:00

HER SECOND, FROM two years ago. My question as I began reading was, will this be as strange, beautiful, and scary as The Hounds of No? Answer: stranger, more beautiful, scarier.

Glenum puts me in mind of... wait for it... Seamus Heaney. Actually, they have next to nothing in common, but they both love a line full of nice chewy consonants. Heaney, from the title poem his first book, Death of a Naturalist:

Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles

Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.

There were dragonflies, spotted butterflies,

But best of all was the warm thick slobber

Of frogspawn that grew in clotted water

In the shade of the banks.

And Glenum's "Crash Site," in its entirety:

Dribbling figgity

among cream-slammed oinkers

the Normopath's piglicker

crushes into ham canyon.

Or should we say Glenum is Finnegans Wake without those sweet seductive long vowels?

Anyway, Glenum's a naturalist, too, we might say, a student of the body. In the first section of Maximum Gaga, we witness the development of a biologically intense relationship between Minky Momo and Mino --

My ratty lingua

sound like the snapping

of flightbones

and you do a cunning runtalingus

to the sucking noises

of my blowhole victrola

--which is witnessed by the Normopath (one whose normality is a kind of disease?). Minky Momo seems almost utterly given over to the experience, but she is also intent on holding to her heritage and identity ( "I come from a long line of female seers who had visions of the Barbie-Christ").

The second section of the book seems to be a drama staged for Minky Momo's benefit & edification by Mino, with the collusion, I suspect, of the Normopath. (On p. 9, Mino tells Minky Momo to identify with "Vamp No. 7," who appears on p. 72.)

The drama is not really describable, but I'm going to go with calling it a Jarry-esque feminist version of the myth of Minos, Pasiphaë, the divine white bull from the sea, and the artificial cow created by Daedalus so that Pasiphaë could copulate with the bull.

Minos has become "Minus," Daedalus "Ded," Icarus "Icky," and Pasiphaë "Queen Naked Mole Rat," or usually just "the Queen." In Glenum's version, though, it is not Pasiphaë's uncontrollable lust that compels her into the engine designed to exaggerate all aspects of female animality -- that is, the cow -- but the men, eager for spectacle, anxious for confirmation of their own role as masters of reason and technical accomplishment.

Glenum's Queen is not the cartoon of the myth. She's aware, cagy, also to some extent compromised, but able to teach Minky Momo much more than Mino suspects.

The Visual Mercenaries, a kind of chorus, deliver a "proclamation" that includes the volume's title:

How to rectify this, o dog of language? How to rectify your losses at the hands of your own tongue? Run headlong into Maximum Gaga! Run, now that your own poor words have been crammed back into your torso like guinea pig carcasses & greasy red clouds, now that you face certain doom from all quarters! Seek sanctuary in Maximum Gaga!

So Maximum Gaga is... the white bull from Poseidon? God? The Transcendental Signified? The Panopticon? In any case, you'd obviously be better off seeking sanctuary anywhere else.

Glenum notes in her acknowledgments at book's end that it "paraphrases or appropriates the work of Mary Russo, Delueze & Guattari, Michel Foucault, and Jean Baudrillard in certain places." No kidding. Simulacra and bodies without organs abound. But what, no Lacan? (Actually, p. 92 seems more than a little Lacanian to me.)

An amazing book, I think. I read it at one sitting -- it was that compelling, that inventive, surprises on every page. I wonder if any fans of the pop singer will be misled by the title and pick this up... and what might ensue? More visions of the Barbie-Christ?

Wells Tower, _Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned_

2010-07-21T09:51:00.000-07:00

MUCH-BUZZED, AND deservingly so in this instance; Tower is a talented writer and one to watch. The writing is controlled and witty, the observations of human, especially male, foibles acute.

Which led me to wonder -- would it be fair to say that male writers of literary fiction born later than, let's say, 1960 more or less internalized the second-wave feminist critique of American masculinity as a kind of psychopathology?

Here, as in much else, David Foster Wallace led the way with Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Either Lambert brother in Franzen's Corrections could serve as an example. The men in the fiction of Gary Lutz and Ben Marcus often seem wholly alienated from their own emotions, and unnerving as Jane Dark in Marcus's Notable American Women is, one scarcely doubts that the father needs to remain deeply buried in the back yard. On the somewhat more popular front, there's Fight Club. It's as if they all rolled up some Gilligan/Dworkin/MacKinnon in the late 70s/early 80s and deeply, deeply inhaled.

This development seems like and unlike the recent Hollywood guy-movies à la Forty-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, The Hangover, in that those films also seem to have internalized the second-wave critique of masculinity, with the important difference that the films juggle the situations so as to do their best to make the male characters, despite their psychopathology, play out as likeable and lovable. Nothing so redemptive goes on in Wallace, Lutz, or Marcus.

Or in Tower. The point-of-view characters in "Retreat," "Down through the Valley," and "On the Show" are game enough to make an effort to get out of their self-excavated holes, but we see enough to know they too are going to stay buried in the backyard, probably a good thing for everyone.

The final story, which lends the volume its title, is unique in that all the other stories are straight realism while "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned" adopts the elaborate conceit of lending a medieval Viking raider the speech of an ordinary contemporary American suburban Joe (or Jason or Jordan or Josh). An ingenious way to make the same point the other, more conventional stories make: what separates the historic forms of male pillage, rapine, and arrogance from the new? Not much.

Mark Levine, _Enola Gay_

2010-07-19T11:02:00.001-07:00

HIS SECOND, FROM ten years ago. Somewhat lower voltage than Debt, I thought, as though Levine had in the meantime encountered something of ample power to chasten and subdue. A pleasurable read, all the same.

The jacket copy suggests that Wallace Stevens hovers in the background of the book, but I was more reminded of Hart Crane. The combination of ornate but orthodox syntax with bend-y, startling, left-field semantic juxtapositions occurs in both Crane and Stevens, but Levine's forays in this direction made me think more often Hart than of Wallace. Here's Crane:

Oval encyclicals in canyons heaping
The impasse high with choir. Banked voices slain!
Pagodas, campaniles with reveilles out leaping-
O terraced echoes prostrate on the plain!…

Levine likely would have avoided "slain," and the exclamation points, but he too loves to blend the syntactically clear with the semantically opaque:

I called on the orange

tab to rid me of this shawl, its heaviness.

Its contamination. Its need to be bundled

into silence and tramped with shears

among the skewed roots of industrial hair.

Can one terrace an echo? Can an encyclical be oval? How could an orange tab rid one of a shawl, and why would a shawl need to be tramped with shears? If you're a Crane-ite, as I am, or a Levine-ite, as I may yet become, the music of the poem persuades that such propositions are right and inevitable.

What I was most reminded of, though, was Eliot's "Marina." There's a recurring landscape in Enola Gay, a place of rock, shore, forest, and mist, of salt water and sand, the landscape of "Marina." A crucial difference is that in Eliot's poem some unfathomable blessing has occurred, while in Levine's something unspecified has gone badly amiss, or will soon ("And the stars began to fall, and though everybody is waiting / for a terrible surprise, it hasn't come yet, not just yet"). Yet there is no elegy or lament here, but a kind of stoic, clamped-jaw acceptance, a grim satisfaction in knowing the worst and dispensing with self-delusion.

"Forgetfulness" in particular seems to evoke "Marina," but the landscape and the boat seem to encode guilt rather than redemption:

Beware the dark sea.

What does darkness look like? What does it mean?

My bark is thinking of me, my unhappy bark

is balancing on its hook in the shaken sea

shrinking and sinking and blinking and thinking of the

distant blank blue hills. Where are my tall trees?

But is the landscape meant to evoke not Eliot's New England seacoast, but Japan? Is that why the book and its longest poem are named after the airplane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima --? But why does that very poem bring in clam-bakes and Jew's harps (an allusion to Eliot's Yankee anti-Semitism?) and end by landing us in "downtown Sumer"?

Well, I'm sufficiently intrigued. On to The Wilds.

One doesn't hear Hart Crane mentioned as often as he deserves to be. What's up with that?

Charles Dickens, _The Old Curiosity Shop_

2010-07-17T11:44:00.000-07:00

AT THE RISK of being tiresome about William Logan's review of Against the Day, I note his parenthetical observation, "no one has ever wept over the death of a Pynchon character the way thousands wept over Little Nell." Coincidentally, I was reading the Dickens novel in which Little Nell figures, The Old Curiosity Shop, over the same weeks in which I was reading the last 700 pages or so of Against the Day. While I'm glad to have finally gotten around to The Old Curiosity Shop -- I haven't read any other pre-Copperfield Dickens -- I'd have to say Against the Day was a more captivating read, really.

Logan writes that Pynchon's sentence rhythms are those of Dickens, and that Pynchon resembles Dickens in other ways as well: "These are almost the rhythms of Dickens, whose freakish surplus of characters, juddering episodic plots, and teary sentiment Pynchon half imitates, though in each case with a nearly lethal dose of irony." Then there are the amazing names, of course.

It's those "lethal doses of irony," I suppose, that prevent our weeping at the death of a Pynchon character? So is Logan suggesting Dickens's teary sentimentality has the saving grace of having made people cry once upon a time? Is he sneering at Dickens's sentimentality and at the same time sneering at Pynchon for not trafficking in it? A classic Loganism.

I found Nell difficult to appreciate it, actually -- I couldn't quite manage Esther Summerson, either, for that matter. Bleak House is in a lot of way Dickens's best work, but the Esther half of it I found barely readable. Nell and Esther are just too Victorian picture post-card for me, and just about anyone this side of 1914, I suspect. So, no, I did not weep.

Then there's the fact that I knew going in she would die -- Little Nell is famous for dying, after all. Her death most have come as a shock for the novel's first readers, of course -- quite daring, really, of Dickens to not provide the usual happy ending.

Dick Swiveller, though -- there's the Dickens I love.

_Against the Day_ (IV)

2010-07-15T12:19:00.000-07:00

THE TITLE CAN be taken in at least three ways. For one, the novel participates in the same neo-Zoroastrian children-of-light vs. children-of-darkness opposition that figures often in Pynchon, so one may say the novel is about those who are making war on the day. (The principal child of darkness, Scarsdale Vibe, has the best Pynchonian villain-name since Brock Vond.) Second, the resistance, the children-of-light, are in a confrontation with the hegemonic powers, with things-as-they-are, so they are "against the day" in the sense of opposing the prevailing temper of their times. ("'Sometimes,' said Virgil, 'I like to lose myself in reveries of when the land was free, before it got hijacked by capitalist Christer Republicans for their long-term evil purposes...'." Amen.)

Third, we have the idea of providing for the future, anticipating some eventuality, preparations. The novel insists that the 20th century we had was not the one we had to have, that unrealized hopes did not go unrealized because they were impossible, unattainable -- that we need to remain loyal to those hopes, to keep imagining another world is possible. This is uncharacteristically sunny stuff from Mr. Entropy, and William Logan in the VQR got a bit snarky about it -- "The final pages of the novel offer a frazzled sentimental tale of coupling and growing old" -- but I'm old enough or long-coupled enough to have found these pages convincing, even moving. I was moved by this, for instance, the birth of Yashmeen Halfcourt's & Reef Traverse's daughter:

The baby was born during the rose harvest, in the early morning with the women already back from the fields, born into a fragrance untampered with by the heat of the sun. From the very first moment her eyes were enormously given to all the world around her. What Cyprian had imagined as terrifying, at best disgusting, proved instead to be irresistible, he and Reef to either side of the ancient bed, each holding one of Yashmeen's hands as she rose to meet the waves of pain, despite the muttering women who plainly wanted the two men elsewhere. Hell, preferably.

I witnessed the births of both my daughters, and I would say that Pynchon got something absolutely right here. (My daughters were not born during rose harvests, but even that seems utterly spot on.) That bit about the eyes... perfect.

Or take this subjunctive-mood vision of happily-ever-after he conjures up for Kit Traverse and Dahlia Rideout:

May we imagine for them a vector, passing through the invisible, the "imaginary," the unimaginable, carrying them safely into this postwar Paris where the taxis, battered veterans of the mythic Marne, now carry only lovers and cheerful drunks, and music which cannot be marched to goes on uninterrupted all night, in the bars and the bals musettes for the dancers who will always be there, and nights will be dark enough for whatever visions must transpire across them, no longer to be broken into by light displaced from Hell, and the difficulties they find are no more productive of evil than the opening and closing of too many doors, or of too few. A vector through the night into a morning of hosed pavements, birds heard everywhere but unseen, bakery smells, filtered green light, a courtyard still in shade...

Yes, in twenty years the Wehrmacht will be marching into this paradisal Paris -- but we need to keep contemplating that music that cannot be marched to -- it too goes on.

_Against the Day_ (III)

2010-07-14T12:04:00.000-07:00

I DID NOT read Against the Day with the slack-jawed wonder at its thematic architecture that I felt in reading Gravity's Rainbow way back when, more than thirty years ago. How much of that is simply due to my own aging? Would I be agog at the complexity of Gravity's Rainbow if I read it now, would I have been astonished by Against the Day had I read it at 25?

No way to answer that, is there?

At the same time, I don't remember being much smitten with the prose style of Gravity's Rainbow. It seemed a convincing pastiche of several pulp-fiction styles of the 1940s and 1950s to me, but neither comely nor graceful, hardly to be savored for its own sake. The pastiche of 18th century prose in Mason & Dixon, however, I often found myself relishing, probably simply because I found the source of the pastiche congenial.

And now -- I don't know whether Pynchon learned a few tricks following the subtle volutes of Gibbon and Johnson or what, but I think the prose of Against the Day is frequently gorgeous. Pynchon is still a pasticheur -- a master, the master pasticheur of our time, greatest since Beerbohm perhaps -- and the source of the pastiche is an unpromising territory bounded by H. Rider Haggard, Talbot Mundy, Robert Louis Stevenson, "Frank Richards," and a touch of Zane Grey whenever we're in Colorado. But even while indulging in the winding circumlocutions of turn-of-the-20th-century adventure prose, Pynchon can sound great.

She dreamed, the night she knew for certain, of a hunter arrived at last, a trainer of desert eagles, to unmask against her soul the predatory descent that would seize her, fetch her away, fetch her back, held fast in talons of communion, blood, destiny, to be plucked off the defective Riemann sphere she had been taking for everything that was, and borne in some nearly vertical angle of ascent into realms of eternal wind, to hover at altitude that made the Eurasian continent a map of itself, above the glimmering of the rivers, the peaks of snow, the Tian Shan and Lake Baikal and the great inextinguishable taiga. (891)

"Lake Baikal and the great inextinguishable taiga." Sigh. All right, I know, not for everybody, awfully high in cholesterol compared to, say, Beckett. But one or another Pynchon sentence walks across some such Niagara on a tightrope on almost every page of Against the Day. The prose had me slack-jawed this time.

_Against the Day_ (II)

2010-07-13T11:51:00.000-07:00

BACK IN THE 1970s when I was reading Gravity's Rainbow, it seemed like a lot of other people were as well, or had already read it, or were planning to. When Vineland arrived, I knew at least a few people who read it. I knew one other person beside myself who read Mason & Dixon. So far, no one else in my circle of acquaintance has mentioned taking up Against the Day.

"What's that you're reading there?"

"Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day."

"Whew! Good luck!"

Well, reviews were mixed. And the length is intimidating.

This era of the blog post, the YouTube clip, and the Tweet seems wholly unpropitious for the large-scale 800-1000-page novel -- yet they keep popping over the horizon: Against the Day, Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones, Alexander Theroux's Laura Warholic, Joshua Cohen's Witz, and a new one by William Vollmann every six months. Who is reading these? Are even the reviewers reading them (see Jack Green's Fire the Bastards!)?

There is an Against the Day readers website -- , part of a larger Pynchon website -- with acres of helpful annotations and indices, so obviously the book has its devotees, length notwithstanding.

I recall that my daughters were not dismayed as the later volumes in the Harry Potter series grew longer and longer -- if you're reading the book just for the sheer pleasure of reading it, more is better, perhaps, as three scoops of ice cream are better than two. Likewise, Stephen King's readers seem not at all put off by the length of The Stand, say.

But -- when a book is reputed to be complex, ambitious, intellectual, important, and so on, and it clocks in at, say, 1,087 pages, even serious lit folks (e.g., my faculty colleagues) will probably give it a pass.

Yet writers still read them, publishers still publish them... someone is reading them, in some Anti-Terra inaccessible to me.

Thomas Pynchon, _Against the Day_ (I)

2010-07-12T11:33:00.000-07:00

I BEGAN READING this in January of 2007, a few months after it came out. I got about two hundred pages in, found it interesting enough, but somehow it got to the bottom of the pile, drifted into "dormant" status on my reading list. May 2008, back at it, got another hundred pages further, then the same thing happened. May 2009, another hundred pages and... same thing.

Some time in 2009 I read William Logan's utterly Loganesque takedown of _Against the Day_ in VQR and very nearly lost heart. Did I really want to commit to completing my reading of a nearly 1100-page novel that, if Logan was right, was mainly a self-indulgent, exhausted jumble?

But second thoughts arrived. What, am I taking my cues from William Logan now? Surely things haven't come to that. So, May 2010, back to it -- basically, a hour a day. And I finished today.

And I can certainly say I enjoyed it. Then again, I enjoyed Mason & Dixon while I was reading it, but later found almost nothing of it had stuck with me. The opening section, when M. & D. are in South Africa for the Transit of Venus, seems to me one of the best things Pynchon has ever done, and the account of the changeover to the Gregorian calendar in England was echt Pynchonian, but the rest of it just evaporated, basically. So will Against the Day linger in my mind, or not?

This will have to be continued, I see.

John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, _Game Change_

2010-07-10T09:51:00.000-07:00

A PAGE TURNER, certainly -- hard to put down -- a hybrid of Balzac and _People_ magazine, let's say. As in the _Comédie Humaine_, the fates of nations turn on personalities, temperaments, alliances, betrayals, feuds, and who is sleeping with whom and who knows -- which sounds like _People_ magazine already (or Suetonius), but Balzac has a sense of history and conception of the whole of French society, while _People_ does not -- and _Game Change_ certainly does not.

Heilemann and Halperin certainly knew whom to talk to, and who would be willing to talk -- the whole book is the insiders' view. The view is so far inside that there is no outside, really. The United States and all its messy differences and dilemmas enter the book only when reacting to this leak or that gaffe or some zinger in a televised debate, some lowball TV spot.

As an academic, somewhere I picked up the idea that history is about classes, conflicts, consciousness, dialectic... now and then, a new idea, an emergent possibility... all of that is wholly and utterly absent from _Game Change_. Everything comes down to who said what to whom on the campaign plane, If this book is _the_ story of the 2008 campaign, as its popularity suggests it is, then history is basically _Grey's Anatomy_, with really high stakes.

Obviously there are better analyses out there. But if _New Left Review_ were on hand at your dentist's office, would you pick it up? Or would you rather know what John Edwards's campaign staff was saying about the real Elizabeth?

Heather Christle, _The Difficult Farm_

2010-07-09T11:47:00.000-07:00

"PEOPLE LIKE SURPRISES," the poet declares in the first line of "Television," and if you like surprises, as I do, you will delight in The Difficult Farm, as I did. Hardly a sentence, a strophe, or a poem resolves in the way one's half-formed expectations thought it was likely to:

Because my head is a magnet for bullets

I am spending the day indoors. First

I admired the topiary for several hours

and when my eyes began to ache I rang

for lunch. Lunch arrived with injunctions.

I considered my feet. I did not consider

my altitude.

That is the beginning of "One of Several Talking Men," and a few of the poem do seem to be in covert dialogue with various male writers of fiction: Hemingway (wounded and in the hospital) in that poem and in "Wilderness with Two Men," Donald Bartheleme (the fourth of the "Five Poems for America"), Ben Marcus ("Stroking my Head with my Deception Stick"). Certain Presidents also get called in for a brief talking-to: "Come in, Mr. Roosevelt, Mr. Adams, / Mr. Didn't-Feel-Obligated-to-Wear-Any-Pants. / Where are your bustling wives?" (That is, Eleanor, Abigail, and, erm, Hilary?).

A few busy, accomplished women enter the picture as well: Florence Nightingale, "the infamous Sarah Morgan, who moved / to town one summer, but never arrived / at school, despite the exquisite sharpness / of the pencils we had readied in hopes / of dazzling our unfamiliar friend," Mother Nature ("Dear nasty pregnant forest. / You are so hot! / You are environmentally significant. / Men love to hang themselves / from your standard old growth trees"), and the poet's mother, despite the difficulty of writing about her ("It is difficult, a good poetry concerning my mother").

If the Delphic oracle ever started doing stand-up, she might sound like Heather Christle.

Keep up the good work, Octopus Books.

Joshua Beckman, _Take It_

2010-06-29T11:23:00.000-07:00

I PICKED UP a copy of Shake when the Wave Poetry Bus came through our town in (I think) autumn of 2005 and enjoyed it, and I likewise enjoyed this volume, published last year. Like the poems in its predecessor, these poems asymptotically approach traditional poetry without getting there, and it's the not-getting-there that intrigues and delights. The lines approach, even flirt with iambic pentameter without ever resolving into it; the images seems always just about to click into focus as a narrative, then escape. Antique-sounding constructions -- "But this convinced him not," "Dark mornings shown thy mask / made well thy visage and voice" -- jostle with the contemporary colloquial:

Ousted by the neighbors from what had been

a perfectly comfortable dream, I wandered into

the hallway and fuck if there wasn't this kid

sort of straddling one of my houseplants,

pulling at its leaves, and the parents, they were

just standing there, looking at me!

In several poems, Beckman creates a kind of tricky syncopation by rhythmically counter-pointing dashes and line breaks; he also likes a nicely buried rhyme. A good example of both devices at once:

Dark and sparkled boot -- beloved book from

which we learn -- your intense eyes -- I close

upon you now this hand -- and north of here

the snow will land -- as once you did gently

lift your pen from the letter --

I'm reluctant to suggest the book contains anything so obvious as a message, but it does often seem to reflect the national shame and bleakness of the closing Bush years: "So untrue my firm countrymen, so untrue." The book's second poem, the one beginning "Through God's grace the little drops," somehow seems to me what Lincoln's Second Inaugural might have sounded like, had Lincoln been stoned when he delivered it, and had he spend much less time reading the KJV and much more reading Flow Chart.

I love the way Beckman begins his poems. Consider this:

I am made of butter. I am wrapped in gold,

I am forgotten as a friolator forgets a haddock,

and then I tell my sweet love that I want to spill

coffee all over her bottomside, and she tells her friends,

so they take her to the country where they all

go for walks and play honesty games.

Man, we've all been there.

Leszek Kolakowski, _Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?_

2010-06-25T11:29:00.000-07:00

YES, THE SAME Leszek Kolakowski who wrote the three-volume, 1200-page Main Currents of Marxism, which no, I have not read, despite its reputation, because... well, because it's three volumes and 1200 pages, for crying out loud. But I'm tempted to plunge in after reading this much smaller book -- a mere 223 pages, and tiny ones at that, about five inches by three.

"This little book is not meant as some sort of super-condensed textbook, encyclopedia, or dictionary," Kolakowski insists in his introduction, and in truth it is not, and hurrah for that, for had it been any thing of that sort I never would have picked it up. Rather, it is twenty-three brief (10-11 pages), jewel-like essays on the most influential arguments of twenty-three major western philosophers, in chronological order, each essay ending with the questions the philosopher's arguments raise.

As one reads, it does feel like one is getting a highly compressed history of western philosophy, Greek metaphysics morphing into theological hair-splitting morphing into epistemological conundra, but one is delighted, fascinated, compelled all the way -- and no textbook, encyclopedia, or dictionary could quite compete.

I don't know what Kolakowski sounds like in Polish, but through the translation by Agnieszka Kolakowska (a relative, perhaps?) he sounds unfailingly humane, helpful, and fair, carrying his enormous learning lightly, with a dry kind of charm. This is the sort of book I fall in love with.

With what crushing dismay I learned that the publishers omitted seven essays that were part of the Polish edition of the book. Why, why, why? The book would hardly have been too long at 300 pages, and I find myself aching to know what Kolakowski said about (e.g.) Heidegger, especially since the Heidgegger essay would have presumably stood as the book's last.

G. C. Waldrep, _Disclamor_

2010-06-14T11:32:00.001-07:00

EVERYTHING REMINDS ME of Wordsworth these days -- the second part of Richard Greenfield's Tracer, the central poem of D. A. Powell's Chronic, and now much of this, G. C. Waldrep's second full-length book. Especially, in the present instance, the poems such as "Candlemas, Vermont" or "Circle Park" or "Wildwood" or the "Battery" poems, which carry traces of someone walking, observing, thinking, remembering.

But by volume's end, I was more often reminded of Eliot. For one thing, rather like the Eliot of the quatrain poems, Waldrep likes to juxtapose homely words as old as the language itself with specialized vocabulary terms, throwing in a curveball adjective:

A vesicle conscripted from the oriflamme,

rejecting, rejected,

a butchered

iridescence on the Schuylerville pike.

("Titus at Lystra")

Or, from the same poem:

To dowse for that secret spring:

the geese,

the temblor, what

livid farrowing.

For another, like the Eliot of Ash Wednesday, he creates an atmosphere of cryptic candor, of being in the same breath painfully frank and unfathomable:

I carry the bones of the pedagogue

in ivory brackets

my hand is steady

I mix consecration

with consecration

"Romeward," for instance, has a wrenchingly confessional tone -- but one can only guess what is being confessed.

By mid-volume the Wordsworthian element has mainly evaporated -- we are still walking, but now in a dreamworld rather than a landscape:

I buy and I buy; with each receipt

something shredding and translucent breaks upward

from darkness. This is unavoidable.

("Wunderkammern")

But the "I" seems to persist from poem to poem over the whole volume, always erudite but (like Eliot again) sometimes having a laugh at his own erudition, always scrutinizing his conscience, always noticing.

The nine "Battery" poems especially unify the book. Having read them as a series in an earlier chapbook, I was wondering if spreading them out over a book, with three or four poems coming between, would diminish the effect they have together. But no -- they now act as a spine, deepening the book's historical dimension, its implied contest between cruelty and hope.

Goldbeater's Skin made me suspect that G. C. Waldrep is one of his generation's most interesting writers, and Disclamor persuades me all the more.

Mathias Svalina, _Destruction Myth_

2010-06-12T11:07:00.000-07:00

PHILIP ROTH? WHY is there a drawing of Philip Roth's head in the lower right-hand corner of the corner of Mathias Svalina's new book, and why is the drawing reproduced full-page size on the flyleaf? And why does Roth have two sets of eyes? And who is the four-eyed gentleman in the drawing on the final page? Ralph Ellison? No, no moustache.

Roth's four-eyed presence on the cover is only the first enigma in a volume that presents a good many. Forty-four of its forty-five poems bear the same title, "Creation Myth" (twenty-four of these were in his New Michigan Press chapbook, Creation Myths). The classic function of the creation myth is to explain how things came to be as they now are, but the explanations in Svalina's myths tend to deepen rather than dispel mystery. They begin sometimes goofily ("In the beginning everyone looked like Larry Bird"), sometimes ominously ("In the beginning everyone wanted to fight to the death"), sometimes astonishingly ("In the beginning people had cornfields rather than sex parts"), then proceed down passages with many beckoning doors, plunge down the one you least expected, and leave you in perplexed enlightenment:

"Every night the President appeared on TV to wish every person goodnight individually. 'Good night Meredith,' he said. 'Good night Meredith. Good night Meredith. Good night Meredith. Good night Meredith. Good night Meredith. Good night Meredith. Good night Meredith. Good night Meredith. Good night Meredith.Good night Meredith. Good night Meredith. Good night Meredith. Good night Meredith. Good night Meredith.'"

William of Ockham held (I am told) that God is "absolutely omnipotent: He can do anything that is not self-contradictory." The creative power in Svalina's creation myths, I am delighted to report, suffers no such limitation, and the self-contradictory flourishes.

"In the beginning there was nothing. But the nothing smelled like bacon. No one could figure out how nothing could: a) have a smell & b) smell like bacon."

So, not only does this cosmos of nothing smell like something, but beings are present to smell the smell that emanates from this cosmos of nothing and speculate about why it smells as it does. An empty cosmos already populated -- which may reflect the affinity between creation myths and the world of our early childhood. In creation myths, as in the world of early childhood, there are only a few objects; the world is uninhabited save by a countable number of people, pieces of furniture, toys, yards, and so on. Svalina's myths capture that simplicity. But they also paradoxically assert -- again in a way that reminds us of early childhood -- that this new-born world has nonetheless a dense history, is more populated than we know, has already been home to more conflict and pain than we can imagine.

Creation -- at least among us of the west -- implies fall, and some sort of a turning, collapse, shift, or fall marks all of Svalina's myths: "Soon the people lost their nouns"; "On three they all pulled. / It was the first ripping sound / the world ever knew, / this world used to cutting"; "the people unwrapped the final wrappings that held the mummy. Inside the wrappings there was a hive of wasps."

Sometimes, Svalina's own childhood flickers by ("My mother & father are both chemists"), but the poems are not about childhood so much as they recreate worlds like those of childhood, a hard-won, shadowed second innocence like that of Cosmicomics, a connection Svalina seems aware of having conjured: "In the beginning / there was a book / by Italo Calvino."

The forty-fifth and final poem is "Destruction Myth." In attempting to convey a Vision of Closure that is both sublime and ridiculous, both hilarious and terrifying, Svalina has some august and hard-to-beat predecessors in Daniel and John of Patmos, but he rises to the occasion. My favorite line: "In the end the mimeograph machines will begin to produce originals."

Joseph O'Neill, _Netherland_, & Keith Gessen, _All the Sad Young Literary Men_

2010-06-09T12:26:00.000-07:00

I WOULD RATHER not cover two books in one entry, ordinarily, but these two have such a natural affinity that I am going to make an exception. They both belong to that large and growing set of novels in which well educated and intelligent young people settle in New York City, full of ambition and spunk, and get their clocks cleaned in every conceivable manner. Classic reference points include Plath's The Bell Jar and Didion's essay "Goodbye to All That"; recent examples include Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children, parts of Mary Gaitskill's Veronica, and, erm, The Devil Wears Prada and its proliferating imitators.

The grandaddy of them all, certainly, is The Great Gatsby. Gessen acknowledges F. Scott's blazing of the trail in his title, which adds the word "literary" to the title of a Fitzgerald short story, and Gatsby is name-checked in both a blurb on the back of Netherland and, for good measure, in the copy of the inner flap of the jacket.

O'Neill's narrator, Hans van den Broek, like Nick Carraway is a newcomer to the city, works in the financial district, and has a much creamier and more melodious prose style than you would expect a worker in the financial district to have. Like Nick, he becomes friends with a fellow outlander with high-wattage charisma and a crazy dream -- Chuck Ramkissoon, whose Daisy is the ambition to make cricket popular in the United States.

Hans's wife and son return to London after 9/11/2001, leaving Hans to become even better friends with Chuck and to do a stint as a boho-tourist at the Chelsea Hotel. Turns out Chuck is, like Gatsby, mixed up with some shady characters, like Gatsby breaks a few laws, and like Gatsby ends up murdered. He gets no "you're worth the whole damn bunch put together" sort of eulogy from Hans, though, who has rejoined his family in London to live, presumably, happily ever after, a good deal less affected by his friendship with a doomed dreamer than Nick was by his.

All the Sad Young Literary Men is less ambitious but a lot more likable. Keith (who gets first-person narration), Mark, and Sam (who both get third-person narration) want to be in NYC but are by force of circumstance elsewhere (a D. C. think tank, the grad school of Syracuse University, a temporary office job in Boston), and are not just literary but politico-literary, writing (respectively) an analysis of the 2000 election, a dissertation on the Mensheviks, and a novel about Zionism. More precisely, they are not writing them, preoccupied with as they are with the problems making them sad, which have mainly to do with their relationships with women.

Why did I like this one better? It was funnier, certainly; it seemed to have a tighter grip on the pulse of the culture, noticeable in a number of small details about temping, about grad school, and so on. That the characters were (in their distinct ways) titanic screw-ups lent them much greater charm than Hans van den Broek ever musters. It evokes its era (the Oh-ties, or whatever we decide to call the last decade) much more palpably. I suspect that Netherland will turn out to be one of those novels that gathers all sorts of admiration and respect on its first appearance but rings ever more hollow with the passage of time. But then there's Chuck -- Chuck I will not soon forget.

I note from the back flap of All the Sad Young Literary Men's jacket that Keith Gessen was born in Russia. Hmm. Shteyngart, Bezmogis, Dumanis... they're everywhere.

Paul Auster, _Invisible_

2010-06-08T14:42:00.000-07:00

HIS BEST SINCE The Book of Illusion, I think. Not that it's much of a departure. Like a great many Auster protagonists, Adam Walker resembles Auster himself in several ways (born 1947, attends Columbia, aspiring poet, student of French literature). Like the protagonists of Mr. Vertigo and Book of Illusions, Walker has a mentor who becomes like an antagonist -- though where Master Yehudi and Hector Mann are merely darkly complicated, Rudolph Born is downright sinister. Like Peter Aaron from Leviathan, Sidney Orr from Oracle Night, and the narrator of The Locked Room, Walker has a friend, Jim Freeman, who is also a writer, to whom he is bound in a tricky knot of support and rivalry.

Finally, like a lot of Auster protagonists, Walker is shadowed by a traumatic loss -- a younger brother accidentally drowned as a child.

So far, so Austerian. Invisible throws us a curve, however, in its attention to justice.

Walker recalls (in a section of the novel using second-person narration) that "hours after your mother was carted off to the mental hospital, you swore an oath on your brother's memory to be a good person for the rest of your life." Events he witnessed and participated in during his twentieth year, in 1967, lead him to devote himself to "twenty-seven years of legal aid work, community activism in the black neighborhoods of Oakland and Berkeley, rent strikes, class action suits against various corporations, police brutality cases, the list goes on."

In 1967, Walker was a witness when Born, a man who seemed prepared to help Walker achieve his wildest ambitions, murdered a perfect stranger on a New York street. As the consequences of that moment unfold over the rest of the novel, as we click from first-person narration to second-person and then to third (as Freeman takes control of his friend's story) we recurringly have occasion to ask what being a good person means, what justice requires, what one can and cannot do and still be "good," what the pursuit of justice does and does not permit.

Obviously, this is a Guantanamo-era novel, but these questions are much, much older than that -- just think of Welles's Touch of Evil, to say nothing of the Oresteia.

And the title? As both the plot-starting murder and the final episode (narrated by yet another character, Cécile Juin) of a concealed but suddenly-visible prison colony suggest, justice and injustice have everything to do with what we see, or don't see, or refuse to see.

On second thought, we might say there was an earlier Auster novel preoccupied with justice -- Leviathan. My favorite, as it happens.

D. A. Powell, _Chronic_

2010-05-30T09:39:00.000-07:00

ON TO THE latest Powell. Chronic is divided into three sections, beginning with "Initial C," concluding with "Terminal C," and between them "Chronic," which contains only one poem, likewise titled "Chronic."

My guess: the book's organization mirrors a life, having a defining originating event (birth), a defining concluding event (death), and between them a phenomenon unfolding in time, with its recurrences, ragged patterns, and dumb persistence.

The titles of the individual poems also all begin or end with the letter "C," although an initial or terminal "c" in a poem's title does not entail its inclusion in the section with the appropriate name -- too obvious, perhaps.

I invested a little time in the hypothesis that the poems in "Initial C" were about beginnings and those in "Terminal C" about endings, but I had to give up on that idea -- likewise too obvious, I suspect. However, the poems in the first section do have an airier, lighter quality, like a water-color painting, are more frequently set outdoors, seem more hopeful, while those in the final section are denser, more tangled, angrier. I preferred the poems of the third section to those of the first, but that's just me; there are excellent poems in both.

"Chronic," though, for me, was far and away the highlight of the volume, a poem I expect to revisit frequently. To place a poem titled "chronic" in a section called "Chronic" in the center of a book titled Chronic is to impose upon it a burden of expectation that few poems can fulfill -- but "chronic" is more than equal to the challenge. I've read it six or seven times in the last few days, and I think it belongs in the company of Wordsworth's "Intimations" ode as a meditation on loss, on the marriage of our minds and our bodies to nature and that marriage's inevitable decline and end.

Sometimes the poem deliberately summons an echo of 19th century poetry, as in the syntactical inversion of "and delight I took in the sex of every season" or the Hopkins-like twist of "vibrant arc their swift, their dive against the filmy, the finite air." I even hear a little Yeats ("I carry the same baffled heart I have always carried" -- cf. opening lines of "The Tower"). Or the Wordworthian catalogue of this line, combined with the question of why one feels compelled to make catalogues:

why do I need to say the toads and moor and clouds --

Yet Powell has in some ways more on his plate than Wordworth had -- the lights were going out in Wordsworth's imagination, but he was physically healthy, which Powell is not ("daily I mistake -- there was a medication I forgot to take"), and while Wordsworth did have to worry about the destruction of the English countryside, he did not have to worry whether humans would make the planet uninhabitable:

choose your own adventure: drug failure or organ failure

cataclysmic climate change

or something akin to what's killing bees -- colony collapse

The concluding lines takes a tag-line from the Homeric Hymns and turn it into a heartbreaking plea:

light, light: do not go

I sing you this song and I will sing another as well

Chronic is a fine book -- "chronic" something extraordinary.

Junot Diaz, _The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao_

2010-05-28T13:40:00.000-07:00

THE BOOK CLUB read this for...February? March? A Pulitzer winner, and deservedly so.

As the novel begins, we seem to be getting a recent-immigrant version of The Nerd's Tale, Oscar being an overweight, Tolkien-obsessed teenager, tormented by desire but invisible to girls -- with the twist that his parents are recently arrived in New York City from the Dominican Republic. Our narrator is an almost-friend of his, fond of Oscar and unfaithfully in love with Oscar's sister, but continually making apotropiac gestures to ward off the nerd-toxicity that clings to Oscar like a cloud.

Interesting... but then we rewind in history to get the story of Oscar's mother's young womanhood in the D. R. during the Trujillo era, and later the story of his grandfather, yet further back in time but likewise under Trujillo -- and so we have a multi-generational family saga folded into our Nerd's Tale, with a teaspoon of magical realism in the legend of a fukú, or curse, under which Oscar's family and the D. R. alike suffer.

The Dominican Republic's curse is, first and foremost, Trujillo, and after Trujillo's assassination a series of "leaders" who similarly traffic in corruption and brutal intimidation. The family's curse is that its members love wholly, completely, body and soul, and always are beaten within an inch of their lives, or actually to death, for their love.

So now you know why Oscar's life was brief -- and also why it was wondrous.

Diaz gets a lot done here, and his voice is convincing throughout.

Oscar's surname is not, in fact, "Wao," and therein lies a tale, but I've told you enough already.

Louis Menand, _The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University_

2010-05-25T11:13:00.001-07:00

OH, THE IRONY that Louis Menand's previous (and excellent) book, The Metaphysical Club, took as subject the circle of polymaths that advanced the maturation of American intellectual life in the decades following the Civil War: Oliver Wendell Holmes, C.S. Pierce, William James, and John Dewey. In the century since, he here tells us, the American university has nurtured a bosom serpent: disciplinarity.

Menand wrote this book having been deeply involved in the reform of Harvard's undergraduate general education curriculum, and the subtitle suggests that process was far from easy. As far as I can tell, it's never easy. What makes it hard?

Menand argues that designing a general education curriculum means answering the question, "What should a well-educated person of the present moment know, or be acquainted with, or understand, or be able to do?" A tricky enough question, made trickier by the necessity of relying on a college's faculty to provide the answers.

One prepares for becoming a member of a college faculty, Menand reminds us, by becoming an adept in some discipline, trained by a department. Writing a dissertation requires spending years in the abstruser realms of that discipline, wrestling with questions of almost zero interest to the larger population, or even to other academics in other disciplines. One becomes a member of a faculty by being hired by a department, having demonstrated that one is an adept in its discipline. One then hones one's adeptness in one's discipline by further scholarship and research and trains young aspiring adepts in the discipline.

So, when one is asked what a well-educated person should know, the only answer likely to come to mind will be, "Among other things, a well-educated person ought to understand the fundamentals of my discipline." Thus, the battle is on, and the curriculum ends up a Rube Goldberg contraption, every bizarre detail of which was fought for tooth and nail by somebody.

Is "interdisciplinarity" the answer? Ha! Menand has short shrift for that beloved buzzword: "Interdisciplinarity is not something different from disciplinarity. It is the ratification of the logic of disciplinarity. In practice, it actually tends to rigidify disciplinarity paradigms." "Interdisciplinarity" usually just means you have two or three disciplines on their separate pedestals in the room, rather than just one.

Menand also looks at the question, "why do all professors think alike?" The answer, again, is our long professional incubation -- 11.3 years is now the median time to earn a doctorate in the humanities, with another five to the tenure decision. To hang in that long, Menand argues, you just have to adapt to the prevailing climate, talk the talk, walk the walk, fit in: "The academic profession in some areas is not reproducing itself so much as cloning itself."

None of this is going to change soon.

D. A. Powell, _Cocktails_

2010-05-23T10:32:00.001-07:00

I STILL HAVE yet to read Lunch, the first book in the trilogy Cocktails completes, and I may yet, since Cocktails, like its predecessor Tea, was a richly engaging read.

Thom Gunn, in a blurb on the paperback cover, connects Powell to Richard Crashaw, which intrigued me and focused my attention as I read on anything that seemed 17th century-Anglo-baroque. Sure enough, there's a striking conceit in the first poem, where the speaker's mouth becomes a "tiny neon lounge," and some nifty verbal juggling in the second ("homilies and hominy and decidedly no harmony"). Sometimes the nifty verbal juggling opens up chasms, as in this phrase, the speaker's answer to the question of when he caught HIV, which sketches an arch bridging the pre-Stonewall and post-Stonewall eras of gay life: "sometime between the day lady day died and the day lady di died."

The middle section, "Filmography," is a biography (possibly auto-) in thirteen poems, each in the key, so to speak, of a particular film: "Hook," "Ode to Billie Joe," "My Own Private Idaho," "Fantastic Voyage," "My Beautiful Laundrette," and so on. This is a wonderful sequence -- Powell does a pas de deux with the conventions of camp, letting Hollywood serve as lens on key episodes of a life, yet Powell is leading, not being led, and he makes every swirl and flourish count. To my own surprise, I kept thinking of the Hill's "Mercian Hymns" in this section -- it's that good.

Since Dante, every trilogy has to end up in heaven, so "Bibliography," the closing section, is all-stops-out Crashaw. Talk about camp -- there's a certain vein of English literary queerness, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous to the sublimely ridiculous (Newman, Pater, Hopkins, Wilde, "Baron Corvo," Firbank), that loves Roman Catholic ritual and iconography, or High Church Anglican dilutions of the same (Eliot, Auden), and Powell has decided to try it on. The first poem in this section is addressed to Mary -- that is, the BVM (is Powell evoking archaic gay slang here? One wouldn't put it past him). The poem seems dipped rather too long in the language of the aesthetes of the 1890s ("the fine seric of the east was brought to me / soft and unfinished. dyed in the tyrian manner // of purpura and janthina the violet snail." We'll have two more bowls of absinthe, please). Then in the next poem we seem in full pursuit of the eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli: "tanned youths track his scent."

But Powell can make even this work. The third poem in this section, "he tastes the air with his tongue, his eyes a gory kitling," blends John's baptism of Jesus with a man's tending to his ill or dying beloved and is the strongest thing in the book. The succeeding pieces are very nearly as strong, and "Bibliography" ends up as a powerful conclusion to a powerful book.

I really should read Lunch. But then there's a new one, too... Chronic. Sometimes it seems there's just too much good stuff out there to read.

Janet Malcolm, _Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice_

2010-05-22T11:45:00.000-07:00

This, apparently, is my 100th post. I've been doing this about two years -- so that averages about once a week. Not bad, I guess.

This is the fourth book of Malcolm's I've read, I think, and while it doesn't supplant The Silent Woman as my favorite of hers, I gulped it down quickly and delightedly a couple of months ago.

It examines several aspects of the Stein-Toklas partnership, but is especially interested in (1) how two American Jewish lesbians managed to survive in Nazi-occupied France (an old friendship with an unusually slimy collaborateur helped), (2) how the genesis of the first Steinian masterpiece, The Making of Americans, intertwines with the inception of Stein's relationship with Toklas, and (3) how Stein fared after WW II, and Toklas after Stein's death.

Malcolm remains a master of the old Lillian Ross strategy of letting her interview subjects ramble on long enough to reveal themselves as nakedly as any Browning monologuist. As in The Silent Woman, In the Freud Archives, and The Purloined Clinic, she gets the leading scholars and researchers of the field to perform more entertainingly than most fictional characters. On stage in this book are the magnificently-named Ulla Dydo, who solved a key textual puzzle of Stanzas in Meditation during one of her dreams, and Leon Katz, privy to extraordinary revelations in a series of interviews with Toklas while he was but a Columbia doctoral in the 1950s, revelations which he has by and large kept to himself for the fifty-some years since.

Neither Dydo nor Katz lets it all hang out quite so completely as Jeffrey Moussaleff Masson did in Freud Archives or Olwyn Hughes in Silent Woman, but one is left wondering, why does anyone ever consent to be interviewed by Janet Malcolm, knowing one is bound to end up trussed on a silver platter with an apple in one's mouth, done to a turn?

Don DeLillo, _Point Omega_

2010-03-28T11:20:00.000-07:00

WITH THE NEW Roth seeming utterly Rothian, the new Powers utterly Powersian, I should not be surprised that the new DeLillo is utterly DeLillian. I'm getting nervous about picking up the new Auster, for fear it will turn out to be utterly...

...but if I like these writers, why should I be disappointed that they write like themselves? Perverse of me, really. Still, one would like to see a curveball now and again. Thank goodness for Ashbery.

Point Omega brings in again DeLillo's fascination with conceptual art (Underworld, The Body Artist, Falling Man). In its first and final chapters, we are at MOMA in 2006, taking in Douglas Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho (the iconic Hitchcock film projected so slowly that it takes twenty-four hours to screen the film) from the point of view of a strange, lonely, and (as it later appears) potentially homicidal young man (shades of Libra?). Also in the room for a few moments are Richard Elster, an intellectual formerly but no longer in the upper echelons of the Department of Defense, and Jim Finley, a young filmmaker who wants to make a documentary about Elster.

For most of the novel we are in the company of Elster and Finley, Elster waxing gnomically cosmic, Finley the ambitious disciple -- not unlike Bill Gray and Scott in Mao II, with Elster's daughter Jessie arriving presently to take the Karen role, sensitive young woman slightly out of phase with the world, haunted and haunting, dazed Cordelia to Elster's pontificating Lear.

Jessie disappears one day, leaving all her belongings behind. We never learn exactly what happened. Escaping Jim's creepy Norman-Bates-like tendency to peek into her room? Murdered by the Norman-Bates-like MOMA visitor? Lost a coin toss with Anton Chigurh?

I think it all works, though. The famous Janet Leigh shower scene, the slower-than-slow projection of which opens the novel, feels emblematic of the quintessential American fears of my lifetime. When we are in the midst of our daily routines, in the semi-autonomic performing the actions we habitually perform, made vulnerable by our own comfortable adjustment to the normal, is exactly when evil will strike -- or so we fear. We will be showering, and the murderer will yank back the shower curtain. We will be dropping the kids off at school, and the sexual predator will be lying in wait for the moment our back is turned. Or, one of the other kids will have brought a gun that day. We will be jogging in Central Park, and the gangs will be out wilding. We will be arriving from our commute to our workplace, and the terrorists will crash a jet airliner into it.

Psycho, Elster's mysterious role in the "war on terror," and Jessie's unexplained disappearance all seem to speak to how we, having achieved a level of wealth, security, and comfort scarcely imaginable to previous generations, find ourselves paralyzed in a nightmare of vulnerability.

All very DeLillian, but in the best possible way. His prose is still strong, the scenes in the desert especially:

I looked out into the blinding tides of light and sky and down toward the folded copper hills that I took to be the badlands, a series of pristine ridges rising from the desert floor in patterned alignment. Could someone be dead in there? I could not imagine this. It was too vast, it was not real, the symmetry of furrows and juts, it crushed me, the heartbreaking beauty of it, the indifference of it, and the longer I stood and looked the more certain I was that we would never have an answer. (93)

Richard Powers, _Generation_

2010-03-27T11:03:00.000-07:00

A SLENDER VOLUME, by Powers's standards -- the first to weigh in at under 300 pages, by my reckoning. It does not really have what I think of the characteristic Powers device -- two or more seemingly independent narrative strands that wind up intersecting -- but otherwise it is certainly Powersian: lots of fine-grained local detail (about Chicago, in this instance), a tablespoon of metafictional leavening, above all the incorporation of ideas from the frontiers of mathematics, medicine, and the natural sciences (this time, bio-engineering). Powers has carved out something of a niche for himself as the Michael Crichton of literary fiction.

There's something new, though, too -- a lightness, a deftness, a willingness to risk a joke. (The best has been cited in most of the reviews: "Dada: it's not just for umbrellas anymore.") And there's Thassadit Amzwar, an Algerian refugee film student, whose DNA encodes some kind of neural chemistry that keeps her ever emotionally buoyant, delightful to be around, joyful. Her natural resiliency and cheerfulness make her an object of attention first to students and faculty of her college, then to a local paper, then to a cutting edge bio-researcher/entrepreneur, then to the Oprah-like Oona O'Donough, then to every tabloid/talk-show/preacher/clinic/you-name-it of the United States. Will her joyfulness survive such an onslaught?

For the novel to work, Thassa has to be awfully damned charming -- and to Powers's credit, she is. He has created compelling women characters before -- Laura Bodey and Karin Schluter would be my examples, and Candace Weld in this one makes a third -- but Thassa is something else again. Of Powers's previous female characters, only "Helen" of Galatea 2.2 lights up the page quite the way Thassa does, and "Helen" is a computer program. She's not sweet or angelic, really, not selfless or any kind of paragon, but Powers somehow succeeds in making it entirely credible that everyone who meets her finds her wonderful. As the forces that seek to strip-mine Thassa's being rise up and surround her in the last chapter of the novel, as Powers multiplies the examples of how in our society attention is toxic, I was genuinely terrified for her.

What the novel is at bottom most interested in, though, is how the not-yet-existent mysteriously leaps the threshold into actual being. Technological breakthroughs, theoretical breakthroughs, fictions of all kinds, inventions of all kinds... and babies of all kinds, of course. A small fragile hopefulness about the future flutters at the edge of vision in Generosity, rather as it did in Plowing the Dark, and at my age I tend to treasure such things.

Jaan Kross, _The Czar's Madman_, tr. Anselm Hollo

2010-03-18T17:47:00.000-07:00

IT SO FELL out that I recently participated in a whirlwind two-week course on Estonian literature, and this was one of our novels. I had not so much as even heard of this writer before, but this is an astonishingly good book, a revelation for me.

The Estonian original was published in 1978, translated into English (twice) in the 1990s. It seems to be out of print at the moment -- I got a copy for, I think, one dollar plus shipping through abe.com.

It's an historical novel, and its main character is an actual historical figure, Timotheus von Bock, an Estonian nobleman who breathes in the winds of change of the early Napoleonic era and pledges his life to enlightenment and reform. He marries the woman he loves, even though she is a serf -- he has to purchase her first, in order to emancipate, then educate and wed her. Being one of Czar Alexander's most trusted companions, he hammers at the Czar to accept a constitution, create a legislature, and bring the institution of serfdom to an end. Alexander at length is mortally offended, and Timotheus is imprisoned. He is at first treated gently, to get him to recant, then brutally, with the same end in view, but he holds out, and is finally released on the grounds that he is insane. He comes home, under house arrest, obliged to do his best to maintain the pretense he is insane, for fear of being sent back to prison. Elaborate plans are made for him, his wife, and son to escape the country...

...well, I won't give away the whole thing. What's great about this book? For one thing, the evocation of the early 19th century. Timotheus before his imprisonment carries with him the electric air of Beethoven's Eroica and Shelley's Revolt of Islam, the idealism of characters like Tolstoy's Pierre and Calvino's baron in the trees.

The traumatized Timotheus is diminished but keeps his dignity, even reveals a steel core we might not have thought he had in the face of a monolithic, literal-minded authority that recognizes no acknowledgement short of perfect submission. In these parts of the novel, we're in the world of Darkness at Noon or The Joke, Timotheus reminding us of Nabokov's Krug or Malamud's Yakov Bok, but would either of those two have weighed the sweets of freedom against the taste of rowanberries, as Timotheus does in the novel's most wrenching scene?

And I haven't even mentioned the character Eeva, whose sufferings as the wife of the "madman" Kross neither conceals nor romanticizes, nor the sheer ingenuity of Kross's telling Timotheus's story through the diary of Eeva's brother.

This book really deserves to be better known. Do yourself a favor and find a copy.

James Shea, _Star in the Eye_

2010-03-17T20:09:00.000-07:00

"I AM THE opposite of a solipsist," the 24th section of "Dream Trial" announces, without further comment. That would be, what, someone who believes only other people exist? But what kind of voice can announce its unbelief in its own existence while it remains fully confident about yours?

Such are the slow-motion explosions brought on by the grenades James Shea impassively lobs into your cerebellum throughout Star in the Eye.

Then there is "The Riverbed," 42 quite short (most of them 3-4 lines) poems, each with its own title, all about riverbeds. Not rivers, mind you... riverbeds. How does one think of the riverbed without thinking of the river? One has never seen a riverbed, save in time of drought. But can one think of the riverbed with the river in it while still not thinking of the river? And there goes a depth charge down your spine to go with that grenade in your brain.

There is an Asian streak in Shea's poetry -- but Asian with a nod and a wink, something like the subversive japonaiserie of "Araki Yasusada" without the actionable fraud. Consider the poem "Haiku," which turns out not to be a haiku but a list of titles of haiku, from "Upon Kissing You After You Vomited" to "On Stopping at the Train Tracks and Having a Deer / Break His Head Through My Passenger Window, / Stare at Me, and Then Run Back into the Wood" (the latter, at 33 syllables, almost twice the length of a haiku). A sprawling, blowsy poem, "Haiku" seems to want to blow a big wet fart at every western cliché about haiku ("Poem / in Which I Embody a Moment So Vividly, So / Succinctly, Yet Decorate It with Such Sills, / Such Elaborations").

Shea reminds me of Robert Francis's "The Pitcher":

His art is eccentricity, his aim

How not to hit the mark he seems to aim at,

His passion how to avoid the obvious,

His technique how to vary the avoidance.

The others throw to be comprehended. He

Throws to be a moment misunderstood.

Yet not too much. Not errant, arrant, wild,

But every seeming aberration willed.

Not to, yet still, still to communicate

Making the batter understand too late.

I expect Shea to win fifteen games this year, with an E.R.A. of 2.93.

W. G. Sebald, _On the Natural History of Destruction_, tr. Anthea Bell

2010-03-16T13:26:00.000-07:00

IT FELT PECULIAR to realize, upon noticing the late W. G. Sebald's birth year (1944) and this book's German publication date (1999), that at the time he published the book he was the same age I am now.

It felt peculiar because Sebald is one of a number of writers -- Thomas Bernhard and E. M. Cioran being two other salient examples -- who make me feel young. That's "young" as in green, naïve, unfledged, wet behind the ears, dewy-eyed, puppy-clueless. That hope-sapping mittel-Europa fog rolls in with the opening pages, departing when I finish the book in a world sadder and more twilit than I had ever imagined possible, without even the poignant quasi-satisfaction of interesting ruins -- just smashed concrete pylons beside cracked asphalt roads, rebar pointing crazily every direction like scorched pipe-cleaners.

There is no sadness like that mid-20th-century European sadness -- No Exit, Beckett....

It has everything to do with the war, Sebald suggests, with seeing familiar urban landscapes turned to rubble and ashes, with the realization that there is no evil, none at all, that people, even people you know and love, even you yourself, will not commit.

The thesis of the book is that German writing after the war collectively refused to acknowledge the trauma of Allied bombing. I am in no position at all to judge the validity of that thesis, my knowledge of postwar German lit scarcely going beyond Günter Grass and Heinrich Böll. I can imagine any literate German responding to Sebald's argument with "what about X?" or "he's forgetting y," but the reasons Sebald advances for the silence make sense: a wish to get on with the future, a lurking feeling that to resent the bombing opened the door for Nazi apologetics, the horror that made the experience too excruciating to recall.

The bombing of cities... what, I wonder, are people making of Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke now, two years on? There was a flurry of discussion for about fifteen minutes when it was published, but did anything sink in? Or, as Sebald suggests, is this something we just aren't able to think about?

On another track entirely -- very grateful to have Sebald's appreciation of Peter Weiss included in the volume. Any news on the translation of volumes two and three of The Aesthetics of Resistance? I've been waiting for years now.

Christian Bök, _Eunoia_

2010-02-07T13:36:00.000-08:00

I WAS INSPIRED to pick this up after reading an interview with Bök in The Believer some time last year. Eunoia is a text with five chapters, each chapter named after a different vowel, and each chapter containing only words that contain only that vowel. ("Awkward grammar appals a craftsman" is the first sentence of "Chapter A.") The chapters for A, E, and O run close to twenty pages apiece; those for I and U are shorter. Each paragraph of each chapter gets its own page, a not-quite-square block of print, all of very similar length, say eleven or twelve lines long.

Can such a project possibly be readable, to say nothing of interesting, intriguing, revelatory, moving... any of the things we hope a poem will be? Turns out it's all of those things. But how is that possible? What does it mean? Working under a constraint that would seem to nearly preclude persuasive mimesis or honest self-expression or the speaking of truth to power or compelling fantasy -- to identify some of things readers ordinarily say they are looking for -- how does Bök nonetheless draw you into his text and keep you there?

I have no idea. My best guess is that he is astonishingly talented.

What also interests me is that Eunoia (which, it turns out, is the shortest English word in which each vowel is used once and only once) might be seen as a case in which experiment leans over so far backward it bumps into literary tradition on the other side -- for what are meter and rhyme if not constraints?

Almost every spring I have the responsibility of getting a group of undergraduate English majors to acquaint themselves with some specimens of 19th century English poetry, and the larger part of them come in skeptical that rhyming, metered poetry can be poetry at all, since all that artifice -- the counting of syllables, the patterning of accents, the line-endings that have to contain a vowel-consonant cluster that matches the vowel-consonant cluster of an earlier or later line-ending -- can only be an obstacle to achieving persuasive mimesis, honest self-expression, and so on, right? Why would any poet who really has anything to say put him- or herself through so many hoops? I wonder if Eunoia would help me here -- or if they would just see it as an oddity.

I also wonder about the news borne on the back of my copy: "A BESTSELLER IN CANADA." What? Can that be true? Are Canadians that much smarter than we are? Hmm, possibly -- there's Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene, Atom Egoyan, Sheila Heti... there's also that fact that Eunoia was written with support of the Canada Council of Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council. They're either that much smarter than us or they just never had a Jesse Helms messing with public arts funding.

Roth, _The Humbling_

2010-02-04T17:32:00.000-08:00

I KEEP BUYING and reading Philip Roth novels, I've decided, rather the way I keep buying and listening to Neil Young albums. Both of them settled upon a handful of characteristic moves and gestures quite a while ago and are largely content to replay them. Both of them, odds are, have already done the work for which they are most likely to be remembered. As influences, they are dead ends; both of them are so utterly and idiosyncratically what they are that it would be foolish for any young writer or musician to imitate them. In an uncharitable mood, one could accuse both of simply imitating themselves.

The Humbling certainly gives one feelings of déja lu. The main character, Simon Axler, is an actor who has suddenly lost the ability to act, putting us in mind of other Rothian versions of the artist whose inspiration is blocked or dried up, Nathan Zuckerman in The Anatomy Lesson, Mickey Sabbath in Sabbath's Theater, "Philip Roth" in Operation Shylock. Like those three characters, Axler gets himself into some unsuitable shenanigans, throwing himself into an affair with a lesbian named Pegeen (named for the Synge character), who turns out to have a dangerous penchant for unsuitable shenanigans herself, like her many, many sisters in the Roth gallery of shikses fatales. And then there is the recurring late Roth pondering of death: following Everyman, Exit Ghost, and Indignation, The Humbling seems to wrap up a death tetralogy (unless we count A Dying Animal as the inaugural volume).

So far, so familiar. And then there's the Rothian trick of having some major plot development occur in a gap in the narrative, so that we readers learn of it only after it has occurred. The Rothian way of folding-in episodes that occurred years before the action begins. The marathon male-female dialogues, like Chinese ping-pong, enormous exertion and strategy put into the volleying back and forth of a tiny, nearly weightless ball.

And you know what? I couldn't put it down. I read it in a day. I can't stop myself. As long as he keeps publishing them, I'm going to be reading them. When whatever he leaves unfinished, his Original of Laura, gets published, I'll read that too, if I'm alive. I just can't get enough.

Narayan, _The Ramayana_

2010-01-18T11:12:00.000-08:00

WELL, YES, I really should have read a translation of the complete original Sanskrit version. Maybe someday. This version, written in English by the 20th century novelist R. K. Narayan, is not even based on that Sanskrit original; it jumps off from a version written in Tamil by the poet Kamban in the 11th century C.E. So no authenticity points for me. That concession made, I found this a marvelous book, witty, highly colored, brisk, charming, utterly engaging. Given the likelihood of my bogging down at p. 43 of whatever late-Victorian translation I would likely have been able to procure at the library, I think I made a good call in picking this up. The effect is rather like reading Edith Hamilton -- if Hamilton had brought in a few sly jokes and had risked a Fielding/Gogol kind of intimacy with the reader.

Zoé Heller, _What Was She Thinking?_

2010-01-17T12:17:00.000-08:00

A REVIEW I read of Heller's latest novel mentioned how good this one was; I took the bait, read it, and I agree -- it's very good.

As we begin, one of the characters, Sheba Hart, is the much-beleaguered center of a scandal; an arts teacher in her mid-30s, married and the mother of two, she has been discovered to have been conducting an affair with one of her teenaged students, Stephen Connolly. Dismissed from her job, dropped by her underage lover, abandoned by her family, hounded by the tabloids, she is being looked after by her friend and fellow teacher, Barbara Covett. Barbara is our narrator, and she embarks on a reconstruction of the affair, told in parallel to the story how she became friends with Sheba.

So, we are in Unreliable-Narrator-Land. As James Wood has pointed out, unreliable narrators actually have to be more reliable than most -- the strategy works only when we can detect that the narrator's account is systematic in its distortions and omissions. Barbara takes a while to sort out, though. Her last name is a clue that there's a streak of envy in the friendship (Heller is obviously not above such Wauvian signal-names: the passionate Sheba is "Hart," the smarmy headmaster of their school "Pabblem"). There is also admiration... resentment... a longing for intimacy... a lust to dominate. Complicated.

For instance, it turns out that Barbara is not only Sheba's last refuge, but also the person who let out her secret. Somewhat impulsively, even somewhat inadvertently, as a way of getting back at a third party for a perceived slight... or does she really want to destroy Sheba? Or does Barbara perhaps intuit that this a way for her to have Sheba to herself?

The novel put me in mind of Mary Gaitskill's two novels, both of which have partly to do with the dangerous waters of friendships between two women, one of whom is attractive and popular, the other of whom is plain, lonely, intelligent. It's easy to see why Sheba would become friends with Barbara, who is the one gleaming intelligence on the school's dull faculty, wickedly witty, a promising candidate for confidante. It's easy to see why Barbara would become friends with the sophisticated, dashing, talented, cosmopolitan new arts teacher. But is it going to matter that Sheba is well-off, with an elite education, an interesting past, a successful husband, a big rambling house, and two kids, while Barbara, dateless for decades, has a flat, a cat, a dispiriting job, and no future prospects for anything but more of the same?

Oh, yes, it is going to matter. And we haven't really gotten to the whole class thing yet. In the truly unnerving final scene, we realize that Barbara has Sheba wholly within her power, and that the prison term Sheba is hoping to avoid may be the better of her two possible outcomes.

Juliana Spahr, _The Transformation_

2010-01-16T12:23:00.001-08:00

IN THE LAST few years I've been coming across examples of poets' autobiographical prose taking surprising forms. There was Under Albany by Ron Silliman, a memoir in the form of a commentary on the first section of his poem The Alphabet. I'm about halfway through Jennifer Moxley's The Middle Room, which surprises by its Edwardian detail and amplitude. And there is this, The Transformation by Juliana Spahr, a memoir which dispenses almost entirely with proper names and even with first-person pronouns.

"This book tells a barely truthful story of the years 1997-2001," Spahr tells us in her afterword. In the book, Spahr and two other women resolve to form a household and together move to Hawaii for a university teaching job (that is, one of them has the job; another I think is an adjunct, and the third has a non-academic job). They love the natural beauty and the perfect climate of the islands, but become increasingly conscience-stricken about the ways their being in Hawaii involves them in the legacy of imperialism. Their politics tend to align them with the Hawaiians who want to restore the cultural and political autonomy of the islands, but their livelihoods connect them to an institution firmly cemented to the cultural and political power of the imperial interlopers. Eventually, the sense of living in bad faith drives them to relocate to New York City (perhaps Long Island?) in the summer of 2001, where they become eyewitnesses to the attack on the World Trade Center, prompting further reflection on what James Baldwin called "the weight of white people in the world." Furthermore, the world is warming. On the other hand, there is the community of writers, a countervailing source of hope and joy.

The thing is...The Transformation is really nothing like the book I would imagine after reading the above paragraph. First of all, there is the avoidance of proper nouns. Hawaii is referred to as "the island in the middle of the Pacific" (later in the book, Manhattan and Long Island are designated as "islands in the Atlantic"). Academia is "the complex," and the University of Hawaii at Manoa is "the local branch of the complex." Native Hawaiians are "those who had genealogical ties to the island from before the whaling ships arrived." Spahr even avoids phrases like "avant-garde poetry" or "experimental poetry"; this kind of writing is always identified as "writing that uses fragmentation, quotation, disruption, disjunction, agrammatical syntax, and so on." Persons are not identified by name (though some are identified in the afterword), not even the other two women in the household. The collective identity of the household is so crucial that Spahr does not refer to herself as "I." She rejects even the cozy comforts of "we." The household is always "they." Whenever it becomes necessary to refer to a single member, the designation is "one of them."

My problem of description is deepening, for The Transformation is nothing like the book I would imagine from that paragraph, either. It sounds unreadable, doesn't it? Trying too hard to achieve some politically correct purity, stiff as cardboard, bleached-out, flavorless? I don't know why, but that's not what happens. Somehow, a phrase that would be clunky and ungainly if used once gains a peculiar balletic-hippo kind of grace by dint of repetition. Something like this also happened in the This-is-the-house-that-Stein-built repetitions of This Connection of Everyone with Lungs. Spahr knows what she's doing -- she writes at one point, "they refused to get rid of any of the awkward repetitions or the weird turns of phrase that they heard in their writing as musical but they knew those in the complex often heard as just weird and awkward" (62). Like a dancer that has for some reason decided to perform with five-pound weights on each ankle, the Spahr's prose is graceful with a different grace.

Graceful -- and purposeful, too. Hers is a language continually alert for what it may be complicit with , not unlike the household's anxiety over its (I would say) very attenuated links with imperialism. That alertness leads to détournements and anomalies aplenty, but as I read I became increasingly confident that Spahr always had a good reason to insist of her chosen designations. Also worth noting is that even though the book often touches upon the controversies of high academe and the most rarefied flights of aesthetic theory, the vocabulary stays resolutely on a plain-language level. There's scarcely a word in here that a smart 8th grader wouldn't know.

This will sound odd -- one more failed attempt at trying to describe this utterly singular book -- but it often reminded me of the autobiography of Teresa of Avila. (A book I admire, I ought to say). The household's painstaking self-scrutiny of its complicity in imperialism reminded me of Teresa's continual examination of her own conscience for traces of pride and vanity. When the household begins to feel "uncomfortable among their friends who did not think about colonialism all the time [...] so uncomfortable it was hard to hang out with them" (112), I thought of Teresa finding it harder and harder to talk with people who did not share her pursuit of union with God. Like Spahr, Teresa develops an idiosyncratic language with a certain amount of sprawl and repetition to it, but so deeply hers you wouldn't alter a word.

So -- St. Juliana of Spahr. She would bridle any such suggestion, I'm sure. For all I know, she curls up on the couch with Cheetos and a beer to watch the Oscars just like the rest of us. But there's something inspiring about this book. The account in chapter 4 of trying to fit into what Spahr calls "the complex" is perhaps the most painfully truthful I've come across.

S. Yizhar, _Khirbet Khizeh_

2010-01-13T13:53:00.000-08:00

AS THIS NOVELLA is about historical events that Israel would prefer to have disappear down Orwell's memory hole -- the forced removal of Palestinians from their homes in 1948-49 -- it would matter even if executed at journeyman level. Turns out it's much better than that.

The narrative begins in the morning and simply describes the Israeli soldiers doing a job, surprising the village, rounding up the villagers, putting them on the trucks. The soldiers make jokes, talk about family, break for lunch -- it's all routine, and the routine insulates them from thinking too hard about what they are doing. The first person narrator finds himself, nonetheless, thinking about what he is doing, in long, somewhat Thomas Bernhard-like sentences that wind between observation and reflection, bumping into realizations that the narrator backs away from, then is led back to even more forcibly. Here he gazes over the villagers' fields:

Some plots were left fallow, and others were sown, by design, everything was carefully thought out, they had looked at the clouds and observed the wind, and they might also have foreseen drought, flooding, mildew, and even field mice; they had also calculated the implications of rising and falling prices, so that if you were beset by a loss in one sector you'd be saved by a gain in another, and if you lost on grain, the onions might come to the rescue, apart, of course, from the one calculation they had failed to make, and that was the one that was stalking around, here and now, descending into their spacious fields in order to dispossess them.

The translation by Nicholas de Lange and Yaacob Dweck is that dry, that sober, throughout, and the narrative has the same understated plainness. The narrator murmurs, but does not make any great gestures. The similarity of the rounding-up of the Palestinians to the rounding-up of Europe's Jews only a few years previously is visible, but not melodramatically underlined.

The novella has been well-known, though controversial, in Israel for a long time, but had to wait until 2008 for it English translation. Hmm. Well, we can be glad it's here, for many reasons.

Ben Doller, _FAQ:_

2010-01-12T12:59:00.000-08:00

As an admirer of Radio, Radio, Ben Doller's first book (he was then Ben Doyle), I've been looking forward to reading FAQ:.

Each poem is an answer to an unstated but presumably frequently asked question; almost all begin with "Thank you for your question." Occasionally one can deduce from the answer what the question was, but not always, so I found helpful the index at book's end listing all the questions.

The format has a lot of interesting angles. For one thing, "FAQ" sections, often encountered in websites and brochures, have a reader-writer transaction all their own.

As a reader, one turns to the "FAQ" section when one has a question, but the questions it contains may or may not include yours; they address questions that are statistically probable, as determined by the tabulation of inquiries preceding yours, but is your question among the statistically probable ones? Do you fit in the schema created by those who have already asked questions? Or does the "FAQ" section ask you as a reader to inhabit a kind of fictional subject position, asking questions that in fact are not the questions you would have asked?

As a writer of an "FAQ" section, you are under a variety of awkward obligations. You do not get to choose the questions you will answer; the history of questions has done that. You are nonetheless obliged to be helpful, to know what the asker seeks and be able to provide it. But you do not get to assume that the reader has the basic background he or she needs; if the reader had such background, why would he or she be checking the "FAQ" section? The audience for an "FAQ" section is a writer's nightmare: numerous, anonymous, needy, ignorant.

Both writers and readers of "FAQ" sections are at a disadvantage going in. Neither is in control of the transaction (statistical probability is in control), both have a lot to live up to (the reader has to have "normal" questions, the writer has to know things "normal"people don't know). It's a format designed to be maximally helpful that has enormous room for frustration, misunderstanding, and self-doubt. Using it as the format for a book of poems is a stroke of weird genius.

Doller ups the ante by having his frequently-asked questions include not only classics of the FAQ form like "What is a widget?" but also questions that are genuinely frequently asked: How's the weather? What is your name and what do you do? What do you say? Why didn't you just pick up the phone? There is even the unanswerable question of Eliot's woman whose nerves are bad tonight, "What thinking, what?"

Doller's answerer tries hard, answering the weather question almost intelligibly, giving us dozens of names and occupations, going nuts with with "what do you say?" --

Shirt, I say.

Shirt shirt.

I said shirt.

-- and so on for several pages, like a soul singer exhorting the crowd to let it all go (in homage to the Bonzo Dog Band? I can only hope).

At times the answerer begins to sound beleaguered, ready to give up. In response to the question "And just what song would that be?", we get an unintelligible word-blizzard that may, sung to the right melody, turn out to be an anamorphized version of familiar pop song lyrics, on the order "'scuse me while I kiss this guy."

But our answerer, having tested us to our limits and tested himself to his, seems at peace by volume's end. In the penultimate poem, he looks back in weary and wary amazement at what he has done:

I simply imagined a shape & I stepped into it. Like a trans-fat, straight up, spackled into a capillary. There was the moment before, then this other moment. A very long moment. A shot of air.

And then, answering the final question, "How do you feel?", he can give James Brown's answer. And he deserves to feel good, as he knew that he would.

Margaret Atwood, _Oryx and Crake_

2010-01-10T11:25:00.000-08:00

I LOVE ATWOOD, but care little for science fiction, so it took the publication of the sequel for me finally to open Oryx and Crake. I should have given her more credit, seeing how good A Handmaid's Tale was, but I've now learned my lesson.

The novel has two chronological tracks. In one, some terrible catastrophe has occurred, wiping out virtually all human beings. We get the point of view of one, perhaps the only, surviving human, Snowman, who devotes himself to scavenging food, avoiding predators, and looking after the "Crakers," a small community of new, improved humans with DNA re-engineered by Snowman's brilliant but now dead friend, Crake.

In the other, we get Snowman's memories of the pre-catastrophe world. He was then Jimmy, and grew up in a compound -- some kind of autonomous corporate city-state, a kind of armed-&-gated suburb, devoted to bio-tech research and production of consumer goods for the "pleeblands," that is, those parts of the world that are not compounds -- these parts being dirty, dangerous, toxic, a non-stop bazaar where all is for sale, but where there are also occasional gestures of resistance to the power of the compounds. In good speculative fiction fashion, this world is a terrifying extrapolation of our own, with all checks on global capitalism removed, its tendencies to social stratification and environmental degradation utterly triumphant.

It is in the compounds that young Jimmy meets Crake, whose brilliance as a DNA-magician later lands him at the top of a corporate pyramid. Crake plucks his boyhood friend from obscurity to a plum job at his compound, where they both become involved with the beautiful and mysterious Oryx, former child-porn star, currently goddess-figure-cum-tutor for the new, improved humans Crake has designed.

Atwood's deft handling of the two then-&-now narrative time-lines (which reminded me of my favorite among her novels, Alias Grace) places the revelation of the nature of the catastrophe at novel's end. It's a doozy. Crake has come up not only with a species of new Adams and new Eves, programmed to avoid our worst mistakes, but also with the means to wipe the slate, to cleanse the world and ready it for their emergence.

In the closing pages, Snowman/Jimmy has a Crusoe-on-the-beach moment, discovering the presence of other old-model humans like himself. So he locates one of the last of the old weapons and heads out to kill them -- an act of evil undertaken to preserve the innocence of the Crakers. At which point one can only think, here we go again.