Edmund De Waal, _The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss_

 COULD THIS BOOK, I wondered, actually be as great as so many people say it is? Turns out, yes.

De Waal’s book begins with a collection of netsuke (miniature Japanese carvings in wood and ivory) assembled by Charles Ephrussi in the 1880s and 1890s. The Ephrussis were a prominent European banking family with origins in Odessa; Charles was a connoisseur of the arts in Belle Époque Paris (being the third son, he had not that much to do for the family business). He is the figure in the top hat towards the back in Renoir’s famous painting Le Déjeuner des canotiers and may have been part of the inspiration for Proust’s Swann. De Waal does an extraordinary job of evoking the art world of that time and place and how it crashed into the anti-semitism of the Dreyfus Affair. (Charles’s grandfather is De Waal’s great-great-great-grandfather).

Charles gave the collection as a wedding gift to his cousin Viktor, who belonged to the part of the family running the Vienna branch of the bank. De Waal turns out to be as sure-handed and evocative in conjuring up Secession Vienna as he was with Belle Époque Paris. Here too, however, anti-semitism exerts pressure, thanks to the anti-semiotic mayor Karl Lueger.

The real, fatal pressure comes in 1938 with the Anschluss, when Austria is incorporated into Nazi Germany. The Ephrussis lose their business, their house, and their art collection to Nazi appropriation. The netsuke, however, being so tiny, are smuggled out by a house servant, and find their way to Viktor’s son, Ignace, who got out early to the USA and joined the army when America entered World War II.

After the war, Ignace moves to Tokyo—and once again De Waal skillfully represents a legendary milieu. De Waal, great-nephew of the gay and childless Ignace, becomes the next inheritor of the collection.

Besides being compulsively readable, De Waal strikes an extraordinary balance in presenting, on the one hand, the beauty of artistic objects and the sensibility of those who love and preserve them, and on the other, the cruelty and brutality of history (including not only the Holocaust but the bombing of Tokyo). The Hare with the Amber Eyes is a book that will continue to attract readers for generations, I will venture to say.

Sam Tanenhaus, _Buckley: The Life and Revolution That Changed America_, Part 4: Controlling the Message (1966-1974)

 THE MAIN EVENT in the fourth part of Tanenhaus's life of Buckley is the coming of Firing Line, the long-running public affairs talk show in which Buckley interviewed a long and amazing list of newsmakers and opinion leaders. Among the ironies of the show’s run is that Buckley, who made no bones about providing a conservative perspective with his show, gave more airtime to radical leftists (Eldridge Cleaver, Jesse Jackson) than the mainstream media ever did. He was probably hoping to show how extreme and out-of-touch the radical left was, but in the process he produced a show that’s an invaluable archive, a better record of the actual politics of the era than any of its competitors.

Buckley decided to support Nixon rather than Reagan for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination, disappointing or infuriating any number of hard-core movement conservatives. Buckley felt Nixon was conservative enough and had a better chance of winning, but there was much gnashing of conservative teeth after Nixon opened up relations with China. 

Part Four also provides close-ups of a couple of Buckley’s more embarrassing public moments: (1) his clash with Gore Vidal when the two were providing commentary on ABC of the 1968 nominating conventions, in which Vidal triggered an on-camera meltdown by Buckley, and (2) Buckley’s advocacy for the release of convicted murderer Edgar Smith, of whose innocence Buckley was convinced. It turned out Smith was actually guilty, and a few years after his release nearly killed someone else. 

The obvious analogue (which Tanenhaus points out) is Norman Mailer’s advocacy of Jack Abbott, which likewise ended badly. I also thought of Vidal’s sort-of defense of Timothy McVeigh (“The Meaning of Timothy McVeigh,” Vanity Fair, September 2001). 

Marjan Kamali, _The Lion Women of Tehran_

 I AM GUESSING that this novel is about Kamali's parents' generation. She was born in 1971, but the two main characters, Ellie and Homa, were born in 1943, and most of the novel is set during their childhood and young womanhood, in an era before Kamali was born. I wondered whether some of the characters and events were drawn from Kamali's own family history, but for all I know the whole story is imagined.

It's a novel about female friendship. Ellie and Homa become best friends during primary school, are separated for a few years, then again become best friends in high school and college, then are estranged when Ellie inadvertently tips off a government agent that Homa is behind the distribution of certain anti-government pamphlets. Homa is arrested, imprisoned, and tortured and raped in prison. Ellie emigrates to the United States with her husband and loses touch with Homa. After the Islamic Revolution of 1979, however, Homa reaches out to her old friend to see whether she can help Homa's daughter (Homa was impregnated in being raped) to get to the U.S.A. She can and does, and the old friends are reconciled.

As a study of female friendship, I found the novel not quite as compelling as Elena Ferrante's famous Neapolitan quartet. I got a good idea of what Ellie found dazzling in Homa, but less idea what Homa saw in Ellie. Surprisingly, Homa is much more interesting in the chapters narrated by Ellie than she is in the chapters narrated by herself.

The chapters narrated by Homa seem to pay less attention to revealing her character than they do to filling readers in on what is happening in Iran after Ellie emigrates. In these chapters, we learn about the Shah's somewhat paradoxical modernizing-yet-repressive regime and about the advent of theocratic rule under the Ayatollah Khomeini, but Homa herself is not that strong a presence.

The novel has its share of memorable scenes, especially when Ellie and Homa are young and scooting around Tehran, and Ellie's mother is a memorable character in a Mrs. Bennet sort of way. The Lion Women of Tehran does have a kind of "book club" texture and aura, though. It's a brisk read, but I don't expect it will stay in my head the way Ferrante's novels did.

George Saunders, _Vigil_

 I DO NOT always appreciate Adam Mars-Jones's harsh reviews of recent novels in the London Review of Books--I sometimes wonder whether there are wicked giggles in the LRB office as the editors discuss whom he will eviscerate next--but I thought he had a reasonable complaint about Saunders's new novel. In Saunders's previous novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, the reader could gradually piece together how the afterlife in which the book is set worked: what its options were, what the better and worse choices were, what was at a stake. Vigil is also set in some liminal zone between our life and the afterlife, but as Mars-Jones noted in his review, it's harder to tell how things work.

The narrator, Jill "Doll" Blaine, has been operating in this liminal zone for about fifty years. Has she remained close to our world because she is still attached to it? Because she has unfinished business? Maybe--she died young when a bomb intended to kill her police officer husband killed her instead, and at the time of her death everything in her life was going extremely well, so she may feel not ready to leave.

Or is she still there (here) because she has been given work to do? She hovers near people who are on the point of death, offering comfort and consolation, helping reconcile them to  their new condition, a special class of angel, perhaps.

However, she is currently assigned to K. J. Boone, a dying oilman, more crucially an oilman who did much to undermine and discredit climate science in order to enhance the profitability of his business. Is Jill supposed to be helping Boone to see the damage he has done, so as to achieve contrition, opening a path to a better afterlife? At certain moments, she seems to be working more towards this end than that of comfort.

None of these questions, so far as I could judge, got a definite answer, and that was frustrating. 

Saunders still has that uncanny ability to conjure the internal voices of his characters, and he does an especially good job with Boone's, I think. Given how insightful and moving Lincoln in the Bardo was, though, Vigil was worth reading but mildly disappointing.

Paul Molinari, _Julian of Norwich: The Teaching of a 14th Century English Mystic_; Frances Beer, _Julian of Norwich_

I HAPPENED TO read these two books on Julian one after the other and was struck by the contrast between them. Both writers approach Julian with respect, insight, and reverence--even with a love that lifts right off the pages of their books. But they seem almost 180 degrees apart.

Molinari was a Jesuit, and his book from 1958 puts its greatest energies into showing how completely Julian’s experience and conclusions align with Roman Catholic tradition and doctrine. 

Beer’s 1998 book is mainly a translation of the shorter version of Julian’s Revelations, with the Jesus-as-Mother chapters from the longer version appended. She also provides an introduction and a concluding essay; in the latter, she sees Julian as “however inadvertently, something of a radical,” noting her “transcendence of misogyny” and her “rejection of hierarchy.” 

Beer’s view is closer to my own, certainly. Julian seems to be pushing back against the idea that the divine is totally male and against the exclusion of women from conversations about the divine. I also have the feeling that she doesn’t believe in damnation. But Molinari certainly makes a thorough, carefully documented case for her perfect orthodoxy. 

Duck or rabbit?

Nam Le, _36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem_

 EVEN THOUGH THERE has been an extraordinary flowering of Vietnamese-American poetry in recent years—e.g., Ocean Vuong, Paul Tran, Truong Tran, and Diana Kho Nguyen, to name only the authors of collections I have read—the title of Nam Le’s debut collection took me by surprise. It’s as though some contemporary of Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth had titled a book Another Jewish-American Novel.

The title does acknowledge, though, that the historical and cultural experience out of which Le is writing has been written about often enough by others that it has begun to have its own recognizable contours. The traumas of colonization, imperialism, and war; the further traumas of relocation to the United States; life among the stereotypes American have about Asian cultures (Ezra Pound is mentioned often); the subject matter of Le’s poems carries with it a kind of déja lu familiarity.

But let’s also note the phrase “36 ways” in the title, hinting as it does at Le’s formal versatility. The experiences out of which Le writes and the conceptualizations he works to dismantle may be recognizable and even familiar, but page by page he keeps finding new ways to bring it before his readers. Hardly any two poems here have quite the same voice or quite the same form. While each poem has something to do with Vietnam and being Vietnamese, lending the collection unity, each poem is also methodologically distinct, lending the collection variety. 

Whether a poem can be this attentive to formal variety and still be “sincere” is a question the book addresses (see poems 13 and 14), and it’s a good question. Le’s poetry is as knowing and as conscious of itself as a seminar paper. Does it still work? By and large, I’d say yes.

Catherine Lacey, _Biography of X_

AS A NOVEL that purports to be the biography of a recently deceased brilliant figure as written by a longtime close associate with no claims to being brilliant, Biography of X has some interesting predecessors: Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann is the most famous, but Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943-1954 by Stephen Millhauser and Ticknor by Sheila Heti are also worthwhile. Lacey takes the whole conceit further, though.

First, "Biography of X" by C. M. Lucca not only has its own title page inside Biography of X by Catherine Lacey, but also its own copyright page, author bio, and author photo. Small touches, yes, but they add a tablespoon of verisimilitude, and I appreciate the extra ingenuity.

Second, the biography is set in an alternate-history 20th century USA, á la Roth's Plot Against America.

X was an artist--versatile (filmmaker, novelist, songwriter, and more), transgressive, and internationally celebrated. She gave up her name and lived as a variety of different characters for years in sustained performances that eventually became her breakthrough piece, The Human Subject. She is also what Jenny Offill in Dept. of Speculation called an Art Monster, a creator so single-mindedly focused on her work that she she leaves a trail of human wreckage behind her. She is not meant to be a portrait of anyone in particular, I'd say, but figures like Susan Sontag, Kathy Acker, and many others contribute details to X's life and legend. (Many of the things X says are adaptations of quotations from actual artists.)

C. M. Lucca is X's widow--that is, part of the trail of human wreckage. Lucca tries to steer away from the topic of how she herself was damaged by X, but keeps getting closer to candor as the novel proceeds. The emotional stakes keep rising as we get further  and further in the novel, in (I thought) an utterly convincing way. Henry James would have been impressed, I think. As we begin, Lucca mainly wants to clear away the mistakes and misjudgments of X's first biographer, but the deeper we go, the more visible her grievances against X become.

The tricky, even audacious device Lacey combines with the cowed-but-resentful biographer narrator is setting the story in an alternate history. "Biography of X" by Catherine Lucca is set in a U.S.A. in which the states of the old Confederacy seceded again in 1945 and existed as a separate nation for fifty years, establishing a fascist-theocratic government with old school patriarchal customs. X, as Carrie Lu Walker, was born and raised in this society, became a resister, and eventually was lucky enough to get out.

The alternate history has a few other striking touches (Emma Goldman is part of FDR's New Deal cabinet, Frank O'Hara did not die in that road accident), but the Atwood-like misogynistic dystopia of the "Southern Territories" gets most of the satiric energy. (The depiction of life in the "Southern Territories" has some points of contact with Lacey's Pew, we should note.)

Biography of X became harder to read as X's capacity for cruelty became more evident, but it was still compelling. And Connie Converse is a character! Check out her album How Sad, How Lovely on Bandcamp.